Deuts.NET

CCTV Cameras and Security

deuts — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:38:34 +0000

The use of CCTV camera is a detective form of security. It isn’t as effective as the preventive ones like putting up security guards in the premises to secure the area or perimeter from unauthorized entries (and exit). It only allows you to review and take action AFTER the wrong has been done.

That’s why putting up CCTV cameras alone will not ensure security of your office or building. They do require the attentiveness and skepticism on the part especially of the lobby guards.

Videos from these cameras can only be used to identify the culprit. That is, if the culprit is from the same building at all. What if he/she were a total stranger, just like in the video below.

This video was recorded from our company’s CCTV camera, which faces the office door fronting that of our neighbor’s.

CCTV cameras ensure that you have a record of any crime that happened. Certainly, they do not prevent crime from happening.

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I learned about my passion in photography when I had my first digital camera in Sony DSC-S60. Then I took it the next level when I had a Canon EOS 30D. You can check out my latest photos at my flickr photostream or my self-hosted gallery (which I intend to update soon).

If you wish, I would love for you to subscribe to my flickr photostream via email. By subscribing, it means that you’ll receive an email notifications everytime I upload new photos to my photostream. Click here, enter your email address, and follow the online instructions.

Cherry Mobile D15 Meets Half of My Expectations

deuts — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:38:51 +0000

I was recently looking for a good backup phone. I was scrounging through some of the China phone models from Cherry Mobile, Torque and MyPhone. My initial criteria for a good backup phone were:

Dual sim (i.e., dual standby);
A good battery life (despite the dual sim capability);
Less bells and whistles – to support the long battery life;
Sleek, sturdy and small — that puts Qwerty phones out of the question (I already had a Qwerty phone);
A sub-P2K price;

Having these in mind, I settled for the Cherry Mobile D15, features of which include:

Dual SIM / Dual Standby;
Camera;
FM Radio;
MP3 / Video Player;
Flashlight;
Micro SD Card up to 2GB;

At a price of P1,999, I guess the extra features (on top of my minimum requirements) including the FM Radio and MP3/Video Player make CM D15 worth it. And these features are basically what make up the pros.

Now, for the cons:

Meager battery life performance. That’s 3days for light use, 2 for moderate, and 1 for heavy use before recharging. It may be acceptable to many, but not for me who have experienced using the small and sturdy Nokia 1202 (the latter could last me 2 weeks on light use);
The keys are a little bit on the hard side;
Typing a message is faster than reading what you have typed. If you type real fast into its numeric keypad, you have to wait a bit for the screen to actually display your message;
Volume during mp3 playback is not adjustable;
Substandard voice-call-audio quality. Volume for voice calls are adjustable, yes. But the sound quality–it’s like listening from a tin can;
A headphone jack that often fails to lock into position;
An FM Radio where radio networks battle over one frequency. You tune-in to one station (that’s “spot on” in its digital frequency dial), and you’ll hear two network programs fighting for your attention;
The OS is proprietary, which I think is not optimized at all to extend battery life before recharging;
Picture quality of the camera, in a rate of 1 to 10, is 1;
The body is built of almost (if not all) plastic. But then, that’s what makes it lightweight;

Conclusion

I’m not one of those people who hop from one blog to another just to bash about the cheap cellphones’ lack of this and that “loser” features. Why look for a cheap phone when the features you really want don’t come cheap to begin with?

As the cliche goes “you get what you pay for”.

As for me, I’m half-satisfied with my purchase. At least I have my dual-sim phone and I intend to push it to its limits. For its price, I wouldn’t mind if it won’t get me even a year of extreme usage.

The upcoming release of the dual-sim phone from Nokia (the Nokia C1 or C2) is a welcome development. Hope it comes with the *needed* long battery life just like the Nokia 1202 and within the same price range.

P.S. Another insightful review of the Cherry Mobile D15: A good phone is a useful one: the Cherry Mobile D15.

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Torture, Torture, That Is Sick!

Mon — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:42:56 +0000

Post by Monster Mon as it originally appeared in http://moncruz.tumblr.com/post/985651065/torture-torture-that-is-sick.

To make everything clear before anything else, I don’t intend to glorify, much less justify the ghastly scene caught in that torture video leaked to the media (oh and if the point is not yet driven home emphatically by now – for the record, it was an exclusive by ABS CBN).

Such barbaric and inhuman act simply has no place in a civilized and dignified society we live in.

Or is it a civilized and dignified society that we actually live in to begin with?

