The Processor

There's only one website in the top ten.

TIME's Best Inventions of 2008

Cocoatech's Path Finder hits version 5.0. It's by far the best replacement I've seen for Apple's Finder. Too bad this one's for Mac OS 10.5+ only...

Path Finder 5.0 is available, more file-management power Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Awesome.

University of Toronto to Acquire Canada's Most Powerful Supercomputer From IBM | Reuters

Via Alumni e-News (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering) October 2008 l Volume 2, Issue 10

Amazing video of brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte recounting the details of her stroke as she lived through it.

Via TED | TED Blog

Great feature released by the Gmail team a few weeks back. Now there's finally a way to get rid of that pesky All Mail folder in Apple Mail! Note that you have to enable the feature in the Settings > Labs tab in your account.

New in Labs: Advanced IMAP Controls via Gmail Blog

Congrats to the folks at A List Apart on their 10 year anniversary. It's one of the best web design knowledge resources around.

"When Google was little more than a napkin sketch and the first dot-com boom was not even a blip, we started a magazine for people who make websites. Celebrate A List Apart's first decade. Join Zeldman for a look back at the way we were—and why we were that way. Find out what we've done and who did it with us, peek into our process, and get a clue about what's next."

Ten Years Via A List Apart

Been hearing a lot about "Dark Flow" lately...

"Dark Flow" Outside Observable Universe: "DynaSoar writes 'NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable. The material is pulling clusters of galaxies towards a region of space known not to contain sufficient matter to create the effect. They can only speculate on what the material is and how space might differ there: 'In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.''

Via Slashdot

Some of the comments on the Slashdot post are hilarious. Haven't laughed out loud like that while reading in a long time.

The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time (Slashdot article that provides the link to the article listing the error messages).

Experience Research

Looks pretty nice. Also noticed that the U of T homepage got a makeover too. Cool.

Via News@UofT September 2008 | Volume 8, Issue 9 (email)

Many congratulations to Ali and Maleeha on their marriage!

May Allah and put love and mercy between them and bless their marriage.

Interesting article on Scientific American about how beneficial sleep is to the brain. Amongst the examples cited in the article is the story of Friedrich August Kekulé whose dream about a snake eating its tail helped him discover the ring structure of Benzene.

Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter Via Scientific American

Came across this beautiful post today. Very touching.

Via SeekersPath

I've been doing some cooking lately. Of course, I've cooked before (read rice) but never the likes of meat. I was advised by my mom to start with chicken and it was great advice. Last week I bought like 7 pounds of chicken and started out on the road to becoming a chicken tikka expert.

I've seen my mom make it and it always looked easy. That was the same feeling I got when my mom told me the recipe too. So, I tried it out. The key to making chicken tikka is to allow the chicken to marinate in the masala-yougurt-mix for at least a day. The first time I made the dish, I separated the chicken into two portions. One I wanted to make right away and the other I wanted to make the next day. Needless to say, the first batch of chicken didn't taste as good as the second since it didn't have enough time to soak in all the masala-goodness. Not that it was bad, in fact, it was pretty good for my first time but the second batch was superb.

I cooked the remaining chicken this evening after coating it with marinate this morning. The first time I cooked it, I felt like I put on too much masala so this time I held back. I think I put in a little less than I should have but I guess it turned out fine.

So, this was the third time I cooked chicken all-by-myself. I have yet to top the second time I cooked it but I think the more I cook the better I'll get.

Chicken Tikka Recipe:

• Chicken legs / thighs
• Yogurt
• Kissan brand Tandoori Masala
• Cooking oil

According to an article on Ars Technica,

Spam accounted for 81.5 percent of all the e-mails sent in June, according to MessageLabs. In the US, Illinois was the most-spammed state, with 92.1 percent of all e-mails considered spam.

That’s a crazy amounts of spam. Catch the full article here.

Last year, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal (a.k.a Rafa) met in the final round of the world's most prestigious tennis tournament, Wimbledon. It was Roger that won that match, making him only second player in tournament history to win five Wimbledon finals in a row. What an amazing run for Roger.

Fast forward to this year's French Open where the two met yet again. That match was decidedly won by Rafa where he not only proved that he has what it takes to beat the world's top ranked player but do so in such an overwhelming fashion.

