Year Ender 2014

Year Ender 2014

We, Team 8layer,  are composed of young and dynamic individuals, who are dedicated in creating game changer softwares for Filipinos using open source platforms and stacks. This year, we opted to have some sort of a tour to unwind our minds as well as to have an 8lien vacation as part of our 2014 year ender activity. Where? ILOCOS!

Some of the places that we visited are the ff:

1. Vigan-Which is now one of New 7 Wonder Cities
Vigan Cathedral
Plaza Burgos
Empanadahan-Vigan Empanada
2. The Pagburnayan of Vigan City
3. Baluarte, Vigan, Ilocos Sur
4. Marcos Museum and Mausoleum
5. Paoay Church
6. Paoay Sand Dunes
7. Ferdinand Edralin Marcos' Birthplace Museum, Sarrat Ilocos Norte
8. Malacañang of the North
9. Kapurpurawan Rock Formation
10. Bangui Wind Farm
11. Blue Lagoon - Pagudpud

The team stayed at Supertramp Lodge at Solsona, Ilocos Norte, where we had some chitchats about 8layer changelleges, expansion and how we want it to grow old.

We would like to thank our driver, Kuya Den as he took care of us during the long trip.

2015 will be an exciting year for us. That's why we want to give thanks to all of you, our supporters, mentors and partners. Rest assured that we will always do our best to serve you better!

Implementing SSMTP to send email via command line

SSMTP is a program which delivers email from a local computer to a configured mailhost (mailhub). It is not a mail server (like feature-rich mail server sendmail) and it does not receive mail, expand aliases or manage a queue. One of its primary uses is for forwarding automated email (like system alerts) off your machine and to an external email address. Check https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSMTP for more information.


1. Remove sees and postfix (if it is currently installed on your system)

pacman -Rnd sees postfix

2. Install ssmtp

pacman -S ssmtp

3. Configure ssmtp

vim /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

#
# /etc/ssmtp.conf -- a config file for sSMTP sendmail.
#
# The person who gets all mail for userids < 1000
root=postmaster
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
rewriteDomain=gmail.com
hostname=localhost
UseTLS=Yes
UseSTARTTLS=Yes
# Username/Password
AuthUser=meric.mara@gmail.com
AuthPass=
FromLineOverride=yes


4. Check permission
chmod 640 /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
chown root:mail /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

5. Users who can send mail
gpasswd -a mmara mail

6. Check your Google Less secure apps settings
https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

7. Send test mail

echo test | mail -v -s "HELLO WORLD" tousername@somedomain.com

That's it!

Merry Christmas

Installing Zeal on my Arch/KahelOS Linux

What is Zeal? Zeal is a simple offline API documentation browser inspired by Dash (OS X app), available for Linux and Windows (check this for more information http://zealdocs.org/).
Download page can be seen on this site http://zealdocs.org/download.html 

Installation 
1.cd /usr/local/src
2.wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ze/zeal-git/zeal-git.tar.gz
3.sudo tar zxvf zeal-git.tar.gz
4.cd zeal-git
5.sudo makepkg -s
6.sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.xz

 Run Zeal application

 Loading DocSet

Click Edit-->Options-->DocSets

That's it! Enjoy!

Ripple Labs: Building the Internet of Money

Cryptocurrency , Borderless Possibilities

The Experience

I remember in 2013 during the Software Freedom Day at Boracay, we had a good discussion with some of my colleagues about BITCOIN. We tagged this technology as a NEW MASTERPIECE in the digital world that will provide Freedom in Payment. It was technically perfect and this can be a big thing for Filipinos here and abroad. Two weeks ago (first week of December 2014), I had a good discussion about BITCOIN, Stellar and Ripple with one of my close friends and mentors, Mr. B Bulatao at St. Patricks Square and we agreed that this technology brings "THE INTERNET OF VALUE". We know that it will surely create BUZZ and WOW in this new age.

We even had a film showing at our "Open Source Museum" about the Rise and Rise of Bitcoin and invited some friends and members of open source community here in the Philippines so that we can all have a good understanding about it. This also gave us a chance to meet new friends in the IT industry.

It seems that there are lots of beautiful things about this technology that you can call decentralized global ledgers. But for me, at the onset, what gives more excitement in the digital currency world is the fact that it has no central operator, thus creating borderless possibilities we can only imagine. I believe that this will lead to global adoption. These past few months, we've been busy doing hackathons, playing and doing gateway that is based on litecoin, bitcoin and ripple (altcoin). The experience gave us more information on how cryptocurrency works in the real world. We are amazed that the information is very transparent and it only requires very low fees for the users.