Just taking a step back one bit and thinking out loud here. What if we make the context closer to home than Asuncion area. Living in more upscale areas may provide a false hope of security; that one is not subject to the harm and terror at the hands of these criminals, so why bother giving it a thought?

But then again, we will always use our roads, pass by areas teeming with these hoodlums to go about our daily lives. What if we’re actually dealing with chronic, serial criminals here who have absolutely no regard for the law, makes a mockery of the ideals of a justice system whose aim is to reform and rehabilitate more than to punish?

They point their paltiks or balisongs at their victims, get their stuff, subject them to anguish and may be a life time of trauma. Worse would be some sexual abuse here, non fatal stab wound there or if they feel like it, or if they are too drunk or too drugged to think about it, install a gripo on the side of the abdomen or bore a bullet hole on their heads. Every day these morons play their role to the fullest. On a bad day they may get caught,spend a night or two in a cell, get out as fast as you can say “torture” then off they go to the streets again, on the prowl, waiting to grab on to their next meal ticket.

What if these misguided souls (by choice and occupation) happen to chance upon your parents, siblings, sons and daughters, etc.? What if one of your family members is the unwilling recipient of their next thrust of the knife or their bullet?

These criminals have rights; but so does the citizenry and the state. Why should the rest of the population live in constant fear and terror at the hands of these hooligans? That they should be given a chance to reform and mend their ways – at the expense of what? Your wife’s and child’s lives? Your parents’? Yours?

Lack of education is not an excuse to not understand the words: “Masamang magnakaw.” And a grumbling stomach is not a justification either. Try working, no matter how menial, stupid.

But in the same breath, torture is still not justified despite the repeated heinous offenses of the culprits.

In a way, by consciously living a life of crime without a tinge of regard to life and limb of their fellowmen, and no remorse for their past acts, these monsters have effectively signed up this kind of fate – just not through this cruel and graphic manner I guess. But the fact remains, deep inside in each one of us, there’s this thought that actually longs for all evil elements to just be eliminated or contained. The only uproar here is in the manner manifested to us by which the lawbreaker was eliminated or contained.

Articles on summarily executed individuals are just daily fare in the tabloids; paperwork related to these cases just pile up in the CHR. Ivan Padilla will just end up to be a statistic. Harrowing ordeals of inmates and detainees are for everyone to listen to and get a glimpse of when visiting the national penitentiary. Being confined within those walls for a significant part of one’s life by the way is still torture, albeit not of the physically brutal kind.

These are not media scoop material though. And we are partly oblivious to them.

At the end of the day, I think the prevailing subconscious sentiment is: just get these thugs as far away from us as possible. And don’t make it messy in doing so. It’s not primarily because these hardened criminals can still be considered human beings.

It’s because the rest of us still are.

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PNoy State of the Nation Address 2010

Mon — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:45:34 +0000

Post by Monster Mon as it originally appeared in http://moncruz.tumblr.com/post/858899126/sona-2010.

While it is very much welcome for the President to report to the people what kind of a sh*t hole the past administration has driven our nation into after nine inglorious years, it shouldn’t be the end all and be all of the SONA.

Though it seems that nothing can shock us anymore regarding the GMA administration’s wicked ways, we are still bound to be shocked by what we are about to be told, according to PNoy.

Beyond the impending shock coming our way though, what will be more shocking is if we’re going to dwell and end there. The overwhelming majority voted for PNoy because they believe that he can and will deliver the reforms we need. The SONA should indicate how people responsible for such despicable acts will be brought to justice, and what concrete steps will be undertaken to address what we are left with after the dark days of Arroyo.

If it’s mere reportage that we need, former VP Noli De Castro, with his signature voice, should have been the man. But what the people thirst for is rectification and what they clamor for are solutions.

Realistically speaking, the next six years shouldn’t promise for us a hacienda at the end of the path. Just leading us through the “daang matuwid” will already be a journey very much worth undertaking.

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Would Brgy. Ginebra Appreciate FIFA?

Mon — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:11:04 +0000

Another guest post from Monster Mon. Check out the other posts by Mon.

Why is football a long shot in generating significant fan interest and sparking a sporting revolution in the country to overtake basketball in the hearts of gullible Filipino masses?

As it is right now, nothing much can be expected from our various National Sports Associations in terms of funding, support and initiative in promoting their various fields. With athletes’ cries of delayed and entirely lacking and/or undelivered allowances, what more can we expect when it comes to solid provision for local and international exposures, gears, coaches and trainers, etc.
With this, much of the needed funds and publicity will and should obviously come from corporate sponsors and sporting godfathers. Of course, nothing comes free. In exchange for sponsorships, athletes, teams, meets and leagues serve as marketing tools and vehicles of these interested sponsors.

