The Processor

I always knew my alma mater (University of Toronto) had some of the brightest minds in the world but now I know that the Times also agrees. Its Higher Education Supplement (membership required) ranked University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering No. 1 in Canada, No. 7 in North America and No. 11 overall in the World's Top 50 Universities for Technology.

Congratulations to the faculty and keep up the good work!

Read the university's official announcement here.

Via: Alumni e-News, December 2007. University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Relative to recent years, winter came a little early this year noted by the fact that we’re already in the middle of a significant snow storm. I’ve heard predictions of approximately 20cms of snow in the city with much more in other areas. If this continues, I won’t need to work out this winter because of all the snow shoveling action!

Looks like a report I saw on T.V that this may be the worst winter in 15 years might be right after all!

In his post over at the Google blog, Reza Behforooz, a Software Engineer at Google states how how easy it was for him to contribute to the GMail code base even though he doesn't work on the GMail team:

In my first month at Google, I complained to a friend on the Gmail team about a couple of small things that I disliked about Gmail. I expected him to point me to the bug database. But he told me to fix it myself, pointing me to a document on how to bring up the Gmail development environment on my workstation. The next day my code was reviewed by Gmail engineers, and then I submitted it. A week later, my change was live. I was amazed by the freedom to work across teams, the ability to check in code to another project, the trust in engineers to work on the right thing, and the excitement and speed of getting things done for our users. Engineers across our offices (and across projects) have access to the same code; I didn't have to ask for anyone's permission to work on this.

If this post came out of a small software company, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but coming out of Google, one of the hottest software companies in the world, it's pretty cool. The author goes on to mention his work in other software projects at Google and it's worth a read. Check out the whole post at "Crossing team and global boundaries"

(Via Google Blog.)

I recently started looking into Javascript libraries such as Yahoo! UI (Y! UI), jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, Dojo etc. and have come to like the first two, primarily due to the quality of documentation they have. The latter two are also very popular but aren't (in my humble opinion) libraries that a Javascript beginner can get into. There is very little documentation in terms of tutorials or example pages and frankly I was pretty overwhelmed by them.

Y! UI by far has the best documentation of the lot and has pages upon pages of examples. In fact, the documentation is so good that it made the library seem a little complicated at first. However, once I took the time to read portions of it carefully, I found it to be excellent. There's a lot of customization that can be done to the provided widgets and a lot of work is being done by Yahoo!'s developers to get new features out.

However, my library of choice (at the moment) is jQuery. The main thing that drew me to it was its syntax. I found it to be very similar to CSS, which I also like working with. I don't want to get into it very much now, but if you'd like to know more, check out jQuery and Learning jQuery. In a recent posting on the Learning jQuery blog, more tutorial resources were provided so you might also want to give those sites a look-see too:

Tutorials Elsewhere (Via Learning jQuery)

Just like last year’s Mac OS X Tiger review, Ars Technica pumps out another in-depth review of Mac OS X Leopard. The review isn’t just a listing of new features (Time Machine, Spaces etc.) but a critical analysis the visual and technical aspects of Apple’s new cat. Here’s a taste of what you can expect:

The new, standardized window style makes the biggest visual impact and is the best aspect of the new design. At the other end of the spectrum are the baffling alterations and adornments that make Leopard less usable and (in many cases) less pleasant to look at. There are small visual improvements in individual applications, but the overall look of the OS proper is foundering.

After reading the sections on the Dock and Menu Bar, I’m not sure if I like the new visual changes. But then again, maybe it’s just something that takes getting used to. After giving it much thought, I think I’ll be keeping Tiger on the iBook and save Leopard for a new mac (I hope that’s soon!)

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review, via Ars Technica

I had a chance to go through my flagged items in NewsFire today and found this excellent post that I’d like to share a portion of with you:

I distinctly remember the tribulations my father went through in his career. He worked hard to achieve an MBA from a prestigious business school. The degree opened up many opportunities for him, but I don't think he ever found exactly what he was looking for. We moved throughout my childhood, travelling from job to job, never staying in one place for more than a year or so. I'm not sure he ever found work that satisfied him, even to this day

To catch the whole post, check out Remember, This Stuff Is Supposed To Be Fun over at Coding Horror

A few weeks ago, someone asked me to write a post about all the books in my bookshelf. The excuse I’m using for not writing that post is that the bookshelf in my room was moved to the basement last winter so I don’t have a bookshelf. Seriously though, the truth is that most of the books on said shelf were my university textbooks and honestly, who reads calculus and engineering economics textbooks unless they have to? Okay, to be fair, some people might and they’re probably way smarter than me so, good for them, hehe. There were some textbooks that I actually liked reading while I was in school (Labyrinth of Technology) but those are so few in number that I can’t remember them off-hand.

