anyone wondering where is almondmendoza.com (my other site). The DNS of almondmendoza had some problem right now and hostmonster are doing all they could (i hope so) to maintain point back to their server. sorry for the inconvenience it caused.

I’m back and now we shall talk about how the internet and computer saves our trees. The internet and computer are both new media and as we know both of them are slowly killing the old media that needs papers, pencils , which indeed came from our trees. I’ll side track a little bit here, anyone who has blu-ray i totally recomment Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series. If you want to see fish flying in your TV or see how beautiful your HDTV would become, then this thing is for you. Back to our topic, here are some of the sectors that had been deeply or will be deeply affected by computers and internet.

Newspaper
We all know that newspaper is slowly becoming a thing of the past, this is not just in US both all over the world. Younger generation don’t even want to read one and this causes a lot of newspaper company to shutdown or embrace the internet as its new media.

Snail Mails
How many times have you written a snail mail to your friend or to anyone you know? Birthday cards, greeting cards and all of the cards that you usually give during special occasion before, do you still do them now? Or just twitter them or post a greetings on their wall?

Music and Video
Many of you might wonder why music and video relates to saving our trees. Before internet the method of distributing music and video to you is via disc or cassette, which would need something to cover them. In relation to that they need album covers and movie covers, most of them are either paper or plastic. Imagine how many trees would be saved if people decided to buy The Fray’s album online instead of having the cd. It doesn’t stop with just the album and movie. This extends to lyrics, guitar tabs, piano tabs, lyrics and music compositions, video catalog, posters, scripts and a lot more.

Artistic Drawings
In the old days, our artist uses a lot of method in creating perfect arts, in the time of computer while there are still a lot of them left. Some of the artistic mind are shifted to making computer arts, some went to gaming, some went to building websites, some went to animation and a lot more. Imagine how many paper and pencils were saved by letting our artist friend draw on the computer.

Engineering Sector
Before computer, engineers would have to draw their blueprint and calculate their mathematics on a piece or paper. And usually blueprints are drawn over and over again. With the help of software like AutoCAD they could see their blueprint instantly and all they have to do is print the final blueprint.

Libraries
With all the resources almost online at the tip of your fingertip, people now a days are learning that they don’t have to go their libraries to answer their simple questions, ofcourse there are still a lot of exception like why people must go to the library, this includes special papers, research papers and stuff but one day, i believe these would be available online as well.

Kids Drawing Books
I used to have a lot of these went i was young, this released the creativity out of me, but kids these days are given computers at a very young age and parents just buy softwares that they think their child would want to play. This seems to be more advantage to parents due to the fact that young people cannot eat the mouse compare to eating the crayons and the child is cleaner after playing computers then say playing water colors. This also extends to kids games, a cool stuff that would be the future toys for our kids is siftables.


Books
With the e-books reader becoming a lot topic today and with the forthcoming Kindle 2 on its way. E-books would lessen the production of books especially when e-book really hit big in other places than US.

And a lot more
Schools, Hospitals, Porn Industry, Banks and a lot of.

I therefore conclude that we should promote internet and computer to save more trees which would therefore save our world.

I had incorporated Google Friend Connect to monmonja’s music site, why Google Friend Connect and not Facebook Connect? Mainly because facebook is not that famous in the Philippines, and Google seems to be more appropriate to use. For those people who might wonder what social network is famous in the Philippines. Its still friendster and multiply, and i use and like multiply more.

Labs section would be temporarily removed coz my harddisk died and Google App Engine won’t let you download your own files and i didn’t have backups so ill try to get all i could and port it to php.

There might also be a transition of my tech post from here to almondmendoza.com and labs might be placed there as well. I’ll try to keep monmonja.com to music and almondmendoza.com to tech. Thanks everyone.

Here is a small function to convert cakephp’s array from find statements to xml.

function cakeArrayToXML($arr,$keyParent = "rows"){
$arrayRow = "<$keyParent>";
foreach($arr as $tkey => $trow){
if(is_numeric($tkey)){
$arrayRow .= $this->cakeArrayToXML($trow,"row");
}elseif(is_array($trow)){
$arrayRow .= $this->cakeArrayToXML($trow,$tkey);
}else{
$arrayRow .= "<$tkey><![CDATA[$trow]]></$tkey>”;
}
}
$arrayRow .= “</$keyParent>”;
return $arrayRow;
}

To use it you would do something like
header("Content-type: text/xml;charset:UTF-8");
echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>';
echo $this->EcOutput->cakeArrayToXML($this->Lyric->find("all",array("limit"=>2)));


Output would be an xml with a parent node of rows and a node name of row on each row, i guess you just have to test it to understand what i mean, haha.
Hope it helps.

While google search seems to be the best search for almost everything, the google blog search is the best way to find rapidshare or megaupload files. Head over http://blogsearch.google.com/ and try it.

Hope it helps

Here is the fastest way to resize a picture in linux through command line.

Download imagemagick and install it using the ./configure, make, make install or if your using Ubuntu you could sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Open terminal (Alt+F2 gnome-terminal)
Go to the director of your picture, eg desktop
cd ~/Desktop
Convert your picture
convert -resize 100x100! myPic.jpg myPic.png

Explanation:
convert is the program you need
-resize is the function you need for the resizing
100×100! - destination width and height, add ! to force it to 100×100, remove ! and it will respect the ratio of the picture
myPic.jpg is the source file or the file you want to resize
myPic.png is the destination file after the resize is done

Hope it helps

Here is how to remove the sounds in terminal in ubuntu.
* Go Edit
* Profile Preferences
* On the General Tab unlick the Terminal Bells

Hope it helps