Nobody's Home

I've moved my blog to blog.jploh.com. Goodbye Blogger! Please update your bookmarks and feeds.

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Jollibee Food Corporation and Worm Patties

Okay, follow the instructions. Open this page. Hit "ctrl+a" or highlight everything. Unless they haven't changed it yet, you should see this: Wow. To be honest with you, I hate Jollibee's service. But I have to hand it to them, from a case study or thesis (whatever you want to call it), they became one of the largest corporations in the country. I think their webmaster hates them, is unethical or was forced to do this. The squares near the bottom are non-Unicode characters (letters that your browser is not set to understand). This is what they are:

jollibee food corporation, home based franchise, hot dog manila and hot dog philippines jollibee food corporation, kiddie party, palabok pancit recipe and palabok recipe jollibee food corporation, restaurant chain philippines, spaghetti and swirly bitz, Yahoo Web Sites, yahoo.com [snipped] earthworm hamburger patties, employment fast food and entrepreneur franchise opportunity, DMOZ.org jollibee food corporation [snipped] Lycos.com jollibee food corporation [snipped] earthworm hamburger issue and earthworm hamburger patties, Northern Light.com jollibee food corporation, fast food, fast food job and fast food job restaurant, Google.com jollibee food corporation, food delivery, food recipe manila and food recipe philippines, Search MSN, MSN.com jollibee food corporation [snipped] ebay.com jollibee food corporation, peach mango pie [snipped] food manila, franchise business opportunity and franchise buying opportunity, compuserve.com

Then if you view the source and check the meta tags, this is what it says:

<META NAME="object" CONTENT="jollibee food corporation, earthworm, earthworm hamburger, earthworm hamburger issue, earthworm hamburger patties, earthworm meat, earthworm meat price, eating fast food">

What this does is it cheats search engine rankings like Google's. Everyday, pages all over the internet are scanned by computers that run spiders, programs or scripts that index information about the page it passes. What Jollibee is doing is completely unethical because it ruins the beauty of page ranking and returns irrelevant search results. So if your search includes "ebay.com", Jollibee might pop out as a result. Wouldn't that piss you off? Or as some might say, "WTF?!". Way to go. I guess they haven't heard of this. The earthworms are here to stay and they have an evil plot to conquer the world. Follow the thread over here.

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Evolution: When Monkeys Became Human

No, I'm not going to be in the Darwin Awards. I'm trying out Wordpress and I might move my blog there (as soon as I figure out how). I really wanted to be able to sort my entries by categories and put tagging too (in an automated, organized way). I also tried MediaWiki and it's great. I might try Joomla! for my site too. Wordpress seems to have too much that it becomes a bit too confusing. I just wanted categorized posts but what the hell, change always comes with getting used to something new. By the way, it's been raining everyday and I don't like it. Specially last week when we celebrated Bheng's birthday ...at Tagaytay.

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Microsoft Varsity Program (MVP?)

Personally, I don't like these publicity articles but what the hell. This year's Microsoft Varsity Program kicks off (hey, it sounds a lot better thang FSAP!!). I accidentally passed by that night because I attended a talk on XAML by MSDN Connection. XAML really looks promising or heartbreaking, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, DLS-C is not included anymore since we're really not part of NCR (or we messed up last time). But Rose said the program is expanding. This year's program is now organization-centric. Unlike last year, there are selected faculty and students, hence the Faculty and Student Ambassador Program. In other countries it's just for students, we're a special case. FSAP was not as bad as as I thought. I didn't have to endorse Microsoft products. In fact, we didn't even "cascade" the knowledge given to us in the trainings. The look on the teachers and students learning new and cool geeky stuff gives a different feeling way better than getting multiple orgasms (I can't tell, I'm a guy). That is, if they did learn from us.

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Blasted Compiler!!

I have experienced different results from two different compilers with basic operations so I think I know what the author[s] of IZArc is talking about.

I received many emails from people that have problems with archives containing files with non English filenames. Also some peoples ask me for x64 version of IZArc. Unfortunately I can’t help them because IZArc is created using Borland’s Delphi but it doesn’t support Unicode names and can compile only x86 (32-bit) applications. That’s why I decided to rewrite IZArc using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 (Express Editions are not applicable!!!). To be able to do this I have to purchase a licensed copy of VS 2005 and probably some additional components. Anyone who wants to support IZArc can donate some amount of money and help me to create one better and more reliable version of IZArc. Just follow this link and donate as much as you want (change the quantity field for more than 25$).

IZArc is my favorite application for handling compressed files [for Windows] because it's not much of a resource hog and it can read/write TAR and ISOs. I want to donate but I can't. I'm also curious why the author[s] didn't choose to make it open source. It's not like they're going to lose anything. Should that explain the need for VS 2005, that's a pretty hefty price tag?

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