Actually, if you asked me about all the books I’ve read from cover-to-cover over the past year, I would say “none”. Casual yet meaningful reading is something I’ve seldom done in my life and is something I feel I’ve missed out on. Reading is important. Just reflect on the fact that Divine Revelation sent down to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) started with the word ‘ikra (read).

So, in an effort to ramp up my meaningful reading, I’m starting off with some technical books. As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve great interest in web design (not to be confused with web development) and one of the most famous books on the subject is “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug. I got a hold of that book through work today and have started reading it with great anticipation. So far, it’s been a pleasant read and I hope it gets better and better with each passing page. “Simply Javascript” by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams also arrived at work today and from what I’ve skimmed through, it looks like a good one too.

I hope to write a review of those books but don’t expect them anytime soon, hehe.

First of all, a very warm (yet belated) ‘Eid Mubarak to all. May Allah Ta’ala accept our fasting, prayer, charity and other good works during the blessed month. I hope we’ve came out of Ramadan with boosted faith and will continue doing at least one good deed that we got in the habit of doing during the month. Ameen.

If you’ll notice the date on my last post, you’ll realize how much time usually passes between my posts. Well, hopefully that’ll be changing as I’ve decided to spend more time on my blog. I think the reason why I don’t blog so much is that I don’t really have a consistent topic to blog about and this leads to many would-be posts that never make it here. So, I’ve decided to just post stuff now and we’ll see how that pans out. The last time I checked, I’ve subscribed to about 115 feeds and with all the information, there’s a lot that I find useful. Expect me to post some of that stuff along with some original content over the next month or so.

Catch ya later!

It’s always great to welcome another “switcher” into the family. But this time I’ve great pleasure in relaying to you that Brother Faraz Rabbani has left the world of Windows behind and has switched to a Mac.

By the way, what a first Mac! It’s Apple’s top-of-the-line portable, the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

MashaAllah!

As of a few days ago, I have left the world of Windows-based PC’s and switched to an Apple Mac-the Macbook Pro (17″, 2.4 GB)

(Now a Mac User, via Faraz Rabbani's blog.)

Err the Blog has quite a few application and programming-specific cheat sheets that may come in handy for some of you.

There are cheat sheets on bash, capistrano, chmod, curl, e (text-editor), emacs, markaby (I want to give that gem a go), markdown, radrails_ruby, regexp, textmate_rails and many, many more.

Check out the complete list of sheets at Cheat Sheets

In Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve, Joel Spolsky writes:

I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system -- it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

(Via Joel on Software)

I’ve been thinking about building/buying a new PC and comments like one the above make me think twice about embracing Vista.

In Fixes for Excel, Gadget flaws, John McBride over at M-Dollar writes:

Among the interesting patches unveiled in Microsoft's August security briefing are those that deal with remote code execution in Excel and three Vista Gadgets. You're not still signed on as Administrator, are you?

On this note, I’d like to mention that I’ve seen many people use admin accounts for casual computing. If not obvious from the article above, that’s never a good idea, no matter which operating system you’re using. Chances are that for casual day-to-day computing, you won’t need admin privileges so it’s best to just set up a non-admin user account for daily usage. Besides, you can always provide admin credentials when necessary.

In a tie-breaking third set, world No. 4 Novak Djokovic beat world No. 1 Roger Federer at the 2007 Rogers Cup Men’s Final in Montreal. With the win, Djokovic became the first player in over ten years to beat the world No. 3, No. 2 and No. 1 players en route to a championship. Quite an amazing feat for a twenty-year-old!

