Random Thoughts

I have always wanted to be an avid reader, but that never happened. So, I recently decided to take a little shortcut and become an avid listener of audiobooks instead. Sure they are not the same, but listening to audiobooks while driving has been one of the most rewarding experiences for me as of late. Here, I intend to write some reviews of audiobooks I have gone through lately. The World is Flat , by Thomas Friedman ( A ) It is a great [audio]book describing the flattening of the world in the information age, allowing everyone from the globe, particularly India and China, to participate in the world economy along the dominant West. The author lists the forces that led to the flattening of the playing field, and suggests ways Americans can cope with and compete in an increasingly competitive global economy where more and more people can compete for resources and services. I highly recommend it. 1984 , by George Orwell, read by Frank Muller ( A ) I have read the book in high sch...

I have always wanted to keep an active and up-to-date to-do list and be always reminded of the things I have to do. There are lots of choices out there, but I wanted to stick to simple commandline driven tools to keep from wasting valuable RAM on non-critical utilities. After a few hours of playing around, here is the solution I have adapted. Todo/devtodo I use ' todo ' to make a list of my tasks. ' todo ' is a reminder/task program aimed at developersis, but it is very easy to use and has a good set of features. For our purposes, we can generate the list shown below by simply entering the following commands: todo -G -a "Jobs applied to:" -p 1 todo -G -a "To Learn and Review:" -p 3 todo -G -a "Daily to-do list" -p 5 If you enter, ' todo ', it will list your to-do list. Feel free to explore more of ' todo ', but the example above suffices for out little demo. I want my extended to-do list to hit me in the face every hou...

Did you ever want the capability of live spell-checking inside vi ? Well, I did and I googled the subject and found this simple solution. Assuming you have some sort of spell-checking software like ispell and agrep installed on your machine, you can use the " Engspchk " set of scripts for " multi-language", "on-the-fly spell checking." While the package documentation is pretty good, I will go ahead and narrow it down to a clean procedure. 1) Download the scripts , Unzip/untar them into your .vim directory. cp engspchk.tar.gz $HOME/.vim/ cd $HOME/.vim/ tar zoxvf engspchk.tar.gz 2) Open your ~/.vimrc file and add this piece " This piece enables live spellchecking inside Vim" set nocp if version >= 600 filetype plugin indent on endif set mouse=a let g:spchkmouse = 1 let g:spchkautonext= 1 let g:spchkdialect = "usa" 3) Open a file using vi and enter ' :helptags $HOME/.vim/doc ' 4) To invoke the English spell-checker for a ...

I shall officially look to Python for all my scripting needs from now on. Just when I thought scripting could not get any easier than Perl, Python has come along and proved me wrong. Everything I have heard about Python's simplicity and elegance is true. My Python education started a while back when I attended at least two tutorials in grad school by Python enthusiasts who were trying to pull some of us Perl enthusiasts to their side. The whole idea of learning a whole new scripting language did not appeal to me and thus I didn't give Python much thought. Lately I have had some downtime and there seemed to be no more productive way to spend it than learning Python and that's what I did. My first set of tutorial was a quick and basic intro by Steven Thurlow . Aside from what is contained in those s ets of lectures, I needed to learn two sets of subjects, namely string/text manipulation and system calls. David Mertz provides a nice introduction to text processing usi...

I always interesting pieces I never get to share to avoid creating a million little posts about non-original material. So, I will instead contain them all in this one post. Browser market Shares - Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads "Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark . From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent." Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit "Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit . The Singularity re...

Slashdot led me to an interesting article from which I wanted to share a few gems. The original article can be found at http://www.cio.com/article/135700/Seven_Wonders_of_the_IT_World/ Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software: Linux kernel Created by: Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helping open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems. The Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour Number of developers: Total since 1991 is unknown; 3,200 developers for the kernel as of release 2.6.22. New releases: Every 2.6 months.* Quick change artists: 2.89 changes made to the kernel every hour. Lines of code: 8.2 million and growing (about 10 percent per year). Amount of code added every hour: 85.63 lines. Revenue diverted from Microsoft: Perhaps only Mr. Gates knows. *Unless otherwise marked, statistics reflect Linux kernel releases of the past 2.5 years (version 2.6.11 through 2.6.21). Wor...

Well, I had to take care of some business in Chicago recently and I thought I would make a trip out of this opportunity by visiting my very good friends in the area, namely Jay in Chicago, Will in Milwaukee and "the Fekade's" in Minneapolis. The trip started with an 9-hr drive to Milwaukee when I listened to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and learned the value of audiobooks, not only in an educational sense but in battling my costly tendency to speed [and get ticketed] during long trips. Milwaukee:: Once in Milwaukee, I settled in the beautiful Whitefish Bay suburb where Will and his family live. Within an hour, I decided to ride Will's bike a mile or two from his house where I was at the edge of a hill overlooking Lake Michigan. For someone who is not fond of the beach and all the heat, burning and nudity that comes with it, there was nothing better than feeling a cool breeze and serenity of the lake. The next day, we went to a Mexican festival and love...