Sunday, October 22, 2006

Earthquakes!!!

Wow, we had earthquakes for like 2 days in a row now, the with the last one felt very early today, between 3 to 4 am in the morning. I checked the USGS Earthquake hazards program by the US, a website displaying earthquakes around the world (URL was given to me by my friend Steven. Thanks dude!), and found the epicenters of all 5 recorded earthquakes we experienced.

Here's the link to the infos to each of the individual earthquakes we felt:

Magnitude 5.8 - MINDORO, PHILIPPINES
Magnitude 5.7 - MINDORO, PHILIPPINES
Magnitude 5.7 - MINDORO, PHILIPPINES
Magnitude 5.5 - MINDORO, PHILIPPINES
Magnitude 4.5 - LUZON, PHILIPPINES

Hope no dormant volcano is stirring up from its slumber, waiting to unleash its fury once again into this poor city. Guess its my wild imagination that's just stirring up instead. You would feel the same though if you grew up and live in a place surrounded by green mountains that used to be active volcanoes. God Bless America (err, I mean Philippines... hehehe). God bless us Filipinos.

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Thursday, October 12, 2006

Hurrah for Paypal!

Good news for all Philippine based online citizen. You can now create you account in Paypal using your Philippine address. Although a Philippine-based account is still limited in terms of functionality, it still is a good start. All hard work of those fellow filipinos who strived to make Paypal notice us is now bearing fruit, especially Paypal4PH.com.

Just created my Home-based Paypal account now. Hope we can tie-up our local paypal account with our local bank very soon.

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Monday, October 09, 2006

Python and .NET

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language which runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Amiga, Palm OS etc. It is becoming a favorite language by programmers due to it's portability and fast performance. It doesn't matter if your a seasoned programmer, or just started creating your first "Hello World!" program. You can learn the language in just a few days. It's really very easy to install and offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools.

I started dabbling with Python a few years ago, creating quick solutions and a few libraries for my personal software needs. I was then given an opportunity to be a part of a web-based software development using C# and .NET Framework. Although I still tried creating small and quick solutions in Python, the .NET project I am working on prevented me from fully integrating Python into my application. Don't get me wrong, I really love C#. But Python has somehow captured my fancy.

Then came Google. I was amazed to learn that the Python was a major powerhouse behind the company's powerful applications. I was more amazed in learning that Python played an important role in the development of MMORPG's like Eve Online, my favorite Civilization 4, and even Star Wars: Episode II.

Acting on the excitement building up in me, I started looking back again at Python and started researching on ways how I may be able to implement it on the .NET Framework and be able to have it interoperate with my existing C# applications.

My research narrowed down to two solutions, IronPython and Python for .NET. It is really a good thing to know .NET programmers and even Microsoft people are now taking notice of the Python language's capability.

Unlike the Python for .NET package which "does not produce managed code (IL) from Python code", IronPython does enable you to compile your program into bytecode (IL). It makes .NET libraries available to your Python program, and even extend your existing Python applications by importing libraries and assemblies in .NET.

In terms of execution speed, benchmarks conducted on IronPython produced positive results.

The future of running Python on CLR looks promising. Can't wait to try my hands on this new found toy.

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