From GRID Computing Now! - Competition 2008. Too bad it’s only open for UK residents 
Enter the Grid Computing Now! Competition 2008
Grid Computing Now! is pleased to announce its second competition for applying innovative grid computing solutions to an environmental problem. The competition is supported by the British Computer Society, The 451 Group, Intellect, Memset, Microsoft, National e-Science Centre, Oxford e-Research Centre, the Technology Strategy Board and WWF.
Of course supercomputing systems have are already widely used to analyze weather patterns like MM5 and other NWP suites. So what solutions kinds of solutions can show one’s creativity? The middleware component is very interesting for us system integrators but we build the system so that the end-user (the average scientist) can make their data exploration much faster and draw deeper insight into a situation. Computational scientists, meterologists and disaster rescue operatives coordinate their workflows together to support relief efforts in a natural disaster. It is indeed true that today’s grand challenges in science is also the concern of everyone in the society and not just a single discipline.
Other links that might be of interest is the press release of the previous winners. But I can’t find the links to the project deployments of the winning projects. Anyone know their URLs?
About time. Original article from Inquirer.net: CICT explores use of digital signatures.
MANILA, Philippines–The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) has secured a $2.3-million grant from South Korea to help establish a national public key infrastructure (PKI) standards body in the Philippines.
This PKI body will be responsible for issuing digital signatures (or digital certificates) for individual and business users transacting with government-run websites.
It’s nice to know that got some grant so that the government can do some action. Doc Mana has been ranting about creating an infrastructure a few months ago during press releases about the modernization of the national elections.
Even if we did not receive a grant, the Philippines can creatively setup an infrastructure. Given that PKI technology is not new and a lot of local companies are providing these service anyway, we can simply setup a national federation of Certification Authorities (CAs) in the Philippines issues these public keys.
Probably most of the funds of the grant will go into the pilot deployment on government organizations like the BIR (which volunteered). But hey, how about Comelec? You guys have a deadline right?
Every second week of July (7-11) we celebrate the National Science and Technology Week. This year, it is DOST’s 50th anniversary so it is expected to be a very grand celebration (also probably the reason for cost-cutting the previous years :D). Too bad I won’t be able to go this year
I looked at the DOST website to grabe some teaser news but the website does not seem to work. When I click on a news article, it goes back to the main page. Hey DOST web people, updates please! 
The del.icio.us Firefox add-on provides very neat integration into the latest version of Firefox three. I like the synchronization between local bookmarks, shortcuts, etc. The “most visited” tab actually counts how many times you clicked a bookmark and updates the toolbar respectively. The only problem is that for private bookmarks like the ones that initiate javascript link calls do not update the bookmark counters.
One of my favorite links is the citeulike.org’s add to library shortcuts which initiates a javascript call containing the current url on your browser such as an overview page of a journal article. This frustrated me for a while but after “grep”-ing my Firefox profile directory for the name of my citeulike bookmark, I edited the citeulike entry in my ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILENAME/delcious.rdf:
<NC:Bookmark RDF:about="rdf:#$iw2hg3" NC:URL="javascript:var%20pw=window.open('http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?username=aespinosa&bml=popup&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title),%20'citeulike_popup_post',%20'width=800,height=600,scrollbars=1,resizable=1');%20void(window.setTimeout('pw.focus()',250));"
NC:Name="CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers"
NC:ShortcutURL=""
NC:Description=""
NS1:LastCharset=""
NC:PostData=""
NS2:shared="false"
NS2:localonly="false"
NS2:hash="cfbf4f27149a10bca7a44c05be12ca99"
NS2:metahash="af1dd1906f18340e4a74c20e9497ceb3">
<NS2:tag>bibliography</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>citation</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>bookmarking</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>research</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>reference</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>academic</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>tagging</NS2:tag>
<NC:VisitCount NC:parseType="Integer">300</NC:VisitCount>
<NS1:LastModifiedDate NC:parseType="Date">Tue Jul 03 07:49:43 2007 +000000</NS1:LastModifiedDate>
<NC:BookmarkAddDate NC:parseType="Date">Tue Jul 03 07:49:43 2007 +000000</NC:BookmarkAddDate>
</NC:Bookmark>
The code entry above shows the XML entry for a bookmark. Simply change the “NC:VisitCount” tag to a very high value and it will appear at the top of your del.icio.us toolbar most-visited tab.
Enjoy your new favorite bookmark!
The past few weeks was very tight as I preparing from my resignation as an instructor in Ateneo (and attending parties). I will be joining the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago for my graduate studies. My work will be on grid computing and distributed computing under the supervision of Dr. Ian Foster, the father of grid computing himself! He is also one of the founders of the Globus Toolkit project, the key middleware in every grid deployment in the world.
This blog site will still be up and maintained but my faculty page and ECCE wiki page will not be updated as much for the next six years. Below is my new contact information:
So if you’re around the Chicago-Hyde park area, drop me an email and let’s meet up! 
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