Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times came out with an article about “elite” Korean schools which groom their students to enter Ivy League universities.

Reading the following passage made me reminisce about my high school alma mater, which with its reputation and demanding curriculum, such stories are not unusual at all:

One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.

Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.

“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said. [The New York Times, emphasis mine]

I also had a batchmate who would freak out and weep when he got 99/100 in quizzes. He supposedly got beatings from his parents from such scores. It’s toll on the guy was obvious: he was socially inept. And by inept, I do not just mean that he’s a dork: by inept, I mean that, at 14 or 15 years old, he exhibited the emotional maturity of a 9 year old.

I’m not kidding, nor do I mean it in a degrading nor insulting way — he genuinely exhibited the emotional maturity of a 9 year old. While a lot of people was dealing with their adolescence hormones (although many, who are similar to him, are not), dealing with their relationships with the opposite sex, this guy was drooling (literally) in front of his Game Boy trying to finish The Legend of Zelda. He acted in this weird, comical way, as though he was always acting out a skit from some sort of cartoon. He wrote in the school paper, but his material never went beyond echoing the preachings of parents who made sure that their little boy behaved properly.

And all of that to satisfy the whims of parents who determined from day one that they will measure their child’s worth through the name of the school he went to, and through the numeric scribbles of some stranger on a thickened piece of paper.

While I agree that honing the talents of a gifted child is necessary so that talent does not go to waste, I believe that elevating perfection to some sort of sadistic standard and measuring a child’s worth through their adherence to that standard is pure and unadulterated child abuse. Indeed, many of us from that school, myself included, reached a point during our college years where we just burnt up, bombed out, and got disillusioned by the meaning of all the numbers ruling our lives, despite the absence of pressure from our parents at the time. It was simply expected of us because we came from that school.

It was tough being unable to distinguish one’s self worth from that stigma, the label of being a graduate of an elite school. Many people, upon learning that you’ve come from that school, immediately expect you to be some kind of superhuman or ubergenius; a person who is expected to be “successful” by excelling in all aspects of life, especially in academics and, years later, in a career. It’s as if failure is not an option.

I deeply appreciate my parents for not burdening me with the kinds of expectations some of my batch mates had to go through.

I am not discouraging people from sending their children to Philippine Science High School, or to any other science high school, or for aspiring for entry into Ivy League schools for that matter. Neither do I regret going to Pisay, because the challenges there certainly made me a stronger, more resilient, and more reflective person.

However, fourteen years’ worth of hindsight makes the repercussions of a high-pressure academic environment much, much clearer. Now that I am also a parent, at least the effort becomes more conscious: never ever make your child feel that they are only worth the grades they get. Being in an elite school is hard enough — lowering their self esteem will only make it worse.

They will thank you for it when you get older.

Sidney Snoeck, author of my favorite photo blog, My Sari Sari Store, announced that he is signing off due to some unexpected personal circumstances.

I have been viewing My Sari Sari Store regularly for the past three years and to say that his photos inspired me is but an understatement. His style is a major influence in my own attempts at photography over the past 8 months of going around the Philippines — a photo collection I haven’t had the guts (and time) to come out with. My efforts (both successful and otherwise) at photography have been the expression of both frustration and appreciation of individuals like Sidney, a foreigner who perceives the beauty and idiosyncrasy of the Philippines in an a much better fashion than most Filipinos ever can.

While I can’t fully promise it, I’ll be working on my stash of photos in the next few weeks. They won’t be at par with the quality of Sidney’s gallery — but they would be in the same spirit of unraveling the beauty of the Philippines and its culture.

Thanks, Sidney, for showing us more colors of the Philippines than the drab that its people always paints it as. I fervently hope that soon enough you’ll be back to posting your photos of Philippine sights. Maraming maraming salamat sa iyo. Mabuhay ka!

