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MANILA, Philippines - Commission on Elections (Comelec) officials on Thursday virtually acknowledged Smartmatic-TIM’s failure to deliver the agreed first batch of 42,000 units of counting machines for the May 2010 polls due to production constraints of the manufacturing subcontractor in Shanghai, China.

Comelec chair Jose Melo earlier said that Smartmatic-TIM could only deliver 30,000 this month because of the high shipping costs due to the holidays.

But in Thursday’s hearing of the joint Congressional oversight committee on automation, it was disclosed that Smartmatic has only manufactured 30,000 units this month, not 40,000 as earlier announced.

Initially, Comelec officials stuck to the alibi that the first batch of 40,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines may not arrive as scheduled because of delivery problems.

“It is actually a delivery problem because of the lack of maritime vessels that would bring the PCOS from Shanghai to Manila. It is Christmas season and everything comes from China,” Comelec executive director Jose Tolentino said when asked whether it is delivery or manufacturing problem that causing the delay in the automation project.

But when pressed by Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman whether the 40,000 to be delivered this December were already manufactured and ready for shipping, Tolentino backtracked.

Tolentino admitted that only 30,000 have been produced so far, and that the 10,000 units are still to be manufactured.

“We have a team that went to Shanghai, and based on the production run that was conducted, the spare parts available at the manufacturing plant, it's correct that more or less about 30,000 will be available by December,” Tolentino said.

Under the P7.1 billion contract signed between Comelec and Smartmatic, the latter is supposed to produce 82,200 PCOS machines for the country’s first ever nationwide polls.

The machines were supposed to be delivered in two batches, with the first batch of 40,000 last November.

However, only 9,800 would be delivered this month, and another 20,200 units after the holiday rush.

Revised timetable

Smartmatic, however, maintains that the delays in the automation project pertained only to delivery problems.

In spite of the apparent production problems, Comelec is optimistic that Smartmatic would be able to complete the manufacture of machines by February.

Commissioner Rene Sarmiento said that based on a revised timetable, Smartmatic will be able to beat the deadline of the delivery of machines by one week.

Concerns have been raised over Smartmatic’s failure to beat its deadline in the delivery of machines, which is causing a domino effect on Comelec’s timetable.

The field testings and mock elections should have been held last November and this month, but the lack of machines prompted Comelec to revise its schedule.

The Comelec has also yet to start training teachers and poll officials on poll automation.

LEGAZPI - Volcanic activity is building up inside Mount Mayon and an explosive eruption is expected within 2 weeks, a government volcanologist warned Sunday.

The warning came as civil defense officials tried to convince the last residents still living within the volcano's shadow to evacuate their homes.

"Up to now, the activity continues to increase. Most probably if this would further accelerate, an explosive eruption would occur within 2 weeks," said July Sabit, part of the government team monitoring the mountain.

He said at least 222 volcanic quakes were detected from Saturday morning to Sunday morning compared to 197 quakes in the previous 24-hour period.

Sabit told AFP that an explosion could be expected sometime around January 1, adding that it would likely shoot a column of ash about 10 kilometers (6 miles) into the sky.

He said that although the ash was unlikely to be of direct danger to residents, there was the risk it could turn into a deadly mudflow, as happened during the last eruption in 2006, when hundreds of people were swept away.

While no one was directly killed by that eruption, tons of debris that had collected on Mayon's slopes were dislodged by a typhoon 3 months later. The avalanche of mud and boulders crushed entire villages, leaving over 1,000 dead.

Local civil defense head Raffy Alejandro said that the military and police had already evacuated more than 8,000 of the 9,000 or so families living within an 8-kilometer (5 mile) danger zone set up around Mayon.

"Those left behind are in the edges of the 8-kilometer zone. We are still convincing them to pull out," he said.

"We try to do the persuasive thing but if (it) gets bad, the governor has instructions to forcibly evacuate them," he added.

Mayon, renowned for its near-perfect cone, has erupted 48 times in recorded history. In 1814, more than 1,200 people were killed as lava buried the town of Cagsawa.

