Comp Sci

I definitely decided that I wanted to study comp sci in college. I have no clue what college I want to go to, but I don’t want to worry myself to much about that.

I have read many articles from bloggers about how comp sci is not what people think. They say that it focuses more on the theory of comp sci and not the specific languages. I really am excited and can’t wait.

I’ve also read a lot saying how software engineering is one of the best jobs ever. Some of the reasons are flexible schedule, good pay, doing what you like to do, and more. I’m really glad that what I’m gonna be doing for the rest of my life is my passion and not some boring job that I don’t want to do.

Blogging is amazing 😉

Netvibes, Box.net, TadaList

 

I started to use a Web 2.0 homepage service service called Netvibes. It has many great features such as taking the titles of your favorite RSS feeds. Netvibas can also be integrated with many other features such as a custom to-do-list, integration with box.net, and many more.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it is slow in loading. Now when I say slow in loading I mean that it is slower than loading google.com, which of course is not saying much. All in all it is a great service; it is one of the three web 2.0 apps that I use. The other ones are tadalist.com and box.net.

Been a While

I’m just updating the blog to say what has been happening lately. I was worrying too much about the quality of my posts and with my new keyboard getting here, it should motivate to write more.

Like I’ve said before,I don’t really care at all if people visit my blog, I’ll post my worthwhile posts to digg and reddit and people will increase their rank if they like them. Like I read in one of Paul Graham’s post just right now, most bloggers just think out loud.

WIth all the stuff that I ordered I’m going to start playing counter strike: source in CAL. I’m looking for a clan to participate in season 5. I have really high hopes for competetive gaming in cs:s.

I finally decided what text editor I’m going to use. It’s called SciTE; it is an editor based on Scintilla, which is what most editors are built on anyways. I chose SciTE as my text editor because of various reasons.

• Small download, no installation required. Very fast and simple.
• Excellent code folding for many languages.
• Syntax highlighting for many languages out of the box.
• Can be used on many plataforms.
• Customizable. Although it cannot challenged Emacs or Vim, it suffices.

Python is completely amazing. I’ve been reading more tutorials and every time I reread all the begginers tutorials I’ve read I know all the material on them. I actually feel like I am making good proggress.

I chose Gaim as my IM client of choice, although Trllian was a tough contender. Gaim, like all my other programs that I love, is lean and simple. It works with more protocols than Trillian and just feels and works overral better.

I noticed that I am actually being affected by the much hated firefox memory leaks. About a week ago I saw that firefox was using 250mb of RAM! As a result from this event, I tried out Opera and it is indeed amazing. Opera is faster and it has many nice features, but in the end it can’t compete with the Firefox standard and its extensions.

That about sums everything up! My goal for this year is one post per day, most days at least. I was also thinking about moving my blog to blogger because of the fact that WP.com blogs cannot be customized nearly enogh as the blogspot.com blogs.

Update

I haven't made new posts in a while so in this post I'll say whats been
happening. Some of the more important things include: getting Photoshop CS2, Azereus, Daemon Tools, XP with genuine key.

I got Azereus, a popular Java based BitTorrent client, and its simply amazing. Once I can plug my old hd onto my new computer and get the password to my router, I'll be able to get port forwarding set up.

I got a Photoshop torrent + keygen and it worked like a charm. I'm really interested in creating kick-ass graphics with photoshop
and I started reading a plethora of tutorials. I remember back in the
good old days when I was a member of a lot of forums, especially invisionfree, and I used to make signatures for people with ms Paint. The power of photoshop is unsurpassed, although, it is quite a resource hog even with my decent system.

Daemon tools is a program which can emulate various cd-rom drives on your system. Before, when installing programs which were downloaded as an iso, I had to burn in into a disc. Now with Daemon tools all you need is to mount the iso on your emulated drive and it runs!

My uncle is also finally mailing me a copy of WinXP with an authentic key. I have not been able to get any workarounds working to get updates on my corporate version of WinXP.

I'm feeling quite lazy at the moment and so I don' want to provide links to theseprograms. If you're interested in any of them just google them, they are all common and you won't have any problems finding or downloading any of them.

Python

I have been reading for some time now a lot on a programming language called Python. It is a a newer programming languages focused on being dynamically typed and easy to read syntax. Before, I wanted to start by learning C or C++, but they are both a huge waste of a programmer's time in most cases. C++ and Java are both much faster than Python due to their statically typed nature and low level programing, but in today's world where computers are very fast, you don't need to write all programs in C++ or Java for them to run fast. Programmer's time is much more valuable than the user's time.

Here is a condensed description of Python from the official Python website:

"Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python's simple, easy to learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed.

"Often, programmers fall in love with Python because of the increased productivity it provides. Since there is no compilation step, the edit-test-debug cycle is incredibly fast. Debugging Python programs is easy: a bug or bad input will never cause a segmentation fault. Instead, when the interpreter discovers an error, it raises an exception. When the program doesn't catch the exception, the interpreter prints a stack trace. A source level debugger allows inspection of local and global variables, evaluation of arbitrary expressions, setting breakpoints, stepping through the code a line at a time, and so on. The debugger is written in Python itself, testifying to Python's introspective power. On the other hand, often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective."

