Live in Batanes, earn $8000/month

Three years ago, when were busy installing free Internet Stations and Hotspots in remote locations in the Philippines (see www.phdf.org.ph), I would give talks about how it might be possible to live in the province yet make a living on the Web.

A few days ago, I came across a story on CNN that gives us a clue how the improbable can actually become possible. It’s a story of how an artist would put up his paintings for bids on E-bay. The artist - based in the US - would price his works in the $1250-$2500 range and he recently had an $8T month! Pretty impressive. (Certainly enough to live by if you lived in the mountain province - this means you, David F.)

Of course, someone who is actually using one of our Internet cafes in the boonies would still have the problem of receiving payments. G-cash is one possiblity, yet there still is the need for a middleman to receive International payments (perhaps via Paypal or an Online Payment Gateway), then remitting the funds to the artist via G-cash, SmartMoney, or bank transfer.

There also is the need for the artist to establish himself on E-bay as a reliable merchant. (After, a buyer in Connecticut might have serious concerns about dealing with shysters in the Philippines).

Here is the CNN story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/18/artists.online/index.html

Mr. Pena’s response to our open letters

I just got a hold of Mr. Pena’s response to our 2 open letters.

I must say, I’m a bit disappointed that Mr. Pena is now trying to distance himself from his CICT guidelines. Obviously it’s become quite a mess and I guess he doesn’t want to be associated with this mess. My brother JJ does a good job here of explaining how the Guidelines are Mr. Pena’s creation, and that he shouldn’t try to duck responsibility for the Guidelines.

What I instead want to point out is Mar Roxas statement last week about the CICT not being accountable:

I’ll quote:

“What kind of an animal is CICT? It’s not accountable for the e-government fund. So it was a basic management decision to re-align the [P1 Billion Peso] fund back to the government agencies.”

Mr. Pena, don’t you think this would be a good opportunity to show Mr. Roxas that you’re willing to be accountable for your actions? No one expects you to be perfect. We’ve pointed out the serious outages on EDU.PH and GOV.PH servers. Shouldn’t you ask your System Administrators to explain what is going on? We would be more than happy to work with you to resolve these problems, and to suggest ways to fix these problems. After all, the Gov.PH system is your repsonsibility, and it does affect all of us!

And since you seem to be under the impression that either the Gov.ph or Edu.ph registries are technically capable of taking over DotPH’s responsibilities, isn’t it time that you re-examine your reasons for wanting to shut down DotPH? What is the point in Government running the PH Domain if it is just going to result in the kinds of massive outages we seen with edu.ph and gov.ph?

Perhaps, at last, you can just ask your Domain Advisory Board to come up with a list of problems that they’ve seen with DotPH? (Surely they must see some problems with our operation, or else they would not ask you to shut us down!) Then we can all talk about ways to fix these problems in a cooperative problem-solving fashion, and hopefully we can all move on with our lives.

I sincerely hope you think about this carefully.

domainwatch.ph

I notice that the administrator of EDU.Ph, Mr. Bombim Cadiz has questioned the EDU.Ph and Gov.PH outage data presented in our open letters. The data we derived from our study is summarized at http://domainwatch.ph. Note that we even graph the outages!

For instance, here is how gabriela.ph.net behaved on Dec 19, 2004. Gabriela is both an EDU.PH and Gov.PH nameserver. The area marked in red denotes outages. The area in green denotes that the server was up. Since Dec 19 was a Sunday, it’s likely that Mr. Cadiz doesn’t have any SMS alerts to tell him when his servers are down on the weekend.

And below is the graph for Dec 20, 2004 for gabriela.ph.net. Looks like when someone reported in for work on Monday at 9 am, the problem was found and the server was rebooted:

It also looks like the edu.ph Website at http://dns.ph.net has had a troubled December.

edu.ph website Dec 2:

edu.ph website Dec 3:

edu.ph website Dec 5:

edu.ph website Dec 6:

edu.ph website Dec 7:

the website behaves decently for a few days then nosedives again:

edu.ph website Dec 11:

edu.ph website Dec 12:

edu.ph website Dec 13:

Looks like someone came in at 1145 am on Monday then rebooted the web server.

But another outage begins the next day Dec 14:

and the server is rebooted on Dec 15 at 9 am:

I just hope the Edu.PH Administrator will take the time to fix the Edu.PH webserver soon. I notice that it hasn’t been modified in the last 5 years. Does this mean the hardware is also 5 years old?