COPENHAGEN - Chaos and farce reigned at the birth of a climate accord agreed by a clique of leaders, with statesmen going missing, critics crying foul and hacks stampeding on vain hunts for Barack Obama.

Fatigue fermented a feverish cocktail of human emotion overnight Friday as the US president claimed to have staved off a default in the dying hours of global warming talks in Copenhagen.

But small nations like Cuba and Nicaragua erupted in fury at being snubbed in a game of big power diplomatic chess also involving developing giants Brazil, China and India.

Claiming a "meaningful" deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Obama fired up carbon-belching Air Force One and raced back from the global warming summit to outrun a storm ironically tipped to dump a foot of snow on Washington.

It was a stunning turnaround, as earlier, as the summit went into extra time, the whole project was on the verge of collapse, US officials said.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd added: "There was a grave risk that these negotiations would collapse altogether."

While Obama's team clearly had an interest in spinning the climax of the talks to the young US president's advantage, they revealed a stunning succession of events more apt to a French farce than a major world summit.

Frustrated at deadlock in the talks, largely over China's refusal to accept a transparency regime to monitor developing states' emissions, Obama vowed to have "one more run at getting this done," a senior aide said on Air Force One.

Desperate for a foreign policy win, Obama drew the line when a comparatively minor Chinese official Yu Qingtai, an expert on climate change talks showed up to a multilateral meeting instead of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

"I don't want to mess around with this any more, I want to just talk with Premier Wen," a senior aide quoted Obama as saying.

Obama also decided he wanted to speak to leaders of major developing powers seen in China's camp.

So, he dispatched his advance team to find Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and South African President Jacob Zuma.

One problem: US aides were told that Singh was already at the airport, probably believing the talks were done.

"Advance basically tells the South Africans that at this point the Brazilians are unclear about meeting without the Indians, the Indians are at the airport, and Zuma at that point says, 'well, if they're not coming I can't do this,'" said the US official.

Soon, Wen's team came on the line and said they were ready to meet Obama.

Obama's advance men headed off to scope out the room in the cavernous Bella Centre where the talks were taking place, but could not get in ... and the reason soon becomes clear.

"We've now figured out why we can't get into that room: because that room has Wen, Lula, Singh and Zuma," the official said. "They're all having a meeting."

Obama, according to reporters close to his side as he strode towards the talks, headed straight in.

"Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me? Are you ready? Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me? Are you ready?" Obama cried.

US officials insisted the president did not barge in univited on the surprise meeting, but was merely showing up on time for his talks with Wen.

"We weren't crashing a meeting -- we were going for our bilateral meeting ... we found the other people there."

At this point a near scuffle broke out after Chinese cameramen made a rush for a shot of all the leaders together.

"My people" have to get into the room, "or we're leaving" said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs in an unusual role as defender of the US press.

Downstairs, waves of reporters, cameramen and photographers started to surge through the conference center, as rumours ran riot that Obama was about to give a dramatic press conference.

But Obama's small corps of traveling press was already salted away in a makeshift television studio fashioned from black curtains, in a deserted shopping mall with half dressed mannequins just out of sight.

The president declared the non-binding pact unprecedented and historic, though short of what must be done to tame global warming.

Shellshocked delegates were left to digest implications of the non-binding deal, with vague promises to cut emissions, in an all-night plenary session of the Conference of Parties (COP).

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen was in the chair, but at times the late night talks descended into incoherence.

"The United States abstained, then I passed the floor to Nicaragua ....." Rasmussen said, confused by a breakdown of the session.

"Nicaragua abstained .... who wants to speak?"

A new version of Bluetooth has been revealed by the industry group behind the wireless technology, which is targeting low-energy applications in the health care, fitness, and security markets.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced the adoption of Bluetooth Core Specification version 4.0 on Thursday. The new iteration follows the speed-centric version 3.0 of the Bluetooth specification by just 10 months, but the two versions are intended for different use cases.

