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Archive for the ‘Daily Life’ Category

My dad asked me to help book a flight from Manila to Boracay for my uncle who would be a balikbayan this weekend. The rates at PAL were better, so we decided to book using their website. I did the search for the flights, booked the seats, input my uncle’s details, etc. When we got to the screen to input the credit card info, my dad went to call my uncle to confirm and to get his credit card. He can’t have been gone five minutes. When he came back, I enter the credit card info in the form, click submit…and I get a session timeout error.

Wow. Their session timeout value is somewhere between five to ten minutes, closer to five. I’m not sure if this is reasonable, especially given that their website isn’t that user-friendly to begin with and you may spend some time poring through the flight lists to get one that you want.

Anyway, I figure the credit card hasn’t been charged yet since I timed out while entering the CC details, so I go to try again. Search for the flight…wait, the one with the cheap rate was no longer available!

I figure that while I was selecting dates the first time through their Online Booking application, the backend marked the last seat on that flight as “Reserved” under my uncle’s name, but since I timed out before I could pay that seat may now be lost forever.

I figure they probably have some sort of cleanup if the booking hasn’t been confirmed (i.e. paid for), so I leave the website for a bit then come back later. I search again, and the cheap flight is there! I get my dad’s credit card and proceed to go through the steps again. I get to the credit card form and input the details and click submit. Yay, it’s verifying! Checking the status bar though, it seems to be verifying against a MasterCard URL…but the card I used was a Visa!I was in such a hurry I forgot to tick MasterCard.

Unbelievably, the credit card verification was being done from my machine (since I could see the mastercard URL in the browser status bar), instead of on the server where it could be done more reliably.

Okay, this time it was my fault. No sweat, I’ll wait for the website to fail the verification then re-input the credit card details. So I wait. Then wait some more. The website is taking forever and not doing anything. Firefox prompts that the website tried to show a popup. I right-click and enable pop-ups for the website, nothing though. I wait some more.

Damnit, I finally reload the page to find that “my session has expired.” Sure enough, I tried to search for the cheap flight and it was no longer available AGAIN.

I give up. I’m not going to try again. Seriously this time. I’ll give the credit card back to my dad and just tell him to book manually (and to double check that the card has not been charged.)

I always have a bad time with Airline websites - I hate the Cebu Pacific one as well. These companies need to get better web developers.

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Software Developer, Tech | 1 Comment

My brother pointed me to a new (to me at least) online music service called imeem. The website caught my interest for two reasons.

1. It uses Adobe Flex, a technology which I’ve been using for the past year or so. Any Flex developer knows it’s Flex just by looking at the widgets. (Click to enlarge the screenshot!)

2. The service allowed me to find an mp3 which I’ve never found before and have used as a benchmark for how good an mp3 search service is. The song is the Tagalog opening for Shaider! (Now I need to find a new benchmark)

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Pop Culture | No Comments

Actually, I’m writing this post to test comments on the blog, which someone has reported to be currently borken. See ya in the comments.

Posted by Roy in Daily Life | 7 Comments

• NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development: Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008)
  (tags: blogs programming)

Posted by Roy in Daily Life | No Comments

If you’ve been having trouble with Bayan DSL web connections to some websites (which we have for the past few weeks or so), you may be surprised to know that they have an HTTP proxy server you can use. Strange, considering that when reporting such problems to their trunkline, they never ask whether you’re using that proxy server or not. I don’t recall ever being told about it by the Bayan DSL staff.

My brother found out about it last night and lo and behold! The websites we’ve previously had trouble accessing, such as Yahoo Mail, Multiply, Flickr, etc. have become accessible and Youtube videos now stream well, etc.

The settings are:
HTTP proxy server: proxy.skyinet.net
Port: 3128

You can set these in the options dialog of Firefox, under Advanced -> Network -> Settings.

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Tech | 3 Comments

After trying out usernamecheck.com, I decided to try claiming my username “roytang” at various websites. Here’s a list of various websites where I have this username.

http://friendfeed.com/roytang - This one actually seems useful.

http://twitter.com/roytang - Okay, I admit it. I’ve actually had this for a few weeks now.

http://pownce.com/roytang/ - I’m not yet too clear on what it’s used for.

http://roytang.posterous.com/ - would be useful if I didn’t already have a blog

http://roytang.livejournal.com/ - now I can be emo!

http://roytang.pbwiki.com/ - I created this a long time ago. Recently I had to use pbwiki again so I revived the account.

http://www.last.fm/user/roytang - music I listen to.

http://roytang.wordpress.com/ - As mentioned, I only got this account so I could activate Akismet

There’s probably more. Sometimes when I see a random website I try out my username to see if I’ve registered before and this is successful more often than I expect.