Atariboy

One of my favorite blogs that I’ve been actually reading basically everyday is atariboy’s blog. He has a lot of good articles and links. His blog is pretty popular; in fact, its one of the most popular blogs here at WP.com.

He posts about the usual geek stuff that us geeks are obviously interested in. Its not one of those Web 2.0 blogs made to get traffic and revenue. He blogs about whatever he likes. His blog isactually updated very often. There are a lot of quality articles worth reading; I suggest you read it.

Honor Roll & Money

I found out yesterday that I had made the honor roll. I am so proud of myself for being the laziest person on the face of the earth and still getting excellent grades. I think its because of my laziness that programing appeals to me; I read everywhere that programmers are lazy. It is sad that some kids in my grade try their best and still get mediocre grades. Then again, being smart is not all there is to being happy in life; if their dumb and happy, let them be!

I also received 50$ in the mail today from my relatives. With the money I'm getting a mouse-pad, a new keyboard, and a headset. All of these go towards the goal of actually being able to play Counter Strike: Source. Here's what I ordered:

• Logitech Internet Pro Black PS/2 Wired Standard Keyboard – $9.98
  
• Plantronics Gamecom1 3.mm Connector Stereo Gaming Headset – $23.00
  
• X-Raypad Aqua3 Mouse Pad – $12.00

Blog Traffic

 

I just signed up for blogmad and blogexplosion; they are both websites to get more traffic in your blog. The concept is that you sign-up and surf though other people's blogs. For each blog that you see you get credits which you can assign to your different blogs and they get traffic. They are both great services and there are many more just like these two available. I'm choosing these two at the moment because I don't want to have to work that hard for my blog to become known. I want to slowly show up in the blogosphere more and more.

My last post, "Firefox Extensions", was actually on the Top Posts chart that appears in the "My Dashboard" section of wordpress. The reason for this, and all my traffic that day is because I submitted my article to reddit. I really like reddit and in the future I am going to submit my quality articles there; my "Firefox Extensions" article got 7 points in reddit, which isn't amazing but my blog is just starting out, my journey as a blogger is just beginning. I don't want people to get traffic to their blog by posting crappy articles to reddit just because they want people to click it. I'm only submitting the good ones.

Firefox Extensions

Here are the Firefox extensions I recommend and have installed right now and a short description of each. All the links link to the mozilla addons page except siteadvisor.

• Gmail Notifier: Gmail notifier displays a small mail icon in the status bar. The icon has to its side the number of unread email messages to your Gmail account. You make it play a sound every time you get mail. Its a very lighweight extension that simply works. I couldn't live without it.
• ChatZilla: ChatZilla is by no means a challenger to mainstream IRC clients such as mIRC. ChatZilla is however my IRC client of choice. This is in part due because I can set an IRC channel as one of my homepage tabs and I will be connected to the channel when I start Firefox. ChatZilla does not rival mIRC's nook and cranny customization, but its just perfect enough for me unlike other bloated IRC clients.
• Adblock: Thanks to adblock, my most visited websites are virtually rid of advertisements unless they are flash. With adblock you can right click an image to filter it and refresh the page.
• GooglePreview: GooglePreview is a short and sweet extension that uses Alexa's database to generate a screenshot of each result of a Google search. At first I thought it would just waste time but I have gotten extremely used to it.
• StumbleUpon: One of my primary sources of entertainment when I have nothing productive to do. Stumbleupon asks you for your interests and then you can go to random websites which are related to your interests. I bookmark interesting sites and visit them later, many of the things I post on my blog are finds from stumbleupon.
• CustomizeGoogle: CustomizeGoogle provides you with many ways in which you can customize small little details of your Google searches. CustomizeGoogle is capable of slight but useful customization.
• IE tab: I have heard many IE users complain about Firefox's compatibility with some websites. While the websites that are messed up when viewwed with Firefox are few indeed, it is undeniable that they exist. With IEtab all these troubles are gone; if a page is messed up, simply click on the IE symbol in the status bar and the page will automatically be refreshed with IE although still within Firefox.
• SiteAdvisor: SiteAdvisor is extremely useful to determine if a website is malicious or not. SiteAdvisor rates a website green, yellow, or red to determine their safety. You can click on the site report and it contains a plethora of useful information about how the site's rating was determined.
• Performancing: Definetely the most useful extension on the list. This very post was written using this extension and for very good reasons. Out of all the blog posting software I have looked into, Performancing definitely comes out on top. Performancing is not the one with the most features or the most amazing features, but it is simply the best because of reasons that deserve their own post separate from this one.
• ImageBot: Not a very popular extension but I use it for my blog because I don't have a lot of pictures hosted. With this extension you can drag and drop or just plain upload images from your computer or the web to Imageshack or Photobucket. One of the benefits is that you can upload multiple images to my hosting website of choice, Imageshack.
• Flashblock: Flash is my least favorite extension at the moment. Although it does whats its supposed to, it blocks all flash elements and so it is extremely hard to use websites with a significant amount designed with flash. Not many of my heavily visited websites use flash at all, except for advertisements, so it isn't a big problem. Ad blocking is the main reason a use Flashblock.
• DownThemAll: DTA is a download manager for Firefox which also has the ability to download all the elements of a webpage. The download manager is very nice and it certainly is a great improvement over the default. The ability to download all the elements of a page has only been useful about twice but maybe I will find some use for this.
• FoxyTunes: FoxyTunes is the music player of choice for Firefox users. It sits on the status bar and has all the controls an average miniplayer has. FoxyTunes is able to interact with Winamp, iTunes, and many more.
• Bookmark Duplicate Detector: I don't have much to say on this one as the name is self explenatory. I use this one in order to catch duplicates that form because of my hundreds of bookmakrs in Firefox.
• Sage: Sage and FeedReader are the RSS readers I've been using and I think they are here to stay. Sage's simplicity and the fact that it is integrated in firefox is definitely its strong point. Besides this there isn't anything new or innovative.
• View Source Chart: I saw this recently in Digg and I thought I would give it a chance. I don't look at html source code often but when I do this little extension is extremely helpful to understand hierarchies within the page and such.

