Josh Highland’s Blog

C-Low is one of the best dice based street gambling games there is. I have been know to play some mean C-Low in my time, in ghetto situations (random fact: I am in a gang)

Here is how you play:
Gather your homie in a circle, everyone places a set betting amount on the floor. Dollar bills work great.

Everyone rolls one die to determine the rolling order. The higest rolling player goes first, then second highest, etc.

The point of the game is to roll 3 dice until you get a matching pair of three of a kind, what ever happens first. You keep rolling until you get double or triples.

If you roll doubles, your score is value of the dice opposite the pair. Triples (”trips”) beat any doubles. The highest trips win.

Special dice combinations:
1-2-3: “crap out”. auto lose. You are out of the game, your money is gone.
4-5-6: known as “c-low“. Auto win. The game stops, you win all the money. Other players lose their turns.

Game Play Example (5 players)

Player one:
roll 1: 1-4-3 = no matches, roll again
roll 2: 3-5-2 = no matches, roll again
roll 3: 6-6-2 = MATCHING PAIR (6), FINAL SCORE = 2

Player two:
roll 1: 3-3-3 = TRIPPLE 3’s (”trip3″), final score = 333

player three:
roll 1: 5-6-1 = no match, roll again
roll 2: 1-2-3 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! crap out. Out of the game, no more rolls

player four:
roll 1: 4-5-6 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! C-LOW! AUTO WIN! no other player is allowed to roll, you take the $$$

player five:
does not get to roll, player four got a c-low.

its that easy!

Wait! What if 2 players recieve the same score? (4 and 4) or (222 and 222)

This condition is called a “push”. The players with matching high scores stay in the game, all other players must double their initial bet. If the buy in was $1 for the first round, the buy in for round 2 = $2 (the losing players now have $3 on the floor, the winners of the first round only have $1 on the floor). The game starts again, giving all players another chance to play.

Why am I posting rules on how to play street gambeling dice games on a mainly tech related blog? Simple, I no longer have to carry dice around to hustle suckas with! Say What? damn straight, with MotionX Dice, a free app for the iPhone, I have a sweet pair of dice to play c-low (or yahtzee) with when ever I want. All you have to do is change the setting to 3 dice, and shake the iPhone.

If playing illegal dice games on your iPhone doesn’t make you feel thug enough, you can always pour one out for the homies with another free iPhone app.

click here to see mor pictures from my 28th birthday party

My Great Grandpa, Henry Izbicki, owned C & H Sales in Pasadena California, a well known electronic surplus store on Colorado blvd.

When I was a little kid, I’m talking about 5 or so. He gave me my first computer. The year was 1984, and I have never been the same since.

It wasn’t a fancy apple IIe or anything like that, it was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. The TI-99/4a was released in 1981 and discontinued in 1983 (I guess it makes sense that the electronic surplus store would have got them in 1984). The CPU on the computer was a blazing 3.0 MHz, with 256 bytes or ram.

To put that in perspective, my phone has 620 MHz with 128 MB. My desktop computer has two 3000 MHz cps and 4000 MB of ram.

The TI-99/4A computer was basically a keyboard that took cartridges, and hooked up to a TV. No internal storage, no file system.  Nintendo hadn’t come to North America yet, and the TI had games, the main reason I started to love that computer. I spend hours in front of that thing playing games like TI Space Invaders, Pole Position, Adventure, Munchman, Tombstone City and a bunch of other games I can’t think of right now, I just remember that they were awesome.

The more I played the games, the more interested I got in computers in general. For about a year straight I think I played those games non-stop until I dominated them all. As I played them, I wanted to know how they all worked, and why they worked. My grandpa had been given a TI computer also (actually every household in our extended family got one, my Great Grandpa literally had a truck load of these things). My Grandpa had some games for us kids to play, but he also had more grown up software, and hardware.

One of the things that my grandpa had that I didn’t was the TI-Program Recorder! The program recorder was an analog cassette recorder with special connectors that would hook up to the computer, so you could save the programs you wrote in TI-Basic. The recorder was amazing at the time. Since the computer had no internal storage, It had to save any data to the tape in an audio format. It sounded like a modem making an extra long call (music to my ears) when then data was being read or written.

TI-Basic was a programming language/application that allowed you to write your own programs. I was fascinated by it. When I was 7, I started to read my grandpas “Beginners Basic” book. It had a bunch of sample code in it. I remember pouring over that book for hours on end. I even used to bring it to school with me (my nerd career started early i guess).

I loved video games, and I was reading the TI-Basic book because I wanted to know how they worked. At age 7, I decided to write my very own game. I don’t really remember the exact details of it, but I remember working on it day after day. When I got out of school, I would beg my mom to take me over to my Grandpa’s house so I could work on it. I forget the details of it, but it involved driving a car, and I thought it was super fun to play and modify. The year was 1986. I was on top of the world.

1986 was also the year that Nintendo came to North America. Compared to NES, the TI games were totally lame, including my home brewed car game. Since I used the TI-99/4A mostly to play games and the NES was way sweeter, I soon forgot about the TI and it soon faded out of memory.

Fast forward to today. Its 2008, 24 years. I am still a fan of video games, but more so, I love programming and technology in general. I went to college for computer science and programming, and I have been working 10 years now as a professional programmer. To think it all started with a Christmas gift from my Great Grandpa, and the direct encouragement from my Grandpa. Both of them are gone now, but I think they would be proud of me, and the things I have done with my life and computers.