Cross-posted from .NET @ Kape ni LaTtEX

When Microsoft came up with its Heroes Happen {Here} campaign as part of Launch {2008}, I found the campaign name cheesy. “Hero” is something you reserve for people who do truly great things, and hardly fits into the portrait of a software developer — someone like me. A flawed person who makes mistakes, writes bugs, and tries his best to go home early to the family every night even as QA bug reports come pouring in for immediate repair.

Deep inside of me, however, I knew the kind of power, and consequently, the kind of responsibility, software developers had in our hands.

Four years ago I joined the IT department of Philippine National Bank, and was assigned under the ATM unit — that small team (3 of us actually) who maintains the software for the various ATM models (which span three decades of ATM development!) the bank uses. Many days were boring drudgery, but there were some days wherein we are up on our toes all because of some error on the system, some bug that was found, some COBOL report that crashed, or some cases of fraud that required investigation, or your new software was being QAed not by your usual QA staff but by the meticulous, devil-in-the-details ladies of the Audit Department.

Whenever those days ended I always find myself spewing out a huge sigh of relief.

But beyond relief, the experience whenever I step outside of the PNB offices and use its public ATMs is quite exhilarating. It sounds weird, sure, but it was dogfooding (for the laypeople — dogfooding is when a developer using his own software for real world purposes) at its finest. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and everything works as intended for everyone, I’d be happy. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and something doesn’t work right — the machine is down, very slow transactions, unresponsive networks, I’d personally pull out my cellphone and call my colleagues over at operations to inform them of the problem. Sometimes, just seeing PNB ATMs in far-off backwater towns with the card receptor light blinking happily green makes me smile.

Sure, it sounds shallow. But there is an immense satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that you’ve got a software working that genuinely helps people — the power that a public facing software application (which an ATM essentially is, tightly coupled with hardware as it is) holds.

(Continue reading A portrait of a software developer as hero)

Cross posted from .NET @ Kape ni LaTtEX

One of the main points of criticism against my rather controversial, death-threat worthy posts regarding Cebu Pacific’s dismal service and the involvement of software development company Navitaire was that they found my posts too negativist and tried to bully me into suggested that I criticize more constructively.

In that case, I do hope Navitaire employees, both former and current, do open their minds and keep themselves from wanting to kill me while I attempt to provide some unsolicited advice, which I hope moves towards a more “positive” and “constructive” analysis of the system at hand.

First I want to acknowledge that some of the errors, particularly, some stray footers, have been fixed and have ceased to be an unsightly annoyance, and let it be known that the fact that errors are being mitigated is something deeply appreciated.

(Continue reading Unsolicited advice for improving Cebu Pacific’s Sky Sales sytem)

I’ve just received a death threat from a guy allegedly named Stevenson Salvador:

Highlighted text roughly translates to “stop this if you want to stay alive where you’re going”

From above, his email address is stevenson.salvador@linksys.com. His IP address is 66.114.104.164

UPDATE 1: I find it rather sad that the IP address above resolves to a Navitaire DNS server (as per the first comment below).

From http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?domain=66.114.104.164

IP address: 66.114.104.164
Reverse DNS: slcinternet.navitaire.com.
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Could be forged: hostname slcinternet.navitaire.com. does not exist]
ASN: 18945
ASN Name: OMTEK
IP range connectivity: 3
Registrar (per ASN): ARIN
Country (per IP registrar): US [United States]
Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars]
Country IP Range: 66.114.0.0 to 66.114.255.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Salt Lake City, Utah
Country (per outside source): US [United States]
Private (internal) IP? No
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 66.114.104.164

I’m now considering what actions, legal or otherwise, I will take from this point onward.

UPDATE 2: Napakasakit, Kuya Eddie? Kaya ba nagcomment ka ng ganito?

Next time, keep your mouth shut if you have nothing intelligent to say. Also, please think twice before you give advice like this. Remember, you’re not talking to a student project. It’s Accenture. I completely believe that every thing you said was done but a project is not just about the software. Read, read, read, and don’t think you know everything. People who knows a little, talk like crazy. People who knows a lot… they read, think, and re-think before something comes out of their mouth.