The match was a treat for any tennis fan, with spectacular aces and blistering forehands. Federer looked a little shaky in the first set, with numerous unforced errors and lost the tie-breaker 7-2. In the second set however, he reminded the world why he’s ranked No. 1 by completely dominating Djokovic, winning 6-2. This set the stage for a third and final set, which went down to the wire with another tie-breaker which Djokovic decisively won, 7-2.

Regardless of the loss, Roger Federer put on a great show and it’s a treat to watch the man play. All the best to both Federer and Djokovic. Overall, an excellent tournament.

We’ve had all sorts of weather lately: hot/humid, spring-like and heavy rain but it looks like we’re back to good old hot and humid.

So, today was WWDC 2007’s opening day. One of the two major events were Apple shows off its latest hardware and/or software. I was following the keynote via Gizmodo’s live blog and wasn’t really all that impressed with all of those Mac OS X Leopard features. Sure, the new desktop looks beautiful and Finder’s gone through an iTunes-like overhaul but overall I wasn’t all that amazed. I mean, iChat STILL doesn’t have MSN support. What’s the deal with that? Sure there are ways to get your MSN contacts on iChat but I don’t like going the Jabber route. Why won’t Apple do it?

Anyway, the one thing that did really surprise me was the announcement of Safari being made available on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Wow, I mean where did that come from? Not only was it announced at WWDC, it was made publicly available as a beta on Apple’s site pretty soon after the end of the keynote. Hm, it was first Quicktime, then iTunes and now Safari.

I wonder if there are any other Mac apps en route to Windows.

The public beta is available for Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP/Vista here.

Apple Inc. today released an upgrade of their professional-series notebook, the MacBook Pro. Upgrades include Intel’s latest Core 2 Duo CPU (4MB cache, Santa Rosa chipset), NVidia’s latest mobile graphics processing unit, the 8600M GT and a mercury-free LED display.

For the first time since Apple’s shift to Intel processors, I feel like Apple’s notebook hardware quality is finally up to par with its outstanding software quality.

Seems like a great time to upgrade from this iBook G4!

Apple Inc. today announced that the next version of their highly anticipated Mac OS X operating system known as 10.5 or ‘Leopard’, is now scheduled for release in October 2007 instead of Spring 2007 as announced earlier this year at Macworld Expo 2007. Apple also stated that the reason for this delay is another one of their highly anticipated products, the iPhone. According to the statement on their website, resources from the Mac OS X team were relocated to the iPhone team in order to ensure a June 2007 release date for the latter.

There’s been a lot of commentary on this announcement and I don’t really want to add anything to it. I just wanted to say that I was hoping to buy a new MacBook Pro with Leopard pre-installed this summer but I guess that won’t be happening. It’s funny though, the announcement has made me realize what a huge investment a new MacBook Pro would be and I’m glad I won’t be spending so much just yet!

SubhanAllah.

In a recent post, I mentioned that students attending the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus are scheduled for a tuition increase with the addition of a new transit pass called UPass, enabling unlimited travel on Mississauga transit from September to April.

Well, guess what? The Student Administrative Council (apparently soon to be UTSU) at U of T St. George campus held a town hall meeting on the matter this Thursday. According to the article in The Varsity’s online magazine, only about 30-40 students showed up to the meeting. Seeing that it’s April and exams are just around the corner (if not already in progress), I can understand why a lot of students decided to skip it.

The proposed tuition hike is around $480 for unlimited travel on the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) from September to April, making it a cool $60 per month. Contrast this to the currently offered U of T student-discounted TTC monthly Metropass for $87.75 per month. Moreover, when compared to the regular adult monthly TTC Metropass at $99.75, we’re talking about close to $40 per month savings!

Check out the two-page article for more on this story.

Admittedly, it’s been a little quiet here on my blog, with my previous posting taking place about three weeks ago. It’s not that I haven’t had topics to blog about, it’s just that I haven’t really had the enthusiasm to blog. Of course, another reason is that I’ve been lazy but not as much as you think.

Now that it’s been about a year since I’ve graduated from university, I’ve considered getting a Masters degree but have held off on it in an attempt to cater to my web design interests.

During my last year of my Computer Engineering degree, I started working with the Ruby on Rails framework and began to appreciate web design. That appreciation has stuck with me and I’ve had some time to enrich myself with some excellent web-design resources on the internet. I don’t want this to be a big post about what web design is or how passionate I am about it, I think it would be good to offer some background into it since I’ve brought it up.

