Friday, November 23, 2007

How does your iGoogle look like?

I was surprised when my baby sister was surprised when she saw my iGoogle page, she said "What did you do with your Google?"

I said, "I didn't do anything with Google."

"Oh.",

To avert a crisis of her eyebrows meeting, I told her half mythically - "Google let me do this to Google."

"Cool."

I guess most kids nowadays like friendster, myspace or whatever and don't want to appreciate the sheer mind numbing activity of gathering all sorts of information which we probably don't need in one page.

I've grown up. Darn. I never did get invited in one of those things called parties. Her eyes grew smaller and said, "Bro, you like to read weird stuff."

I really can't blame her.

One tab in my iGoogle page looks like this:





Yes, I know, boring stuff. Wait till you see my CD collection. But hey, not all iGooglers like to read boring stuff. There's a wide dearth of things you could put in your iGoogle.

You just need to Add Stuff to your liking and make your iGoogle very useful or not. Whichever you prefer.

I'm sure you'd like to give it a try:

1. Go to Google.com -> For most of us here (Phils) - it directs us to Google.com.ph
2. Now look at the upper right corner of your screen - you'll see there iGoogle
3. Click on it and you'll be brought to a page like this



4. It will tell you (that is if you are Filipino): "Maligayang pagdating sa iGoogle, ang iyong tahanan sa web.Magsimula sa pamamagitan ng pagpili ng ilan ng aming pinakapatok na nilalaman."

Wow. Great! Got it! Easy as 1 2 3



Thursday, November 22, 2007

Kubuntu Newbie Experience XIII - AdeptFix - When Trying to Install via Adept Manager

Thanks to my Windows XP powered (or unempowered) Pentium 3 PC, I decided to switch back to Kubuntu - this time using my Kubuntu 7.04 CD from the Netherlands! Installation went with some problems with my hard disk - apparently due to its second hand nature. I remember when I was using XP it kept on asking me to CHKDSK my primary hard drive - and always found something wrong too with the fat32 partition.

I relented to the series of error messages and decided not to hard reboot. To my joy I was able to go as far as partitioning my former FAT32 hdd to a ext3. Whoopee! Took long enough though to make me fall asleep. After 3 hours or so, it finished installing.

First order of the day when I started Kubuntu 7.04 for the first time, wondering if my Pentium 3 could make it move at all was to install firefox. I've forgotten all the codes except for sudo. So I used temujin's instructions. The buttons were greyed out though so I decided to reboot and to reboot and to reboot. Alas, Adept Manager crashed.

It kept on giving this error message:

You will not be able to change your system settings in any way (install, remove or upgrade software) because another process is using the packaging system database (probably some other Adept application, apt-get or aptitude). Please close the other application before using this one.
Okay, time for the kubuntu experts, so I fired up kopete and went straight to #kubuntu in irc.

They said that there may be other instances of Adept running. So we tried to kill them all bloody processes.

sudo killall update-notifier
sudo killall update-manager
sudo killall apt-get
sudo killall aptitude
sudo killall dpkg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

Ok. That didn't work.

Next, we tried this - apparently to check what other processes are utilizing the same resource:

ps ax | grep adept


killed them one by one:

dan@kubuntu1:~$ sudo kill 10103
dan@kubuntu1:~$ sudo kill 10104
dan@kubuntu1:~$ sudo kill 10090


Still no go.

Until somebody finally mentioned this:

sudo fuser -vki /var/lib/dpkg/lock;sudo dpkg --configure -a


That did it!

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Google/Blogger Hiccups

I love irony enough to make me write about it no matter how mundane. My tag for Google related items is "Almighty GOOG". Now, everytime I press refresh or edit one of my widgets in the layout I get this crazy Google Server-error.

Alas, Almighty GOOGs stocks are down and I guess their servers are (well maybe not down) just having a hiccup day.


Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Work for Google: Google Pays Through Adsense


I'm a newbie I know. But could this be IT? My first Google dollar? Unbelievable. Can this be true? I mean, wow. If this is true then someone could make a living out of this Google Adsense thing.

Living in a third world country like the Philippines would surely mean that if 30 readers click on my ads in a month and watch them long enough then I would earn 30 US dollars. Wow. Thats about 1,290 pesos - enough to buy me a cheap Made in China MP3 player. Not a living I know but its a start. Pretty soon I would be selling Google Stickers.

A credible blog, PinoyMoneyTalk made 1,000 USD in one month alone in Adsense earnings for one site. Another blogger, has been getting Adsense earnings, BasaPa.com. Er, nice name.

On the other hand, there are consistent reports of problems with Google Adsense - particularly those concerning click frauds: BusinessTimesonline.

Be very careful not to click on your own ads for tomorrow your Google Adsense account may die.

So, final verdict: Show me the Money!



Friday, November 09, 2007

Work for Google: Label Images

So you want to work for the big GOOG eh? Well, here's your chance. They have lots of openings for "Image Labellers". So if you are of any age, any nationality, able to spell "boy" "hot woman" or "blonde", is not blind, has all fingers intact has plenty of time to spare, then you're the person for the job.

There's one catch: you do it for free. Well, at least you have fun!

And you can also brag to your friends that you work for google as an image labeller.

No need to submit a resume just head on over here.


Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Operation Firefox

I don't know when this started but this should be cool. I'm really a big fan of firefox and would love to post a sticker of the logo anywhere.

The logo in itself is really cool.

What I really liked about mozilla and firefox is the sense of something original, innovative and useful that I am using for absobloodulutely free. I look at the logo and I can say that I have never seen anything like it before. It's way way way cooler than the logo of Internet Explorer.

If mozilla would send me some stickers I'd be glad if they did and I'd give some to my friends to stick on something.

Next: Firefox Tattoos.



Monday, November 05, 2007

Kubuntu Newbie Experience XII - Free CD from the Netherlands

I never won anything in any game of chance. I never get any real mail from snail mail save perhaps my free monthly subscription to makro mail. So, imagine my surprise when I got this:


OMG. Somebody from the Netherlands actually sent me a CD. Wow! Whoopee! When my mom asked me to pick up something in her house, I was surprised. I was not expecting anything. When I saw the package, I said "Now, I never really made that much enemies why would someone send me a letter bomb or virus. Let's see here." Okay so I opened the mail and out comes something that totally surprised me. It's the CD that I ordered two weeks ago from Ubuntu. Two weeks! That was quick.

For something that's totally free I never expected something this prompt.

So, wanna get a free (absolutely cool) CD?

Here: https://shipit.kubuntu.org/login



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