You would’ve noticed by now how rebelpixel.com looks very different to how it has always been for some years now. I always liked it grey. Now though, it’s in boring white that I think is quite a refreshing change. (You wouldn’t know that though if you’re reading this in an RSS reader.) But I guess “fresh” wouldn’t be staying for long.

If you’re reading this on a Mac with a fairly recent browser, you’d think the new minimalistic look blends well with the @font-face embedded font I’m using: Museo Sans. This works in Firefox 3.5 (and the recently released 3.6), Safari, and Google Chrome. Unfortunately, if you’re on Linux or Windows, @font-face rendering can go bad. In my current case, really bad. Look:

Firefox/Mac text rendering just blows aways its Firefox/Windows counterpart, though I honestly feel it’s more of the operating system’s fault. Google Chrome shows us the same trend:

Note how Chrome (and Safari as shown below) renders the text inside <blockquote> tag. It’s supposed to be in italic as defined in CSS though I did not declare an italic sub–font for Museo Sans. Firefox tries to make italics out of the single embedded font file while it’s ignored in Webkit–based browsers. What should be the right behavior? I honestly have no clue.

Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 paints a different picture: it ignored my EOT–encoded fonts and simply rendered text using the next available typeface in the CSS font stack. It’s broken and familiar; silently I think I’d rather take that compared to the rendering inconsistencies in embedded fonts.

Welcome to web design in 2010—it’s almost just like a decade ago.

Now I should really fix this design.

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Web Design in 2010

Last week, Conan O’Brien’s run with NBC’s “The Tonight Show” abruptly came to a halt after what many consider a wrong move by the network’s top executives. It was a sweet seven–month run, and I don’t think the show will ever be as fun again. Not with Leno doing it. But you’ve got to give it to Coco for saying the right thing as everything ends:

I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Now what’s left for me to watch with Conan off the air until at least September 1? I firmly believe Conan’s coming back big with a show worthy of all this drama. He’s always been known for his weird brand of comedy, and I’ll be looking forward to it. And it will somehow feel like this commencement address he gave to the Harvard class of 2000:

I’ve dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you’re desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I’m as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that’s what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it’s all right, I’d like to read a little something from just this year: “Somehow, Conan O’Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there’s always delusion.

I’ll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk.

Surely, amazing things will happen.

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The Last Tonight Show

Around this time last year, I posted some Sinulog photos from way back 2008. Now here’s the rest of them, taken a day before at the Basilica del Santo Niño.

Though I grew up in Cebu until I was five, I could hardly remember if I got to watch it before. So when my mom and dad offered me to join their almost–annual trip for Sinulog, I gladly obliged.

I remember losing my phone (and very my old globe number/SIM); I was distraught about it that I was so hesitant about getting a new number or a postpaid subscription. Globe gladly gave me a custom number I want though, but now I realize I hardly use all of my G–Flex consumable credits.

I would’ve wanted to take the 5Dmk2 for this year’s Sinulog if not for the busy sked. On second thought, it’s rather scary if tragedy decides to strikes twice with me holding a few–days–old camera. Yikes.

Most of these photos were taken in color with my 400D, and they would’ve looked nice, though I think Sinulog in color is too common that I’d rather see them differently. But instead of giving them the Photoshop treatment, I chose Picasa’s basic editing and B&W conversion. I think they turned out well.

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Sinulog at the Basilica del Santo Niño

The last time I ran an FoF installment was around four months ago, but today’s a fine day for the very first one of 2010. After all, the main star of this blog entry screams “five” quite loudly: the Canon EOS–5D Mark II. Christmas came a few weeks late though there’s reason for me to complain now, except for the sad fact that I’m almost dirt–poor once more.

I have no regrets acquiring this camera though it took me quite some time to go over the psychological barrier of purchasing something this lewdly expensive. But I think it’s worth every peso, and peso, and peso, and peso, and peso…

If you’ve set your eyes on a 5D Mark II yourself, let me give you five good reasons to make your decision reasonable:

• Image Quality. I’ve always thought Canon digital SLR cameras produce excellent images, and my 40D and 400D always proved that. The 5Dmk2 though is a different beast. Everything looks smoother yet sharper, with almost no noticeable noise at ISO 1600.
• ISO Range. The 5Dmk2 goes up to ISO 6400 with an expansion option providing an albeit noisy 12800. At 2500 (and 3200), images are just as good as 1600 from previous Canon DSLRs. Pairing the cheap 50mm f1/.8 with the 5Dmk2 at ISO 6400, we finally have a camera that can see more than the naked eye in barely–lit environments. Yes, that’s no joke, but you’d have to focus it manually of course.
• Top–notch Metering. My older 40D was no slouch at metering, but the 5Dmk2 meters as if it reads what your eyes and brain want to see.
• Excellent Ergonomics and Handling. Just like most recent Canon digital SLR cameras, the 5Dmk2 has almost every button on the right spot. Intuitive controls in a solid body that feels like it can take a good beating. My only complaint is the power switch, which is better positioned in the more recent 7D.
• Full HD Video Shooting. Though I’m no good at video editing, it’s still a pleasure to have a tool that shoots 1080P movies right at your hands. With a good prime lens, you can play with selective focusing and blur that makes you feel like you’re shooting a cinematic epic.

There you have it, the 5Dmk2 on Five on Friday. How about you, what did you get yourself for Christmas?

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Five on Friday: Why A Canon EOS–5D Mark II

2009 wasn’t a good blogging year for me either:

With stats like this clearly showing my blogging decline in the last five years, I’m better off sticking to Plurk and Twitter for microblogging. Oh, but I’m terribly bad at that too.

Last year, I had great plans to turn this blog around and do better blogging. This year though, I might as well just do things as they come and make no promises. Maybe that will work. I hope.

Anyway, here’s to a great year and decade ahead of us. We all need it.

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2009

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The Walk?

If it’s not rage that burns in your heart, then what is it?

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The dying of the light…

Before we go further, you might want to browse through my slides:

Weeks before WordCamp Philippines 2009, I never thought I could join with all the work on the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards looming large. In fact I forgot to register, so I personally messaged Blogie if I could still attend without a proper registration. But when he mentioned there was still one speaker slot available due to a cancellation, I volunteered to speak anyway. I figured I could share my experiences and tips on running WordPress optimally.

WordPress used to simply be a blogging app and not much more. It’s growth in the past few years though has pushed it to adapt a more extensible structure to allow for other uses beyond blogging as well as various other customizations. These changes made it more appealing to a wider range of users, but at the same time it also introduced some performance bottlenecks that become apparent when your blog rises to be just a bit too popular. Ah, the price of success.

Let me be clear about this: there is nothing wrong with WordPress. It does its job well. However, in shared hosting environments, where every bit of CPU and RAM is a costly resource, WordPress users with fairly popular blogs are commonly flagged for “using more than its fair share of resources.” Ouch, as if these web hosting services allocate their resources fairly.

Since many WordPress users are on shared hosting, it’s good advice to play good neighbor to everyone and make sure your blog uses only the resources it actually needs. That’s the easier thing to do anyway, instead of complaining how unfair oversold shared hosting is.

My presentation’s goal was to answer four pressing questions that I believe are necessary to running a tip–top WordPress blog:

1. What is the most effective way of deploying WordPress?
2. How do you maximize performance of a WordPress blog?
3. How do you optimize your blog for search and your target readers?
4. How do you protect your blog from malicious users and catastrophic failure?

Just briefly, I’ll go through some of the points you’ll see in the slides.

Deployment

• Should be simple, fast, and secure.
• Use official repositories (wordpress.org) for the app and plugins.
• Avoid copying files from an existing installation.
• Use SSH/SFTP when possible.

Performance

• WordPress dynamically generates everything, which is both good and bad. Use WP Super Cache if most of your content is static or rarely changes.
• Use only the features you need.
• Use Akismet to save yourself from all the comment spam trouble. (And yes, WordPress does invite a lot of comment spam!)
• For more performance, consider offloading content to a CDN and using 3rd–party discussion plugins like Intense Debate and Disqus.
• Other performance tricks beyond WordPress involves optimizing PHP and MySQL as well as replacing Apache with Nginx or other lightweight web servers.

Optimization

• The truth is, you don’t really have to try too hard, as Google’s Matt Cutts would say:
  “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) SEO.”
• Use pretty permalinks for descriptive URI’s—make your readers know what’s on the page before they even click on the link.
• All in One SEO Pack handles the other things you’ll need SEO–wise.
• Analytics360 + Google Analyticator along with WordPress.com Stats is good for identifying your site’s popular content and monitoring your growth.
• Google XML Sitemaps helps search engines make indexing your site easier.
• FD Feedburner offloads your feeds and makes sure they’re universally compatible through the Feedburner service.
• Broken Link Checker finds dead links in your content so you could update them as necessary, helping your readers follow what you write without interruption.
• Content is king!