This way, there will be no “death-threats” if I should even call it a threat. But if it is, do you think it’s okay to risk it? Your life inexchange for your stupid comments? I don’t think so.

I just think you’re finding a way out of your stupidity by diverting the topic from what you are saying into something else. That Salvador made more sense to me — it’s called common sense. A sense that you don’t have but pretend to have by using jargons like RAID and whatever.

Peace. Just my 2 cents. Just keep out of fights, okay? Shut up.

I can’t believe how “peace” and “shut up” could go on one line. Why do I have a feeling that that sentence was intended to be a veiled threat?

Let’s look at his IP address: 74.63.84.61

IP address: 74.63.84.61
Reverse DNS:
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Could be forged: hostname does not exist]
ASN: 0
ASN Name: IANA-RSVD-0
IP range connectivity: 0
Registrar (per ASN): Unknown
Country (per IP registrar): US [United States]
Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars]
Country IP Range: 74.63.64.0 to 74.63.95.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Chicago, Illinois
Country (per outside source): US [United States]
Private (internal) IP? No
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 74.63.84.61

Hmmm, taga-Chicago nga kaya? I wonder.

In the ensuing comments in my previous post, Cebu Pacific’s monumental failure: A new online reservation system, several people questioned why I appeared to be singling out Navitaire and its online reservation system SkySales in the current Cebu Pacific brouhaha.

I gave thought to this after reading Aileen’s post on how she lost money because of Cebu Pacific:

I booked 4 members of my family for a trip to Jakarta. Because of the new policies of DSWD and the long time it takes to get documents from NSO I was not able to obtain a travel clearance for my son despite all the efforts I put in it. In short, I had to cancel his ticket.

Unfortunately the time I had to cancel the ticket was the time that Cebu Pacific decided to upgrade (a.k.a. mess up) their system and my calls and emails were left unanswered. I was also advised that it would take more than half a day if I went to their office as it was jampacked like a rock concert. I cannot stand crowds and hey I’m a very busy person, I cannot take half a day out just to cancel a ticket. Besides what are customer hotlines and emails for if you cannot call and seek assistance through these channels?[An Apple A Day]

While the failure coincided with the transition to the new system, I might have been a little harsh on Navitaire, as it appears that some other changes were taking place which caused the swamping of Cebu Pacific ticketing offices at the time. This was confirmed by an email sent to I-NAV Travel & Tours:

17 MARCH 2008

TO : ALL SUB – AGENTS

FROM : [omitted]

SUBJECT : MANUAL TICKETS

Please be informed, effective 01 April 2008, the new system, New Skies by Navitaire will no longer accept manual tickets and these will be purged from the Cebu Pacific system. All unused manual tickets shall be surrendered to Supersonic Services Inc., and all issuance beyond 01 April 2008 shall be considered as unauthorized and the corresponding penalties shall be imposed on violators.

Please be advised, likewise, Cebu Pacific will be pulling out from the BSP and IATA agents will be no longer be able to issue BSP tickets.

Agents that do not have the new system, Navitaire, installed in their offices, may continue to transact business for Domestic and International tickets thru Supersonic Services Inc.

Clearly, not only was there a software change, but a simultaneous process change scheduled for April 1, 2008.

Around March 30, Cebu Pacific issued an advisory in their website that their online booking system would be taken down until noon of April 1.

What happened on April 1 was telling, as experienced by Melynn and her partner travel agencies. Nobody was answering the phones at Cebu Pacific. This was particularly disastrous because travel agencies which were not connected to Cebu Pacific’s system either had to use the call centers or the ticketing offices. Everyone, including online customers, were also supposed to use the call centers to rebook and cancel flights, or request for refunds (like Aileen did).

