Chasing Daydreams

With the upward trend of fuel prices, people are finally seriously looking at diesel which used to be less expensive than gasoline (not anymore) and lasts farther than gasoline. But there are limited choices for diesel in the market. At the car segment there was only the Ford Focus and a bunch of Hyundais (Elantra, Accent, Getz). The last two were small cars and the Elantra didn’t really succeed in the market and is now replaced by the i30. Unfortunately, the i30 suffers from the same problem of high price. Sure it looks good, but it’s still fall behind the Focus in more ways than one. Will it suffer the same fate as the Elantra? I hope not. We need more diesel vehicles.

Google has released the beta of Chrome, their own browser. Chrome joins the ongoing free-for-all browser war between Firefox (my personal favorite), Internet Explorer (the current leader by virtue of its being pre-installed along with windows), Opera, and some other smaller players. Looks like this is going to be a pretty exciting next few months.

First impressions: Most visible is the slick minimalist UI whose most notable feature are the tabs being above the address bar. This does make sense if you think about it. As for the way it displays web pages, there seems to be nothing markedly different compared to say Firefox. This is not surprising since they’re supposed to be using the same rendering engine. But its primary selling point is that it is supposed to be faster. A longish narrative about that and more here. Not sure if I’m just imagining it but it does seem just a bit so.

Not bad. But what else are you expecting from Google?

After a lot of dilly-dallying, I finally pulled the trigger on the Asus EEE PC 1000H. As I mentioned on my comparison, it seemed to me that it is the best of the current crop of netbooks.

The Asus EEE PC 1000H is definitely bigger than your typical netbook. But it brings with it a bigger display, keyboard (majorly sucky wrongly-placed itsy bitsy right shift key), and battery. Although these lead to less portability, these definitely improved usability and coupled with the bigger memory and disk space brings it up almost to the level of ultraportable notebooks but without the hefty price tag. The sleek black case even reminds me of the Fujitsu P7020 that I was lusting for a long time ago.

It booted up straight out of the box and, with the input of some personalization and localization information, was almost ready for use.

The wired network worked fine. It let me get my wireless network’s security details which I then keyed in, unplugged the network cable and I was wireless in a snap.

The 80gb hard disk provides a comfortable amount of space but is partitioned in two. Not very flexible. So merged the two with the freely downloadable EASEUS Partition Manager. As with most netbooks (and some ultraportables), there is no built-in optical drive. So I had to use my USB to SATA/IDE adapter to copy my backup files from my external drive and install software from their CD installers.

And that was it. It seemed snappy with Firefox 3.0, Yahoo! Messenger, Open Office 3.0 beta 2, and Eclipse. Movies and music played smoothly with VLC. I’ll also be running Tomcat and MySQL servers but maybe after a 1Gb memory upgrade.

Been refreshing my Java and UML. Next up would be Hibernate then Spring. And it’s fun!

Although for now the price of oil has gone down and the fuel companies are doing their rollback charade (increase price rapidly, decrease price slowly), there is no illusion that the price of oil is on an upward trajectory. Because of this, people are finally waking up to the benefit, albeit only the cost benefit, of alternative fuels. This is evident in the the queues to E10 fuel pumps. That is when it is available.

But not all alternative fuels are equal. Take two off the more popular alternative fuels: biodiesel and ethanol. Biodiesel is a direct pour-in replacement to diesel whereas ethanol blends higher than 10% requires modifications to the vehicle’s fuel system. Biodiesel can be extracted from plants like Jatropha that grow in land that can’t usually be used for food crops whereas ethanol is derived from sugarcane grown in land allocated for food crops. Biodiesel is definitely better for these reasons.

This is why my next car will hopefully be diesel. So should yours. Now if only the manufacturers and the government can do something about the high prices of diesel cars…

I’ve been waiting for the Asus EEE PC 901. I’ve decided that it has the best combination of features that I want. Unfortunately, it seems that Asus is not planning to release it here so I figured the best compromise would be the Asus EEE PC 1000H which has almost the same specifications but in a slightly larger package. It has however a tough competitor in the MSI Wind U100. So I made the following comparison:

At first, the two netbooks seem to be evenly matched until you see that the Asus has a much longer battery life, very important for devices like these, as well as Wi-Fi N. Of course, it pays for this by being larger and heavier but it’s still quite manageable. In terms of price, the Asus might look too expensive but it actually is the better deal with its 12 months installment payment term (unless you really have nothing else to do with your money). So it looks like the Asus wins unless the MSI goes down in price and/or gets a better battery (there’s supposed to be a 6-cell battery available).

There are many reasons to love Linux. But there are also many reasons to hate it. And this is one of those reasons.

