The Globe Broadband Tattoo is a USB wireless modem that they say has a speed of up to 2Mbps.

I decided to buy one as a back-up ISP, if ever my primary ISP, which is PLDTmyDSL, had some temporary technical diffculties. Ideally, I just have to plug the usb modem to my laptop and I'm supposed to be connected to the internet again. Right?

But, no.

I am actually one of Globe Broadband Tattoo's very unsatisfied users.

Below is a screenshot of a live statistics from the installed Globe Broadband application, the software is or should be installed when you first use the usb modem. Users of this product can always check the bandwidth through this software.

(click the image for a larger version)

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Statistics:

Upload speed = 0.00 kbps

Download speed = 0.00 kbps

Tried connecting in the following areas:

1. Caloocan

2. Commonwealth, Quezon City

Duration : 30mins - 1hr

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I also noticed that when it's raining and I had to use my Globe Tattoo, by all odds I would experience the same poor service.

If you're hoping to have a seamless connection, this product is very unreliable for the areas that I've mentioned.

I want to try and test Sun or Smart's USB modems.

This morning my PC's speed began to slow down (I have VirtualBox, Firefox, jEdit, CoreFTP and winamp on load) the usual noticeable lagging of the mouse cursor's movement irritated me, obviously one of the applications was eating a big chunk of the process, so I hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE, to check what was going on...

The CPU usage shows 100%, then I checked which processes has the highest memory usage, the culprit was firefox - BUT I wasn't really browsing memory heavy webpages, still I checked which tab should I close, then I noticed Yahoo! Mail has an animated flash ad (about 400x400). I closed that tab, then checked my CPU usage again, eventually it went down to 13%.

AHA!

This remarkable discovery Ü lead me to download a firefox plugin to block ads.

Lo and behold! The Adblock Plus by Wladimir Palant

It's very easy to install and supports a lot of filter subscriptions.

URL: http://adblockplus.org/en/

Ideally when you're a PHP programmer/developer you should be able to access Windows and Linux at the same time.

Depending on the number and the built of computers that you have, there are 3 ways to achieve Windows and Linux parallelism:

1. if you have several PCs, acquire two computers and install one pc with Linux and the other with Windows, then hook it up on your network

2. if you only have one PC that can support virtualization, go for this option.

3. if your PC cannot support virtualization, purchase a domain and web space installed with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP)

In my case, during development or experimentation, I would opt for #2.

So what are the advantages of virtualization?

1. You could have several operating systems running without having to reboot.

2. It gives you freedom to mess up with the virtual OS environment. If you screwed up on something during development or testing, you could always rebuild the virtual computing environment. Highly recommended and effective for people who want to learn Linux.

3. You'll save on hardware cost.

Currently, I am using Sun Microsystem's VirtualBox - an open source virtualization software that runs on different platforms such as Windows, Linux, MAC OS etc.

I have installed it on my WindowsXP and Ubuntu OS (I have a dual boot PC)...since then I am one happy soul.

I received this email from GlobeLabs, probably because of the Google & Globe Workshop we attended a few weeks ago. Anyway, I am sharing this to everyone:

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Mash-up Globe and Google APIs to build commercial worthy apps!

Globe Labs is giving out five (5) one-year Globe DSL subscriptions or Tattoo packages for the first five apps slated for commercialization.

Ownership of apps submitted remains with the developer and all submitted apps have equal chance of commercialization.

Deadline for submission of applications is on August 15.
 
Make your great idea into a real app, then monetize it! For more details, visit the Globe+Google Mashup page in the Globe Labs portal.

Yesterday k0n advised me that I should read or prepare for HTML 5, then he showed me several new html 5 tags, that I think is quite a leap from the way we code our current html pages - so yes, I was convinced that I should do a bit of research.

So far, here are the remarkable articles that I have found. I suggest that you'd read these accordingly for a better flow of information intake.

1. Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!
2. HTML 5: Now or Never?
3. HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson discusses features, pain points, adoption rate, and more

As a rundown,

- yes, HTML 5 would definitely reshape how we construct webpages, specifically for multimedia content. They say it would undermine Flash and/or Silverlight.
- HTML 5 would make the web a full pledged application platform
- Browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and Opera  9.64 have support for HTML 5. So yes, you can modify "some" tags of your site to HTML 5.
- currently, Internet Explorer has the lowest level of support for HTML 5. Beware.
- if an HTML 5 tag is not yet supported by a browser you could always use javascript and css to alter its properties
- there would be APIs for the common javascript tasks such as window.location, setTimeout()
- Google would release "Google Wave"later this year. Its codes are in HTML 5.
- The expected release date of the final HTML 5 specification is on 2010.
- The proposed recommendation of HTML 5 is on 2022. Yep, that's 13 years from now.
- some groups abhor this "maturity" they say that it defies the standard of the separation of content and design

And as for me, I would heed the words of the professionals and wouldn't really focus my attention to this "yet". Although I might try some of the new HTML 5 tags for experimentation.