I’ve been to a number of provinces in the Visayas region last year. Every single time, I needed a Wi-Fi connection because my job required an Internet connection.

I’ll be updating this post as I get to know new Wi-Fi hotspots in the provinces. Please comment if you know of any hotspot in the provinces. I intentionally excluded Davao and Metro Manila because I believe it’s not hard to find hotspots in those cities. Read more »

I support the initiative to drop Internet Explorer 6 ASAP a hundred and one and one-half percent. Well, I haven’t been supporting IE6 for maybe six months now anyway. I guess you can partially blame my Vista OS for not supporting IE6. I imagine IE6 can be a bitch especially when you’re customizing your Wordpress themes. Read more »

I just installed IE8 beta hoping to see visual improvements, especially on the toolbars. I would prefer the refresh and stop buttons on the left side where it should be. I know I could have just googled the browser screenshot but I wanted to try it out anyway. I guess I’ll also mention that I was hoping I could skin IE8 and add add-ons ala Firefox.

Anyways, I also have been planning a browser shift from Firefox to IE7 or IE8 for the longest time. My Firefox keeps crashing on me (I’m using Vista Ultimate). I have long suspected Firefox to crash when a lot of Flash movies are being loaded in the browser. The IE8 beta release seems to have finally made me do the shift. I’ll have to admit there’s no real improvement in my browsing except that my browser won’t crash that often.

For now, I don’t care about 2 new significant features introduced by IE8 - Activities and WebSlices. I’m sure their product page can explain those features much better.

Last January, I wrote about how Network Solutions stole my domain name. It turns out that I am not the only one who has observed this. You can say I’m quite naive, thinking I’m the only one who has noticed this scam.

Another article even discusses the trick pricing I complained about:

This allows Network Solutions to continue charging substantially higher prices for domain name registration. Network Solutions charged $34.99 to register the name sought by this suit’s lead plaintiff. A competitor would have charged $9.99.

Apparently, it’s not only Network Solutions who practice this evil scheme. I really hope the authorities penalize these companies to kingdom come. Thinking of a new and cool domain is no joke. I didn’t work for a whole day thinking of cool domain names for my blog and my other Web sites. If you ask me, they should pay at least $1,000 for every name they stole in favor of the person who made the name search.

Google on Monday added three experimental views to its list of possible alternatives to the established vertical list of Web pages delivered as search results. The latest additions, which people are free to try out if they have a Google account, are available through the Google Labs site. The idea behind the experimental search page is to give Google fans a chance to try out the search engine’s newest ideas.

The latest experiments include a “map view” in which locations related to search results are marked on a street map. Users also have the option of viewing the location on a satellite view.

The map view could be helpful, for example, if a person was looking for all the musical performances around town or technology conferences happening in a state. Because traditional results are spread out over many sites and pages, they may be hard to visualize at once, so the map view is aimed at solving that problem by plotting some of the key locations. Read more »

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are really very new to me. I found this site that articulately explains them. However, you know the Net is widely used as much as it is widely abused. I’ve read some posts that say quite a number of sites turn off their trackbacks (am not sure about pingbacks) because they are spam magnets.

Wow, the Net really complicated our already complicated lives, don’t you think?

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today’s announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Click here for the full article…

Last week, I was searching for available blog names (and its corresponding domain names). I consider myself a “late bloomer” as I caught up with blogging a bit late. So what’s my point? My point is most of the cool blog names are already taken. Then, I thought of “blogmachina.com”. Alas, it was available!

I like the way GoDaddy gives you alternative names (this is useful when your desired name is already taken and you might want to pick a name that closely resembles it) when searching/checking for domain names so I tried GoDaddy’s search tool. Good Lord, it’s available. For reasons I don’t need to divulge here, I also checked the availability of “blogmachina” in Network Solutions. Predictably, it also was available.

I went to Host Monster to sign up for a shared hosting account but I didn’t have the sufficient balance on my credit card. That same day, I paid my bill to increase my balance but sadly my payment was reflected only after 24 hours. The next day, I signed up again. Can you guess what happened? “blogmachina.com” wasn’t available. I couldn’t believe it so I tried checking the name again in Network Solutions. It is available. What’s going on here?

It seems that Network Solutions bought the name and is reselling it. The problem is, when you search for the name, it tells you that it costs only $9 per year.  But when you proceed with the checkout (without signing up for hosting), it suddenly becomes $34.99 per year!

What’s goin’ on here???