The Four-eyed Journal » Internet

Belated happy 20th birthday to the Internet

jhay — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:15:35 +0000

What better way to return to blogging than to give my birthday greetings to the Internet which had just turned 20 last August 6 according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee because on the same date in 1991, the very first web page was born.

It’s amazing to look back on how much the Internet has changed the world, especially mine. If I recall it right, the very first time I encountered the Internet was when a friend of mine told me that I could look for pictures of Ferrari F1 cars using Google. It was after my introduction to the sport back in 1999. It was the British GrandPrix where F1 champion Michael Schumacher had that infamous crash resulting in a broken leg that forced him to sit out most of the season’s remainder. Since then, I had become an F1 enthusiast and a fan of the Ferrari F1 team.

After abusing Google for pictures of Ferrari cars, my next obsession was fanfiction stories based on the Gundam Wing series. It was around during that time that the anime was shown on GMA 7. Every day, I rushed home from school just to catch an episode.

Come 2002, in my last months of high school, my buddies succeeded in recruiting me to join Friendster, which was king of social networking sites back then, at least in the Philippines, and started to regularly haunt Internet shops to roam the world wide web.

Shortly, I stumbled upon HTML, free web hosts and Blogger.com. Two years later, I started The Four-eyed Journal, on a subdomain of a website intended for the fledgling advocacy group Lasallian Students for Justice and Peace in DLSU-D using WordPress.

Then I got on board Gmail via an invite from my college mentor, soon after I was blessed with a free .com.ph domain that has been the home of this blog since 2002.

Along the way, I received many checks and PayPal payments from Google, Text Link Ads, Chitika, LinkWorth and PayPerPost. The foreign exchange rates back then allowed me to stay in college and get my own laptop PC. The more fun part of it was the chance to meet a lot of cool folks, fellow bloggers and advocates locally and from around the globe.

It has been an incredible journey so far and I can’t imagine life without the Internet. We may be still stuck with pen and phone pals but I’ve had no regrets so far. Cheers to another 20 years and more of the Internet!

Image by Will Clayton

Globe Ignores NTC Memo? Continues to overbill and steal load from subscribers

jhay — Mon, 30 May 2011 03:14:36 +0000

It’s been more than a month since I joined the public hearing/consultation conducted by the House Committee on Information and Communications Technology that looked into quality of broadband Internet services offered by local telecoms. It was held last February 19 at the Meridien International School in Taguig City.

House Committee on ICT met with bloggers and consumers about their mobile Internet concerns

One of the issues brought up by my fellow consumers were the unfair policies and practices by telcos with regards to their mobile Internet services. I believe the highlight case of the hearing was Rep. Ana York P. Bondoc, MD’s tussle with Globe Telecom when she was overbilled for an insane amount for using mobile Internet services she wasn’t aware that she was using.

This issue was dealt with in the NTC Memorandum Order No. 01-02-2011 where mobile phone providers are required to inform subscribers and users of this mobile Internet-enabled phones of such features, the charges or rates for mobile Internet access, how to turn off such features and inform customers if their usage is nearly half of their allowed credit limit.

While the NTC memo deals primarily with the concerns of postpaid subscribers, I believe a similar scheme would be implemented for prepaid subscribers, wherein providers would inform users of what mobile Internet service or promo they have subscribed to, the amount of credit they have left and a notice via text message when the subscription is about to expire.

Well, that’s how it was supposed to work. Unfortunately, the NTC Memo seems have reached no one in the telcos.

I remember subscribing to Globe’s SuperSurf promo a week ago and though the system was quick to register me in the service, it did not send any message alerting me that my subscription is about to end. It also did not send me a message saying that my subscription has indeed ended.

So my prepaid credit or load continued to be consumed because I wasn’t sure if my subscription has ended or not. I called up their customer support hotline and more than two weeks after my complaint, no update nor action from Globe has been done.

The very exact problem sought to be remedied by the NTC memo remain persistent, giving us subscribers terrible mobile Internet and customer support services. If an NTC Memo is not enough, perhaps it’s now time we need a law to protect our consumer rights and finally make these telcos take notice and clean up their acts.