Since nobody could call, everyone showed up in the ticketing offices. Disaster struck, and it appears that it has not yet shown signs of abating.

I still stand by my observation that the confusing way by which SkySales handles credit card payments is a major flaw that has to be changed, or at least made more clear. However, I now believe that SkySales or New Skies is not the weakest link in this Cebu Pacific saga.

The weakest link was the sudden, eerie crash of Cebu Pacific’s call center services.

As of writing it still takes an average of 45 minutes wait before a human would answer your call to Cebu Pacific. The problem is exacerbated by the confusion caused by the disambiguation of reservation and payment, with people wanting to know why their payments are still pending after a few days, or why existing confirmed and paid reservations appearing and disappearing from the system intermittently, or wanting to cancel their transactions completely.

We could only speculate as to what really is happening in Cebu Pacific, but right now the following mistakes are clear:

• A change of software was made simultaneous to a change in workflow/processes. This is almost inevitable, but can usually be compensated with vigilant customer support
• Call center services were taken down/became inefficient just when they were needed most
• Customer service emails were also being ignored (as per Aileen)
• No additional personnel have been delegated to ticketing offices despite weeks of backlogs and being swamped by customers
• Perhaps mitigation steps have been taken but seriously, none of them are working

It is an understatement to say that Cebu Pacific has some people problems in its organization, especially in terms of handling its customers and customer feedback systems, namely, the call centers and emails. I really hope Cebu Pacific would be able to resolve all these problems, and that Navitaire can help them expedite the resolution of any technical issues they still have.

So my previous statement still stands: avoid Cebu Pacific for now. We’re gonna tell you when Cebu Pacific’s human agents are able to answer promptly again.

UPDATE: Due to the shortcomings of this initial post, I wrote a follow-up post entitled Cebu Pacific’s failure isn’t in the software, it’s on the phone.

Melynn, who operates I-NAV Travel & Tours, got pissed yesterday. She arrived at the Cebu Pacific ticketing office at 10 in the morning. By the time she was done, it was already 3 in the afternoon. The office was simply overwhelmingly jampacked.

Nope, there was no Piso Fare promo going on. Everyone was doing their transactions manually because Cebu Pacific just changed their perfectly fine online reservation system with a massively confusing online facility made by Navitaire.

I don’t know precisely why Cebu Pacific replaced their previous online system. It was working fine last time. But a few weeks ago they changed it and it is now what it is.

At first the bugs seem to be really simple, and as a web developer myself I understand how bugs such as this could happen:

That’s a screen shot of the online reservation system jumbling its div tags in Internet Explorer 7.0.

And the online reservation system absolutely doesn’t work in Firefox 2.0. Or at least doesn’t go beyond the flight search page. Which renders it useless for FF users. I wonder how it is in Safari.

However, the above are simple bugs really. It’s easy (at least for me) to excuse these kinds of errors.

But along the way they also changed things that shouldn’t be changed. A guy named Phen commented this on a previous thread about Cebu Pacific’s service:

I used to fly Cebu Pacific for my personal trips, the reason being cheap. However with what happened to me last April 4, 2008 for my Davao-Cebu flight, I will never be on this carriage again. I was supposed to fly to Cebu at 6.30 am, I was there at Davao airport 5am. Upon checking in, I was told that I couldn’t take the flight because my ticket wasn’t confirmed! I purchased it online with confirmed status clearly indicated in my print-out. The not-so-customer-oriented staff pointed out that the status for payment was pending, which was written at the bottom part of the ticket. Who on earth would think that you were not able to pay when you got a confirmation?! And worst, nobody from Cebu Pacific thought of calling me to let me know. I was denied right on the spot, and when I asked for their assistance to at least get me in, the lady in the check in counter just instructed me to go to the ticketing office.