Security

• Content theft is a significant issue, but you can’t change your blog or content just to make it harder for thieves. Focus on writing more good content instead.
• RSS Footer “brands” your posts in case someone else scrapes them through your RSS or Atom feeds.
• Because WordPress is very popular, the sheer volume of users makes for discoveries of vulnerable code, faster. Just the same, its extensibility makes it flexible but open to mischief. The best way to stay secure is to always keep WordPress up to date!
• There are other “security hacks” you can use to make it just a bit harder for malicious users to compromise your site.
• Just as you secure WordPress, make sure your server and relevant apps are kept up–to–date.
• Use proper file permissions for everything.
• Some helpful security–focused WordPress plugins: WP Security Scan, WP Exploit Scanner, WordPress Database Backup.
• Don’t keep your backups in one place. Offline backups are not optional.

So there it is, most of what I mentioned in my WordCamp talk. It’s rather long but I hope you find most of it useful. I’ll try to keep this updated for other WordPress–related information that would be helpful to everyone.

This post was published at rebelpixel.com

WordCamp PH 2009: WordPress in the Wild

I haven’t blogged regularly for so long that I couldn’t find my rhythm, so I’ll do what I’ve always thought was the easier thing: post a photo.

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Blue

Last Friday’s Manila/National leg of the Philippine Blog Awards turned out just how I’ve always wished it to be: full of gems that litter the Philippine blogosphere, waiting to be found. Some of the winners were blogs I’ve long admired, while others I’m just starting to enjoy now. All of them wonderful reads.

Gang Badoy of Rock Ed Philippines gave a beautifully inspiring piece for her keynote address, one that makes us bloggers and the rest of the online community truly proud:

2009 made me realize that a nation is not its government. Thank God. Blogging has relieved me with the fact that the history of the Philippines is no longer solely in the hands of the textbook writer. (Thank God) A history of a nation is really the collection of stories of individual lives. Our individual lives. Yours.

In the sad and uneasy days of October, amidst all the chaos and tragedy, the Philippine Blog Awards has given us just a bit to smile about.

(The “Jose & Andres as Bloggers” video was created by our friends from When In Manila. Good job guys!)

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We Are One Blogging Nation

If you’re looking for me, I’m somewhere out there trying to be a rockstar. Or lending a hand for this year’s blog awards. See you there!

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The 2009 Philippine Blog Awards

This is interruption is brought to you by Poladroid. For more digital polaroid craziness, rawimage’s polaroid generator also works well for those who love to use Photoshop.

I guess this will be good enough if we fail to save polaroid.

Now I’m off to go back to work.

This post was published at rebelpixel.com

Pola

About a month less than two years ago, we got the chance to watch Sugarfree’s first major solo concert Sugarfree Live! Some of you may know that the band is not known for big concerts and that first one at the Music Museum came eight years after they started. Later tonight, Sugarfree celebrates its tenth year anniversary with Dekada, again at the same venue.

Just like the last time, tonight’s (and tomorrow’s) gig is backed by the wonderful Manila Symphony Orchestra, lending depth to Sugarfree’s already hypnotic melodies.

With the addition of Mornings and Airports, I’m sure we will be hearing just the best of their music, and maybe just a bit more. Ebe casually mentioned there will be 24 songs for the night—I’m not sure if that would be enough for all their followers though.

And because it’s going to be first of two dates, I bet tonight’s set will be extra special—that’s how Ebe sees it.

And before these photos from two years ago get so old and lost in my archives, I’m putting them out now. No better time to share them.

See you later!

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Sugarfree Live!

I think I’ll just share five thoughts on the democracy that we have now.

1. The Philippines is a democracy. It is not perfect, but in its twisted form, it is still a traditional democracy. Unfortunately, our form of government, or more precisely, our way of running our government, has always been wrong. Politicians have never grown out of their dark pits, and sadly the young ones are encouraged (and they oblige) to dig their own too. It’s a dark world they have out there, and I don’t think I can clearly point to one who has swam out of their self–made Hades that is Philippine politics.
2. Though we hear about suppression of information and limitations to freedom of speech, most of us Filipinos get to say what we think. Some though die for it. It is a sad fact that our society has developed a webbed network that lets information move freely, generally, yet we have all grown the seeds of apathy within us. Our voices scream revolution but our actions spell lethargy.
3. Democracy is the rule of the people. Ideally, democracy calls for unity after a plebiscite or an election; we respect, uphold, and defend the popular choice, even if it’s not one’s own belief. You may still have your opinions, but you have to use it to better what has been the consensus. It does not happen in the Philippines. We instead choose to put down each other into chaos.
4. The disparate distribution of wealth and education in the Philippines has produced a less than ideal democracy. Because the rich and the poor have different concerns, they tend to patronize different values and personalities. This has led the poor to elect a president in ERAP, for he championed the cause of the masses. In some way, it has also elected GMA in 2004. If she really did win, perhaps it was an act of the middle class and the filthy rich trying to “choose the lesser evil” and saving us from FPJ, which would’ve been ERAP part two. The truth hurts, and it’s painful to know that our democracy has fueled a clash of Filipino classes.
5. We have in our sleep sown a democracy ruled by rulers, not by the people. We have grown leaders that have no sense of accountability to every Filipino. We have failed to punish the wrongdoers and have made pedestals for our leaders. We put them up when they should be raising every Filipino above the drowning waters of mediocrity. Instead, we have politicians grouping among themselves according to their own self–serving interests. Their loyalty is to their cabal, not to the Filipino people.

