Flop’s Scribbles

We’ve been using T-mobile since 2005. Even though T-mobile doesn’t get great coverage in the block where I live in Albany, T-Mobile comes through. First of all, T-mobile is the only U.S. cellphone carriers that supports UMA. The second reason is their great customer service.

UMA is sometimes confused with VOIP, when it’s really more like GSM over IP. The service basically allows you to make your calls using your home broadband internet connection instead of the T-Mobile cell towers. This is great because I can finally have some decent cell phone coverage at home. Also for people who want, they can sign up for the Unlimited Hotspot severice that allows them to have unlimited calls when the call originates from WIFI. Also UMA is great for travelling. I can make calls abroad using WIFI and I won’t be charged when making calls to the US.

Over the years, I have called customer service for many reasons. People have been knowledgeable about a topic. Only a couple of times, I got a customer service that didn’t give me a correct answer. People are friendly, and they actually seem to care about the customers compared to other companies. I have dealt with customer service from many other companies, and they have never been good at all.

Thanks to the UMA I get good coverage at home using T-mobile. Also being able to make a call inside a building using WIFI where nobody else can get a signal is pretty useful. Great customer server is just icing on the cake. Having a helpful and welcoming person helping you through a problem is just prieceless. Keep it up T-mobile.

In Ecuador people are known for delicious meals, but meals usually take quite a while to cook. The trick to a quick meal in Ecuador is to not cook in big quantities. The recipe below can be easily be combined with a salad.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of rice
• 1/2 lb of thin sliced-meat (beef)
• 1 tsp of ground Cumin
• 1 tsp of mustard (optional)
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 1/4 tsp of ground black pepper

Instructions:

Put the rice in a pot with 1/2 cup of water in medium heat. Once most of the water is gone from the rice, put 1/2 Tsp of oil in the pot, mix it with a fork, and cover it. Because you are cooking a very small amount of rice it should be cooked in about 10 or 15 minutes at the most.

Mix the thin sliced-meat with the cumin, mustard, pepper and 1/4 tsp of salt (For better taste you can put the seasoned meat in a container in the fride for 2 hours or overnight). Once the meat is seasoned, put a little bit of oil in a frying pan in medium heat. Once the oil is hot, put the thin slice meat. After a couple of minutes you can turn the mat and in about 5 or 6 minutes the meat should be cooked.

Meat is very popular in ecuador. Finding vegetarian food is very easy, but most ecuadorians are meat lovers. I was shocked when I ate meat for the first time in the  US. People here usually eat big thick pieces of steak. In ecuador it’s very common that people who cook take the big chunks of beef and cut it into thin slices. This is done mostly to strech a piece of meat so that you can feed more people.

This is a healthy low fat (based on the type of yogurt) that I got from my mom in Ecuador. I figure I would share with the tubes in the web. Unfortunately I don’t have the exact measurements for each ingredient, so put in the ingredients based on how much you like them. Personally I wouldn’t put in a lot of onions.

Ingredients:

• fresh raw carrot
• fresh tomatoes
• white onion
• plain white yogurt

Instructions:

Tomatoes are probably best in chunks. The carrots can either be sliced or cut into small strips. Mix the ingredient together and let them sit for 15 minutes so that the natural juices mix together. That’s it.

Git is my favorite scm. The guys in irc are really friendly and always more than happy to help out new users. For an open source project, the amount of documentation on the web regarding git is amazing. I recently ran into the gitcasts provided by Scott Chacon. The videos are very informative and professional, absolutely a must watch!

We have a canon sd750 camera. I personally dislike Canon because they don’t support Mass Storage Mode in their cameras and also because they have horrible customer support. I still chose to use their cameras because they really take nice pics.

Recently I tried CHDK. We have two canon cameras: Canon powershot a520 and Canon powershot sd750. At first I thought that CHDK could breathe some life into the canon a520, but because that camera uses the DIGIC I processor, there’s not DHCK support for it.

The canon sd750 uses DIGIC III, and since DHCK works with DIGIC II and III, there is support. I found a thread in the forums that has information of the port of CHDK to the canon sd750.

CHDK is an awesome addition to the canon point and shoot cameras. It adds a lot of really cool features such as: raw shooting mode, live histograms, scripting, shorter shutter speeds. CHDK unleashes a lot of powerful features in the canon digital cameras. The fact that you don’t have to install anything permanently into the camera, and that by turning on and off the camera you can go back to the original firmware is really cool. Below are some useful links

CHDK FAQ
firmware usage
Scripts

Update: To download the CHDK software for the canon SD750 use the links below:
Wiki page with links to available ports
Thread monitoring progress CHDK canon 750

Ok, so we all know that having git submodules to include libraries in a git project is very handy. Today, I was trying to remove a git submodule that I had in a project, and couldn’t really a find a good answer by googling, so I went in irc and thanks to a good samaritan: Ilari, I found the answer.

Let’s say that you have a submodule in your project called ’submodule1′ and it’s in the following path: ‘vendors/submodule1′. In git there are 3 traces of this this submodule:
1) .gitmodules
2) .git/config
3) the submodule entry in the index/commit itself.

