Coursera's Programming for Everybody (Python)

Today I just submitted my final exam for the online course "Programming for Everybody" or PR4E. This was a massive open online course (MOOC) from Coursera offered by the University of Michigan. I took it for ten weeks.

Special thanks goes to our instructor Dr. Chuck Severance for coming up with this course for beginning programming using Python. The course materials are FREE.

I attended my virtual graduation video, complete with commencement speaker Dr. Curt Bank of Indiana University, and the blank piece of paper rolled with a nice bow.

Someone else, something else, and... we're back!

Dear readers,

My name is Oliver Queen. After five years... whoops, wrong channel.

No, we're not in Yan Yu.

About five years has passed not owning this domain due to my neglect  to renew it, I checked tonight if myspaceless.com was still available. I quickly purchased it from Name.com and I'm so glad to get this back. For a while it contained JAPANESE writing, and I really don't remember who owned it or whether I even bothered to check.

That's all in the past now, and I'm back to writing geeky stuff.

Looking forward to more posts with you.

God bless,
Rex

New York Times Features Elance and Odesk

In a society where people are losing their jobs, many have turned to self-employment. Companies who see outsourcing as a viable strategy for their business hire these independent contractors.

In today's New York Times, two communities that I'm part of were featured: Elance and Odesk. These were not the only ones, and the article says a lot about the growth in the freelance communities because of the economic crisis. To read the whole article, click here.

These are my profiles in Elance and Odesk, respectively:

My Elance
My Odesk

php | architect: Order Accepted

I was able to contact phparch.com's toll-free number and talk to a customer service representative. I contacted them to inquire about the shipping address that was registered in their database because I was being charged 11.90 USD for shipping even though I selected a US address for the shipping address. It turns out that the shipping address was indeed the US address, but since the billing address was a Philippine address, their system automatically charged shipping (this is apparently a bug). The lady on the line asked me to send a refund request once the order is accepted. At this time my order wasn't accepted yet since they manually had to check my credit card for validity.

I now know why my credit card was manually checked. It's a policy that they have right now, to check credit cards that have an overseas billing address. After that conversation, my order was accepted and I was able to download the soft copy of the book on my online account:

After they sent my receipt by email, I replied to them that they charged 11.90 for shipping and that I'm requesting a refund.


Now I'm waiting for the refund. They promised it will take about three days to credit back to my credit card.

Credit Card Manual Check

Today I tried to purchase the 2nd edition of Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide at phparch.com's online book store.


When I first tried to order the book by my saved credit card in my online account, it generated an error saying the number is invalid. So I entered my credit card details manually.

After the order, the site gave me this page:



It seems that I'm now suspected for credit card fraud. They will review my purchase manually. This is weird. It's not the first time I made a purchase from phparch.com.

You might also experience this, and note that this link will show on top of that page:


Is it because there was an error the first time I tried to use my saved credit card details and when I entered my credit card details manually they now get suspicious?

If you have any experience with phparch.com similar to this, do leave a comment.

Regular Server Maintenance

Some time ago, both Twitter and Drupal went offline. They had scheduled planned maintenance, but seemingly for two different reasons. I suspect Twitter again had too many tweets. It's a phenomenon that is happening rapidly. People seem to use Twitter a lot, increasing its server load. But in Drupal's case, it was doing an upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Whatever the case may be, down times are important. Servers, or at least clouds, work 24/7. Given the load that is bombarded into them, all loose ends need to be tied once in a while to make sure they don't crash.

Ubercart for Drupal

A few months ago I was able to set up a shopping cart for Drupal. I made it using Ubercart, a module you can easily install. It looks very seamless with a wide variety of payment methods. It emails you your invoice. It even has shipping cost calculations.

If you want to test it, you can check out this dummy site I made for testing the shopping cart. When calculating shipping costs, I set the pick-up address to a California 95262 zip code, so that's the origin of the package. Go ahead and try it at

http://cart.site40.net/

It's 2009!

Happy New Year to everyone! It's the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. I also just turned 28 on January 1.

For the previous year, it was met with a lot of challenges for many of us. The recession has affected first-world countries such as the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Singapore. There's less effect on us here in third-world countries but nevertheless the effect is there. Many Filipinos working abroad have returned to their motherland. Some have gotten laid off because of the financial crisis. Even my job hunt was not successful in Singapore, a first-world country that has a suffering economy as well.

As I'm writing this, I'm back in my motherland the Philippines. I'm currently a freelancer who's hopefully a future shareholder in a new business venture. The economy here has not changed much. Generally, companies pay as low as possible, and it seems that it's not easy to find employment that pays well based on experience, skills, and education. We just haven't reached that level in our job culture yet (my humble opinion).


Anyway, for the latest technology I've been exploring -- I recently got back to Drupal and learned more than I had at first. Drupal is viable for creating social networks, shopping carts, and point-systems (e.g. rewards for shoppers). I've tested all three features and they work. It's a growing active community with lots of modules to choose from. It's good to use for seamless integration that reduces the need to hard code. All you need to do is install the modules and activate them.

To a great year ahead...

Scratchproofing

Recently I bought a Nokia 2630 when I was in Singapore. One of the things they gave me for free was a transparent plastic case to protect the phone from scratches and dirt. The transparent case broke easily and I had to get a new one in Manila. My phone is protected now.