"With today's announcement, the race is on for product designers to be the first to market," Bluetooth SIG chief Michael Foley said in a statement. "Bluetooth low-energy modules for all sorts of new products may now be qualified--this is an important step towards our goal of enabling new markets with Bluetooth wireless technology."

Twitter stumbled again overnight on Thursday. But this time, it wasn't the work of the "fail whale," the cuddly cartoon personification of the site's excessive technical baggage. Rather, the site was replaced with a foreboding message from "Iranian Cyber Army" before crashing entirely, indicating that it had been the victim of a malicious attack that targeted its internal servers.

Co-founder Biz Stone posted a brief clarification on the issue late on Thursday night. "Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed," he explained. "As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully."

At the risk of sounding like an evening-news anchor calling attention to exactly how dangerous your treadmill is or how many diseases you can get from the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, I think it's time to explore the question: Is it safe to use Twitter?

For one, Twitter's track record with security has been shaky at best. A security flaw this spring exposed the data of a number of employees and allowed a hacker to pilfer some internal documents. Several high-profile accounts, like those of Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, have been targeted individually. Twitter has been the victim of phishing attacks. Other hackers have proved that Twitter accounts can be set up specifically to corral botnets of infected PCs. And in perhaps the biggest incident of all, a politically motivated denial-of-service attack in August that targeted multiple social-media sites managed to cripple Twitter entirely.

Think of it this way: if Facebook, a far bigger and more mainstream site that's had concerns about user privacy splashed all over the news recently, saw its homepage replaced with a nefarious political message, there would probably be a fresh round of calls for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's resignation. Twitter's heavy users are, for better or for worse, accustomed to sporadic downtime and glitches. They're also less likely to ever visit the Twitter.com homepage, considering the service has so many points of entry--text message, as well as third-party apps for mobile, Web, and desktop. Users have become accustomed to logging into third-party applications with their Twitter credentials.

That, perhaps, makes the overnight hack a bigger concern. Even though it's unlikely that user accounts were compromised in this DNS redirect, it's yet another sign that Twitter's security operations have time and again proven weak enough that the service doesn't exactly seem watertight.

A political message, or just plain obnoxious?
On the other hand, we still don't know much about this attack and it may have been less sophisticated than some may fear. One, nobody's exactly sure yet who the hackers were. "Of course, just because a message saying 'This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army' has been posted on a Web page does not necessarily mean that hackers from Iran are responsible for the defacement," Sophos security consultant Graham Cluley wrote on his blog Friday.

Additionally, Cluley said, the aim seems to have been to either get a political message through or to simply be obnoxious. "Fortunately there is no indication at this point that the page was carrying malicious code, and this attack appears to have had political motivations rather than being designed to steal confidential information from users," he wrote.

"It really looks like it was people were redirected to a 'hactivism' site," weighed in fellow Sophos analyst Beth Jones via e-mail. "There was no malicious code on the site claiming to be the 'Iranian Cyber Army' either. It looks like they just hacked the registrar to redirect traffic. So it's quite probable that none of Twitter's own servers were touched."

Another reassurance is the fact that Twitter simply doesn't have the kind of sensitive data that a Facebook or Google does. While it does have millions of mobile phone numbers stored to power its text-message app, not to mention archived private "direct messages" between users, Twitter does not index a whole lot more that isn't otherwise public. Facebook, for example, has many members' credit card numbers on hand (if they've ever used its "gift shop" feature), not to mention extensive personal data in profiles like addresses, birthdays, and family connections. Members who are still concerned about the security of their Twitter accounts can take the obvious step of changing their Twitter passwords to something that they don't use on their e-mail, Facebook accounts, or elsewhere--just in case.

Beth Jones says she has confidence in Twitter. "I wouldn't say their security is second-rate by any means," Jones said via e-mail. "As it stands, they weren't actually compromised, but I can see from a user point of view the questions and concerns. At Sophos we see a new site compromised every 3.6 seconds. That's easily close to 24,000 sites a day, and of those, the vast majority are legitimate sites that get hacked."