Scheduled down time Friday, May 13, 2011 at 10pm EDT (GMT -4)

jhay — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:00:44 +0000

A little heads up to everyone! This coming Friday, May 13, 2011 at 10pm EDT (GMT -4) this blog will undergo a scheduled down time because my VPS hosting provider ServInt will begin migrations to a newly provisioned host server.

They estimate that the down time will last for around 15 minutes. That time converts to 10:00:00 Friday May 13, 2011 in GMT+8 Philippine time.

These things are a normal part of the process in the web hosting scene and is a positive sign that the web host, in this case ServInt is taking active measures to further improve their services.

Image by Christian Haugen

Services which have been fantastic and world-class. Ever since I have moved to ServInt, this blog along with my other websites have up and running smoothly. If ever there were downtimes, those were very rare and usually the culprit has been badly coded scripts and WordPress plugins. However I had little worries because ServInt has been consistent in providing excellent customer support each time something goes wrong in my VPS. Apart from fixing my VPS problems, they have also been unfailing in providing me support whenever I wanted to do some tweaks and customizations to my VPS.

This is not purely a marketing or promotional post, this is more of a testimonial to the great hosting and support services you would get when you host with ServInt. Here’s a link to ServInt, give it a try and you’d never look for another web host.

Image by Christian Haugen

Send Email Using @facebook.com from Gmail

jhay — Mon, 02 May 2011 01:00:35 +0000

Do you already have your own Facebook email address? This new feature came with the new Facebook Messages wherein your Facebook account becomes the central hub for your communications: email, Facebook messages, chats and text.

It’s a cool new feature and definitely a welcome update to Facebook that once more proves why it is the king of all social networking sites today.

No matter how cool it is to send email with ‘@facebook.com’ address, I still prefer Gmail in handling my e-mail. So I thought of ‘merging’ the two: being able to compose and send email using Gmail but with my ‘@facebook.com’ address listed as the sender.

I did this by using Gmail’s Sending mail from a different address feature. It’s quite easy to setup and if you’ve done this before the whole exercise could be done in less than five minutes.

The steps are easy, once logged in to your Gmail account, click on the gear icon in the upper-right and select Gmail settings and select the Accounts and Import tab.

1. Under Send mail as, click Add another email address

2. In the ‘Email address’ field, enter your name and your @facebook.com address

3. Choose the option to use Facebook’s SMTP servers.

4. Click Next Step then ‘Send Verfication.’ Gmail will send a verficiation message to your Facebook inbox.

5. Open that message and copy the verification code in the Accounts section of your Gmail settings.

And you’re done! You can now send an email from your Gmail account and have your Facebook email address appear as the sender. Of course replies to that email would still go to your Facebook Messages Inbox but now you can send messages outside Facebook and use Gmail’s neat features like formatting, attaching large files etc.

I haven’t gone around to using a desktop mail client like Thunderbird to manage my @facebook.com email yet. Perhaps somebody else has done it already, but that’s for another time. Hopefully, this simple tutorial will help those who like to use their Facebook email address but retain the neat features of Gmail.

Wi-Tribe in Cavite?

jhay — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:22:56 +0000

4G Internet anyone? A couple of days ago, my father brought home an old Compaq Presario notebook. How old? It was from the days when Compaq was still independent from Hewlett-Packard. The Presario laptop even had 3.5″ diskette drive! It sure did brought back memories from high school when the diskette was the primary means of portable storage and flash drives were still too expensive for the common folk.

Anyways, the most interesting thing that came with the laptop was the 4G Internet modem from Wi-Tribe.

Being outside of Wi-Tribe's coverage area, it's pretty much a big and sleek paper weight

It’s pretty much useless out here in Cavite as it is outside of Wi-Tribe’s coverage area. Though the idea of having a fast wireless Internet connection is a geek’s wet dream, the reality is it’s a horrendous nightmare in the Philippines. No matter who the service provider is, 4G Internet in the Philippines still needs a lot of work in order to be at par with its global counterparts. Heck, the same could be said of all Internet services here in the country!

Hopefully, things will really improve over the next years with more players coming in and the government making sure consumers’ rights are protected and their interests served. Anyone using a 4G Internet service? How is it?

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