General
- Learn by doing.
- Learning a bunch of stuff before trying to do is useless.
- Learn what you want to learn. This keeps you motivated and excited. Motivation is a powerful tool.
- When you get started with something new, you'll suck at it. That's okay.
- Go to the site in Safari
- Click the little RSS button in Safari’s address bar
- Copy the RSS/Atom URL and add it to Vienna
How To Learn
Key points in Sam's post about how to learn:
If you want to learn something, just start doing whatever you want to learn.
So, go start doing right now. Seriously, close this blog post and fire up Google. There's no time like the present.
Scientists Store Entire Textbook In DNA
Fascinating research by scientists at the Harvard School of Medicine.
Scientists Store Entire Textbook In DNA
(Via Slashdot)
Pancake Venn
From illustrator Stephen Wildish: the pancake venn diagram. Is it Friday yet? [via]
(Via FlowingData.)
That bad, eh?
Mobile Conference Literally Divided Between iOS, Android Users:
One attendee shouted out that those with a BlackBerry should just step outside.
(Via All Things Digital.)
In one single day and night by Maulana Rumi
In one single day and one single night, God deals with a hundred thousand things: He takes away a whole people, He separates those who were close and scatters each of them in a different country, then He raises the wave of the sea of destiny and reunites those who were separated.
Blogging again
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.
Congrats newly weds!
I had the privilege of attending two marriage ceremonies last week, one of which was of my close friend Salman Sayany to Zeenat Malam. It was lovely to see so many university friends there. I probably hadn’t seen many of them since the end of third year. Reflecting on the experience, I realize how much time has passed since we all first met. Life passes so quickly that years pass by and we don’t even notice.
May Allah Most High put love and mercy between all the new couples and those that are currently married.
U of T Engineering ranked #1 in Canada, #11 in World
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
Snow storm!
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!
On Enjoying Your Job
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
Hopefully more blogging
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!
More on Windows Vista
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.
Another reason to avoid admin accounts
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.
UPass at U of T Downtown? Not so fast.
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.
No more Photoshop Lightroom for me
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.
UTM students get 'UPass'
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.
Building a soup kitchen in Haiti
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
NewsFire Review
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:
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!