Back in the early to mid 1990s, I was already a geeky young man having taught myself how to program BASIC from several books borrowed from the school library. While I enjoyed playing games on the PC (Sid Meier’s Civilization rocks!) and the Nintendo Family Computer (Super Mario Brothers 3 is still the best), I eventually realized that it was more enjoyable creating programs and with it, the ability to create my own (simple) games. I eventually discovered the QBasic and QuickBASIC variants of BASIC that have their own IDEs and it was such a powerful feeling having the power to create your own EXE files. When the World Wide Web came to the Philippines, I quickly discovered that there was a worldwide community of QuickBASIC enthusiasts with plenty of websites containing tutorials, programs, and discussion forums.

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I wasn’t able to watch the TV screening of The Last Journey of Ninoy on ABS-CBN but I heard many good things about the film from those who’ve seen it. So when I learned that it was being screened at Glorietta 4 during the last week of August, I really went out of my way to see it.

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After three and a half years, I was forced to retire my ASUS A6500R laptop. The main problem was that it wouldn’t boot up properly anymore. The symptoms started a few months before but it managed to eventually start up after some combination of jiggling around with the battery, the master reset button, and the power cord.

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The Apache web server modules mod_gzip (or mod_deflate), mod_rewrite, and mod_include apparently don’t interact very well. Specifically, mod_gzip returns to the web browser an incorrectly compressed file when that file is constructed using includes (via mod_include) with virtual URLs rewritten using mod_rewrite. The apparent workaround is to avoid rewriting include URLs or to disable mod_gzip.

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Last October 10, I and bunch of bloggers met Gen Kanai, who is Mozilla Foundation’s Director of Asia Business Development. Gen was in town to attend the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards after being in the country last September for WordCamp Philippines 2009. Over dinner at Cafe Juanita (which, by the way, has great food in a really quirky ambiance), Gen talked with the bloggers regarding our thoughts and ideas on how to make Mozilla’s products more useful and relevant in the Philippines.

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