That doesn't mean that Twitter shouldn't start making it more clear that it takes security seriously. If the company, which is now beta-testing a "Contributors" feature that may pave the way to paid corporate accounts, begins storing financial information, we can only hope that their security operations are turned up a few notches. Or, ideally, an order of magnitude.

ILM was called in late in the 'Avatar' development process to help finish a series of the movie's shots.

SAN FRANCISCO--About a year ago, with James Cameron's science-fiction epic "Avatar" well under way, it became clear that Weta Digital, the visual effects studio doing much of the computer generated imagery, or CGI, on the project, was a bit in over its head.

At that point, the movie, which opened Friday, was about 40 minutes longer than it ended up being, and what was needed to finish the project was another company that could come in and lend a helping hand--and do so at the same, very high level, that Weta was working at.

And that's where Industrial Light & Magic came in, recalled John Knoll, the Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor tasked with parachuting in to help finish what was, more than on most films, the crucial job of crafting the "Avatar" CGI work.

What followed was months of coordination between ILM, Weta, and Cameron's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, with a primary goal of ensuring that the two visual effects teams, one in San Francisco and the other in New Zealand, avoided any unnecessary duplication of effort, even as both sometimes found themselves working on effects for the same movie sequences.

For ILM, this wasn't the first time it had been called in to help rescue another effects house, but it may well have been the first time it did so for one as big and as accomplished as Weta. And while ILM's overall contribution to the finished film was minor compared to Weta's, the fact that "Avatar" came out on time and is being seen as a visual tour de force is certainly due, in part, to ILM's ability to come in and, if not save the day, at least contribute mightily to the day turning out well.

For Knoll, the challenge of working alongside Weta was about identifying a body of work that limited the number of assets the ILM team had to develop and which would allow them to be the most helpful. Ultimately, they were handed the keys to creating the visual effects for many of the specialized vehicles in the film, including the Valkyrie, a large shuttle used to move people and equipment, and several different types of helicopters, as well as the landscapes those vehicles lived in.

ILM also did the effects work on the film's final battle scene, taking responsibility for the shots of all the vehicles taking off, as well as the sequence's cockpit interior shots.

Working together on a scene
For the most part, the teams at ILM and Weta worked on different scenes, but Knoll said there were some in which the two companies handles different parts of the same sequence. An example, he said, was a scene in the film where a group of helicopters attack the giant "home tree," where the Navi, the humanoid alien race in the film, live. Knoll said that the effects in the scene were mainly put together by Weta, but ILM handled all the shots in which the camera looks back toward the choppers.

In the scenes where the two effects houses both were charged with creating shots, the challenge was figuring out how to "checkerboard" the shots, Knoll said, especially because in some cases, ILM didn't know what Weta's work looked like.

"You keep cutting back between ILM shots and Weta shots," Knoll said. "They're really intermixed. I was worried, because we had to get going and go pretty far down the line before we had any Weta shots to refer to. We were both doing development in parallel."

This might have been a serious problem on many film projects, but with "Avatar," both ILM and Weta were working from extremely detailed templates given to them by Cameron. Knoll said that the templates gave his team very specific direction on how they should construct their shots, down to rough indications of the lighting in the scenes.

"It did help that the templates were so specific," Knoll said. "They were very detailed and Jim [Cameron] was very insistent: 'I've put a lot of time into making sure these are exactly what I want them to be, so you need to do a good job of matching that.'"

Still, with both houses working in parallel, there was certainly a bit of a race to finish a shot, Knoll said, because the team that was fastest would be able to more or less set the tone for the whole scene. "Whoever gets there first is who drives it," he said.

"For example, in the home tree sequence, we have to fire a bunch of missiles," Knoll recalled. "[There wasn't] anything established for what the missile trails look like. We did our own version of the what [they] would look like and Jim liked it, so that's what Weta had to match."

Of course, in other cases, Weta would finish first, and ILM would have to match what the New Zealanders came up with. And in some cases, it was a bit of "splitting the difference," Knoll said. Ultimately, he added, he hopes that audience members won't be able to tell that two separate visual effects teams shared the work.

