Here is the plan

• Get NetFlix streaming only service for 7.99 that gives us access to unlimited streaming movies and TV Shows
  which takes care of the “On Demand” needs
• Get PlayOn.tv which gives us direct access to Hulu, NetFlix, Comedy Central , CBS, ESPN, Nick, and TBS
• Get Hulu Plus for a few extra Perks
• Cut off the cable completely and see if I can survive
• Get “Over the Air” some of the channels we can
  

Here are the shows that me and my family watch and where they are available

Parenthood – Hulu
House – Hulu (Plus) Day after Air
Biggest Looser  - Hulu (Day after Air)
Law and Order SVU – Hulu
Law and Order LA – Hulu
Undercover-boss - CBS
Fringe – Hulu (Day after Air)
The Walking Dead – N/A (AMC)
Merlin – Hulu
Leverage – N/A TNT
HawthoRN – N/A TNT
V – Hulu
Covert Affairs – Hulu (USA)

We start today! I’ll post on what progress / problems we run into

As you probably saw either on Google, my site or any of the thousands of sites that reported it. In order to celebrate Pacmas 30th anniversary the folks at our favorite company Google, made their first ever animated doodle which let you play Pacman with its original sounds and levels. The blog at rescuetime.com has speculated that this awesome little stunt may have cost us $298,803,988.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
• $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I don’t believe this numbers to be anywhere near accurate and I still appreciate and enjoyed thoroughly what Google did. I wonder if anyone ever calculated how much money we loose on Facebook every day?

As usual Google has chosen to use, it’s logo to honor what could be considered one of the biggest games of all times. However, this time there is a twist. If you stay in the page long enough and click around. The doodle comes alive allowing you to control the pacman and play the game with the original sounds and all.

The interactive doodle — a first for Google — is the brainchild of senior user experience designer Marcin Wichary, whose earliest exposure to Pac-Man came at age five while traveling across his native Poland with his father, a game technician, to repair arcade machines. Wichary worked with Google doodler (yes, it’s a real job) Ryan Germick to create the finished design. more…

This right here, is why I love Google!

Update: Google has just posted an entry on their blog about the pacman game and its significance.

When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors; peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets; and—of course—free games!

One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.

Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.

Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys).

The first thing we need to do is create out layout files, I have for this example created two layout files, one called main and one called listitems the code is below.

main.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    >
<ListView
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:id="@+id/lstText"
    />
</LinearLayout>

listitems.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
	android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent">
	<LinearLayout
	android:orientation="vertical"
	android:layout_width="0dip" android:layout_weight="1"
	android:layout_height="fill_parent">
		<TextView
		android:layout_width="fill_parent"
		android:layout_height="wrap_content"
		android:id="@+id/txtAlertText" />
		<TextView
		android:layout_width="fill_parent"
		android:layout_height="wrap_content"
		android:id="@+id/txtAlertDate" />
	</LinearLayout>
</LinearLayout>

Once you’ve done this you need to create an new ArrayAdapter class specific to your object as such

package josecgomez.com.android.dev.webservice;

import java.util.List;

import josecgomez.com.android.dev.webservice.objects.alerts;
import android.content.Context;
import android.view.LayoutInflater;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.ViewGroup;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.LinearLayout;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class AlertsAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<alerts> {

	int resource;
	String response;
	Context context;
	//Initialize adapter
	public AlertsAdapter(Context context, int resource, List<alerts> items) {
		super(context, resource, items);
		this.resource=resource;

	}

	@Override
	public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent)
	{
		LinearLayout alertView;
		//Get the current alert object
		alerts al = getItem(position);

		//Inflate the view
		if(convertView==null)
		{
			alertView = new LinearLayout(getContext());
			String inflater = Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE;
			LayoutInflater vi;
			vi = (LayoutInflater)getContext().getSystemService(inflater);
			vi.inflate(resource, alertView, true);
		}
		else
		{
			alertView = (LinearLayout) convertView;
		}
		//Get the text boxes from the listitem.xml file
		TextView alertText =(TextView)alertView.findViewById(R.id.txtAlertText);
		TextView alertDate =(TextView)alertView.findViewById(R.id.txtAlertDate);

		//Assign the appropriate data from our alert object above
		alertText.setText(al.alerttext);
		alertDate.setText(al.alertdate);

		return alertView;
	}

}

Then on your main activity you may add this items to the list as shown below. Please keep in mind that this tutorial assumes you’ve correctly implemented my web service calls in a previous post.

package josecgomez.com.android.dev.webservice;

import java.lang.reflect.Type;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

import josecgomez.com.android.dev.webservice.objects.alerts;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;
import android.widget.ListView;

import com.google.gson.Gson;
import com.google.gson.reflect.TypeToken;

public class main extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
	//ListView that will hold our items references back to main.xml
	ListView lstTest;
	//Array Adapter that will hold our ArrayList and display the items on the ListView
	AlertsAdapter arrayAdapter;

	//List that will  host our items and allow us to modify that array adapter
	ArrayList<alerts> alrts=null;
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
        //Initialize ListView
        lstTest= (ListView)findViewById(R.id.lstText);

         //Initialize our ArrayList
        alrts = new ArrayList<alerts>();
        //Initialize our array adapter notice how it references the listitems.xml layout
        arrayAdapter = new AlertsAdapter(main.this, R.layout.listitems,alrts);

        //Set the above adapter as the adapter of choice for our list
        lstTest.setAdapter(arrayAdapter);

        //Instantiate the Web Service Class with he URL of the web service not that you must pass
        WebService webService = new WebService("http://www.sumasoftware.com/alerts/GetAlerts.php");

        //Pass the parameters if needed , if not then pass dummy one as follows
		Map<String, String> params = new HashMap<String, String>();
		params.put("var", "");

		//Get JSON response from server the "" are where the method name would normally go if needed example
		// webService.webGet("getMoreAllerts", params);
		String response = webService.webGet("", params);

		try
		{
			//Parse Response into our object
			Type collectionType = new TypeToken<ArrayList<alerts>>(){}.getType();

			//JSON expects an list so can't use our ArrayList from the lstart
			List<alerts> lst= new Gson().fromJson(response, collectionType);

			//Now that we have that list lets add it to the ArrayList which will hold our items.
			for(alerts l : lst)
			{
				alrts.add(l);
			}

			//Since we've modified the arrayList we now need to notify the adapter that
			//its data has changed so that it updates the UI
			arrayAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
		}
		catch(Exception e)
		{
			Log.d("Error: ", e.getMessage());
		}
    }
}
 

I hope this helps

Here is the help page that tells you more about it http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/homepage.php

Merry Christmas~

This version features a cool new button on the tool bar,   by pressing it the whole screen became viewable in 3D by using stereoscopic glasses.

This in itself although a novelty doesn’t represent much. But looking at the way the layout changes and the way the button behaves, one could conclude infer that this was made utilizing what would be the plug in functionality of Chrome. So maybe in the very near future Google will reveal the next version/phase of its awesome browser.

Take it as you wish!

Research group switches on world’s first “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system.

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we’re pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It’s an exciting moment that we’re determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE’s emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.  More…

They seem to have put a LOT of effort on this joke including 3D viewing for websites using Google Chrome which ACTUALLY WORK check it out here if you have stereoscopic glasses. Way to go google, its great that you find time to have some fun when the economy is so bad!