Nethazard.net

After today’s iPhone announcements and all the excitement that has been generated, I started thinking about the competition. The nokia n95 and all the other smart phones have little advantage over the attractiveness of an iPhone.

The features and the looks are nice. But the price? I can’t think of how a Nokia N95 at more than $500 dlls is going to compete with an iPhone 3G at $199 dlls standard pice world wide.

And it reminded me of a nice Dilbert cartoon:

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I’ve been working with Drupal templates these past weeks and I needed to make a photogallery.

I found a great resource for doing it following this nice video. But because of the space available in my template’s design, I needed 3 columns intstead of the default 4 on my grid view.

So what I had to change to do that, is in the modules/views_bonus_grid.module and on line 20, you change:

// set default count.
$cols = $view->gridcount ? $view->gridcount : 4;


with:


// set default count.
$cols = $view->gridcount ? $view->gridcount : 3;


Place whatever number you want, and there you have it.

I know that editing the module itself is not the best way to do it. But it works and its the quickest way to get it done.

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It is incredible the effect that Steve Job’s announcements have on the internets
tubez. The keynote is starting and there’s a lot of speculation about Twitter
coming down to its knees. Well… so far I can still access twitter.

There’s a lot of links where to get live updates:

• Leo Laporte’s twit live
• Engadget
• Techcrunch
• Mac rumors
• Twitter and Summarize for live tweets

But I prefer the IRC channel on irc.macrumorslive.com, channel #macrumors where
I’m getting the latest and fastest updates on the keynote.

No, I’m not an Apple fanboy. I don’t have any Macs or ever had one. But I love
to be updated with the latest in technology. And like it or not, every Apple
announcement kinda changes the world.

Hope to see something like that happening with free software related news someday.

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Its been a while since my last update here on my blog. Truth is that I’ve been distracted with other types of blogging but mainly I’ve been through major changes.

I don’t know if I wrote about it before, but I used to work for HoraDeComer.com a web startup for restaurant searching in Monterrey. Micro managing there didn’t work for me, so I looked at other opportunities after 5 months of developing interesting stuff there.

Fortunately I got a call from Danilo Black. I’m happy to say that I’m working with Drupal and hope to be contributing some patches someday soon. Its been a great experience for me so far because I get to work with Basilio, a good friend of mine and I’ve been learning to work with a larger team.

Work on the twexter project has been progressing a lot these days, and we have already a nice demo to test. There’s still a lot of work to do on that interface but we’re getting there step by step. Its my first “open source project” I’ve contributed and curiously I’m the mantainer of the main code. I’d love some input from others but I think the tool needs to mature more to wake some interest for contributions. I just hope the tool will help kids and people in general to learn new languages easily. It can also be used as a nicer translation tool.

I’ll try to keep up my publishing and will try to publish more interesting stuff, and less personal life gossip.

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Its been a while since the last time I tried blogging with the weblogger mode. I don’t think anything changed so far, but I just wanted to give it a try once more. The other easier way to blog with emacs is using the It’s All Text Firefox extension.

It’s weird that there’s a video editing mode and a music synthesizer for Emacs, but I can’t find a way to do simple image editing.

I’m experimenting the Emacs Operating System experience. I already do all my coding with it, have my notes and agenda in org-mode, sometimes browse with w3m, and my favourite so far has been twittering. I still have to migrate my email from Thunderbird to Gnus. I don’t know if I’ll be ready to take that step soon. Anyway I like the idea, and someday I might do the transition.

Maybe my next step should be learning Lisp or eLisp to work on a decent php-mode that works with PHP 5.0 syntax and do something useful. Probably I already mentioned this.

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Just finished publishing ACM Crossroads issue 14.4 online.

This speed of publishing is thanks to Emacs. I use tramp mode to edit and fix files remotely on the ACM servers via ssh. Tidy with html-mode to validate and fix all markup so that the files are XHTML 1.1 Strict. Dired mode to rename, move, copy files, and image mode to check if images are correct.

I wonder if I can edit images (like crop, resize, convert to jpeg, compress) in Emacs. I know you can edit videos, so images can’t be more difficult.

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