Reading News

Before, I spent about 30 minutes of each day reading news on google and such. Now I have much better tools that I will explain below. No more browsing though Google News to find nothing interesting at all. Welcome to the world of RSS/Atom.

I've never been a huge fan of rss feeds because they never proved useful to any of my needs. Recently however I have started reading all my news with a very simple and minimalistic open source atom/rss reader. With this program I can check many news sources at once inluding The Register, Slashdot, The Inquirer, Digg, and Reddit.

I recently found out about Reddit and Digg. Both services work basically the same way. Any user can submit a news article to the website and other users vote if the article is good or not. In Reddit, you can reate it good or bad and in Digg you can simply "Digg it" if you think it is a good article. This way only the good stuff makes it to the frontpage and thus to my rss reader.

The only downside to this at the moment is thinking all that time I wasted reading news when I could have done this from the beggining. Now I finally understand what the whole atom/rss rave is all about.

Blog News

After getting more and more involved in the blogosphere I have decided to scrap my previous philosophy of only writing long articles. I dont plan on promoting my blog because it will look bloated and rater disorganized, instead I’m going to focus on promoting my articles.

An article like this one for example is not of much interest to anyone but I may write articles that might be interesting to other people and when people see my articles from one source or another they will go to the blog pag of the article itself and not the main front page.

With this new phillosophy I will certainly be updating the blog daily. A lot of my posts will be opinions about things I find on reddit and digg.

Writely

Writely is a web based word processor recently purchased by Google. Upstartle was the original company that developed Writely, but Google announced their purchase of Upstartle on 3.9.06 in an attempt to rival software giant Microsoft in the area of office applications. Microsoft Word is a worthy competitor, but Writely does not strive to mimic all of Microsoft Word’s features.

Writely is very user friendly, although new registrations are currently not available as the transfer to Google is made. The main strength of Writely is that since it is completely web based, different people can edit the same document from different computers. You no longer have email documents to yourself to open them in another computer.

I am typing this post from Writely and all I have to do to post on my blog is click on Blog and then I have the option to either preview it or post it. The only grudge I have with using Writely to post messages on my blog is that the time stamps on the posts are off by about 2 hours; many people have complained about this but it is only a small bug in a huge beta project.

Some highlight features that will keep me using Writely to post to my blog are the auto save feature, excellent ability to upload and handle images, ability to export and save to extensions such as .pdf(Acrobat Reader), .doc(Microsoft Word), .txt(Plain Text), and OpenOffice documents.

Writely is a great tool and although it is still in the beta stage, the recent change to Google will hopefully mean that it can be improved to the point where it gets the popularity it deserves. Writely is still buggy in some areas and there are many feature requests by users. Google has been known for developing superb services such as its search engine and Gmail; hopefully Writely will reach the popularity of such services.

NEWS:

• PC World
• Playfuls

LINKS:

• Writely Homepage

BLOG POSTS:

• Writely Blog
• Unofficial Google Weblog
• Absolute Value

Begginings

And thus the continium was born. I plan to use this blog to convey my ideas, discoveries, interesting finds, and any other interesting things that i can come up with. I update the blog regularly. I encourage everyone who reads the continium to post links to it in other websites and quote my posts.

The layout that I chose is just a basic black & white simple template. I will be adding small improvements such as a hit counter shortly. I want the theme of the blog to be clean and not hard on the eyes. I don’t have any current plans on selecting a different template at the moment.

One of the reasons I decided to create the continium is that I wanted to have a place where to talk about websites I find using StumbleUpon. I will also post the bookmarks that I have collected.

I also would like to use this blog to enhance my writing skills and maybe even write some short stories and post them on the blog.

I hope I can maintain the blog and update it regularly. The blog will be a portal so that my ideas and thoughts can be conveyed to the web.