To remove the first two, is really simple, you just edit those files and remove the lines that specify the submdoule. In order to delete the third and last trace of the submodule in git, you need to type the following command:
git rm --cached path/to/submodule

In the example above, we would type:
git rm --cached vendors/submodule1

Finding this information in google is not easy, hopefully this will help other git users.

* Let the 1/2 cup of lentils rest for 2 hours in water
* Make refrito - take 1/4 of onion (white or red) , 1 tsp of butter, and put it in low heat and stir until the onion is clear
* Then add 1/2 cup of lentils or beans and 2 cups of water and let it boil for 10 - 12 minutes
* Then add 2 cups of rice and change the heat to medium.
* Check the rice to make sure that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan, if it starts to get a little dry add 1/3 cup of water and stir
* Let it cook for 30 minutes

Instrucciones en español

* Pones a remojar la lenteja por dos horas, ok
* Con media taza de lenteja, la remojas por dos horas
* Luego haces un refrito de cebolla perla, blanca o colorada, no importa la que sea, con una cucharada de mantequilla, a fuefo lento en ese refrito echas la media t aza de lentejaa cocinar con dos tazas de auga
* Hierve por 10 minutos y le agregas dos taza de arroz, a fuefo medio, cuida que no se te pegue, cuando ya se seca el arroz le tienes que poner en fuego bajo, la tapas y dejar cocinar por 30 minutos.

Instruciones para Cocinar Moros de lenteja (receta de mi mama)

los moros de lenteja son faciles y ráido de hacer, la lenteja es bien blanda se cocina más rápido que los frejoles.

pones a remojar la lenteja por dos horas, ok

has la prueba, con media taza de lenteja, la remojas por dos horas

luedo haces un refrito de cebolla perla, blanca o colorada, no importa la que sea, con una cucharada de mantequilla, a fuefo lento en ese refrito echas la media t aza de lentejaa cocinar con dos tazas de auga

hierve por 10 minutos y le agregas dos taza de arroz, a fuefo medio, cuida que no se te pegue, cuando ya se seca el arroz le tienes que poner en fuego bajo, la tapas y dejar cocinar por 30 minutos.

es todo, no te puede quedar crudo si sigues la instrucciones

Ok, so it’s been ages since I write in this blog. Main reason not to write is because I’m kind of lazy. Writing the posts in both english and spanish is a pain. There’s lots of things that I have done in this past year. So I should have plenty of things to talk about.

Last year I started working at OSU Central Web. It’s a cool place to work, and people are awesome. I have learned quite a bit about html, php and webpages. Heck, it’s kind of sad that I’m more confortable writing this post in html source rather than the WYSIWYG interface of wordpress

Last year, my mom came to visit me for a few days, and I think that she had a little bit of a hard time recognizing me at first. I guess I had changed quite a bit in a few years. I got some good tips on how to cook ecuadorian food from her. I will try to get some of those tips and recipes up online

I also got tired of having to use my old computer at home (an old 1.5 Ghz cpu, and 256 MB of memory), so I got myself a mac book pro. This laptop is so nice, compared to my old desktop, at first I wasn’t really comfortable with mac os x, and all of its gui, but at the end, I’m kind of liking it. Things just work, but since I’m a geek, I want to have something to fix in my computer so I installed ubuntu. Ubuntu runs so nicely and fast in this mac book pro. Will I ever installed Windows ? I hope I never have to, and I probably never will.

I also had to make a quick travel to Ecuador to renew some paperwork, and also to visit family while I was down there. The food was just delicious. I got quite a few recipes, and tips on cooking. I got them jot down, and will post them. I also got some great pictures. I got some good stories to tell about my trip about Ecuador

I was expecting this to be a short post, but I guess it has become a little long. I will leave it to tomorrow to write the Spanish translation for it

For the past year, I have been using mostly open source for most of the web stuff. Some of the php open source programs that I have been very happy with is wordpress and media wiki. What got me thinking about how great these programs are was their update process. The last time I upgraded wordpress, it was only a couple of painless steps, and with media wiki, you just run an update script.

The update process of these programs is better than most commercial software. For the past few days I have been tracing the update.php script that media wiki uses. I’m doing this since at work we made some modifications to an older version of media wiki, and we want to apply the sql changes manually. This meant that I had to figure out which of the of sql files get executed by the udpate script. The php is not pretty, but it is obsious that a lot of care and effor went into making the update experience of the user as easy as possible.

*** Español ***

En estos meses, la mayoria de los programas y archivos que he usado son libres o “open source”. Un par de los programas libres escritos en PHP que me gustan son wordpress y media wiki. La razon por la cual escogi estos programas es porque son muy fáciles de instalar nuevas versiones. La última vez que actualize wordpress fue muy sencillo y rápido, y media wiki tiene un programa que puedes usar para actualizarlo.

Los procedimientos de actualizacion de estos programas son mejores que la mayoría de los programas comerciales. Estos dias he estado leyendo el código de update.php de media wiki. Leí este codigo porque donde yo trabajo usamos una version de media wiki que hemos modificado y queremos actualizar la base de datos. Por eso tuve que leer el código y averiguar cuales son las tablas que son actualizadas por el codigo de update.php. El código de update.php no es fácil de leer, pero se puede ver que los programadores pusieron mucho esfuerzo y cariño para que el proceso de instalar la nueva version de media wiki sea muy fácil.