All-CGI explosions
One benefit for the entire film industry of having ILM step in to help out on "Avatar" may be that in working on the project, Knoll and his team came up with a new way to completely computer-generate large-scale, close-up explosions.

Until now, big fiery explosions in CGI-heavy films have been shot with live camera and then had visual effects added to them. But Knoll said that because of some of the limitation of matching Cameron's templates for "Avatar," there was no practical way to meet the movie's explosive needs with live-action.

"We've done CG explosions in the past," Knoll said, "but never with this level of realism, and never this close up."

Fortunately, ILM had pioneered the rendering of the visual movement of fluids in films like "Poseidon" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," and Knoll knew that the shape and movement dynamics of an explosion were similar to that of water.

"The same underlying engine is being used on this," Knoll said. "The motion of the underlying gas is similar to the motion of fluids. The medium is relatively uncompressable. So when there's movement of the medium, it can't change volume real dramatically. So if you push on one side, something has to push on the other side."

That meant that ILM could take the graphics engine it had created for fluid shots in the previous films and apply the same basic technology for the explosions in "Avatar." Though there are clearly some major differences between fluid and big fire--notably that as fuel burns, fire expands, and then retracts when the fuel goes away, the technique was similar enough that the technology could be adapted to the needs of "Avatar."

"I think this is going to be an important technique (for the industry) in the future," Knoll said, "to tailor-make an explosion that looks good close up."

Sometimes terrible movies -- the ones with such bad acting, dumb dialogue and cheesy special effects that they're unintentionally hilarious -- are the ones we remember the most.

No genre is immune, but movies about technology -- ominous Web sites, evil hackers and so on -- seem to fail more often than not. Maybe that's because it's hard to dramatize someone sitting at a computer. Maybe it's because Hollywood doesn't understand tech.

So that got us thinking about the worst tech movies ever made. Not science fiction movies, with their planet-killing asteroids, journeys to the Earth's center, and homicidal dinosaurs, but movies about the digital world. Movies with technology that, even by Hollywood standards, is ridiculous.

For help, we enlisted some people who either know about movies or technology or both: Steven James Snyder, a film critic for Time magazine's Techland; Matt Atchity, the editor-in-chief of Rotten Tomatoes, the movie site; and Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University and the author of "Hollywood Science: Movies, Science and the end of the World."

"There are good movies that have bad tech in them," Atchity says. "And then there are bad movies with bad tech."

Bad movies, bad tech -- here's our list, which is by no means comprehensive or definitive. You probably have strong opinions about what movies should and shouldn't be on this list. So, post your comments below and we just may include them in a future story.

Antitrust (2001)

Ryan Phillippe is a computer whiz kid who's hired by NURV, a software company led by a guy named Gary Winston (played by Tim Robbins). Winston has ambitions of constructing a giant communications system which will transform the world.

Winston -- a character who appears to be based on Microsoft's Bill Gates -- turns out to be a ruthless man who'll "stop at nothing" to launch his project.

Milo learns the meaning behind the movie's tag line: "A good idea can get you millions. A great idea can get you killed."

Despite the argument it makes about open source software, what earns the movie a spot on the list is the absurdist ends it takes the stereotype of the evil, massive tech corporation bent on destroying anyone in its path.

My favorite line in the movie, to quote Winston: "This business is binary. You're a one or a zero -- alive or dead."

Feardotcom (2002)

Four people in New York City die within 48 hours of visiting a Web site where a sadistic doctor, played by Stephen Rea, tortures women before killing them.

All four die of what they fear most: One dies in a car wreck, another is swarmed by insects and so on.

Detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) and researcher Terry Holt (Natascha McElhone) are charged with tracking down the killer.

"Promise me one thing, that you won't visit the site," Terry asks of Mike. We all know he will. And if the subtext of the dangers of Web voyeurism weren't blatant enough, all four victims are shown bleeding from the eyes.

"What could have been a pointed little chiller about the frightening seductiveness of new technology loses faith in its own viability and succumbs to joyless special-effects excess," wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly.