I’ve been trying to refresh Selene, my Thinkpad X22, since I returned my office-issue Thinkpad T60. I figured Linux would be a good idea as it had Kubuntu before and I was reasonably fine with it. Unfortunately, the only Linux installer I have on hand is Fedora Core 4 (circa 2005). It installed without a hitch BUT I was stuck with Firefox 1.0 which doesn’t support a lot of those Web 2.0 stuff out there.

I tried automatically updating Firefox but apparently the FC4 repository is no longer being maintained. It only contained a point release. My next recourse was to manually download and install Firefox 3.0. But it flat out doesn’t work. Missing library or something. I tried updating the library but, you guessed it, the repository is no longer being maintained.

I turns out that once a new version of the distro is released, the old version’s repository is available for only about a year and then that’s that. This means you need to reinstall your OS once a year! I could probably get things manually updated and working one way or the other but it would just be too much hassle.

Now contrast this with the much older Windows 2000 Professional which installs fine, gets updates fine, and runs Firefox 3.0 just fine, thank you. Now if only I can get rid of the damn spyware that keeps infecting it.

There are quite a few things you can do in Bohol. Some of these are:

• Beach
• Blood Compact Monument
• Baclayon Church - The oldest stone church in the Philippines
• Tarsiers - Cute little critters. The reason why I ended up in Bohol :P
• Loboc Children’s Choir
• Loboc/Loay River Cruise - Cruise along the river while eating buffet lunch. Along the way you will see kids diving into the river as well as kids singing and dancing along the shore.
• Man-made Forest
• Chocolate Hills - Need I say more?
• Giant Python (and Marimar)
• Hanging Bridge (and The Buko King)
• Butterfly Farm
• Bohol Bee Farm
• Hinagdanan Caves
• Firefly Tour
• Dolphin Watching at Pamilacan Island
• Diving/Snorkeling at Balicasag Island

If you haven’t availed of packaged tours, you can contact Jessie Gumapac at +63-928-307-9791. He does the countryside tour which covers most of the above. He can also arrange for a Pamilacan dolphin watching and Balicasag snorkeling tour.

Amarela is one of those boutique hotels that have mushroomed all over Bohol. It started off as a vacation home with a few rooms and has since become a hotel with a wing housing a lot more rooms. But because it started off as a vacation home, it has that homey feel to it. The staff is friendly, the restaurant serves good (in terms of quality and quantity) food, a cozy infinity pool (that unfortunately doesn’t appear to merge into the ocean), and facilities for beach activities (volleyball court, beach chairs, kayaks/bancas, snorkeling gear, etc). And if you really can’t leave work behind and just focus on your vacation, they have a business center with WiFi access.

There’s just one problem, the beach is not all that good. But then again, I’ve never been very impressed with the few Bohol beaches that I’ve been to. If you really want the beach maybe you can try the new Eskaya or time-tested Bohol Beach Club. Or for a lower budget you can try Alona Kew or Dumaluan Beach Resort. The last two are rated rather poorly in reviews but they should be fine if you’re not planning on staying in your room most of the time anyway.

Amarela is not cheap. But it’s rated quite highly in reviews. I myself would rate it higher if not for the rates (and the beach). But that’s just me.

Rating: 4/5

Got my car back the other day from Big Thumb where it had been undergoing an SR20DE transplant. After some road testing I observed the following:

1. Vibrations. These become more apparent when turning to the right. The mechanic said he didn’t adjust the length of the driver-side axle so that could be the reason.
2. No power when overtaking or going up basement parking ramp
3. Timing is at 8 degrees only (normal is 15 degrees) and yet the distributor is set at maximum advance already.
4. Hard shift shocks
5. Sometimes doesn’t start at P or N
6. Stiff shifter when switching between 1 and 2

Argh! The headaches never end. Guess it’s back to the shop.

UPDATE 1: Got the car back 8/6. The first issue was solved by shortening the drive-side axle. Second, third, and fourth issues were fixed by replacing a faulty distributor. The last two were solved by simply adjusting the transmission link to the shifter. Distributor is now centered. Throttle response is now good and power is apparent. Vibrations and shift-shocks are now normal.

UPDATE 2: I went to Servitek 8/11 and got the camber and toe adjusted since the process of modifying the axles screws up the alignment.

UPDATE 3: I went to M7 8/15 and had a solid rear engine mount installed. The old engine mount was too soft which caused the passenger-side engine mount to hit the bracket when the engine is torqued.

If you need or want an engine swap, you can check out Big Thumb. Owner is Noel Paroginog +63917-861-1963. They’ve done quite a few swaps and they know what they’re doing. They just need some improvement in their QA :P