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Archive for the ‘Tech’ 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

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

I’m not sure why but I decided to try out the Flock 2 web browser beta, the “social web browser” built on top of Firefox.

This is a test actually. Flock’s blog post dialog doesn’t seem to provide any category support (it supports tags instead), so I want to see what category this post would go under. (Update: Flock let me choose a category after I try to publish the post.)

I’m not yet entirely sure what the merits of using Flock are, it seems to be mostly conveniences when using certain webapps. I’m going to try it out for a few days.

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Tech | No Comments

The gist of it is: it wasn’t as annoying as I had been led to expect.

Frankly, I think it’s better than XP, but I might be blinded by the fact that it’s very pretty. Visually it’s a step up from XP the same way XP was a step up from ‘95. The XP box at work seems so bland to me now.

The file manager (Explorer) is very nice, I like the functionality of being able to navigate the address bar by mouse click (though I never used this back in Ubuntu) and the ability to sort files even in thumbnail view. The desktop gadgets are neat but probably not really that useful, though I still keep them around.

IE7 so far has been tolerable, except that I found out just now that it has Javascript errors when I’m using the Wordpress RTE for posting. Also, the Ctrl+K shortcut for the search box is missing, but I still insitinctively use it all the time. I think I’m going to switch to Firefox right after posting. :p

All the permission prompts that I had heard people complain about didn’t really bother me. They only come up when you need to do administrative-related tasks, and coming from Ubuntu I’m a bit used to it.

I haven’t removed most of the preinstalled Acer crap yet, but I’ve removed the 90-day trial of Norton Antivirus and replaced it with Avast antivirus.

Oh, Windows Update is prompting me for a restart! It’s also my first time working with an OS that has Windows Update enabled, and some people have told me how annoying the restart prompts are especially while playing games. Luckily, I can afford to restart right now.

All in all, Vista seems okay, and I believe it’s a good upgrade to XP, which has been getting boring to me. I was originally planning on dual-booting this laptop with Linux, but I think I’ll stick with Vista for a while.

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Tech | 1 Comment

Because I’m a sucker for trying out alternative software, I installed and tried out the latest release of the Opera web browser, Opera 9.5, for a bit more than a week. Opera is neat and all, but I don’t see any features that are so awesome that they can’t be done in Firefox (with some extensions maybe).

My favorite feature is I guess the Speed Dial page; where opening a new tab displays a customizable table of common websites you visit. Opera also provides a function to zoom in or out of any web page (don’t know if Firefox has a similar extension). Supposedly Opera is also the fastest in terms of browser rendering; I didn’t perform any benchmarks, but I didn’t notice any significant difference either.

There are quite a few cons though. In particular:

• The standard Wordpress rich text editor doesn’t work correctly; I had to use the plain text editor when posting using Opera.
• Some Google properties such as Google Docs and Google Notebook don’t work correctly
• Flash content that renders before the rest of the page does not correctly move into the proper position once rendering is complete

The Wordpress and Google support are deal-breakers for me, without those problems I would have considered keeping Opera as my primary browser for a while. As it is, I’m switching back to Firefox 3.0.

Posted by Roy in Tech | No Comments

I added an iGoogle Gadget that allows me to post from iGoogle. Neat huh?

But I’m not sure if it’s okay to trust the gadget with my blog account details…

Posted by Roy in Tech | No Comments

An alpha release was just announced for Open Office 3. Being an Ubuntu user, Open Office is really the only sane choice I have for an office suite. At work I’m using Microsoft Office 2007. Among the office suite applications, I’m most of a power user for the spreadsheet applications. Here’s my side-by-side comparison of Excel and oOo Calc:

Microsoft Excel 2007 on Windows XP:

• Looks really pretty.
• Loads up quickly.
• Proprietary and expensive.
• Not available for Linux.

OpenOffice Calc 2.4.1 on Ubuntu:

• Feature-rich - has some features that excel does not.
• I can have a sandwich in the time it’s loading.
• Free as in speech, and as in beer too!
• Usability issues, such as inconveniently prompting a dialog box on every delete. (This is logged in their database as bug # 9392. There’s a workaround, but hopefully it will be fixed by default in Open Office 3)
• Autofilter feature is immature compared to Excel, not enough options for filtering.
• It can open a password-protected XLS correctly (prompting me for the password), but it can’t save it back with the password.
• I was going to complain about the UI, but now that I’ve thought better of it, it’s no worse than other GTK/Linux apps.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Tech | No Comments

Part 1.

Part 2.

Moonglove Winnower template is currently live on Roy on Magic.

I made several color and formatting changes since the last update. Relatively easy due to the stylesheet. I also had to scrap the CSS hack for implementing equal height columns, it was causing problems with anchors in the URL. I went with a 1-pixel high background image instead.

Currently most of the PHP logic/heavy lifting is done in sidebar.php while most of the formatting stuff is handled in the stylesheet. Since I’m copying from an existing template and not creating one from scratch, I didn’t actually need to learn much PHP. Most of it was moving code around.

I’m not releasing this source yet because:

• The code is still very messy
• It still doesn’t work properly with Wordpress Widgets
• I still have some improvements I want to make. The search box is missing for instance.
• I’d like to release some variations (featuring other Magic card art) at the same time.
• It’s not yet XHTML-valid. The autocard plugin in particular is causing problems.

Still, the current one is functional enough that I don’t mind using it on the site.

Most of the difficulty so far has been the design part: thinking about colors, how things should be arranged, etc. As an engineer, it’s not one of the things I’m used to doing. I can’t imagine I would be able to do some of the fancy, complicated layouts anytime soon, though I might be able to create simpler, minimalistic ones first.

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Projects, Tech | No Comments

Part 1 of this series is here.

Creating a Wordpress template is harder than I thought. Luckily I’m modifying the default template instead of starting from scratch. The one I’m creating is rather simple but after spending almost 8 hours on it so far, I’m still far away from completing it. I’m guessing the more complicated layouts take more than two weeks of full-time work.

Here’s my current WIP:

Changes since the last part:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Roy in Projects, Tech | No Comments

1. Web design has never been one of my strong points, and it’s something I’d like to improve on.

2. The Roy on Magic blog has been using the default Wordpress Template since forever, and I’ve been trying to find a good WP Template that fits the “Magic the Gathering” theme.

Put the above points together, and I have a new personal project. Just for fun, I’ll log my progress here. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Roy in Projects, Tech | 2 Comments