With so much leading to Wimbledon, it was amazing to see the two meet in the Wimbledon final. Not only because they're the top two players in the world and have established a beautiful rivalry, but also due to the historical significance of either's win this year.

With a win, Rafa would become the first player in 28 years to win both the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year. If Federer were to win, he'd be the first player in the history of professional tennis to win six Wimbledon titles in a row. Interestingly enough, both would be touching on Bjorn Bork's record.

In the early part of the final, Rafa seemed to be on the road to victory with the first two sets in hand, but Roger held on to win the third set on a tie-breaker. The fourth set also saw a tie-breaker with Federer on the winning end again after Rafa had two chances to put the game away. That tie-breaker brought out some of the best tennis I've ever seen. Then came the fifth set, which like the others, trumped the set before it. Already the longest match in Wimbledon history, Federer was trying to become the first player in 81 years to be down two sets and come back to win the final with the score 7-6 in his favour but Rafa mustered up whatever he had to push the match to 7-7 and later 7-8. It was in that game that Rafael Nadal won the match, making him the first player in 28 years to win both the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year and the first Spanish tennis player in 42 years to win a Wimbledon Championship.

It was a history-making match and was by far the best tennis I've ever seen. What a remarkable show.

Well done men, well done.

Hm, where’s the extra description?

[wp_caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“408” caption=“getBundle.png”][/wp_caption]

Got this in TextMate when choosing ‘Show Bundles on Repository’ in the GetBundle bundle.

Wow, I'm soo browsing the LinkedIn job board:

A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro. The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23" or one 30" Apple Cinema display.

Via the LinkedIn blog

Rogers announces its voice and data packages for the hugely anticipated Apple iPhone available July 11th in Canada. Prices start at $60 per month and include a 400Mb data limit. Even the most expensive package at $115 per month doesn't include unlimited data.

Rogers.com - iPhone 3G Voice & Data Packages

(Via Daring Fireball)

According to an article on Yahoo! Canada Personal Finance:

The most lucrative college major today: computer engineering

It's interesting that the term Computer Engineering means different things to different people. Some people think it's some kind of new area of study whereas others simply dismiss it as a fancy term for Computer Science graduates.

Having studied Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto (arguably the best place to study the subject in Canada), I know Computer Engineering to be a mixture of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Computer Engineers not only know how to design and develop software but also the machines used by the software.

If you're looking for a big paycheque straight out of school, think about an engineering degree. The four highest paid majors for people with less than five years experience were all engineering-based, with computer engineering leading the way.

Check out the full article here

Good article on the basics of camera lenses from the folks at Macworld.

How to Buy a Camera Lens

Via Daring Fireball

I’m finding it pointless to keep two blogs since I don’t even have the content or time to update one.  Therefore, I’ve decided to go back to my orignal blog and stop posting to this one.  I hope this leads to more posts on my Blogger blog.

Thanks for reading!

So I haven't been posting to this blog.  Part of that's due to the fact that the certificate on Wordpress was all messed up and MarsEdit wasn't liking that.

In any case, lots of people have gotten married (yes, more marriage posts) and a friend's walima is coming up.  I've also taken a course on Oracle 10g that I think I might learn a lot from.

Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) comes with a program called Dashboard which is an application where you can view and manage widgets. Think of widgets as mini-applications. They're actually all over the place these days, with Yahoo!, Google, Opera and probably many other companies producing them en-masse. In any case, Mac OS X ships with some pretty handy widgets including one for weather. As you may have guessed, I really like that widget have posted images of it on this blog. When I took a look at the weather widget today, this is what I saw:

I think that's supposed to be freezing rain! Pretty awesome image eh?

In reflecting on how much David Heinemeier Hansson still loves Ruby on Rails, he states:

In light of this, I strongly recommend that you find a vocation in your life where you just really enjoy the act itself. Not just the results, not just the external incentives. The actual work. There's not enough time to spend it doing anything else.

By the way, for those not familiar with David Heinemeier Hansson, he's the guy who invented Ruby on Rails.

Via Loud Thinking

Came across an excellent quote on Gina Trapani's blog a while back:

Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today’s actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?

Roz Savage (Rower, writer, speaker. Working to become the first solo woman to row across the Pacific Ocean from California to Australia)

I've heard this kind of advice many times but it's always nice to hear it again.