The real point of the blog posting is this:
Not to long ago, I was going through an old box of things that belonged to my Grandpa, and I came across this:

It’s the audio cassette tape that I kept at my grandpas house, the same exact one that I used to save my car game to when I was 7. It even has my Grandpas hand writing on the label, “Joshua’s Auto Races 1st Game Programmed Alone”.

I’m not very sentimental when it comes to possessions, but I’m glad that I have this tape. I’m going to frame it and hang it next to my diploma. As lame as it might be, its probably one of my most treasured belonging. Sure it’s my first program, but more then that, I love the fact that of everything I ever made as a kid, my Grandpa hung on to this for 20 years.

I love wordpress as a blogging platform an I love the iPhone as a mobile computing solution. Yesterday I saw that there was a wordpress app avaliable for the iPhone, so I had to try it out.

This is a post from the wordpress app, and so far it’s easy to use. I don’t know how much milage I will get out of this app, I tend to blog from home and use Twitter on the run. Who knows, this app might change that!

Let’s see how the image attachment feature works. This is me, right now in my office.

If you have the new 2.0 software, follow the diagram below to take a screen shot of the current screen on your iPhone.

Press and hold the home button and the screen on/off button together. The screen will flash, and the image will be added to your camera roll, so you can download it or email it off. Great for remembering your settings!

It finally happened after I added the new Anniversary album, I have over 100 Gigs of music in my iTunes!

I’m very strick when it comes to my music. Minimum 192 kbps. I’ve made posts before about how to create good mp3 files through iTunes.

I’m just excited to break the 100 gig mark. My iPhone only holds 16 gig, but it’s nice to know I can listen to music for over 45 days and never hear the same song twice!

Excess, what’s that!

damn I cant wait until friday…

Sometimes I do my best programming when I’m tired. Don’t ask me why, I just do. It’s a skill I picked up in college.

Being tired and producing good code wasn’t the case last night. I was trying to use the sprintf PHP function with a SQL “Like” statement. I made some dumb mistakes that tripped me up for a while. Hopefully someone out there will find this post and help them not make the problems I made, sleepy or not!

Normally the LIKE is used in mysql like this:
SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE 'J%';

That would get all names including: Josh, Jason, Jimi, etc.
In a SQL Like statement the % is a wild card, so the command is to match everything starting with “J”

Now when you use the sprintf() function it looks kind like this:
$query = sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name='%s'", $searchString);
The %s will be replaced with the value of $searchString

Trying to combined them is where I had some problems….

At first I tried to do something like this:
$query = sprintf(”SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE’%s’”, $searchString);
didnt return what I was looking for at all, it had no wild cards in it!

Then I tried this:
$query = sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE'%s%'", $searchString);
didnt work either, this time it threw errors

But this worked great
$query =sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE '%s'", $searchString . "%");

So the moral of the story is, if you want to use a SQL Like statement, appent the wildcard for the Like statement to the string to be inserted by the sprintf funtion.

If you know me, you know I love my iPhone. I have had it for a year now, and it’s the best portable device that I have ever owned.

Last week Apple announced that they were going to launch a new iPhone on July 11, 2008. I am going to buy one of these new iPhones. Simple math tell us that if I own an iPhone and buy the iPhone 3G, I will have 2 iPhones, that is why I am giving away my iPhone.

Give away your iPhone? Thats right. my iPhone that I love can become yours. It works great, and has been in a hard protective case since that day I got it. It has served me well.

How to enter of the give away:

1. Join twitter.com if you don’t already have an account
   (twitter is a free micro-blogging site you can update via txt message. I cant get enough of it!)
2. Follow me on twitter.com, my profile is at http://twitter.com/JoshHighland

Thats it!

on July 11th, after I receive my iPhone 3G, I will randomly pick one of the people following me on twitter as the winner of the contest.

The only catch is I have to have at least 1500 1000 followers on twitter, so tell your friends to follow me. If I don’t have over 1500 1000 followers on July 15th, I will give away a $50 AMERICAN CASH DOLLARS .

also, let it be known that unlocked iPhones sell for more then $300 on ebay! what are you waiting for, follow me on twitter.com today!

If you have any questions, my email address is:
JoshHighland at gmail dot com

If you have been following my blog, you an read that my PC died, and for a moment, I installed OS X Leopard on it. Well, my new drive from western digital arrived, and I am back working in Vista now (I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not!).

Parallels makes it easy to run Windows inside of Mac, but I haven’t found a good way to run Mac inside of windows. Previously, I used a project called “LEO4ALL” to install Leopard on my PC. A little bit of Googeling around after I installed Vista, I found “LEO4VMWARE”

LEO4VMWARE is a pre-packaged and running distribution of OS X Leopard for the vmware, a virtual machine software. You can download the vmware payer here http://vmware.com/download/player.

Side Note: I’m going to be honest here, you are going to want to get vmware workstation, so you can tweak the performance settings. If you are looking at virtually putting OS X on your pc, you have enough smarts to download vmware desktop for free, and then find a serial number.

What this all means is all you have to do is download LEO4VMWARE and install vmware and you are off and running!

I have gotten it to work (not well, but it worked) on a pentium 4 3 ghz windows xp computer with 3 gigs of ram. On my intel core 2 duo, 3ghz, 4 gigs of ram running vista to work great! Check out the picture below.

Getting networking can be tricky, so read the posts on how to do it here

Downloads for LEO4VMWARE can be found by going here http://www.mediafire.com/?ggkr1obgrft, downloading the zip and looking at the links inside. I personally suggest buying a month of rapid share and downloading for there. LEO4VMWARE is about 3 gigs, and rapidshare offers amazing download speeds.

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.