DepEd thinks using internet technology will combat the lack of classroom materials.

Under the program, students will listen or download lectures and reading materials for particular subjects as well as take examinations as part of the curriculum.

Each grade and year level will have its own channel and will cover all subjects in the curriculum with each subject consisting of a 20-minute interactive computer lecture and 40-minute classroom lecture. The lectures conducted through the computer could be replayed as they would be stored in the computer to be set up in the multi-media classroom. Cyber education would partially solve the present shortage in books and teachers.

The project will initially include 3,000 schools but would exclude those that are in first and second-class cities added Lapus.

The DepEd hopes to implement the project in 37,000 schools within a three-year period. Source: PIA

The idea is good. But what about implementation? What I'm afraid of is that these computers will end up covered in thick plastics as to avoid getting destroyed by the students. Students learn to use these things fast. How about the teachers? And in cases that these computers starts to break down, how about tech support?

I don't how many of these computers will go the way of the multicabs distributed to each barangays in Iloilo City for the purpose of combating crimes and better mobilization.

JC, a former colleague in a BPO company I worked before, gave me a heads up a couple of weeks ago about her new company Virtulance. They're looking for programmers and webmasters.

JC having worked for 3 different BPO companies in 3 different positions before, surely knows the ins and the outs of the business. Being surrounded by developers, she has better understanding of the plight of programmers. She might have learned something from us.

Then there's this talk among us hard headed employees about putting up an ideal company for programmers. Where programmers will be treated with respect they deserve. That day has come, JC launched Virtulance last June 4, 2007 and also set to launch another (PerProject) soon.

Virtulance is uses traditional BPO setup while PerProject caters to programmers who fancy working for themselves like freelancers. Last time I talk to JC, I gathered that they're paying competitive salaries. When I say competitive, I mean 15K-20K. I'm not really sure, though.

So if you need to jumpstart that career in IT, no better time to go about it than now. Head up to their site www.virtulance.com and tell the recruiter you were sent by the good admin of MyIloilo.com.

What's more annoying than getting email, blog comment or SMS/text message spam? Landline spamming.

I'm a Globelines subscriber and I've been getting MyPLDT offers from a machine for two days. It usually call during my most productive hours - early in the afternoon.

Email, comment and text message spam I can live with. They're easily ignored. But nobody can ignore obtrusive phone rings. Landline/telephone rings carries with it urgency. That's why when we need to talk to somebody about very important subject, if possible, we call.

I believe nobody likes to answer prank calls. And who likes to listen to telemarketers? Pizza Hut and Greenwich does that often. That's ok, they're paying somebody to do it. PLDT has a machine to that. And that's clearly spamming.

This is another entry that has nothing to do with Iloilo. The mere fact that I don't get to go out often to observe the latest happenings in Iloilo City is reason enough to write just about anything here.

The earliest date that I can remember when I became a programmer was in year 2000. I bought a Visual Basic book with an educational version of Visual Basic 6 CD. Even with the crippled version of the hugely popular (at that time) programming language, I was able to create crude programs like time keeper, screensaver locks and restaurant menu system.

At that time I was managing our financing/installment business. I was really good at excel that I was using it for everything. Learning VB would be a great help in automating daily tasks. I've also learned a great deal about database while interfacing VB with MS Access. However, I have not created a single app for our business using it. Instead, I went to learn C programming language.

It was already early 2001 and I was able to download an outdated but free ide/compiler/debugger TurboC v2 from Borland website. Being a lower level and closer to the hardware, C taught me a lot about data structures and how to go about solving problems on my own. I only have very limited access to internet. My ultimate guide is an old TurboC book. I created a Snake game like the one in Nokia as a school project in Informatics.

I've also taken PERL and played for a while but never gotten to create anything substantial with it which is what Perl is really good at.

Then came Java. Java was the most sought-after programming skills abroad. Just by knowing how to program in Java can dramatically increase your chance of getting hired or immigrating abroad. Taking up Java was easy because I already know C. It's just a matter of unlearning some C bad habits and learning the Object Oriented paradigm.

It's in Java that I finally wrote our business' program. It was written as an intranet application using Tomcat as the container and JSP for scripting. I was still using MS Access as it was readily available.

Even though those programs were written as a hobbiest and hackish at best, I'm still proud of them. They were the labor of my late night hackfests.

This really has nothing to do about Iloilo. Just a way to tell everybody that the person behind the site is still alive.

