Philippines

I visited the Sun cellular web site to re-check their mobile broadband offer. It looks like Sun is really determined to capture a sizeable portion of the market. They have made some changes to their current pricing — the Plan 1999 is now Plan 999. Yup for 999 pesos a month, you can have mobile broadband of up to 2Mbps. And that includes a 350 a month unlimited voice and SMS postpaid mobile phone bundled in.

What used to be Plan 999 is now only 799. And is now also burstable up to 2Mbps (hmmm wonder if anyone is really able to reach this speed). It’s unlimited and mobile broadband!

If you don’t like to be locked in, you just pay a one time charge of 2,500 pesos and pay a monthly of 799 — maybe they should just make this prepaid instead of postpaid.

If you are one of the early subscribers to Sun Cellular’s Plan 1999, wonder what would happen?

The other day while watching television, I commented to my wife why these local television networks wouldn’t setup their own social network site instead of using multiply. It’s a logical business extension of their media business.

Well I guess, I spoke too soon because ABS-CBN Global Ltd has bought a 5% stake in the social networking site Multiply. The stocks (about 2.5M) was purchased at $1.9806 each totalling to about $5 million USD.

Under the purchase agreement, ABS-CBN Global can bring up it’s ownership up to 10% of the authorized capital stock of Multiply Inc. within a 2-year period. It was not indicated at what price the additional stock purchases, if any, will be based.

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At work, I’ve always pushed Linux as a viable operating system for business. I believe that it’s a very stable and robust environment for enterprise servers. Most of the time, the only real obstacle to adopting the Linux operating system is lack of knowledge and the hesitance (fear?) to use something new.

I started using Linux even before kernel 1.0. I remember having to download the kernel source and compile my own kernel. Nowadays, someone has already done that for you and all you have to do is use it . You can even order a computer with Linux pre-installed.

This weekend, I’ve finally gotten my self to register as a Linux user at counter.li.org (finally after being a Linux user for more than 10 years). My Linux user counter number is 480092.

While browsing the li.org site, I can’t help but notice that the total registered number of Linux users for the Philippines is just 995. I’m very sure that it’s more than that! So if you’re a Linux user, I encourage you to register and be counted. Let’s put the Philippines on the world map as a major Linux user!

If you’re a Pinoy Linux user, I’d like to hear from you. Maybe you can post a comment, pingback or trackback to this article. If you are a Filipino Linux user and you’ve written an article about your Linux experience, you can contact me and give the link to the article and I’ll try to write about it here on my blog.

I’ve always wanted to alot and spend some time to start off a hobby in photography. Getting into photography can be a very rewarding thing. You’ll get to visit places and meet new people. For instance, take a look at the calm sunset shot taken by a friend.

Such a breathtakiing scene. And who says photography needs to be just sunrises, sunsets and places ….

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Blender is an open source 3D animation software that runs on Ubuntu and other Linux distros. The software has created a large number of followers around the world. Being at par with commercial grade 3D animation software, it has been used commercially. A popular example would be the movie Spiderman 2.

Talented Filipino animators have also been using Blender and has resulted into a community of users. Below’s a video sample created by a Filipino animator named “Reynante”. He actually uses other open source software like Gimp, Audacity and VirtualDub for his creative work.

These animators can be found frequenting the Pinoy Blender forum which has become a showroom of their works and a place to help each other use Blender.