Open letters to CICT chairman Ver Pena

Here are two letters we recently sent Mr. Ver Pena. I strongly believe that any decision made by the CICT should always be based on
a good understanding of the underlying technology. For example, if CICT is
to negotiate a deal with Microsoft for cheap Govt windows licenses, it
should first consider

1) Is StarOffice w/ Linux a suitable alternative to MS Office? Does
embracing Linux encourage the development of an Open Source community and
an ensuing software industry to service that community? Does the
Philippines have a good chance of being a world leader in Open Source
development?

2) Is Apple’s Appleworks w/ OS X a suitable alternative to MS Office? Is
Keynote a suitable alternative to Powerpoint? Will Panther’s Expose save
the Govt the expense of having to buy large monitors? Should the govt
attempt to negotiate a deal with Apple instead? Is the Macintosh price
competitive with those of Taiwanese clones?

3) Since we are constrained to uphold US intellectual property rights, and
since Windows is priced well beyond the reach of the average Filipino, and
since Microsoft is intent on cracking down on piracy in the Philippines,
should the Govt institute a policy to WEAN Filipinos away from Windows?
Eg - such as impose a luxury tax on any operating systems whose price is
more than - say - our average per capita income? (that is - if there’s a
petroleum tax to help encourage the use of alternative forms of energy,
maybe an OS tax is needed to remove our dependency on Microsoft?).

I’m not advocating a particular solution at this point, but what is VITAL
is that the CICT should have a good grasp of Information and
Communications Technology if it is to make good ICT decisions.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what happened when the CICT decided to take
control of the PH Domain - as our open letters explain.

edu.ph outages and bombim cadiz’ post on pinoyblog.com

I’ve just noticed this
post on pinoyblog.com from Bombim Cadiz , who runs the EDU.PH domain.
It’s in response to an open letter
we made to Ver Pena of the CICT.

Here is Bombim Cadiz� post:

*
* Now that you have put your technical eggs on the accuracy of this
*”study” to disparage PHNET, let me just point that this study is not
*accurate.
*I didn’t want to bring it up yet so that you would dig yourself into a
*deeper hole but because I think you have already hit rock-bottom, it
is
*time
*to point out the mistakes.
*
*Not having any details about the methodology of the study, I will just
*point
*out that the study is inaccurate.
*
* Let me just point out the differences in the downtimes of EDU1
*(gomez.ph.net) and EDU3 (dns.ph.net):
*
*(1) On Dec1, EDU1 was shown to be down for 5:15 hours but *not* EDU3 –
a
*difference of 5:15 hours.
*
*(2) On Dec 5, EDU1 5:21 and EDU3 5:15 — a difference of 6 minutes.
*
*(3) On Dec 6, EDU1 was down for 17:04 and EDU3 for 16:29 — a
difference
*of
*35 minutes.
*
*(4) On Dec 7, EDU1 down for 9:32 and EDU3 down for 8:29, a difference
of
*1hr and 03 minutes
*
* It might interest you to know that gomez.ph.net and dns.ph.net are
*ONE
*AND THE SAME MACHINES WITH THE SAME IP Address of 165.220.1.1)*.
Therefore,
*their downtimes should exactly match.
*Because your “study” has data points which show that they do not match,

*your “study” can not be trusted.

Ouch! I’ll ignore the vitriolic language for now and focus on the
technical data.

(4) here is the Dec 1 graph for EDU1 - the DNS server at gomez.ph.net:

And here is the graph for EDU 3 - the website at http://dns.ph.net.

Bombim,
You’ll notice that both services were indeed down until 845 am.
(Presumably the server was rebooted at that time? Perhaps you can upload
your logs - as promised - so we can verify the cause of the outage?)
Notice also that the DNS server at gomez.ph.net experienced intermittent
outages from 4pm-615pm that same day while the web server at dns.ph.net
began to respond rather sluggishly at the exact same time: it was taking
20-96 seconds to respond to http GET queries during that time frame. Our
logs don’t show the web server as being down because DNS uses UDP and is
more sensitive to timeouts. HTTP, on the other hand, is a session based
protocol and has longer timeouts. HENCE the discrepancy in outage times.

(1) here is the Dec 1 graph for EDU1 - the DNS server at gomez.ph.net:

And here is the graph for EDU 3 - the website at http://dns.ph.net.

You’re absolutely right, EDU3 was down as well that day - for 2 hours and
25 mins! We just didn’t include it in our open letter as we only wanted
to point out the egregious outages (eg - More than 4 hours). (We didn’t
have room for a full page ad )

Notice however, that you had DNS outages (on EDU1) at 1 am, 3am-6am,
1030am -1145am, 630pm-12 midnight. Observe that at those times your
webserver started to respond sluggishly. Likewise, this explains why
EDU1 and EDU3 may be the same server, yet the outage times are different.
Perhaps another cause of your problem is that you have a slow upstream
link that tends to get congested?