Coding PHP non-stop daily for a year made me feel like I'm lagging further behind the latest web development bandwagon. It was two years ago that I heard about the new web development framework that had everybody excited, Ruby On Rails - in the US, at least. I was deep into Python and was polishing my PHP skills that I didn't even consider learning a new programming language Ruby, the one Ruby on Rails is built on (hence the "Ruby" in the name) much more pick up another framework.

PHP was great. Anybody can develop a web site or a web application in no time. CodeIgniter, the PHP framework we use, still rocks. But why learn another now? In the internet time, you can get yourself obsolete pretty fast. Newer, better, faster and more secure way to achieve what you want in software/application development are being produce everyday.

Why Ruby On Rails?
Over the past two weeks or so, I was rewriting our ever demanding webapp. Last week, I found myself getting increasingly bored with what I do. I need something to get me excited again. Python and PHP got me coding until dawn when I was learning them.

Python still amazes me. Naturally, I would go and get me a python web framework. I started with the more popular ones, Django and Turbogears. I couldn't get the sample applications to work. Next, I found Pylons. This time, I was successful. I could use this one. Reading through their documentation, I found features referencing Rails. I wonder why all web frameworks I get across try to emulate Rails. I wanted to find out.

Getting Started
I'm using Ubuntu, so installing Ruby On Rails was a piece of cake. Less than 20 minutes later, I have a working Rails application up and running. Now, I'm really excited. Development time in CodeIgniter is quick but this is even quicker.

Now I need some tools to make my experience with Rails - and Ruby, for that matter - wonderful. My problem with PHP is that I can't find a suitable editor in Linux for it. Currently, I'm using kate editor for everything but I'm longing for that complete programming environment or IDE. The likes of MS Visual Studio or Eclipse. PHP has PHPEclipse and PDT plugin for eclipse but the former have some issues with my eclipse install and the latter is still in pre version 1.0.

But Rails have Radrails. Also an Eclipse plugin. This time, installing the plugin is as easy as installing rails. I get this feeling that everything Rails related must be easy. That I'm going to find out after I'm done developing a more complex application using it.

To those who have deadlines to meet and clients to maintain, no amount of reasoning can make the world stop and wait for you to finish. For each day that we are fed with crappy internet connection, we lose customers. We lose revenue. If this will keep going on for another month, I'll probably lose my job.

I'm afraid the threshold is closer than I thought. Inquirer reports that repairs to quake-hit asia internet cables are delayed again which would take until the end of February to finish blaming bad weather and other technical difficulties.

We're having technical difficulties too. Servers dying due to high usage. There are things that needed ironing and they're not going to wait. In other parts of the world, business is usual. They tend to view things from their own perspective. They're not concerned how our internet connection here are. They're concerned about how their business is doing. If we couldn't show reliability in terms of service, we couldn't stop them from getting it elsewhere. Programmers in India will happily do my work for half my pay. Yeah, my clients will love that.

As if internet dependent industries in Asia haven't lost considerable amount of productivity and revenue from the damaged submarine data cables, newly discovered damage to the cables leaves us no choice but to lose more productivity.

Newly discovered earthquake damage to undersea cables and bad weather could delay the complete restoration of Asian Internet services until next month, telecom officials said Wednesday.

I've just upgraded MyIloilo.com to the most recent stable version of Drupal (4.7.5). This post doesn't really concerns Ilonggos in general unless they're into Drupal or web development. This is also, in essence, a call to other Drupal developers in Iloilo to know that there exist a shop dedicated to Drupal site development and maintenance. If there something that we, here at MyIloilo.com, can help you troubleshoot your Drupal installations/sites, let us know.

Javier Vicente Rufino suggests we should make internet as reliable as electricity after the recent Taiwan quake exposed how vulnerable we are. Most parts of Southeast Asia was disconnected to the world when the submarine cables connecting us to the rest of the world was massively damaged by a seismic activity.

Javier Vicente Rufino, chief editor of inquirer.net, the Philippines' largest news website, said this week's earthquake showed the vulnerability of his archipelagic nation.

"We are dependent on a rather few number of cables," said the editor whose servers are based in the US. "Are there alternate ways of accessing the Internet? Because what it basically shows is our links to the outside are rather few."

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan. Submarine cables connecting us to international networks is broken.

A "fiber break" in the major submarine cables linking the Philippines to the international network caused a nationwide disruption in Internet and telephone services, local telecommunications company said Wednesday.

The Philippines' links to the Internet were damaged following a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Taiwan early Wednesday. Via Inquirer.net