Bert Garcia^2.0

Finally, completed all 300 levels in Angry Birds for Android.

Started playing during the holidays on my Nook Color, and tried to finish up a level or more every day. It was very addicting to say the least, and I’m not much of a gamer.

Next up is Angry Birds Rio and Seasons, but I think I’ll chill for a while and play other games for the tablet. Who’d of thought that the Nook would get me back to playing games, something I have no time for these days on my desktop computer.

The tablet is a real killer platform for games, since you can take it with you anywhere. Some nights I was playing till the wee hours while laying in bed, with my wife complaining about the light coming from the screen. Those nights I was on levels that I had a hard time getting past, they were the most entertaining and I had the hardest time putting the tablet down.

The Birdday Party World was by far the hardest, but by that time you have a good idea how each bird operates. Honestly, there were some levels in that last world that I thought I’d never complete, only by perseverance and sheer luck was I able to finish up.

I’m like a bird
I’ll only fly away
I don’t know where my soul is
I don’t know where my home is

SOPA and PIPA brought to you by the MPAA and RIAA.

The House of Representative’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP Act are the latest attempts by corporations with deep pockets and the elected officials they’ve bought and paid for, to screw with us.

This isn’t about online piracy or the protection of intellectual property, this is about dinosaurs fighting their extinction.

The Internet has changed everything, except the minds of aging CEO’s who want to hold on to the status quo or should I say their status of living. They lost control the day every kid received a computer with a CD burner and a squelching Hayes modem, sh*t happens.

How dare we, the peons of the world, refuse to pay $8 to $10 for a movie ticket or $15 for a CD of music. Why us ungrateful swine, we should be glad that we have entertainment at all. Bow down to the photo-shopped movie gods and auto-tuned pop idols, eat your pudding damn it.

What a joke, nothing to watch, even less to listen to. But we’ve perfected 3D and Justin looks so cute, come on, just hand over the keys to the Net. Screw us, no, screw you, go away.

I don’t need no arms around me
And I don’t need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don’t think I need anything at all
No, don’t think I need anything at all
All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall
All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall

Santa picked up an HP 100B All-in-one PC at one of the few remaining Comp-USA outlets.

My oldest son wanted a new computer for Xmas, but he was torn between a laptop and a full blown desktop. The bearded one surprised him on Xmas morning with an HP 100B, a nice compromise.

Bert Jr. mostly surfs the web and watches YouTube, so this computer more than keeps up with the tasks at hand.

The 100B came with 2GB of RAM, but I plan on putting another 2GB from Crucial for a mere $15. Since the on board display circuitry shares available RAM with the processor, 4GB should be sufficient for a bloat free Windows 7 running Firefox.

What an All-in-one PC gives you over a laptop is the large screen, a nice 20” display was what my son was yearning for, but he wasn’t keen on having a huge noisy tower in his room. I’ve yet to pop open the 100B, but I imagine it’s a laptop disguising itself as a desktop, since the disk drive, dvd drive and memory are all laptop related parts.

One good thing for me, since we have so many computers running in the house, is that the 100B is very energy efficient. Gotta keep that light bill in check.

One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel alright
One love, hear my plea, one heart
Give thanks and praise to the Lord, and I will feel alright

Wanting a tablet for Christmas, I settled on a refurbished Nook Color for $149. Loaded CyanogenMod’s CM7 on a Sandisk 4GB class 4 MicroSD card and booted off the card, leaving the Barnes and Noble experience alone. The Nook Color has been my primary computing device for the last couple of weeks, as I hit the road to visit friends and family.

With an overclocking kernel in CM7, the Nook has been running at the Max of 1100 MHz from the stock 800 MHz with no issues. At that speed, the Nook feels like a much more powerful tablet, breezing through web pages in Dolphin HD and playing Angry Birds with ease.

Battery life is excellent, the WIFI chip in it can pick up a hotel signal from a McDonald’s across the street, and the screen, what can I say other than the pictures I took on holiday with my Nikon D40 looked incredible on the Nook.

When I get a chance this week, I’ll load up CM7 on the internal memory, and free up the MicroSD slot for a Lexar 16GB class 4 card I have loaded with pictures and videos. I’ve run CM7 long enough to know it’s a solid release and it deserves to run on faster access times. I couldn’t be happier with the Nook, that is until I put Ice Cream Sandwich on it.

I am user friendly
I am addicted to you
I won’t refuse to do whatever you’ll ask me

The Motorola Xoom Family Edition Android tablet is on the top of my Christmas list.

With all this hype about tablets of late, I had yet to find a reason to buy one. That is until I walked into Best Buy today and came upon the Motorola Xoom FE. What’s not to like? Android Honeycomb on a 1GHz dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage, 1280×800 resolution, WIFI, Bluetooth, GPS, front and rear cameras, HDMI out and SD card expandability.

