The Render

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?

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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.

It’s not every day that two books currently in my possession are reviewed one after another on the same site. Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street recently published a short review of The Art and Science of CSS and Simply Javascript, both published by Sitepoint. I purchased a PDF version of the former and have a hardcover of the latter and they’re beautiful books to look at. Anyway, check out the take-away from each review below:

The Art and Science of CSS (Book review)

With that in mind, reading The Art & Science of CSS will teach you how to use CSS to accomplish a number of useful design tasks, so I think it's worth its price unless you already know most of what there is to know about CSS.

Simply Javascript (Book review)

Revisiting the sub-title of this book, I think the audience that will get the most out of it falls somewhere in between the novice and expert levels. To me it seems best suited for designers or developers with a decent knowledge of HTML and CSS and some familiarity with JavaScript. If that describes you, I can recommend Simply JavaScript.

I remember reading this in FeedReader at work and at first I was in denial but after reading the post more calmly, I realized it was true! Brent Simmons, the author of the very popular Mac RSS reader NetNewsWire announced on his blog that all NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, Newsgator Inbox and NewsGator Go! are now free. That’s right, free. For those aware of the popularity of NetNewsWire in the Mac software community, it’s rather shocking that one of the most successful indie Mac applications is going this route.

The announcement makes me glad that I didn’t purchase NetNewsWire even though its synchronization feature made me think twice about using NewsFire (which I did purchase).

Check out the official Newsgator Inc. press release here.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I find NetNewsWire to be way more pleasurable to use than FeedDemon. Macs rock.

After a few days of bitter cold temps, we’re starting to see the kind of warm winter weather we’ve been experiencing over the past few years. In particular, check out that 16 degree forecast for Tuesday!

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.

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