Month: December 2009

General

Sony Playstation 3 Slim

By on Tuesday, December 29, 2009

I was a gamer not too long ago. I played a whole gamut of games from classic arcade games like Pac-man, Space Invaders to classic PC games like King’s Quest, Karateka, Prince of Persia, to the modern FPS, RPG, and RTS like Doom I/II, Duke Nukem, Quake I/II/III, Unreal, Command and Conquer I/II, Red Alert I/II, Warcraft I/II/III (and DOTA), Diablo I/II, Starcraft, I even played an MMORPG: Ragnarok (yesh!). But I guess work and studies plus an underpowered laptop put all that to rest.

With the series of holidays coming up, I wanted to have something to while away the time during the occasional respites from attending to Jeanne (and to a certain extent Michelle). Aside from watching movies, what’s better than being part of those movies, in an interactive way i.e. games, right?

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General

Certified True Copy vs Certified Xerox Copy

By on Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Here’s a puzzle. Michelle was following up with their HR regarding the requirements for claiming SSS maternity benefits and they responded with this one interesting item: Certified true copy of child’s birth certificate (Please take note: It should certified true copy and not certified xerox copy from the original).

So how do you make a true copy (by itself already an oxymoron) prior to it being certified? Apparently not by photocopying. But how else can you make a  copy? Laser printer? Doesn’t that use the same toner and drum technology? Offset printing? By hand? Really beats me. The sad thing is that this stupid bureaucratic mumbo jumbo probably have some twisted meaning somewhere.

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General

Languages

By on Sunday, December 20, 2009

I was cradling Jeanne when my dad, who was visiting us, suddenly started talking to her in Tagalog. I struck me how alien it sounded. It’s not that I don’t use Tagalog, it’s just that it was all Tagalog. I guess it really sounded alien to me considering that my first language is a mix of Cebuano and English (ceblish?) and my second is a mix of Tagalog and English (taglish). English, my third language, is always there in the mix. Looking back, it must have been really confusing growing up with so many languages. You get spoken to in Cebuano, English, and later Tagalog. And all the while your reading materials are all in English. Luckily, I turned out reasonably well (or did I? :P) And here I am still aspiring to learn yet another language (French).

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General

WebSphere 6 Error: Unsupported major.minor version 49.0

By on Friday, December 18, 2009

I was trying to test a web application in WebSphere 6 when I encountered this error:

Error 500: java.lang.LinkageError: LinkageError while defining class: aiu.webservices.bean.ConfigServiceProxy Could not be defined due to: aiu/webservices/bean/ConfigServiceProxy (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0) This is often caused by having a class defined at multiple locations within the classloader hierarchy. Other potential causes include compiling against an older or newer version of the class that has an incompatible method signature.

After a little bit of puzzling and googling, the problem turned out to be that I have been compiling using JDK 1.4. while the WebSphere VM only has Java 1.4. The solution was to Project->Properties->Java Compiler->Compiler Compliance Level to 1.4. And Project->Properties->Java Build Path->Libraries->JRE System Library->Alternate JRE to 1.4.

I exported to WAR, updated the application via WebSphere console, and it worked! couldn’t believe it was that simple :P

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General

Early Morning Scare

By on Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Jeanne had been active the past few nights as newborns normally are but for the past two nights, I noticed what I thought was difficult in breathing. We decided, fretful parents that we are, to go to the hospital.

So off we went at 1AM in the morning to hospital. When we got there, we went to the emergency room where one of the nurses checked her vitals. All the readings were normal: 100% oxygen and good heart rate. She was also kicking vigorously, crying strongly, and feeding voraciously. The doctor on duty called Jeanne’s doctor and they both agreed there seems to be nothing wrong but that if we want, we can have Jeanne admitted for observation.

Michelle and I talked about it and eventually decided to just go home to a less stressful environment, observe Jeanne, and just come back at 11AM. In the event the breathing difficulty recurs, we planned to just rush off to the nearest hospital again.

Later in the morning, we went back to the hospital, saw Jeanne’s doctor, and after a lengthy examination, concluded the same as earlier, there seems to be nothing wrong. She assured as that newborns do sometimes breathe irregularly.

Whew!

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