PM Files

PM Files

* all these files are in ppt format. no zips, no exes. somebody attached virii to the files in the other server so i am moving them to another server.

mcnurin1
mcnurin2
mcnurin3
mcnurin4

estrat
km
erp
crm

$100 laptop

heard about the $100 laptops from MIT? current specs are at a 500mhz processor, 1 gb of hard drive. it's got wi-fi and this baby runs on linux. it has a built-in battery and a crank-wheel - in case you run out of battery, just turn it and *voila!* you've got power again.

it will be first released to the poor countries out there. talk about preferential option for the poor eh? it will be available at a $100 on bulk incentives from governments and will be sold as $200 for the general public.

a lot of debate has been raised over such issus at /.

whether it's worth it or not. heh. some say it's a waste of money because it's not powerful enough. in response, some say, 'who cares, it works and will do everything i need it to do anyway'

if it runs as it is touted to run, linux + simple office productivity apps + web, i'd want to have one for myself too. never mind the slogan that it's for the poor. as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and me being a child at heart, i am entitled to one! besides, the neon green skin will make me the coolest slime on the block.

yeah, but mind you that i don't need one. i just want one. i'd just like to have another linux box to play around with at a minimum cost. and with all those usb ports, adding peripherals won't be such a problem. swoooooosh can do everything that i need it to do.

details of the hundred dollar laptop project can be found here.

when there's a will, there's a way

i sat in at an ITM 124 class today. the course is about business strategy and ICT. the class is led by raul and ed rodriguez. brothers in arms with different expertise but of similar depth in experience and common sense.

i don't care if SOM prohibited MIS students from entering the class. if pipboy wants it, pipboy gets it. it might have been a simple introductory class but the promise of things to come from the two professors have already excited me. when either of them talks, logic magically appears where there was none. it's been a while since i've last brushed shoulders with the big boys. today is a happy day because i got to see great people in action.

we had two cases today and several pointers on case analysis. there'll be more in the coming weeks. from sir raul, we'll be tackling corporate cases. from sir ed, there'll be public sector cases. the course, btw, is designed to veer away from too many IT terms. the focus is on the management aspect of doing business. this would have been a great supplement to our staple MIS courses. although i wouldn't recommend the class just to anyone. there are a lot of readings and a lot of on the spot analysis. that goes without saying if you have an MBA professor with 17 years of experience under the belt and another one with 22 years of corporate experience.

in those two cases, we looked at how and why dot-coms flourished or failed. quick bits to end this blog:

• Focus on the business part of the phrase e-business. the fundamentals of doing business haven't changed
• Pace the speed of your business. you don't have to jump right away at every twist and turn of technology's progress
• E-business cannot replace everything. There are still benefits in traditional modes of doing business. However, the lifestyles of people are changing which should prompt us to adopt properly
• We need strong top-to-bottom management for business to be competitive
• Businesses are not entirely logical. They are also behavioral. For instance, we can't expect all customers to make logical decisions. We have to factor in their values when creating a product.
  

While most of these are common sense for some, the way they were applied in examples particular to the current situation of the Philippines is not. Despite the dismal outlook of doing business in the Philippines, the two professors are able to come up with business ideas that are applicable and profitable. If there's something i want to pick up in this class, it would be the ability to pick up a niche in any business environment and figure out how to work on it as they have shown quickly and easily this morning.

goodbye p3-733

after seven and a half good years, it's time to say good-bye to my p3-733.


the symptoms showed early last week. my friend accidentally kicked my box and it reset. How odd. maybe something went loose.

but it kept running well, so, scrap that thought.

a day or two after the incidient, i added a 128mb stick of ram to bump up the workspace numbers to 650mb. however, lazy me left the tower lying down like a desktop. i thought, hey, there shouldn't be anything wrong letting my tower lie down like this. i left it like that for three days running and downloading.

and then one faithful morning, it wouldn't allow me to get into m$ windows xp. i have sp2, btw. at first, i thought that it was a virus. a virus? impossible! i had a whole slew of applications and firewalls to detect known and heuristically detect threats. but, as a security person, i only know that i'm just lying to myself. hehe. the most secure system is one that is locked up in a safe box and thrown in the middle of the pacific ocean. atlantic, if you're from the west. a virus, after a few seconds of reflection, became possible. it was just discomforting that the last virus that ruined my life was when i was in grade school. exactly ten years ago.

so, i tried getting into safe mode. voila! i got in. and ran some antivirus tests. at the middle of the tests, the computer just restarted!

figuring it was now a real virus, i tried again. but now, even before i get to load my os, the computer kept restarting itself.

bless msi for their DLED. they are the blinking lights which tell you what part of the boot sequence they are initiating at the moment. so even if you don't have any output on your monitor, the DLED will show you the way.


so, with a pre-os hang-up, it no longer had to get into my os to hang! i also tried smelling the insides, nope, there was nothing cooking.

i think it's a hardware failure.

so i started taking stuff out.

i took out my dial-up modem. since it was there for aesthetic and sentimental purposes only. no luck.

i took out my extra network interface card. still no luck.

i changed the cmos battery. for a while, i thought i had solved the problem... and true enough, it was for a while.

i took out the optical disks. nope.