The most absurd part of the whole movie? You'd think the movie's Web site would be fear.com. Nope. It's actually feardotcom.com.

Hackers (1995)

The movie has become something of a cult classic since its release more than a decade ago.

Angelina Jolie is "Acid Burn" and Jonny Lee Miller is "Zero Cool" and they're both hackers. They and their friends come across an evil hacker, "The Plague" (played by Fisher Stevens), who is skimming money off a faceless, multinational corporation.

He frames the kids, the kids fight back.

"There's one decent thing about 'Hackers' and that's Angelina Jolie," Athchity says. "The rest of the movie is a nightmare."

Independence Day (1996)

Sure, this summer blockbuster starring Will Smith is pure popcorn fun. It's the ending that leaves some people scratching their head.

An alien race invades Earth and methodically begins destroying the planet. The end seems imminent until Jeff Goldblum writes a computer virus that damages the alien ships and saves the day.

So, let's get this straight: An alien species whose technology seems centuries ahead of humankind, with ships whose shields render nuclear missiles ineffective, are vulnerable to a computer virus?

"And you're telling me this guy can suddenly decipher the programming minutiae of a completely alien life form that's got an alien language?" Atchity says.

Of course, says one of my co-workers. "It's Jeff Goldblum, he's a genius."

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

It's 2021 and Keanu Reeves is a data courier. He carries the information -- 80G, enough to fill a few iPods -- in his head.

On his last job before retirement, he agrees to transport some vital information from Beijing to Newark. The twist? The amount of data in this upload is too much for his head and he must download it before he dies.

And, of course, the bad guys want the information too.

"Keanu Reeves has too much information [in his brain]?" wonders Atchity. "That can't be possible."

The movie also stars Henry Rollins, Ice-T, a dolphin ... and Dolph Lundgren as a born-again hit man who's obsessed with Jesus.

"It is a disaster in every way," wrote Caryn James in The New York Times' review.

But honestly, I enjoyed this movie when I saw in the theater years ago. And I still can't stop grinning about it.

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Based on a short story by Stephen King, this is one of the first movies about virtual reality.

The plot revolves around Jobe Smith, played by Jeff Fahey, who is an innocent, mentally challenged gardener.

A scientist (Pierce Brosnan) experiments on Jobe with intelligence-enhancing drugs and virtual reality to increase his mental ability. It works, until it all goes wrong.

"It's a legendarily bad film," Atchity says. "It was based on a Stephen King story, but the only thing it has in common is the title."

Oh, and, there's a sequel.

The Net (1995)

Sandra Bullock is Angela Bennett, a computer expert who debugs software, orders pizza online and vacations with her laptop. She's sent a floppy disk -- remember those? -- with a program to examine and before you know it, she's unwittingly exposed to a grand criminal conspiracy.

The bad guys, who want the disk back and who can apparently do anything they want (like causing a plane crash), erase her identity and make her a fugitive.

"The absolute worst film ever about the Internet is the one whose brain trust couldn't come up with a better title than 'The Net,' " wrote Christopher Null in PC World Magazine last year.

Atchity sees the movie as a cautionary tale of sorts.

"If you don't want your parents or grandparents on the Web, have them watch this movie and they'll be terrified," he says.

Swordfish (2001)

John Travolta is a crook who wants to get his mitts on $9.5 billion locked away in a DEA account. He brings in Hugh Jackman, an expert hacker down on his luck, to break in to the government's computer.

The more entertaining scenes of the movie involve Jackman trying to figure out how to hack some computer or another.

"I think a lot of people would argue that watching someone sitting around programming a computer is really boring," Atchity said. But, Jackman is "drinking wine, and acting like he's in some kind of concert or something."

"This beat-the-clock set piece, tricked out with dazzling computerized bells and whistles, is one of the movie's desperate attempts to transform the tedious task of computer hacking into a sexy activity," the New York Times' Stephen Holden wrote at the time.

"[Jackman] stirs up further excitement by dancing around like a mad cowboy to conjure up his brainstorms. Who knew that typing could be so intense?

