Philippine Politics and Redefining Poverty

Was watching the news earlier regarding those who are hitting on Villar regarding his claim that his family was poor considering his father was earning about 35 thousand pesos per month (computed to reflect the current salary value which was about 5K pesos per month during his dad's time). 35K pesos would put you in a good position if you are only rearing at most 2 children and nobody was depending on you. But if you have 9 children and are also helping relatives, 35K pesos wouldn't be enough to get by imho. I find it funny that the media, categorizes that Manny Villar's family as part of the middle class, but considering that he has 9 siblings and relatives depending on his father does anyone think that his father's salary would be enough ?

I think our government and our society should make a much more clearer definition on the categories regarding social status and poverty. I've also watched in the news one of editors in GMA News that ones definition of being poor is different from another, but he should also take note and take into consideration that there is also an accepted definition of being poor in society and that can we also know what him and the media defines as being poor, middle class and upper class.

I just find it both funny and saddening that the wars between "NoyNoy" and "Villar" has reached to this extent. This is what Philippine politics is at its best, smear campaigns and bad publicity. And yet they even have the nerve to say that "They won't steal" and that "They will fight Corruption". *sigh* Where are the campaigns and slogans showing their achievements and the things that they have done for the country? Don't be proud of just your attendance, but be proud on what you have done for the country. Well common strategy in Philippine Politics is that if you don't have any good thing to say or be proud of then use smear campaign against your closest rivals. Luckily for me my choice candidate for President and Vice-President doesn't do those kind of tactics.... Unless you'd consider Richard Gordon's statement " 9 years as congressman and 3 years in the Senate but where is Tarlac now .... " LOL paging Homer Simpson .... Where is Tarlac ?

Upgrading Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy

After some thought I finally convinced myself to upgrade my Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy. Why it took me a while to upgrade it ? Well I haven't used any LINUX box in a very long time or haven't tinkered with LINUX for a while, so making mistakes when upgrading would be a pain in the neck. Anyway I've found that upgrading Ubuntu is much easier now in comparison to upgrading LINUX OS from before. I used the command shell upgrade since I'm using the server Ubuntu Dapper. Below is how to do the upgrade.

1. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list as root. Change every occurrence of dapper to edgy.

a. ) To do this either use the command

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

or use the command

sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Update the source list with the command

sudo apt-get update

3. Upgrade your system with the following command

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

4. To double check if your upgrade was finished properly use the following command

sudo apt-get -f install

5. For the changes to take effect you need to restart your system.

Hope that helps.

Japanese Canned Foods/Snacks

In my 4 years stay in Japan, I have seen a lot of different foods and dishes. From eating ikuradon to nattou and uni and lately uma sashimi (horse meat sashimi). There are a lot different dishes that I haven't tried yet well some of which are the common canned foods or snacks. I have tried canned soups (mostly corn soup) but I yet to try canned oden and the newly released canned ramen. A short description of oden from the wikipedia is written as follows.

Oden is a Japanese winter dish consisting of several ingredients such as boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku and processed fish cakes stewed in a light, soy-flavoured dashi broth. Ingredients vary according to region and between each household. Karashi (Japanese mustard) is often used as a condiment.

Oden in can have become one of the popular otaku foods. When you go to akihabara you will see a lot of different kinds of oden in can. I'm planning to try both oden in can and ramen in can this weekend. A few of the brands and pictures of what's inside is as follows.

Ubuntu Server (6.06) Dapper Drake + XAMPP for LINUX

Last time I dabbled in Linux was about 5-6 years ago when I created a proxy server and e-mail server for the office then (we didn't have a host yet back then). I wanted to try and setup a webpage server running in Virtual PC and Fedora, however due to the fact that I haven't been updated with the current changes and that my desktop is an old Pentium 4 (1.2 Ghz), installing Fedora in Virtual PC was a task uncalled for. It slowed down my system and I couldn't do anything else with it with both Windows and Fedora running simultaneously. So searching for an alternative I ended up using Ubuntu (Dapper Drake or 6.06) which is my first time using it. So far after blotching up with my first attempt to install it, I finally found a nice Perfect Setup Guide and just customized it a bit to add XAMPP for LINUX instead of the LAMPP installation. With ssh already installed, I just access the LINUX box using Putty client. So far it works fine. Initial results here

Article can also be viewed here : Diverse Stupidities

Tomcat, Windows, Garbage Collector Log Problem

I don't know if this has happened to anyone or if anybody who has encountred this been able to solve this problem. So far I have tried everything from installing into three different machines, tweaking the configurations etc., but I still haven't been able to produce or find the garbage collector logfile.

Looking at different message boards there are still people who have encountered the same problem as I have and yet no answer was given or found.

Here is how I installed and started Tomcat. (Windows 2003 Server, Tomcat 5.0, Java 1.4.2)
1. Installed Java and set JAVA_HOME path
2. Installed Tomcat as a service
3. Edited the Apache Tomcat Properties->Java->Java Options and Added the following
1st setup : -verbose:gc -Xprof -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDetails
2nd setup : -Xloggc:gc.log -Xprof -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDetails
3rd setup : -Xloggc:gc.log -verbose:gc -Xprof -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDetails

4. Started Tomcat


After starting tomcat according to the pages and message board that I have visited you should be able to see garbage collection log either in the stdout.log file or the gc.log file which you set in -Xlogg:. However, I searched the whole system for the file gc.log to no avail. If anyone has encountered this problem and has a clue or found a solution how to do this. Help would be greatly appreciated.