Believe in Cryptocurrency 

I remember that I have done some talks in  school about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency. I shared things to students about Math based currency, Mining, Control and Security,  Proof of Work and of course, the BLOCKCHAIN. *I know that some of the students still can't grasp most of the things that I'm saying. But for some, I believe that we have triggered a good interest. Some basic questions popped-up during the seminars and knowledge sharing. Such as:

-How can we get Bitcoin?
-What is Ripple?
-How can we start Bitcoin/Can we also do the mining?
-What is the best cryptocurrency as of the moment?
-Etc...

There are lots of notion that no one will adopt this as this is used for Drugs, Money Laundering and illegal activities. What more can I say? Read more and be more! Just like cars and fiat currency and others, we cannot be sure that these things will not be used for negative purposes. What we should focus more on is to identify  how this new technology can help the humankind and the next generation and how this can be an instrument in making things as simple as possible.


This is why awareness,  technical meetup and discussion should be more frequent especially in schools. Students, government and other professionals should be educated about this technology. *THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS that can be developed and created on top of  this platform. Hopefully, the believers  will  increase the soonest time possible.

Circulation and Awareness Issue

One of the greatest problems that all of the cryptocurrency players encounter is the "circulation" How can users understand and adopt it to be part of their daily lives? As of this moment, I'm still in that stage too, thinking and creatively creating an ecosystem so that adoption will be very fast. This will be a very good challenge especially in the Philippines as many of us here don't even have good internet connection.

I would like to share some simple tips on how we can engage ourselves on this technology.:

1. Creating a wallet and understand how it really works can be a good start for this.
2. Going to meetups to hear insights about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency platforms.
3. Building a gateway and integrate it to other gateways. (This one is for the technical guys)
4. Start using the technology. (Buy-n-Sell can be a good choice for this)
5. Start sharing experiences to others. (schools, communities, etc.)
6. Do some partnerships and collaborations.

Slowly, I believe that we Filipinos are moving on to this arena. Hopefully, there should be good cryptocurrency providers that will emerge too. I can't wait to see all of us paying our bills using this technologies in the near future.

At the end of the day, I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto for opening us to this new world and Thank you cryptocurrency communities for evolving the idea and trying to make these things possible for everyone.

Conclusion

*Engaging in this new radar of softwares/technologies can be a good start and will spark your interest on this arena. Borderless possibilities are just waiting to happen. People should start solving and creating roadmap on how to solve circulation issues and make this platform standard. There should be a good adoption strategy and collaboration among developers and end-users.

https://bitcoin.org/en/
http://bitcoindoc.com/
https://litecoin.org/
https://www.stellar.org/
https://ripple.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency
https://ripple.com/tag/math-based-currency/

Firefox OS & Cherry Mobile ACE- The First PH Firefox OS Smartphone

I just bought a phone not because of the hardware but because of FirefoxOS  Sorry Cherry Mobile! =)

But I reallly like their Christmas P999 promo, http://www.cherrymobile.com.ph/products/smart-social/ace

Very cheap and my notion here is that more developers will buy this phone as a toy or dev phone.

Here are my views on this phone:

1.I believe that this is worth exploring. Will check these coming days how we can hack this OS. Hopefully, we can develop some small apps in the near future.

Note that this one is built upon open web standards like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. This is really cool.

2. I personally find the default UI very user friendly and easy to navigate. ie. Adaptive App Search 

3. I guess the experience using this will definitely change the developers' view to web and mobile platform. check WebIDE 

Kudos to my FIrefox/Mozillian friends for doing a good job! We hope that this product will get a good market share.

Oh! If you are looking for a good gift this Christmas, I guess this one is the BEST.

Visit https://www.facebook.com/CherryMobileACE for more update and info about this ACE Phone.

More FirefoxOS & Cherry Mobile

http://www.cherrymobile.com.ph/products/smart-social/ace

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/WebIDE

https://www.facebook.com/groups/cmacefirefoxos/

http://www.cherrymobile.com.ph/

8layer@BFAR

Team 8layer would like to thank DA-BFAR for giving us the opportunity to share our FOSS experience to their IT team here at Oasis Hotel, Angeles City. The sharing is fun and full of open source activities. Until next time!

Philippine Open Source-Poster

Internet of Vaue

blockchain.

/mbm

Installing Yaourt at My Arch Arm Pi

I want to install Chromium on my arch arm pi, but it requires me to install yaourt.

Here are the basic steps that I did to make yaourt possible on my Arch Arm Pi.

1.Install the ff: packages:

$sudo pacman -S gcc wget make

2.Install Package Query First

$wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pa/package-query/package-query.tar.gz

$tar -xvzf package-query.tar.gz

$cd package-query

$makepkg -s

$sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.xz

Then install yaourt packages:

$wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ya/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz

$tar -xvzf yaourt.tar.gz

$cd yaourt

$makepkg -s

$sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.xz

That's it and enjoy Yaourt!