i took out the new ram. i didn't think it would be the culprit. but if the three sticks ( i had two 256 kingston sticks and the new one was a 128 twinmos stick) weren't compatible, it should have said so from bootup of day one's ram surgery. so i played around by leaving only one of the
three sticks in rotation. no good

i bought a new and branded power supply from pcx (curse you, villman!). it turns out my Php750 (or $13-$15) investment wasn't needed at all.

and finally, i got to the hardest part. the only thing that i was in denial of from the start. the hard disks. the hard disks couldn't be dead! no! that was 120 gb of data (excluding os files)! i just finished organizing them and renaming them for backup and guess what! no, they couldn't be broken. losing the 40gb disk was alright. man, ibm hard disks are tough. this disk is around 6 years old. my oldest hd alive is a 4gb ibm hd. and i can't remember how old it is. hehehe. it's even 5400rpm. it was only worth 15gb of download. a good two weeks worth ONLY. but if i lost my bigger hard drive (which i call batman), i'd be devastated.

so, at first i took them out. ang guess the freaking what! there were ant eggs! yes, ant eggs! the little white ones on the hard disk!crap! this is the second time this has happened to me. although i was able to recover the first time, the first time didn't make my computer reboot like crazy. i
dusted them out and waited a few days for them to "hatch" and get out my virtual real estate.

after a few days no luck.

i tried booting with robin - he's the 40gb ibm workhorse drive. no luck.

and i didn't want to try batman because he's just about data.

without the hard disks, i plugged in linux live cds into my desktop. dsl and knoppix. damn. they worked. could it be the hard drive? could it be? nooooooooooooo!

after a day of playing dota on my laptop, i got ticked and tried to fix my computer's desktop. the fact that batman was still in warranty wasn't enough to console me. my bro's comp
has been out of commission for the past year or so. i plugged in robin... and it worked! i ran some antivirus tests and they finished well! so, my hard disk and software was alive! i plugged in some of my peripherals from p3 - the lan card, ram and of course, batman.

and to my utter delight, it works! i still have to put the hard disks into the proper casing though. i was just so excited to make it run.

the errors that i had on my p3 was a stop error which resulted from paging an out of bound memory location. what caused this, i am still not sure. but like a good CSI, i am on the culprit's tail.

right now, i'm just happy to have my hard disk well and running. but i have a lot to do for next sem so i better organize stuff fast.

my temporary rig:

110% student

next sem will be a blockbuster semester for me... i'll be a regular student!

• normal academic load (no more overloading for fun)
• no sidelines for me (i promise to do everything i can to refer all incoming jobs to other people)
• few organizations (yep, no more new commitments for the meantime. i think 3 orgs are enough for my last semester)

so that i'll have lots of time to spare! no more late-nights to finish non-academic deliverables... just plain late-night academic oil burning. something to make sure that i get to do the following :

• study like a regular student
• exercise and make sweet love with the jogging oval over at the high school
  
• do stuff without pressure (and sadly, without pay)
  
• get ready for the senior syndrome and that blue roast moment (hahaha)
  

this will be exciting. the last time i was a normal student was when i was a freshman in college.

when i got into ateneo, i couldn't believe the college topics were going to be easy. so i supplemented it with real world work. something to put the theories into application. i'm not bashing ateneo or saying the curriculum sucked - but it was necessary for me to if i wanted a good career like my parents. too many are already studying harder than me. i'm not going to swim with the current. allow me to go against the current please.

i also wanted to prove that you could get good grades while having fun. that life was not just about reading books and getting only one mistake per exam. i wanted to show the possibility of work mixing with play (and sometimes pay). hehe, and i almost proved it. no longer running for honors, my averaged grade just got a bit shy of getting that extra medal on march. but no regrets, i learned a lot and met a lot of great people along the way. great people who have helped me more than i have helped them. it's funny what zig ziglar said:

in order to get what you want, you should help others get what they want.

for people who want high grades, you should make sure your groupmates get high grades - which means performing at your peak all the time. for people who want to be successful in business, it means being fair to your partners - making sure you compensate your suppliers well enough for them to grow and serve you better. something like that.

hehe, can't wait until monday!

philo of religion - debater mode (there is no better intellectual massage)
history - favorite subject after math (because life is about tradition)
3D modelling - yeah, because i like models. (lol)
decision support systems - to be or not to be?
theo - there is a God
project management - i was born for this

azureus nat issue

to fix the nat problem of azureus behind a router, enable port-forwarding from your router towards the azureus client with the correct ports that azureus is listening for.

apache 2 troubleshooting

if apache 2 doesn't work on your windows machine, check out these things:

- no other web server is running and listening on the same apache port
- is the service installed? go to the command prompt and :

C:\program files\apache group\apache\apache -k install

this will bring it up in the services console. [ control panel / administrative ... / services ]

- from then on, you can run the apache monitor to start the web server

open source

the sembreak has seen me invest a lot of time into open-source technologies. not that i haven't done any commercial development, but i'd say that i spend 80% of my time lately acquainting myself with the particulars of linux.

i'm talking about ubuntu's breezy in particular. i've been reviewing how to configure linux and have recently enabled interaction between my windows workgroup. it's not something that big, but it's a start. hehe. the unknown keeps me busy during such times of stasis and i couldn't be any happier. i'm thinking of permanently porting my laptop operations to linux for my last semester of school. i wonder how fun that would be...

next week's line-up (in no particular order):

• cron and at
• wine
• iptables
• vnc
• ssh
• ftp, scp and telnet