Tesda (Technical Education and Skills Development Authority) whose sole mission is to provide direction, policies, programs and standards towards quality technical education and skills development here in the Philippines, has been approached by the FPPP (Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation) and some of Manila’s old time bigwigs in the professional photography community to develop a certification and qualification standards for all Filipino photographers.

What brought this about was supposedly the emergence of cheaper, better, and easier to use digital cameras, which is now breeding a new generation of wannabe photographers. I think this certification business fine and dandy, BUT I wonder, does this certification apply to everyone, or only to those who had purchased a high-priced dSLR from the past year or so ago and now becoming so good with it that he is fast becoming a threat to the revenue stream of professionals currently doing advertising and wedding shoots?

If certification becomes a requirement to newbies only, won’t this propagate the so-called ol’ boys network and keep the new talents outside hanging by the fringe; forever dependent upon the blessings of the old timers? Hence, hinder inchoate trailblazing perspectives associated with the young.

Will Tesda someday require our composers to take certification tests as well? Come to think of it, with the proliferation of affordable synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines and Mac laptops, anyone can write music as accompanying soundtrack to those TV ads. I’m not sure about the local music business, but in the States, I know of young people making substantial income from royalties derived from writing music for TV commercials and video games. None of these kids went to music school; they’re simply driven by an intense desire to make music and now making incredible money from it.

How about our writers and poets? There are now computer programs available to make writing novels and poetry easier. Shouldn’t these people be subjected to certification as well?

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IMHO, GnuCash can be a “killer-app” if properly ported to OS X (or even Windows for that matter).

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Which is better? Joost or Democracy Player?

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All thanks to a nifty program called “CrossOver Mac”, Apple users can now access Metrobank’s internet banking facility (otherwise known as MetrobankDirect).

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After nine long years, the much-anticipated sequel to the classic Blizzard Real-Time Strategy game StarCraft is finally here….

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Google’s Picasa is undeniably the best and most user-friendly photo editing software out there. It’s free and what’s more, using or through Picasa itself, you can upload pictures you want to share into Google’s equally user-friendly free photo sharing service, Picasa Web Albums.

A recent great improvement in users’ photograph-sharing capability in Picasa Web Albums was the addition of a feature that enables users “to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page”….

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If I heard it correctly from a morning TV news yesterday, there was a reporter who asked a candidate that sounded like this:

“Sir, ano po ang mga gagawin niyong hakbang para siguradong pasok kayo sa 12?”

Continue reading at The Armorer’s Codex.

Ever since I shifted to Linux, I’ve been trying to find a way to make Cakewalk run in Memphis using Wine. After a few months of sporadic research and experimentation, I gave up. But surprise, surprise! I discovered I didn’t need to run Cakewalk after all.

I’ve read about Rosegarden before but I have never really taken it seriously because until recently, I haven’t been able to play MIDI files in Memphis anyway. (By the way, Rosegarden is a music-writing program– or a MIDI sequencer that has music-writing capabilities– similar to Cakewalk, which I used to make the pieces in the Original Music section.) However, a couple of days ago I suddenly felt the urge to read up on Rosegarden as I feel that I will need to write new pieces in the near future.

Read more: Not So Timid In My Rose Garden on ABCruz.com

The 2007 JavaOne Conference last week featured lots of cool-hot new stuffs! How cool-hot were they?

Read on!

It was just going to be a routine install of Internet Explorer 7 via IEs4Linux but when I logged in to my administrator account, the red star of the update notifier appeared. I thought it was just a prompt for some software upgrade but when I clicked it, the dialogue box said that an operating system upgrade was available. Tempting. I confirmed it and the update manager began scanning Memphis. It took only a couple of minutes, which is very good since I had been working for most of the night and I really wanted to get some sleep.

When the manager was done scanning, it told me that Memphis was ready for an upgrade from Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 to Feisty Fawn 7.04 and that, considering my internet connection, it will probably take some eight hours to complete. Good then, I can sleep as it downloads the required packages and that by the time it’s done, I’d have slept fully. But sleep was not meant to be.

Read more: From Edgy To Feisty;

Whoa. I just posted an entry yesterday, and here I am, posting another one. Oh, well, because nothing worth-blogging has happened to me this week, I’m just going to do a meme.

Instructions: Click “Start,” you’ll see there shortcuts to the programs you use most often. Put ‘em here, and give each an explanation. If there are other programs that are listed in your Start Menu, feel free to include them here.

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Are you a Twitter and a Linux addict? Try gTwitter, a client that runs on Linux!

There is some nasty stuff going on in the blogging world these days… It is all about this post by Kathy Sierra @ Creating Passionate Users.

As I understand the issue, this situation all comes down to “bullying”. I know “trolls” roam around blogging comments, but in this case, the trolls are (or encouraged by) the “A-Listers” of the blogging world.

I am not going to write much about the issue and you can follow up how this unfolds at Tech Meme. This entry is in support of Kathy Sierra and how influential is she on me especially in my career as a software developer.

I first knew her thru Head Rush books – they are revolutionary learning tools especially for software books. Finally, I found books that make strong connection between creativity and being a programmer; software development is not just hacking some code or talking techie coding stuff anymore. I was surprised and happy to discover that the Creating Passionate Users blog are from the authors of Headrush books.

I always try to think of what I read from their blog everytime I work on new projects…

I know there was a reason I wanted to become a programmer… if only I could remember what it was. – Creating a passionate…you

As I wrote here about two years ago … The real reason why am I doing what I do now is somehow, it is really important to care about users’ needs and implement efficient systems that satisfy those needs.

Listen to every user, from manager to regular staff, about their business process, and on how to make them more efficient. Never utter technical jargon when talking to users. Do not let the technology dictate how the interface going to behave, make it as easy as possible to do the users daily tasks. It is never the users fault when the systems fail… On being a passionate software, developer
I will always give some credit to Kathy Sierra.

Canon recently released updates to their DSLR software suite. The Canon RAW Codec 1.0 for Windows Vista seems to be the most notable among the updates since it is a new addition to the suite. The EOS Utility 2.0 Updater for Windows is also a welcome update especially to the Windows Vista users who had troubles in making the older version of their EOS Utility work with their Windows Vista PCs.

More info at Shutter Box PHilippines :: Canon Releases Updates for DSLR Software Suite

Last week, I featured a list of free video editors for Windows. Now here’s a list for Mac users.

Avid Free DV
Avid Free DV is feature-streamlined, standalone software which includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.

Clesh
Clesh from Forbidden Technologies is an unrivalled video editing and sharing tool. Our Java design ensures that most modern computers, Mac, PC, desktop or laptop can use Clesh without any software installation or hardware upgrades. You can benefit immediately from this remarkable product.

Check out the full list

After pulling my hair out with WordPress‘ export and import features (there might have been some issues with the export feature and my previous host, but I don’t give a shit anymore), I decided to get my hands dirty and move my blog to a new host by interfacing directly with the database. It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to make the move without losing data. I rule!

So from this moment on, ladies and freaks, bigbaddie.com is where it’s at. Not entirely sure what “it” is, but it’s here, ‘yo. So for you lovely souls linking to my old URL, I beg you to update your links with my new URL. I’ll owe you a cookie. And as for the new visitors of this attention whore blog, ’sup?

When I blogged about my new toy the Sony DCR-DVD 105, I didn’t expect it to be a support forum of sorts for this device. Visitors have posted comments and asked different questions regarding this camcorder and other video related stuff. Recently, one of the visitors asked me about video editors. So I decided to do some research and put up a list of free video editing software or programs for Windows.

Continue reading..