Oftentimes, the terms web designer and web developer are used interchangeably. They are not the same thing. A web designer is someone who’s concerned with typography, layout, colour, usability and other such things whereas a web developer deals mainly with how a web application functions. It’s a pretty big difference and although I’m interested in developing web applications, I’ve found that my real interest lies in web design. I love reading about typography, layout, colour and usability and would like to get to know more about it. If you haven’t heard of these terms as they’re applied to the web, don’t worry, I intend on writing a post about each one of them at a later time. For now, I just wanted to get something on this blog since it’s been so long!

By the way, I’ve found some great web design resources over the past few days and intend on sharing them but in the meantime if you have a favourite site, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments!

As some of you may know, I was one of the many people who was beta-testing Adobe’s new Photoshop Lightroom application, which expired on February 28, 2007. The application has reached 1.0 status and is currently shipping.

Photoshop Lightroom was a pleasure to use. With its beautiful user interface and easy to access photo editing features, it seemed like a simple but powerful product even in its beta stages. Indeed, Photoshop Lightroom is a worthy workflow application for serious photographers.

Many have compared (and continue to compare) the product with Apple Inc.’s Aperture application. In a recent reading of one such comparison, I noticed the reviewer mentioned that Adobe’s offering runs well on most modern hardware, including Apple’s PowerBook computers. I myself was running it on my iBook G4 and I can confirm that it worked pretty well on it. I’ve seen Aperture running on recent Apple machines including the Mac Pro and it seemed very sluggish so I guess I agree with that assessment. There are of course many other aspects suited for comparison but I chose to bring up that point because it’s something I can relate to.

In the end, whether you choose Adobe’s offering or Apple’s, both are fine products. When software developers compete for cutting-edge features, the consumer almost always wins!

By the way, if you have a Mac and would like to try out Aperture, Apple is offering a 30-day trial of it on their website.

Below is Disco burning a disc.

Intrigued? Well, read on.

Once in a while a program comes along that makes you feel good about doing pretty mundane tasks on your computer. It’s a good thing that such programs are in abundance on the Mac scene. Today I’d like to highlight a recent purchase of mine, a CD/DVD burning program called Disco.

On the surface, Disco is a disc burning/imaging application but don’t let such a simple description fool you. Not only does Disco ooze with style, it comes with excellent features such as Discography and Spandex. Since I like those two features the most (barring the Smoke feature), I’ll give you a brief run-down of what they are.

Discography: It’s simple, all it does is keep track of all the files you’ve burned on a disc (or archived in a disc image) by creating a local searchable index. This prevents you from going through your discs one by one trying for example to figure out which disc you backed up that beautiful sunset photograph on. Obvious, but powerful.

Spandex: If you’ve for example got a whole slew of photos lying around on your Mac from that nature photography course you took and they don’t fit on a single disc, Disco calculates how many discs you need prior to starting the authoring process (Disco assumes you’re going to be using one type of media). This allows you to gather the number of suggested discs or remove some photos to ensure all of them fit on a single disc. Subtle but thoughtful.

The user interface (UI) is pretty slick although it’s pretty out-of-sync with most Mac applications I’ve seen. Furthermore, the UI progresses with a series of choices…kinda hard to explain, but it’s something I’m not really that used to and I think it’s going to take a while before I start feeling more comfortable with it.

So, there you have it. Disco.

After much mulling over, I decided to go ahead and purchase TextMate.

In essence, TextMate is just a text-editing application. At least that’s what someone might say if you asked for a one-line summary of what it is. However, that wouldn’t do justice to what TextMate really is. It’s one of the best text-editors I’ve ever used.

Not only is it stylish and beautiful (I’m getting used to that being on a Mac), it’s also got amazing features. At first, I thought it was a pretty standard little program, way too basic for the huge 39 Euros price tag (that’s around $60 CDN for those keeping score at home) but as I used it more and more, I realized how easy it makes my day-to-day programming. With snippets galore, it’s even got a database viewer along with tons and tons of great features like HTML and CSS validation just to scratch the surface. The application was so well-received that it even won ‘Best Mac OS X Developer Tool’ at the Apple Design Awards in 2006.

