IVAN SOTO

The last couple of months I've been using my Xoom more and more. I give it many uses, like streaming Starcraft 2 games, reading email, magazines, books, playing MKV videos, gaming and much more. Apps are getting much better over time and so are games.

After being disappointed again at Motorola Canada for being completely useless with updates on their devices I decided to take a look at fashing the US rom into my Canadian Xoom. And it worked!

As a note, there's no hacking involved here, you are just unlocking the bootloader and flashing an official ROM provided by Motorola. As you will see, you won't find any link from a non-trusted source. It just involves some terminal work and since I'm a Mac user, I will give the instructions for OSX.

Warning: Rant ahead!

Since 2007 I've been beta testing Google's Android. Back in the days were we had one phone, the G1. I say beta testing because the software wasn't complete, it lacked good audio formats, multitouch, polished UI, etc. I still followed the development (even reading GIT commits). And now we got to a point where I can say Android is capable enough and stable, in fact It's the best mobile OS in my opinion.

But the fact almost every headache Android gives me comes from manufacturers and carriers is what is driving me away from the platform:

Wanting to try out the new Android Market UI I decided to try a couple of hacks in order to install it on my emulator (which I'm pretty sure you heard is _really_ slow).

1. Install the SDK and create an Android 3.0 ADB, like you normally would. We are going to assume you named the AVD: hcomb30

2. Copy system.img to your AVD folder:

During this year I've been moving my projects to GIT. While my private projects are on this server, my public ones are on GitHub as Open Source. Git is a really wonderful version control tool for any kind of project. It makes it easy for me to deploy, maintain and update my current sites. I just wish there could be a way to include the database on it. In this post I will explain how I'm using GIT to manage a Drupal site on both local and live environment. And since most people already have a site working, I will explain starting from an existing site.

Create the repository

The very first thing is going to the actual site, in my server this site is in: /var/www/sitename.com/public

cd /var/www/sitename.com/public
git init
echo "sites/default/settings.php" >> .gitignore

You can also run this if you want to ignore the files folder (that's really up to you)

echo "sites/default/files" >> .gitignore

Then you have to add all files to the repository and make the first commit

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit for this site"