1. SOPA Gives the Power to Censor the Internet to the Entertainment Industry
2. SOPA Curbs Internet Freedom And Online Freedom of Speech
3. SOPA Kills Jobs, Thwarts Entrepreneurial Growth
4. SOPA Doesn’t Curb Piracy, It Merely Makes Pirated Content Less Accessible
5. SOPA Is A Threat To Open Source Too

A lot of big Internet sites are opposing SOPA, including:

• Google
• Bungie
• Wikipedia
• Mozilla Foundation
• Tucows
• NVIDIA 

Below is a quote from the SOPA Strike.

On January 18th, 2012 the internet is going on strike to stop the web censorship bills in Congress!  Now is our moment— we need you to do everything you can, whether you have a website or not.

I guess someone at the LinkedIn offices was having a wonderfull day off and generating some nice stats .

Decent battery live and build quality means most of the 300$ and less models are out of the question. These type of tablets are nice if you don’t expect to get many features, longevity or power out of the tablet. So for me those type of tablets where just not good enough.

On the other end of the scale you have tablets like the iPad and Motorola Xoom, both are decent and have plenty of features. But both cost an arm and a leg and I can’t justify the price for the amount of features they have.

This left the mid-range devices, like the Asus Transformer and the Acer Iconia A500 series. Both of these are good tablets, and both cost roughly the same. So it would have to come down to features and what I wanted to do. The hardware of both devices is almost identical. Both are running on the following:

• Android based tablet
• nVidia Tegra 2 CPU/GPU
• 32 and 64 GB models
• Bluetooth  / Wifi B,G,N
• 3G option (the Iconia A501)

The only thing that separates them feature wise is that the Transformer has a far superior display with its IPS technology. So far for the specs, since both of them are almost identical I had to give both a try in the store. I was unpleasantly surprised that my favorite, the Transformer, didn’t feel all that sturdy. In fact it felt as if the device was rushed out of the factory. The case can be pushed and flexes way to much. It makes me worry its gonna get seriously damaged if I carry it in a bag.

So the Iconia A500 became the tablet of choice and now that I’ve had it for a couple of months I feel that I can write a decent review on this device. Below is a small overview of tablet and who they would serve best.

Please note that the feature difference between the mid-range and the hight end is minimal, especially for the Android tablets. You will mostly be paying extra for the brand name and the designer looks. If you have any devices you would like to see added to the list leave a comment and I’ll update the post.

Update 2 nov 2011: Fixed some broken links in the article

To be honest the tracking of changes works fine, for the most part. But what happens when you made a change sometime in the past, you know roughly what you did but not which files were affected or which branch was used. Yes I sometimes don’t know what version (branch) of the software a fix was made in. In any normal version control system you would open up the history log and start searching for a comment you entered. That would result in some result popping up, and with any luck the change-set you were looking for.

Alas Microsoft in all its wisdom decided that searching is overrated and not needed for a version control system. After all you can read through the entire history log to find the change-set can’t you. Ah you can’t, silly you!

Here is a quick work around for this ‘missing’ feature:

• Open up the History view on the ROOT of the TFS server
• Scroll all the way down, in most systems that will be just a few thousand change-sets
• Select all and copy
• Open Excel and paste

Voila now you can search. At least Excel offers a way to search your Team Foundation Server history.

We are using various IDE’s for editing our Java projects, meanly because different developers like different IDE’s. Personally I’m using Netbeans, which has perfect Subversion, Git, CVS and Perforce support. Some other developers use IntelliJ from Netbrains. Which is sorta expensive and the version we are using has no support for TFS at all.

So when I want to edit a simple file I first locate it in my IDE, which takes me about 5 seconds. Then I need to look up its location on disk, followed by opening the completely useless Team Exporer. Then I again need to look up the file in TE, followed by a check-out. The whole process to the point that the file is checked out and ready to go takes probably about 1 minute, each and every time.

On an average day I probably waste up to an hour checking out files, and commiting them back into the version control system.

To ease the burden a bit I’ve tried the SvnBridge tool to link my IDE’s Subversion system with TFS, but this tool has many flaws. Just a few of which are:

• No longer appears to be developed
• A merge in TE causes all updates to fail, you need to do a clean checkout again
• Random update failures due to commits of other developers

So for now I’m stuck. Really, really, really stuck.

• Redesigning this blog, to bring it up to speed with the latest possibilities from WordPress
• Building of the UML Design tool that I started on some months ago
• Defining the specs of a neural algorithm to build a user centric database (more on this to come in the future here)
• Continued development on the Synchronizer tool, hoping to release version 3.0 soon

And that’s just the work that I do in my rare spare time next to a full-time job.

So far for the good idea, but when Ubuntu asked me what partition to delete I wasn’t sure which was the spare one and which one contained all the source code of all applications and websites I developed. And you probably guessed it, I erased the wrong one.

Gone is a couple of days of work. Serves me right for not checking it in every day

Unfortunately the design of the mATX in combination with my ATX does not allow me to use the SATA ports properly (they are sorta sticking out to the side and into the case). So the hunt is on again for a new HTPC setup. Well not everything has to be brand new, I have a working digital tuner card as well as a relatively new graphics card for hardware acceleration. So this was my current setup, which I loved:

• Antec Fusion V2 case
• Gigabyte  MA69GM-S2H motherboard, a bit old but working (could use replacing maybe?)
• AMD Athlon XP2 6000+
• Asus EAH5750 Formula
• 6 GB Dual channel DDR3 memory
• Harmony Remote
• SATA 160 GB Samsung HD
• FloppyDTV digital tuner card
• LG Blu-Ray player

So I’m not looking for anything fancy any more. I will be moving at least the FloppyDTV an LG Blu-ray player over to the new case. And preferably the graphics card unless I can find an onboard one with equal performance and HD decoding skills. So what are my new requirements:

• The case has to be smaller then my current one (I like the Fusion but it is to big for my likings)
• The system has to be as quite as possible (so minimal fans or big fans moving at low speed)
• It has to have an IR port to receive the Harmony signal

I’m sorta already stuck, and I’m only looking for a new case so far. Am I the only one looking for a small case for a HTPC that is at least a bit stylish, that does not need to have a display.

However lately I believe companies are pushing us to reach new levels of our brain or something. I’ve been seeing more policies where you have to have numbers, letters, special characters and capitalized letters in it. Oh and to top it of it can’t be a password you had in the past, or a incremental version of that (eg: test1 to test10).

Now lets examine how usefull such a policy is. I used to have pretty strong passwords, hard to guess and difficult to crack. Now that my passwords have to be so complicated I’m resorting to putting post-its on my screen with the passwords again. Very insecure and very easy to hack.