For those curious about what day-to-day programming I’m taking about, I’m referring to occasional Ruby on Rails programming. Ruby’s an amazing programming language and Rails is simply an awesome web-application framework. TextMate works very well with Ruby on Rails, with many big-name Rails programmers openly using it. It might also be one of the reasons I love Ruby on Rails so much!

I’m probably going to have a lot more to say about TextMate in the near future as I get more and more familiar with its features. One of the many things I might touch on is the ‘bundle’ concept whereby the application can be extended to cover different languages and frameworks.

Check out some of the TextMate screencasts to get an idea what this superb application is capable of.

Univeristy of Toronto Mississauga campus students, get ready for an $89 increase in next year’s tuition thanks to ‘UPass.’ What is UPass? It’s a Mississauga Transit pass that allows a full school-year’s worth of unlimited travel on the Mississauga Transit system.

There are plans for bringing this to U of T’s downtown campus where students can currently purchase a monthly TTC Metropass for much less than regular price. This may be good news for people who use Mississauga’s public transportation system to get to UTM but what about those who don’t? Students living on campus probably don’t need an $89 tuition hike on top of soaring tuition fees. But then again, they can just opt-out, right? Wrong. The $89 UPass fee is currently non-refundable.

Check out the article in The Varsity for more details.

I recently went out to dinner with a bunch of my friends and asked them if they caught a story about one of our other friends in The Varsity newspaper. Turns out none of them had.

Faraz Siddiqui and Anas Nader, two of our U of T friends, recently went to Haiti with Third World Awareness, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), to build a soup kitchen for a community in need. The Varsity, U of T’s largest student newspaper, featured an article about them and their experiences in the conflict-torn region.

Oh, for the record, Abdullah Arian also went to Haiti last year and can give you an excellent tip on the place to be when you are in a building during an earthquake since he was there when an earthquake hit Haiti!

Check out the article here

Over the past week, I’ve been trying out a whole bunch of Mac software. From NewsFire, Yojimbo, TextMate and the application I’m composing this post on, MarsEdit.

All of these applications are free to try out being either feature limited or fully functional for about 30 days. As I’ve mentioned before in my Vienna post, I love trying out new applications and have found a lot to be happy about in the world of indie Mac software development. Sparked by the buzz of MacHeist, I set out to try some of the most popular indie Mac software out there.

First up, NewsFire. If you read my post about Vienna, you know that I’m into RSS feeds. Vienna is an amazing application especially when you consider the fact that it’s free. It even has a web browser built into it that I’ve heard good things about. One thing I found a bit annoying with Vienna was the fact that I had to do a lot of scrolling up and down since the 12-inch screen on my iBook wasn’t large enough for the 33 feeds I had.

Enter NewsFire.

Developed by Dave Watanabe, NewsFire is one of the most beautiful applications I’ve ever used. That’s saying a lot, considering a lot of apps on the Mac are visually amazing. Not only does it ooze with style, it has a feature that clearly solves the issue I had with Vienna. With NewsFire, whenever a new RSS item is detected, the feed moves to the top of the list. This drastically cuts down on the amount of scrolling I have to do. At first I didn’t like how my feeds were flying all over the place in the sidebar (you really gotta check it out!) but over time, I’ve gotten used to it and find it very convenient.

NewsFire has all the basic features of an RSS reader including adding, removing and grouping feeds, along with importing from and exporting to OPML format. On top of all that, it also supports podcasts (think of them as audio RSS feeds) and exporting to Apple’s iTunes application. Don’t want to export podcasts to iTunes? No problem, NewsFire has a built-in audio player to playback those audio files from within NewsFire. Neat.

There are some subtle features of NewsFire that I enjoy as well. For instance, NewsFire can take a plain website address and discover if it has an RSS or Atom feed associated with it. Prior to using that feature, adding RSS feeds to Vienna was a three step process:

1. Go to the site in Safari
2. Click the little RSS button in Safari’s address bar
3. Copy the RSS/Atom URL and add it to Vienna

There are loads of other features in NewsFire including support for blogging applications such as MarsEdit and programs that post bookmarks to a del.cio.us account.

With a gorgeous user-interface and excellent features, NewsFire is definitely an application that any Mac owner should try out. I loved NewsFire so much, I bought it!