General

Starting A Business

I’ve always been interested about starting my own business. But for lack of certain things, it’s more daydreaming ;) than a real intent at this point. But out of curiosity, I’ve been trying to look for the procedure for starting a business. I’ve asked a few friends, read some articles, and today I stumbled on Doing Business which has, among other things, a ranking of the ease of doing business in various countries. The Philippines ranks a dismal 144 in the list of 183 countries!!!

The difference between the procedures to start at business in the Philippines and starting one in Singapore, which ranks 1,  is telling. No wonder comparatively few attempt to start a business here and even fewer succeed. But I guess there’s a wicked Darwinian mechanism in place here: if you are persistent, determined, and I guess lucky enough to get through all the red tape then you have an excellent chance at succeeding with your business. That’s the government working for you!

Another Bus Tragedy

It’s not just inter-island ferries that are sinking, buses are constantly crashing, too. Such is the sad state of transportation in this country. And whenever these happen, the government would say that this ship, this bus, doesn’t have a license to operate like it is the cause of the tragedy, like it would absolve them of the blame. It actually raises the question why they were allowed to operate at all? Where was the government before the tragedy?

Army of Two

James and I finished Army of Two today. It is a co-op action game about adventures of two mercenaries or private military contractors (PMC) as they prefer to be called, across several years. During this time, they go from being idealistic green soldiers, to gung-ho PMCs, to outlaws who must clear their names.

Read More

Major Major Disaster

Notwithstanding Venus Raj’s making the top 5 in the Miss Universe pageant, we have, to borrow from our almost Miss Universe, a major major disaster for the country. Yesterday, a bemedalled cop who was dismissed from service took a bus full of HK tourists hostage. Incompetent crisis management, incompetent hostage negotiation, and an agonizingly slow-motion rescue led to a tragic conclusion: several hostages dead, numerous others injured, some critically.

Repercussions were immediate: the HK government issued a travel alert telling their citizens NOT to go to the country and for those citizens already in the country to either leave or take precautions. For sure, other countries will follow suit. And even if they don’t, a lot of travel plans are definitely going to change. That’s not good for tourism and foreign investments. The decline in stocks today can partly be attributed to this.

Setting Up Subversion

Every developer should have version control. It can be a simple process or a process supported by tools. One of the best version  control tools is Subversion or SVN. Here’s how to set up your own SVN server on a Linux box.

Install or update Subversion: If you’re using Red Hat-type Linux: yum install subversion or yum update subversion. If you’re using Debian-type Linux: apt-get install subversion or apt-get update subversion. Others Linux flavors should have something similar.

Create your repository: svnadmin create /svnroot

Configure access: vi /svnroot/conf/svnserve.conf. In the [general] section, add:

anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

Add users: vi /svnroot/conf/passwd and add:

<username> = <password>

Start Subversion as a daemon: svnserve -d.

Open up TCP port 3690 on your Linux box’s firewall.

Connect to your SVN server with the URL svn://<server name or ip>>/svnroot

Start using your SVN server. Here are some useful tips:

  1. How to structure your repository
  2. How to fix bugs properly
  3. How to release software properly

That’s it!