If one is a marketing manager with funds at his disposal, it is a no brainer to sponsor someone and something which will be gaining media mileage and publicity, say for example a basketball team participating in tournament complete with prominent coverage in the tri-media, over a grassroots football program at the heart of an almost empty, unkept football field doubling as shelter of carabaos with nary any media attention.

We have enormous successes from the RP Blue boys of youth softball, jungolfers and tennis players, note even chess wizard Wesley So. But without much fallback in the form of commercial and professional leagues, athletes are left to fend for themselves with limited opportunities in sporting fields other than basketball.
A man has got to eat. And without a promising long term horizon in other sports, not much interest is generated and sustained in the hearts and minds of our young athletes to pursue their passion. Government pension for athletes won’t take anyone anywhere.
Come up with an improvised hoop and a ball and you’re ready to go. Roads in our country can double as basketball courts easier than converting them into football fields.
I don’t know if this is entirely accurate. Or I may just be hating to admit it if it is indeed the awful truth, but we Filipinos have a penchant for the “bara bara“, lack of a system, free wheeling, anything goes, “bahala na si Batman” kind of an attitude. Football being the Beautiful game, may be something that is not ready to be appreciated by our masa. For a country thriving with one upmanship, “kanya kanya“, counterflows and cutting corners, the purity of Football will surely lull the masa to a deep slumber even before the first tagay of Ginebra.

With the international success of Pacman, Bata Reyes, Django Bustamante et al, again with the private sponsors and managers funding all their stints, awareness and interest in football will remain so so in the national scale.

So, what keeps a nation of vertically challenged citizens with not much success in the international scene in the significant past still addicted to hoops? Apart from ending, point shaving and the like which adds even more spice to the game, maybe it’s because of the immediate gratification in terms of points and fastbreaks, much the same as jabs and KO punches in boxing, that fans get to experience.

I personally believe that the excitement from basketball is something that Filipinos can relate to more than the excitement and appreciation to be derived from football. We absolutely don’t have a chance winning big in basketball globally. But it doesn’t matter to the fans. James Yap’s jumpers are enough for them to get their fix of adrenaline rush. They wouldn’t care less if James Yap won’t be able to convert those same shots over foreign behemoths in various international meets.

Basketball caters to Filipinos’ impatience more than football. Are you still wondering then why lines in lotto outlets as well as lines for showbiz auditions and gameshow contestants are eternally long?

Filipinos want a quick fix to everything; and they simply won’t last 120mins. with the score reflecting 0-0.

On LBJ Jumping Ship

Mon — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:11:21 +0000

Monster Mon articulates about Lebron James’ transfer to Miami Heat.

Greatness and legendary status entail more than talent. The scenario here is no matter how many titles the Heat may win, LBJ would have some trouble solidly validating and cementing himself as a true leader.

But, if he can totally live with it in the guise of “it’s the team that wins championships”, then it perfectly makes sense cutting corners and hooking up with DWade & Bosh.

MJ, Magic and Larry Legend are really a different breed belonging to a different generation. We can’t totally fault LBJ because he’s just being himself. He’s too self assured (even without a ring at that) that he can afford to jump ship and think that it doesn’t diminish anything at all.

This is a different generation altogether. Remember, even KB insisted on a trade not a few times when LA was in deep sh*t and before they were able to land Gasol for a song.

My point is: True leaders will always be the last person to abandon ship; and the thought wouldn’t even cross their minds. Greatness cannot be hyped. Legends need not be hyped.

So is it just fitting to ask, “What’s there to witness?!” =)

Reposted here as it appeared in http://moncruz.tumblr.com/post/791736670/mj

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World Chicken Dinner

deuts — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:21:29 +0000

Had dinner at the World Chicken in Glorietta 4 foodcourt last night. And it struck me that the usual long queue at the counter during that time of the night is now completely devoid.

Could possibly be because of the currently running promo over at Max’s about Chicken-All-You-Can eh?

The pictures above were taken with nothing special, my Samsung Omnia Pro GT-B7330 smartphone.

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Auto Zip Attachments Extension for Thunderbird 3.0

deuts — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:40:51 +0000

UPDATE: I have updated the extension to support the current version of Thunderbird (version 3.1).

What makes Thunderbird (TB) a kick-ass desktop mail client is its flexibility that makes it extensible through various addons/extensions and plugins.