Here comes the worst part, no one from the ticketing office had the consideration to prioritize me or give me a confirmed reservation for the next flight at the least. The ticketing staff, Mr. Jonathan Leonor, just told me to wait so that they could check. I was waiting already for an hour, and got the same response when I asked for a reservation. He had even the gut to go out for a cigarette break, what kind of staff are these? [Is Cebu Pacific hoodwinking its passengers into empty flights?]

I verified the above with my wife, and she said it was true. Their e-tickets now have two statuses that you have to check: reserved and paid, and instantly confusion is introduced into the system. Let me illustrate:

• Reservation is pending and payment is pending. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is confirmed and payment is pending. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is pending and payment is confirmed. Can you board the plane? No.
• Reservation is confirmed and payment is confirmed. Can you board the plane? Yes.

There is exactly one and only one set of conditions where you can board the plane, and that is when both reservation and payment are confirmed. Why did they have to break the two down and confuse the passengers? This disambiguation which instead of making things clear has led to utter confusion is an act of monumental stupidity on the part of both Cebu Pacific and the software developer Navitaire.

Passengers do not care if either their reservation or their payment is confirmed or not. Passengers only care if they can board the plane or not. This is the question that needs to be answered, and clearly Cebu Pacific does not answer this question clearly in their system, and the result is pissed, inconvenienced passengers who have suffer the hassle of being turned back and made to cancel their travel plans because Cebu Pacific did not make things clear to them.

Yes it sounds cliche, but I really have to say it here: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Cebu Pacific should not have changed their previous online system. Or at least Navitaire should’ve entered a more intensive QA phase wherein they hallway-tested the results of their system where it would be revealed that their e-tickets are absolutely confusing.

So for the record: Avoid Cebu Pacific at all costs. At least for the next few months — until they fix their system, or bring the old one back.

I’ve never had my own car.

Whenever I need a ride I’ve always borrowed my father’s 15 year old diesel pick-up truck, and as one can imagine, using it is an atrocity to the environment. Even with constant tuning and overhauls, it still spews out too much smoke in its low gears, and registers a poor 7.5 kilometers per liter in city driving. Not only does it pollute the air, it drains the wallet as well.

I’ve been thinking about getting my own car lately, as part of plans of adding a new member to our family. Because we travel regularly to Pangasinan, and having two small children plus luggage for everyone in a bus trip, Victory Liner doesn’t look like a practical nor safe choice anymore. If we do travel with a yaya with us, the cost between our fare and the diesel that we consume back and forth plus toll won’t be too far apart. Couple that with a daughter who pees a lot (ever embarrass yourself having a bus load of people wait while your kid urinates at the road side?) and a car becomes more and more of a necessity — at least for those long trips.

As with any familied person, a major concern would be fuel efficiency. Not only does a fuel efficient car save gas, but it also means less pollution. The thing is, fuel-efficient small cars not only tend to have weak engines for when you do have a need for speed, but they will also be quite cramped and uncomfortable for typical 4 or 5 hour highway trips up north. It would be nice if there’s a way to have both a powerful engine and a fuel-efficient one, providing the fuel consumption appropriate for your power requirement.

Such a vehicle will soon become reality as Honda launches VCM 643. VCM stands for Variable Cylinder Management, and 643 denotes the number of cylinders that run on each mode. In short, in high-speed driving or uphill climbs, the engine will run on all 6 cylinders; in moderate inclines and mid-speed driving, it will employ only 4 cylinders, while for slow or gridlocked city driving the engine will only employ 3 cylinders. This unique mode of operation is almost akin to having three kinds of engine under the hood. More information can be found in the Honda VCM 643 website.

I’m excited as to the possibilities this engine presents, and I eagerly await the car models Honda comes up with using this engine. Perhaps a Honda Civic with the fuel consumption of a City? Or a Honda City that can accelerate like a Civic? Or perhaps a Honda Odyssey that has the advantages of both?

I just hope that by that time, I can afford it already — whatever model it comes as!