Weird Science (1985)

It's difficult to put "Weird Science" on this list. After all, it's a 1980s film directed by John Hughes, which has a certain cachet. It has Bill Paxton as obnoxious older brother Chet. And I even watched the TV show based on the movie when it was on years ago.

But, really, two teen-aged boys using a computer to create the ideal babe?

"Maybe computers still seemed somewhat magical back in 1985," Perkowitz says. "[It's] the only way to explain how two dateless teen-aged boys, desperately trying to program a computer simulation of a woman, end up with Lisa, a living, breathing and totally beautiful creation with supernatural powers."

OK, so "Weird Science" isn't that bad. Maybe we're simply being bitter that none of us ever managed to use our computer skills to create Kelly LeBrock.

MANILA, Philippines (UPDATE) - The volume of lava streaming out of Mayon Volcano's summit crater has increased and more ash explosions have been recorded, indications that a hazardous eruption may happen soon, a government volcanologist said Saturday.

"Ang intensification ay isang indication na papalapit na tayo doon pero mahirap tukuyin kung kailan (The intensification [of the volcano's activity] is an indication that it is on the verge of erupting. It's just hard to predict when it will happen)," July Sabit, Phivolcs' resident volcanologist in Albay province, told radio dzMM.

Phivolcs chief Renato Solidum, meanwhile, told ANC that Mayon Volcano is "technically erupting." He said that what they are on alert for is the "hazardous phase" of the volcano's eruption.

Solidum said that based on the Phivolcs' observations for the past 3 days, it seemed the volcano is already "moving towards the hazardous phase."

Sabit said volume-wise, the lava gushing out of the volcano's mouth has increased. He said there is also an increase in the number of explosions recorded since Friday night.

He said the advancing lava flow has reached approximately 4 kilometers downslope from the summit crater.

"The Mayon Volcano's activity has increased and intensified, but we are still on Alert Level 3," Sabit said. He said the Phivolcs would immediately raise the alert level to 4, once rumbling sounds are heard from the volcano and more powerful earthquakes are recorded.

He added that another indication of Alert Level 4 is “lava fountaining,” which is visible at night.

As of 7 a.m. Saturday, Phivolcs said it has detected 197 volcanic quakes and tremors and 18 ash explosions, which produced dirty white to grayish ash columns that reached 100 meters to 2 kilometers (2,000 meters) above the crater summit, it added.

It added that harmonic tremors were continuously recorded by the seismic instruments.

Sabit said the volcano's activity started to increase on Thursday, and then further intensified on Friday morning, with 10 ash explosions and 248 volcanic earthquakes.

He said the volcano's activity lulled by Friday night, but started to intensify again early Saturday.

Albay province has been placed under a state of calamity.

The Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council (PDCC) of Albay has evacuated more than 8,000 families from the 6-kilomter to 8-kilometer danger zones of the picturesque, nearly perfect cone volcano.

A radio dzMM report said the provincial government has been spending P1.5 million a day since Alert Level 3 was raised on Monday night. More than a thousand families remained within the danger zones.

Eruption won’t disfigure Mayon

Solidum, meanwhile, said that the continuous flowing of lava from the summit crater is somehow patching up spots the eroded parts of the volcano due to previous eruptions.

The volcano’s most recent major eruption was in 2006. It has erupted 48 times, claiming thousands of lives. The deadliest eruption was in 1814, were more than 1,200 people were killed as lava almost buried a whole town.

Solidum said that in case a full-blown eruption happens, the volcano’s near perfect cone shape will be maintained.

“Essentially if you look at the form of the volcano, it will be maintained,” he said.

The volcano is one of the country's tourist attractions because of its near perfect cone shape.

Cedric Daep, Albay's Public Safety and Emergency Management Office, said more tourists have been trooping to the province to watch the most anticipated major eruption of the volcano.

Daep said the provincial government has designated "safe viewing areas" in Legazpi City. He said the city "is perfectly safe" from the full-blown eruption as it is 16 kilometers away from the volcano's summit crater.