Barcelona's Secret Places

Ah.. Barcelona… Estrella, the football team, Gaudi, paella, crema catalane and more..

Living two years in Barcelona (for studies) were not enough to see everything. Believe it or not I am so angry to myself for not visiting ALL the places Barcelona has to offer. Well, I must not be too strict to myself, I’ve done a lot.

This post covers all the basics of Barcelona plus some secret places and awesome stuff to do from my point of view (this means that you will find almost all the things I liked about BCN).

I will try to make it as interesting and clear as possible, categorizing the places into the different areas. 
**Spoiler Geek Alert: Contains Comic Book stores!**

Adventure Games Nostalgia

The only type of games I like is adventure games. Old school! Point and click! Unfortunately these type of games are about to fade if not already faded yet. Since LucasArts was shut down, I thought that it was time to make my own tribute to give my appreciation to the company for creating us unerasable memories and fun during our childhood! This post gathers all the adventure games I have played and finished, in order for me to keep some record of my personal achievements and for the rest of the people, who love adveture games of this type, to check if they missed anything on their TO-PLAY list! Next to each game name I have placed my own personal rating for the game!

Backup/Restore Android contacts on Windows or Linux

This post follows the previous one on how to Apply a custom ROM to a HAIWUEI U8650. Consider the following steps in order to Backup or Restore your contacts on an Android device. Have in mind that there are alternative ways to achieve this out there but I am showing one of them. This post favors owners of a HAUWEI U8650. It also shows a clever way to merge multiple vcf files together! There is also an alternative way at the end of the post.

Setting up Eclipse in Ubuntu 12.10 in 10 steps

A quick post on how to set up Eclipse in Ubuntu 12.10

HUAWEI U8650 Core surgery

Almost two years ago I bought my first Android device. HAUWEI (pronounced "Wah-way") U8650 a.k.a Sonic, was a rather cheap mobile but quite respectable for its specifications and performance. As time passed, and the number of applications increased, the performance decreased (usually this happens). It also had the mobile carrier's (Yoigo) custom Android version. Then I knew that it was about time to take action! After a long research, I had worn my surgery gloves and performed open heart surgery to it changing it inside-out! (I bought it a cool case too! Link) As I had to refer to a lot of websites which I found confusing at some point, (excluding the fact that most of them were in Spanish) I decided to gather all the process together into one post!  The rat-lab device belongs to a friend of mine who has a very interesting blog! Visit her blog here! ;)

EXIF alteration madness

Lately for a project of mine I had to alter the EXIF metadata of a JPEG file using Java. After googleing and improvising, I finally wrote a code sample that demonstrates how to change several metadata of a JPEG file, using the Sanselan library from Apache; you can download the jar file and source here. The code below changes Camera Model, Camera Maker and X Resolution, which are included in the Root IFD0 of a JPEG image as well as Digital Zoom Ratio and Image Width, stored in the EXIF Sub IFD. 

Notice: You will be able to view the changes from the image properties of your operating system, except from the Image Width. Use this code to view the raw image metadata.

References: 

• http://bricolsoftconsulting.com/2012/12/08/copying-exif-metadata-using-sanselan/
• http://www.heffee.com/article/467519

Installing CentOS 5 on VMware Player (Windows 7)

Installing an operating system as a Virtual Machine sometimes is not as trivial as it seems. In this post I am explaining how to install CentOS 5 on the latest VMware Player, which is provided free, on Windows 7. This procedure may also be adapted for other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Mint. I will try to explain it in a way so that not so experienced users can follow too.

ForEver...note!

Recently I came across Evernote as I was browsing through Google Chrome's add-ons. It is basically a web application that saves your notes and you can access them whenever or wherever you are. In the beginning I though it was going to store notes written by me, but Evernote does not stop there; notes by you is only the beginning. You can save an article, that Evernote automatically discovers on a page, save a full page (web clipping) or just the URL of a website. If you are using it on a mobile device, you can as well take a photo and save it to your notes! And the best thing is, that all your notes are in sync on all your devices!

Gus, the dragon worm

A fantasy creature which recently appears in a comic that I have been working on for a while, is taking over this post! It's called Gus and it is something like a dragon worm. I have been practicing coloring on photoshop and I wanted to share this as my first actual attempt! ;)

Don't forget to check out my deviantART account for more drawings.

ALSO, check this nice tutorial on coloring using photoshop and maybe a good tablet from Patrick Brown.

4 chord patterns

Did you ever notice that the majority of the popular songs (e.g. Whenever you will go, No woman no cry) use the same four chords? Neither did I! :) Not until I "stumbled upon" these guys:

Vimportant experience

Did it happened to you too, to work on a code, upload it to the remote working machine, compile it and a syntax error appears? Instead of repeating the procedure for just a simple semicolon or space, Vim saves the day! For hardcore Linux users Vim is not something new. The point is that Vim is shortcut key based and it becomes a pain in the butt if you press different keys and another thing happens! This site though gives a clear and simple cheat sheet for Vim! It helped me a lot!

Recursive(ness) meets art

When recursive(ness) meets art! A crazy idea pump into my mind during a lecture! (Yes, I am totally paying attention to was is going on in class) :p I started drawing my hand and this is what it ended like! From my deviantART profile.

Fault Tolerance Systems

Back in the Master days we (me and my roommates) took a course related to Scalable Distributed Systems. It's final project was on Fault Tolerance scheme on distributed computers connected together. We had to deliver something that simulated that scheme (apart from the documentation and theories). Since we had implemented it in Java and in order for everybody to work asynchronously, we had it subversioned at Google Code using the Eclipse SVN.
Lately I learned that Google is shutting down Google Code, so I downloaded the code using Download SVN tool which I found pretty cool. I think there are plenty of code for fault tolerance system out there but if you want to take a look the code is still available here.

First Post (a.k.a Hello World)

Me as Guybrush

printf("Hello World!");

The idea for this Blog occurred to me when my classmates, with which I was doing a programming project, asked me if it was possible to speed up the reading/creating of some file.
- "I can make a script to do that!", was my response.
Soon, one script over the other, they gave me the nickname of The Script Guy (which I like to be honest). Since scripts and programming are not the only things I like, I thought why not gathering them all together in a this digital drawer called Blog, where everything can fit! Its is a strange combination but I love it!

printf("Enjoy!");

Check my deviantArt page.