(3) here is the Dec 6 graph for EDU1 - the DNS server at gomez.ph.net:

And here is the graph for EDU 3 - the website at http://dns.ph.net.

The outage times are practically identical. The most likely reason for
the 35 min discrepancy is that we don’t probe your machines every second
of the day. We only send out a probe once every ten minutes. If there is
an outage, then we send out the next probe (from a different location on
the Internet) a few seconds later - just to confirm the problem. The
probe for EDU1 does not go out at the same time as EDU3, and hence you
can’t expect the outage times to be exactly identical.

I hope that answers your questions.

The key point we are trying to make is that it’s TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE that
EDU.PH nameservers and Websites are down this frequently. It should be
fixed AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

The other point we’re making is that the outages on GOV.PH are even worse
than EDU.PH. We just do not understand how Mr. Ver Pena (of the CICT)
can, after working on the DotPH guidelines for 18 months, be totally
ignorant of the problems existing in Gov.PH and EDU.PH, AND do nothing
to fix these problems, YET to attempt to shut down the one Registry -
DotPH - that is operating properly!

I think the CICT should really focus less on Politics, and more on Technology!

Mar Roxas: the CICT is too heavy-handed

Looks like we at DotPH aren’t the only ones who think that the CICT is getting too heavy-handed. Generally, my philosopy on IT is: don’t regulate it! Back in 1996 I marveled at how many ISPs were operating in the Philippines as compared with Singapore or Malaysia. The reason there were so many ISPs back then: because there were no government regulations barring ISPs! Philippine ISP service was clearly superior to that of our Asean neigbhbors. The Singnet people who operated Squid Proxy servers (to block websites - a necessary task mandated by the Singaporean Govt) seemed to know a lot less about Squid than, say, Migs Paraz of Iphil. We had about 150+ ISPs in 1997. Singapore only had 3 then, and Malaysia only had 2.

Today, only a handful of the original ISPs are left. The reason? Because many of the ISPs are blocked from offering the next phase of Internet Service: DSL, Cable, or Wireless access. One has to be a Telco to be able to offer DSL or Wifi/Wimax; a Congressional franchise is an expensive prerequisite. Getting a franchise to be cableTV operator is equally difficult as well. Too much government regulations can clearly stifle the IT industry.

I believe there is a great opportunity today for the local IT community to get into the Wifi and VoIP market. If only we could get the entire Metro Manila to be blanketed with Wifi. If only we could use these Wifi connections to make calls worldwide at 2c/minute. If only we could have phone numbers in the US or Europe that link directly to our DSL VoIP phones (or PABXes), so we can service these markets. These are real enabling technologies that the Philippines should have a head start in, yet it cannot because of myopic NTC/CICT regulations.

Do we need a CICT? I don’t think so. In fact, I think we need to significantly reduce the amount of government intervention already taking place in the IT industry.

Here is the Inquirer’s story on Mar Roxas and the CICT: (more…)

Sapporo ski trip

I can’t rave enough about this place. First of all - the Hokkaido snow is excellent. It was powder every day. I thought California skiing was great - but it just doesn’t compare. I was hoping for really soft snow, so that if the kids fell - it wouldn’t feel like they were scraping their faces against concrete. But to have a good snowfall every night was unbelievable.

Second - the bunny run is excellent. No rope to hold on to. No chairs (that go too high and end up scaring the kids). The bunny run chairs STAY on the ground, so the kids don’t get scared. And it’s a fairly long run (Ok - not as long as the California bunny runs - but then my kids don’t have to sit in lift chairs 20 stories high in the sky!)

Then there is the proximity. Walking from our log cabin to the ski fields only took 5 minutes (Ok so - it took 20 with the kids throwing snow balls and looking at the sights). But it’s great to be able to walk back and forth to the ski lifts. No need to rent a car!

And then there’s the onsen! Otaru is a small village that not only has a ski field, but also has a Volcanic Hot Spring. So the town has 3 public baths. AND our log cabin had its own private onsen. So we literally soak in an outdoor hot spring daily. You have no idea how surreal this is, to be in a really warm bath and to have it snowing a few feet away. Awesome.

And finally - there’s the food. The Hot Ramen! The cold beer! Otaru is also known as Japan’s sushi capital (because the fish is very fresh). Mmmmm!

We’re definitely going back! Here’s the link to the winkel log cabin.