Chasing Daydreams

Another Bus Tragedy

Jay — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:07:07 +0000

It’s not just inter-island ferries that are sinking, buses are constantly crashing, too. Such is the sad state of transportation in this country. And whenever these happen, the government would say that this ship, this bus, doesn’t have a license to operate like it is the cause of the tragedy, like it would absolve them of the blame. It actually raises the question why they were allowed to operate at all? Where was the government before the tragedy?

Army of Two

Jay — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:02:17 +0000

James and I finished Army of Two today. It is a co-op action game about adventures of two mercenaries or private military contractors (PMC) as they prefer to be called, across several years. During this time, they go from being idealistic green soldiers, to gung-ho PMCs, to outlaws who must clear their names.

It was a major letdown in gameplay especially coming from Resident Evil 5. Ammo is so hard to come by that you don’t actually get to use the reasonably wide arsenal available to you. Not that it matters since the weapons act almost the same way. And they all sound the same way too: puny popping cork guns.

There were no boss fights to speak of. The top bad guys you actually get to fight are just about as tough as the regular bad guys. Heck, some of the special bad guys are tougher. And there could have been some pretty good fights with a boss here and there but the game had a awful habit of ending the possibility via a freakin’ cutscene!!!

Now I’m wondering if the sequel, Army of Two: The 40th Day, is worth getting. Hmmm.

Rating: 2/5

Major Major Disaster

Jay — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:23:25 +0000

Notwithstanding Venus Raj’s making the top 5 in the Miss Universe pageant, we have, to borrow from our almost Miss Universe, a major major disaster for the country. Yesterday, a bemedalled cop who was dismissed from service took a bus full of HK tourists hostage. Incompetent crisis management, incompetent hostage negotiation, and an agonizingly slow-motion rescue led to a tragic conclusion: several hostages dead, numerous others injured, some critically.

Repercussions were immediate: the HK government issued a travel alert telling their citizens NOT to go to the country and for those citizens already in the country to either leave or take precautions. For sure, other countries will follow suit. And even if they don’t, a lot of travel plans are definitely going to change. That’s not good for tourism and foreign investments. The decline in stocks today can partly be attributed to this.

Setting Up Subversion

Jay — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 01:13:56 +0000

Every developer should have version control. It can be a simple process or a process supported by tools. One of the best version control tools is Subversion or SVN. Here’s how to set up your own SVN server on a Linux box.

Install or update Subversion: If you’re using Red Hat-type Linux: yum install subversion or yum update subversion. If you’re using Debian-type Linux: apt-get install subversion or apt-get update subversion. Others Linux flavors should have something similar.

Create your repository: svnadmin create /svnroot

Configure access: vi /svnroot/conf/svnserve.conf. In the [general] section, add:

anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

Add users: vi /svnroot/conf/passwd and add:

=

Start Subversion as a daemon: svnserve -d.

Open up TCP port 3690 on your Linux box’s firewall.

Connect to your SVN server with the URL svn://>/svnroot

Start using your SVN server. Here are some useful tips:

That’s it!

Having Your Cake And Eating It Too II

Jay — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:36:50 +0000

Got another good chuckle reading another Inquirer article on Ramon Ang’s offer to buy Pagcor for $10B. Last time it was the legislative boys blabbing about it, now it’s the Pagcor’s turn to chime in. Quoting Pagcor’s spokesman:

“The $10-billion (about P450 billion) proposal is a good start, but I think it’s too low. If the time is right, we could make use of different valuation methods,” he said.

With an annual gross revenue of about P30 billion, Pagcor can easily earn P690 billion when its franchise ends in 2033, a difference of some P240 billion from Ang’s proposal (taking the current dollar-peso exchange rate of P45), Santiago said.

As Conrado Banal said in his article, there’s such a thing called present value. P450 billion now is better than P690 billion in 2033 and is still better than P30 billion every year till 2033. Unless of course the government doesn’t know what to properly do with P450 billion, which is quite a possibility.

Of course if they can grow revenues then maybe it’s worth more. But still quoting Pagcor’s spokesman:

“(Ang) said he could raise Pagcor’s annual revenue to at least P35 billion. If he could do it, then why can’t we do it?” the Pagcor spokesperson said.

Here’s one reason why not: competence. Ang is rich and you can’t even figure out present value :P