One of my favorite extensions since TB1.5 was the Auto Zip Attachments, which automatically compresses (zip) attachments on-the-fly. This is especially useful for email messages sent with MS Excel or Word format attachments, wherein compression ratio are usually high. No more need to manually zip the files from the file explorer before attaching the same to email to save on bandwidth, which likewise translates to speedier file transfer.

Unfortunately, the developers of this extension appear to have forgotten about it and failed to update the same to keep it abreast of the new and more robust Thunderbird 3.0. It’s only compatible upto TB2.0. It seems that changing the max version in the install.rdf file is not enough. Instead, it involves editing further another file deep into the .xpi file, as described in one of the reviews for this extension.

Following the instructions from the reviews/comments on how to edit the .xpi file to make it compatible with TB3, I successfully installed the Auto Zip Attachments extension into my own TB install. I took the liberty to make that modified extension available here for everybody’s consumption. Download link below:

Auto Zip Attachments Extension for Thunderbird 3.1

Download and unzip the file, then install to your TB3 desktop client. Would appreciate feedbacks for any problems or issues encountered. Hope we enjoy Thunderbird 3.0 more with this extension.

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Migrating from Tumblr to WordPress

deuts — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:29:23 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, Tumblr is great. But with my so many experience with the different blogging engine and even other CMS’s, I always find myself going back to realizing that WordPress is way better.

It had been said many times that it is very important to choose the right blogging platform from the very start. But what do you do when you find yourself making the same mistake as others when they started out their blog?

Here are two ways you can import your posts from Tumblr to WordPress. For purposes of our test, I had more than 1,300 posts at my Tumblr blog that I tried migrating.

Tumblr2WordPress Utility

The process basically involves visiting the utility page over at benapps.net, key in your tumblr url, tweak some settings, and download the WXR (WordPress eXtended Rss) file (in .xml extension) —which by the way is the same format when you export a WordPress blog.

Then heading over to the WordPress blog you want to migrate your posts into, you would import the same just as you would a regular WordPress WXR file.

The results:

1,218 posts were successfully imported, that leaves me missing with more than 100 posts — more or less 90% successful import;
As expected, comments were not imported. But that is something we can have a work around later with the Disqus plugin for WordPress (I was using Disqus as well in my Tumblr blog);
Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have blank titles — that leaves too many polishing yet to be done;
Media are still hosted at Tumblr — media files weren’t imported;
Tags are properly reflected in the new WordPress blog;
WordPress can very well handle post redirection from the original Tumblr permalink structure;

The Posterous Route

If you have not yet known, Posterous has a feature that can import your whole Tumblr blog. On the other hand, WordPress.com has a feature to import from a Posterous blog. Using this route, and the same Tumblr numbers from above, we have noted:

Only around 700 posts were successfully imported — a dismal 50% turnout;
Comments were not as well imported;
Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have common post titles, i.e., “Untitled” — that leaves much more polishing to be done;
Media files were actually imported into WordPress.com servers;
Actual tags were not imported. Instead, posts were categorized accordingly as Photo, Audio, Video, etc.
A new permalink structure, different than the original Tumblr structure that included post ID’s — this would surely lead to bad links;

Conclusion

So far, these two are the only viable solution to migrating from Tumblr to WordPress. Either way can be a pain, especially if you already have a huge blog at Tumblr. Either way, you pay a price for not starting out with the right blogging platform — charge to experience. But in the end of the day, you have to do it if you really need to.

We just hope someday there’ll be a better and smoother solution to help us Tumblr users out migrating to WordPress.

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WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is Here!

deuts — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:18:12 +0000

The moment we WordPress users have been waiting for has finally come — the release of WordPress 3.0 codenamed Thelonious. Deuts.NET is of course already upgraded to the latest version.

Watch this video to know more about the new features of WordPress 3.0.

So far, the list of new great features we’re most excited about and would love to employ in this blog (and other blog projects as well) are:

A new default theme, called Twenty-Ten, paves the way to be an example on how to take advantage of the new features;
Custom background support lets you easily enable your heavily customized theme to support custom backgrounds and custom headers. Moreover, you can assign further custom headers for each post;

Multi-site Capabilities and WPMU Codebase Merge is probably is the main feature of this new release. I hope to turn this blog into a multi-site one and utilizing the domain mapping plugin would probably consolidate my other projects into one big Deuts Network site;
Custom Post Types reduces the need to fiddle around with custom fields. This brings WordPress to be much more of a CMS.

Some other features are, well, add to the bloat. We’ll just continue to wish for the development team to develop a WordPress Core only and that other features can be easily turned on or off.