Random Thoughts

I came across an interesting article ranking the popularity of programming languages. Java is the most widely used language. Contrary to my belief that C++ was slowly replacing C as the middle-level general purpose programming language of choice for many, C remains much more popular than the C++ even though they are both declining minimally in terms of influence. In fact, C++ was overtaken by PHP and Visual BASIC to move from 3rd to 5th position. Anyway, here is the source. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Investing in the stock market is not just for people who have money but also for broke people like myself who want to shell out virtual dollars to make smart and profitable investments that gain them nothing more than the illusion of being a rich person. I recently decided to invest $50,000 of my own money in the stock market using Google Finance . It is very easy to set up an investment portfolio if you have an account with Google. One can find lots of information about companies to invest in, track the stock over time, evaluate its performance in terms of some industry parameters and compare it with similar companies. Buying and selling stocks is effortless. I decided to invest about $50,000 in sectors that should grow and be profitable during this economic recession. Energy seemed like a good choice because of the price of oil. Whichever company could provide energy, preferably cheaply and efficiently would be worthy of my investment. Cost of energy has driven up transportatio...

I hate going for a whole month without posting anything. Whenever people ask me how I kill time these days, I tell them that I blog. So, the least I could do is blog once a month over subjects which are becoming increasingly unintellectual. Believe me, I have tried to come up with things worth blogging about, but I got nothing!!! Enough of the rant. I will fulfill my monthly quota by introducing the Eritrean music collection that I just started sharing at IMEEM . Feel free to check it out at http://www.imeem.com/people/azlLrmh/playlists/ . Enjoy.

My previous post on saving paper and ink/toner using the Aardvark Add-on on Firefox has inspired me to seek other topics on efficiency. This post advocates the client-side blocking of ads on the web as a way of being less wasteful with internet bandwidth. I feel slightly guilty about this because a lot of the free content on the internet is supported by ad revenues, and users blocking those ads might deny access to those revenues for the providers of the free content. However, if you are like me and you almost never pay attention to or click on any ads, then you are probably doing no damage. How do I know what to block? I looked through my Firefox cookies and did a search for 'ad'. I would then selectively block those domains. You can block the ad servers locally on your computer, for example suing 'iptables' in Linux or Network Magic in Windows, or for your whole network through whatever interface you have. In my case, the easiest thing was to configure my...

I am sure you are tired of printing garbage like ads and someone else's colorful artwork while all you wanted was have a hard-copy of some clean text and graphics. If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, there is a solution that can save you lot of paper and ink/toner. It is a Firefox add-on called Aardvark , and it allows you to selectively remove sections of a web page before sending it to a printer. Here is a little synopsis : Powerful and user-friendly utility for selecting elements and doing various actions on them. It can be used for cleaning up a page prior to printing it (by removing and isolating elements), for making the page more readable, and (most appreciated by web developers), for analyzing the structure of a page. To use Aardvark , just right-click on the page and select from the popup menu. As you move the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle around the current block element, along with a label showing its type, and if they exist, its id, class, and styl...

Not too many stories resonate with me as much as the plight of legitimate asylum seekers whose desperate plea to find refuge in the US is ultimately decided by the questionable preference, judgment and mood of a single asylum officer (with some oversight from a regional asylum director) on one fateful day. That decision, according to numerous credible and through studies, depends largely on the location of the regional asylum center, the legal representation of the the applicant, the gender of the asylum officer just as much as the merit of the asylum case, while in fact the legitimacy of the asylum case should be the only relevant factor. This phenomenon has become so real that researchers at the Georgetown University law school have dubbed it the Refugee Roulette . Why am I so sensitive about this subject? My most devastating tragedy of late has been the denial of my legitimate and honest application for political asylum at the Chicago Asylum Office. When I applied believing the ...

These days, a lot of content on the internet as well as other media is being provided for free with the belief/understanding that revenues from advertising will cover the cost for producing and disseminating the content. That led me to wonder about how much money is really in advertising to sustain the media industry. As usual, I did a quick search on " advertising cost " and " advertising GDP " ... etc and came up with a wealth of information. Let me start by answering question "how much money is there in online advertising?" According to the all-knowing Wikipedia , advertising as a % of GDP is about 2.2% (~$250-$300 billion) in 2007. The number we are most interested in is online advertising revenue which was about $21 billion in 2007, according to a TD Pricewaterhouse report. Google by itself claims to have generated $10.5 billion from advertising in 2006. So, does the other $11-15 billion pay for producing and distributing much of the free cont...