Food problem: rice shortage

Middle of this year, prices of rice rose to almost double is long time cost per kilo.

There were reports of hoarding by unscrupulous rice traders who wants to make a killing by keeping away tons of rice they bought at pre-increase cost and sell them when prices have doubled. Several of these greedy businessmen were discovered and punished accordingly.

I just hope that the televised surprise inspections and arrest are not just for show.

Other traders profit by saying that rice production is not nearly enough. If I remember my economics class in high school and college, the decrease in supply triggers a natural increase in cost.

During a recent trip to Baguio City, I was able to see the wide rice fields of Bulacan and Pampanga. this made me wonder, is there really a shortage?



The vast greens sprawling as the eyes can see makes one wonder - are we really short of supply?

Sure, last summer's drought and this season's typhoons damage crops and farmers lose millions but do we really consume that much rice? I for one can eat two service cups of rice. But sadly, others can't even finish half a cup.



I think our problem really is not the supply but rather the consumption. I believe there is no problem with consumption especially when the youngsters now are more concerned of their weight and their figure and prefer to have less rice in their diets.

People tend to buy more rice than they can eat. Merchants sell more rice than their customers can handle.

We do not have a deficit in rice supply but rather a surplus in wasted rice. By wasting rice, we rob those who need them more of the supply that they could have had.

Linux how NOT to: chmod mistakes

I am no Linux expert. I initially learned from an IT school and worked my way through experience.

Last night, I tried to tinker with my PC running on Bayanihan Linux 4 developed by the Advanced Science and Technology Institute of the Department of Science and Technology of the Republic of the Philippines.

In my home directory, I have three folders kenni, lyn, and shared. The kenni folder is of course owned by me. The lyn folder is owned by my wife. And the shared folder I had for so long wanted to be shared by the both of us.

In Windows, when your drive is formated in FAT32 rather than NTFS, each and every user with an account in the PC can access the folders of other users with accounts in that same PC. This is eliminated by formating your drives in NTFS.

In Linux, drives are formated in ext3 (at least for this one I use since I don't really know if other distributions of Linux also use ext3). Each individual user of a Linux-powered PC with an account cannot access anybody else's folder. Unless of course you are the root administrator.

Back to my story, I was trying to make the shared directory accessible to me and my wife so I opened the Linux command list I compiled over the years. And here is what I typed on the terminal console:

$chmod 644 . shared

I was trying to make shared accessible to everyone. 6 means that the owner of the file or folder can read and write on the file but cannot execute. The first 4 means that the group where the user belongs to or one indicated can read the file but cannot write on and/or execute the file. The last 4 means the everyone else can read the file but cannot write on and/or execute the file.

NOTE: To be able to use chmod without restriction, one must first log in as the root user.

When I typed the above in, my shared folder disappeared from the Konqueror explores window (similar to the Windows Installer). I was shocked and did not know what to do.

I tried to reverse what I did (I thought I could) with this command:

$ chmod 644 shared .

This time the folders inside my home directory disappeared. Now I am terrified. All those files, GONE!

But when I had the directory listed while logged on as root (I did not close the terminal console to be sure) by typing:

$ ls

I saw that the folders were still there.

To remedy this, I typed in:

$ chmod 700 /home/kenni

To allow the owner of the folder kenni to read, write, and execute anything on the folder kenni. I had to list the whole directory path since putting in kenni instead of /home/kenni makes the software search for a file named kenni. I did the same to the folder lyn owned by my wife and to the folder shared owned by myself with read access only to my wife.

This put everything back to normal. And allowed me to sleep soundly that night. :)

Linux how to: running script-fu in GIMP

Having used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) for sometime now, I got interested in updating its extension scripts that allows one to transform an image.

So I went about downloading scripts from GIMP's website but had a hard time trying to update my image editor's scripts.

Here's what I found out from the vast resources on the Internet.

First of all, you must download the scripts from the GIMP website. Type in http://www.gimp.org and click on plug-in registry.

Then choose the scripts you wish to download. These will be downloaded to your designated download folder. I have set mine to /home/user/myDownloads by creating the folder and editing the download dialog box. By default, Firefox save downloaded files on the desktop.

Locate your downloaded scripts. They should have the '.scm' extension. Copy these scripts to /usr/share/gimp/2.0/scripts.

Before you can use them, change the scripts' permissions. Log is as root on the terminal console, go to the scripts folder (/usr/share/gimp/2.0/scripts) and type in chmod 644 where filename represents the script (ex: alien-neon-logo.scm). This will allow all users to read the script.

After that, open your GIMP application. Click Xtns -> Script-Fu -> Refresh Scripts.

Your scripts are now ready for use.

By the way, I found out that GNU means GNU's not Unix from wikipedia.

Have fun! Hope this helps.