One day, the Philippines will again be ruled by the Filipino. I could again use “we” to collectively point to all of us, but such a word has been corrupted so much that everyone thinks it is their brothers’ and peers’ duty to fend for their person. It’s time to use “I,” to do it in your own way, here, and now.

(Okay this post missed Friday by a few seconds. Bummer.)

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Five on Friday: Thoughts on Philippine Democracy

The first time we heard about Sugarfree’s latest album, Hana and I eagerly waited for news on its final release. The moment we heard that it’s supposed to be on its way to the record stores, I sent an SMS to the band’s number just to ask which shops already have their stocks. Unfortunately, their manager told me it might take a few more days since the CDs just arrived that afternoon; she added though they’d have copies of it available in their gig later that night. I was told they were playing at 70’s Bistro, though it was on such short notice since someone else was supposed to play on that date.

So off we went to 70’s Bistro, hoping to get a copy of Mornings and Airports. There weren’t much people as the gig was largely unannounced. Our hopes were surely not dashed as we had one of only six copies they managed to sell that night. And to make it even sweeter, we got all of Sugarfree to sign it!

Mornings and Airports’ album insert certainly is one of a kind. Designed to look and feel like a well–used passport, the pages appear filled with stamps and stickers documenting the album’s songs and the band’s history. Also included is a nice sticker I wouldn’t dare waste on just anything yet. Inksurge’s design work on the previous album Tala–Arawan was excellent though I think they did even better with Mornings and Airports.

I was initially under the impression that tracks from Mornings and Airports were not as catchy as those in Tala–Arawan. “Hay Buhay” though is a different thing: it tells a story of life rarely put beautifully in a catchy song. It is so easy on the ears that you’re singing to it even on just the first time you hear it.

A few loops and shuffles and a few days later, I finally got to hear and “see” the songs in a more than casual manner. For starters, this album has more English tracks than you’d expect in a Sugarfree album. This is the most likely cause for my initial impression regarding the songs’ “catchiness.” Just as Ebe told us as we spoke to him after the gig, the songs have gone through a lengthier production process that put a different flavor to them. I must agree, they don’t sound as raw as their earlier hits, they seem more “mature” in technical terms, yet the most important ingredient is more evident than ever: strong songwriting that always seem to speak directly from the heart.

Surprisingly, four of the 14 tracks were not written by Ebe; Jal and Kaka have contributed two each. Kaka has “Get Over It” and “Where Do We Go?,” both of which are good English tracks. His songs put a nice twist to their sound and considering these are his first contributions, I think he deserves to write more for their next albums. Jal’s “Patawad” and “Form Factor” almost immediately scream of lost love. Whatever his reasons may be for writing those two songs, they’re right up there with Ebe’s best on this record.

It would actually be easier if I name songs Ebe wrote that I don’t listen to as much, but that would be cheating. “Feels Like” is an English rock love song, the type you’d love to sing shouting your heart out live at the arena. Though I have this personal bias not to like it, it has kept growing on me. “It feels like love tonight!”

“Wala,” “Hang Over,” and “Wala Nang Hihilingin” are the tunes that will haunt you. They’ve got the chorus–you–can’t–forget trademark of Ebe’s hits paired with vocal melodies that flow smooth like silk. If I had to pick a favorite song though, it would be “Heto Na Naman Tayo.” The song’s theme is typical Sugarfree—heartbreak. The music’s just as typical, launching Ebe into his iconic melodious wail. But it’s how typical Sugarfree’s music is that has kept us singing their anthems—it’s just like speaking from your own heart.

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Sugarfree: Mornings and Airports

I wonder where that shirt is now.

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People Power Shirt