Scratchproofing is important with phones and laptops. If you get a Macbook, iPhone, or iPod from Apple, you can protect these with invisibleSHIELD


Watch out for their sale on October 31 - Halloween Special. 40% OFF All invisibleSHIELDs

My Brainbench

I am currently certified by Brainbench.com in three different areas:

1. OO Concepts
2. RDBMS Concepts
3. PHP 5

As I'm writing this, I just finished my PHP 5 test. Here are the results:


If you want to view my transcript, simply click on this link:

http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=7261841

Another Domain for Sale

I'm new at domain flipping, but it seems like an income-generating thing that can be done on the side.

I'm selling a domain name (without content) called marketbymedia.com. I posted it at Sedo and you can view the page where you can place bids.

I chose the domain because of the keywords it has -- "market", "by", and "media" which seem to have high value and can sell at a good price.

I also recently joined a community of domain flippers at siterev5.com.

Domain Name for Sale

I posted this domain, MYSPACELESS.COM, for sale, along with the site. Although I'm not sure how I can sell the content without giving access to my blogger account, I may just end up selling the domain. I posted it at Sedo.

You can look for it there later on. Right now it's undergoing verification. If interested, you can just email me at

buy _AT_ myspaceless _DOT_ com.

Your domain owner,
RJ Alobba

Brainbench Shape-Based IQ Test

On July 16, I received an email from Brainbench asking for help on the beta testing of their new Shape-Based IQ test. All I had to do was enter the promo code and take the test. If I got 20% or more and answered all questions, I get a free certification worth $49.95 and a chance to win an Apple iTouch.

So I took the test. I made it to 98%. Now I have a free test and have entered into the raffle draw for an iTouch.


I wanna take the PHP 5 test. After all, it's free now for me. =)

Kopete Instead of GTalk

If you're a Linux user like me, you may have noticed by now that Linux doesn't have GTalk. So if you want to chat with your Gmail buddies, you're gonna have to do it over the browser using your email account. No other way, right? Wrong.

I came across Kopete, a chat client that's approved by Google and available in Ubuntu Linux's repository.


It's fairly easy to use, but make sure you have the necessary Debian packages installed in your Ubuntu or whatever installation system is supported by your Linux -- make sure the packages that support SSL and QCA-TLS are there.

Google documents it pretty well. Just click here. I followed the instructions and they work. The most important part is that Kopete uses Jabber to connect to Google, so you have to set up a "Jabber" account that actually connects to Google. But you have to override the default server information and specify connection points. I encircled the connection points below:


When using Kopete, all chats are automatically saved to your Gmail account. And if there are people who suddenly appear online, a widget pops up.

What is "Spaceless"?

As I did some searching, I realized that the term "myspaceless" applies to those who have no My Space account. But then you might notice that's just one word, as contrasted to this blog's title "My Spaceless" -- two words. "Spaceless" simply implies that the Internet allows us to do our tasks without the limitations of geography.

Recently I found this old school-style web page called spaceless.com. The content is about the Internet too -- even using the phrase "life online". Perhaps the site owner had the same definition of "spaceless" as I do. Here's a screenshot:


Anyway, here's a summary of what my "My SpaceLeSs" blog is about:

My SpaceLeSs talks about Internet business and education trends from an Asian perspective. It specializes on the topic of "ubiquity" which means appearing to be everywhere at once, hence its name. Topics range from IT conferences to programming and SEO.

Web Down Times

Even the most popular sites have down times. Perhaps this is because they are popular, and servers can't always handle the incoming traffic for these sites.

Three sites today that I encountered that have down times:

StumbleUpon.com


Mint.com


Google Apps (Gmail for domains)

iPhone 3G Almost Here

It's a short while to go before the iPhone 3G launches. It includes a fast 3G cellular network capability, enhanced, contact functions, and synced email, calendar, and contacts. As for languages, iPhone now offers complete language and dictionary support for English (U.S.), English (UK), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean (no dictionary), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish. You can even draw Chinese or Japanese characters, and the iPhone will recognize them. More of these on Michael Hyatt's blog post.


If you need a protective cover, you can get an invisibleSHIELD

More on Firefox Download Day: We Did It!

Recently I received an email from spreadfirefox.com that Firefox set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. We helped reach 8,002,530 downloads.


They gave me a free certificate to acknowledge my participation in this endeavor.

As of this writing, the following is the status of the downloads for Firefox 3:

31,715,253 downloads.

Paint.NET on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

I was able to install Paint.NET on a Linux, an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). My first attempt was on an Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) which failed. It seems that the mono package was outdated.




It can be done with a few simple steps:

$ sudo apt-get install mono-common libmono* mono-gmcs
$ svn co http://paint-mono.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src paint-mono
$ cd paint-mono
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ paintdotnet

The first line installs the needed Debian packages, the second downloads the Paint.NET source code, and lines 3 to 6 compile and install Paint.NET from the source code. To execute the program, simply follow line 7 in executing it from the command-line.

Based on the command-line execution, I made a shortcut on my desktop so it will be easy to start Paint.NET.

Too Many Tweets

Three times today Twitter responded with an overload. Perhaps the developers did not anticipate the number of people that sign up to the service to be so many. Social media marketing is a growing trend right now, and some people may use it not for personal connections but for business relationships. Whichever the case, these guys who maintain the network better get ready for the volume of sign-ups.