I am amused at how the popularity of photography using digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex, or in simpler terms, “professional”) cameras simply exploded in the past three years. Most every colleague I know owns one, and obscure photography terms like, depth of field, aperture, shutter speed, and “bokeh” have become vernacular.

Even Quiapo’s Hidalgo St. is experiencing a boom because of digital photography, and it’s all good, really. There were anectodes that, in the last Hot Air Balloon Festival at Clark, there were more DSLR holders than plain spectators.

Unlike them, I do not own a digital SLR camera (I only use a mid-range, ill-reputed Olympus SP-510UZ) though I have been dabbling in photography for much longer. For the past decade we have had a Canon EOS 300 35mm film SLR, and my experience in using it underscores why digital photography is so popular these days.

It was simply expensive: you had to buy a 130+ peso roll of film for a mere 36 shots, and development and printing of each roll runs up from 250 to 300 pesos for 4R size prints. To add insult to injury, you only get to see your pictures the first time when they are printed, so even if a shot is terrible, or is blurry, since you have no way of knowing you will have to settle for having them printed and wasting money on them.

These limits of film photography are quite burdensome for tight-budgeted people like myself, but what happened was that this quandary influenced my decision making processes in a certain way with lessons that not only apply to photography, but to a lot of other things in life:

Risk-taking - Every shot you took with a film SLR is a risk; a risk of a lousy picture, a risk of a bad exposure, a risk of bad color, a risk of wasting your money when the photograph is printed. But there are simply places, things, and events that you have to have a picture of. So you have to take that shot — even if there’s little light. Or if you have no tripod. Or if you have little film left. You just have to take that risk, or else suffer in a plethora of what-ifs on your mind on how the shot would have come out later on.

Resource management - With 36 shots per roll, and usually just a few spare rolls with you, plus a budget for developing and printing, you have to keep in mind how many shots you still have with you, and accordingly, if loading that spare roll of film (which you have to finish, as you have to develop all 36 frames on the roll whether you used everything up or not) will be worth it for the given situation. You also have to manage your supply of film, making sure that they don’t go to waste (those things have expiry dates!). It also involves saying no when you have to — like saying no to that camwhore’s request to have a picture taken of them even if you’ve already had 10 pictures of the same group of people taken already.

Risk-management - Both previous points come down to this, added with the fact that in film SLRs, you cannot undo nor erase shots already taken. Every shot you take is literally a gamble, and you must learn when to lay down your cards, or when to call a bluff, or when to up the ante. It takes a lot of practice to master this, but when you do almost every other shot will be rewarding enough for you to ignore the wasted ones.

Foresight - Or more accurately, learning to anticipate what would happen next. On ceremonies like weddings, or during events this is a bit easier — the reason why the availability of wedding photographers likewise exploded is because weddings are very predictable, and you could, as their photographer, call out shots even during the ceremony as to how the shots will be composed and how they would look like. In nature, sports events, or in unscheduled “act of God” events, it would be much more difficult. You have to learn to “see the future” and be there ready to take your shot when it happens, with the correct settings on your camera to capture the moment. This one takes a lot of practice too.

Discipline - Finally it all boils down to discipline. The constant decision making during the time that you are holding the camera up will, over time, instill more discipline in the way that you treat each location, each event, each roll of film, and each shot.

I’m not saying that DSLR users can or will not learn the lessons stated above, but it certainly is easier to see them in action when handling a film SLR. It will definitely help digital photographers though, who have to suffer a far different curse — that of possessing way too many pictures than, say, their web photo hosting or external storage solutions can handle. Perhaps taking a leaf from the obsolescent art of film photography would help them solve these problems too.

I’d just like to invite everyone to join Twitter and add me to their list of followed twitterers.

Twitter has evolved into a quasi-IM/quasi-blog platform where people not only say what they are doing at the moment, but posit and discuss ideas, catch up, keep in touch, joke around, and literally just have fun, while really being disconnected (e.g., you don’t need to log in and out of it like you do with IM).

Hope to see you there!