Honestly it’s the first tablet that I wouldn’t mind using for surfing the web away from my 22” LG monitor. Transfer a video or PDF to the SD card and curl up in bed without the weight of a laptop on me. Hook it up to an LCD TV and use it as a DVD player, or a gaming device. Fire up Skype and do a video call while walking around the backyard. Google Map our route using the free ATT WIFI at any McDonalds while enjoying a chocolate fudge sundae.

The uses for a tablet with the above listed features are endless, and I can see myself flexing all of it’s possibilities. I can’t wait for Santa to arrive ;)

Oh, Honeycomb, won’t you be my baby
Well, Honeycomb, be my own
Got a hank o’ hair and a piece o’ bone
And made a walkin’ talkin’ Honeycomb

One of the first sites I visit in the morning is reddit.

# reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web. Users like you provide all of the content and decide, through voting, what’s good () and what’s junk (). Links that receive community approval bubble up towards #1, so the front page is constantly in motion and (hopefully) filled with fresh, interesting links.

Hugely popular, if you happen to get on the front page, it could spell great things or bad times ahead. Whatever makes the front page, could end up being front page news in mainstream media.

Judge William Adams using a belt to discipline his daughter would not of been such a big deal when I was growing up, but in today’s connected world, it turned into a huge story. With every laptop computer and smart phone equipped with a camera, my aunt would think twice before beating up on my cousin nowadays. Progress, you betcha.

Not a day goes by that I don’t see a story on some mainstream media website or cable channel that I saw first on reddit. The upvotes of reddit are uber-powerful, as is the power of the internet. But this new found power that we the people possess is very scary to those in real power, so keep an eye on the Stop Online Piracy Act. Scary, you betcha.

Did I upset you Daddy
Take out your frustrations on me
Did I make you mad
Take out your frustrations on me

A year after buying the Lenovo K300 desktop, I felt it was time for a memory upgrade.

Surfed over to the Crucial website, ran their System Scanner, and I was shown a webpage explaining my upgrade options. That’s when I saw $29.99 for 2 2GB sticks, throw in free shipping, how could I refuse? Placed the order last Friday, it arrived today in the mail.

This afternoon, I took off the side of Lenovo and surprisingly it was quite clean inside, but I sprayed some compressed air into it nonetheless. Snapped in the 2 memory sticks, closed up the computer and powered it back up. Control Panel reported 8GB of ram, success!

Upped the memory from 1Gb to 2GB in the VirtualBox settings for my Debian LAMP development virtual machine. Started up all my usual software applications, and had plenty of memory left over for more apps and vm’s. Feels like yesterday when 640K was enough ;)

Thanks for the memory
Of cushions on the floor
Hash with Dinty Moore
That pair of gay pajamas
That you bought and never wore

Dennis Ritchie died at home this past weekend, news was quietly reported on Wednesday.

As a longtime programmer, I can’t begin to express the impact that Dennis had on computing. If you use any computing device today, you can thank Dennis for creating the C programming language, which allowed us mere mortals to talk directly to the machine, and is the basis for many of today’s modern programming languages. If you surf the web today, you can thank Dennis for creating Unix, which eventually spun off into Linux, the operating system that powers the majority of the Internet’s web servers.

Dennis was a quiet man who wanted to free computing from the big iron IBM mainframes of his day. He wasn’t looking to become rich nor famous, he just wanted to empower us. His email signature said it all; “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.” The quintessential programmer, his elegant lines of code speak for themselves.

When I first read K&R in the early 80’s, I felt like I was being released from the shackles of business programming languages, like Cobol. For the first time I felt in charge of my computer, I could make it do anything, I was one with the machine. Dennis may have shunned god status, but he sure made me a believer.

Thank you Dennis for using your time on earth to create elegant code instead of destructive Nuclear weapons, you are and will always be my hero. R.I.P.

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

Upgraded to Debian Squeeze on my VirtualBox LAMP development machine.

Lenny to Squeeze in 3 easy steps:

1. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list (lenny to squeeze)
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

374 packages fetched, upgrade took 15 minutes.

The upgrade process worked flawlessly, but there were a few things left to do:

• Squeeze introduces Grub2, vga= doesn’t work anymore for sizing the console window, but I found a nice article entitled Grub2 graphical boot tips.
• Reinstalled the VirtualBox Guest Additions modules.
• To get rid of unneeded packages: sudo apt-get autoremove
• Clean up the disk of Lenny packages: sudo apt-get autoclean

Squeeze was released on February 6, 2011, I was tempted but I kept running Lenny since DreamHost, my web hosting provider, was also running Lenny. This assures me that websites I’m working on locally, will work without a hitch when they are uploaded to the cloud.

DreamHost has begun the process of upgrading all their servers to Squeeze, so it was time for me to upgrade my development LAMP stack:

• Linux – 2.6.32
• Apache – 2.2.16
• MySQL – 5.1.49
• PHP – 5.3.3

At my bedside, empty pocket, a foot without a sock
Your body gets much closer, I fumble for the clock
Alarmed by the seduction, I wish that it would stop

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be
Another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away