Some “roytang”s on the web that are not me:

http://roytang.blogspot.com - obviously not me

http://www.myspace.com/roytang - some guy from Singapore

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky, Meta | No Comments

I was going through some old files today, I found this screenshot of my desktop from 2004:

(Click for larger image)

Actually, I still like that wallpaper. It’s well-drawn. It’s from RPGamer Theme Central.

Items I had in the quick-launch toolbar:

• mIRC (for downloading comics)
• Thunderbird
• IE
• IE again (?!)
• I believe this is EditPad, a notepad replacement
• Chami.com HTML-Kit
• WinAmp
• Windows Media Player
• DivX Player
• No idea
• Shortcut to some folder
• Kazaa (pirate!)
• No idea
• 2xExplorer (Windows explorer alternative)
• Crimson Editor (so far there are at least 3 different text editors)
• Show Desktop
• Terminal
• Outlook (I never used this)
• Excel
• No idea
• Thunderbird again…apparently I never cleaned up this taskbar.
• Visualboy Advance
• Firefox
• Quicktime (3 different media players too!)
• Warcraft III
• Yahoo Messenger
• No idea

For reference, here’s today’s desktop, same wallpaper:

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky | No Comments

I caught Groundhog Day for the Nth time today on HBO (N roughly around 50). My father claims it’s his favorite movie of all time; high praise considering he watches every movie that comes out EVER. I’m not actually going to talk about the movie; it’s awesome, if you haven’t seen it, you should. You’re missing half your life.

If you had one day of eternity, what would you do?

Too bad it’s not possible to train to be Batman (your body gets reset every morning); you need to focus on mastering mental disciplines first. Ideally you would have an internet connection available; it should take a few man-years or so to memorize Wikipedia. Probably at some point I would test the limits of what a human being could accomplish in the span of 24 hours. Is it possible to take over the world in 24 hours? Since you get infinite repeats, maybe.

I wonder if a remake of Groundhog Day would sell in this day and age.

Posted by Roy in Crazy Ideas, Daily Life, Pop Culture | No Comments

I needed to transfer a file to my phone today, but could not find my USB cable. I figured I’d try out the Bluetooth with the laptop.

After around 30 minutes of struggling with the unintuitiveness and some helpful googling I finally was able to transfer my file using the ff steps, for future reference:

1. Turn on Bluetooth on the Acer Aspire using the Bluetooth button.
2. Right-click the Bluetooth icon on the systray -> Show Bluetooth Devices -> Options -> tick “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer”
3. Enable Bluetooth on the N73 via menu -> Tools -> Bluetooth
4. Scroll right on the N73 and the Paired Device screen is shown. Choose Options -> New Paired Device
5. The N73 should list your computer name (mine is PANDA!), select the computer name and you’ll be prompted for a passkey. Don’t input anything yet…
6. Back to the Vista PC, right-click the Bluetooth icon in the systray, then choose Add Device.
7. Tick “My device is set up and ready to be found.” and click Next.
8. The wizard should list your phone. Choose the phone and click Next.
9. Tick “Let me choose my own passkey”, and type a passkey.
10. You get the message to “Please enter the passkey on your Bluetooth device now”, so do just that.
11. The bluetooth connection should be all set up, to send a file to your N73, right-click the bluetooth icon and click Send a file
12. You’re done. Hooray!

Side note: After step 10, Vista seems to want to install drivers for the N73…but it doesn’t seem to be necessary

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky, Hardware | No Comments

I’ve been submerged in work for the past two weeks or so, not having much time to do anything else aside from work and the DS, which lets me sneak in some Professor Layton, FFTA2 or Civilization Revolutions while waiting for bug fixes to be confirmed.

So I took a break this weekend and won’t be reporting back to work until Wednesday. No plans really, just some unplanned downtime to unwind a bit…

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Work | No Comments