Engie's weblog

After finishing CS101 at Coursera, I decided to give Udacity a shot. At first, I was a bit skeptical, particularly that most of the comparisons between Coursera and Udacity that I have met, most of them have praised Udacity's style but none has delved deep into comparing the content. Let's begin with first things first. What shall I compare here? - Programming Languages, - Instructors, - Content of course, - Platform, - Forums, and - Grading. * Programming Languages:  a- Udacity        --> Python 2.x (2.6 or 2.7, not sure)  b- Coursera     --> Modified version of javascript In this respect, I am completely biased against Coursera. The modified version of javascript is really easy to grasp and use, but, at the end of the day it is a __modified__ version. The real javascript is much more difficult. Moreover, the course just scratches the surface using javascript. For me, I think Coursera should have used an unc...

I am very picky when it comes to adding a piece of software to my favourite apps list. By `my favourite apps list' I mean standalone applications that do not need a browser to run.  Yet, a very sleek application quickly made it to my fav apps list. The application is called *** Kapow ***. Honestly, I just searched the meaning and it seems to be sort of an impolite word (according to Urban Dictionary) so we will try to ignore meaning of the word, and get to the function of the application. Kapow 1.3.4 on Fedora 16 (Verne)     Kapow is so simple that it will soon become indispensable to track your time. No much clutter. Just a left panel to add / remove projects, large (start / stop) and cancel buttons to indicate starting or stopping a task, and a simple view with customized columns to see what you have accomplished. The clue to having life-reflecting data is to start / stop tasks when you really begin or end (pause) working on them. The relatively large buttons...

Online education is growing, and I am glad! Indeed, some initiatives have been there for a few years now and a handful of well-known universities are maximizing the opportunity for netcitizens to learn. My favourite part about online education is not being free, but rather is comfort and flexibility. For example, you can always watch the lectures or read course material during the times that best suit you. If you are a working mother or a busy individual, you can do this over weekends. Even better, you have access to the material everywhere you have an internet connection. This simply throws the course into your `comfort-zone'. Once there, chances are you will grasp things better and accordingly can benefit yourself and the society from what you have learned. I bet now you would like to have a list of online-education initiatives. Trust me, at least a couple of the below take knowledge seriously but makes it easy and fun for you. Here are my favourite initiatives / sit...

Hacker Evolution Duality demo always segfaults even when you hit ESC and press `yes' to exit! I had to start the game with strace to find out what the hell is wrong! The game is totally inconsistent. Once it can not find the text file that should be displayed as your first message. Another time it does find it.  In addition, the game throws lots of error messages claiming that it can not run certain MP3 files. I do a $ gnome-open /path/to/mentioned/file.mp3 and it works like a charm. The game also looks for many device files like:  ... /dev/js13 /dev/js14 /dev/js15 /dev/js16 ...   Honestly, I found the demo  not worthy of debugging a hell of segfaults. If you intend to build a good game for Linux, please consider those guys / girls who rely on x86_64 systems! Enjoy the map and the grid, I didn't even bother to make a score.

If you have never been to Egypt in the last 10 years, please do not judge it from behind your PC and please do not generalize your views. If you have never been to Tahrir Square, again please do not judge it from your TV screen nor generalize your views. This said, now let's get to the core. 80+ million people concentrated in around 3% of their country with poor majority, a relatively small number of well educated people and the elites whom you can easily classify with the tags: power, money, corruption. Now the elites to keep and grow their power and money have to work in a few directions (First Person): - keep the poor as they are or drive them poorer so that they have no opportunity (mind / health / time) to find out our crimes, - shut the educated up by any means in order not to enlighten the poor about how bad, evil and corrupted we are, - make allies with whomever supports, protects, grows / can support, protect, grow our interests, - hide our crimes, if not pos...

I now genuinely believe that corporations with red logos suck the blood of their customers and their employees alike. On top of my list are Oracle, Vodafone, RedHat and HSBC. That's from where they get the red colour!

I was going to write about how these August, September and October are overwhelming in IT through: - Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, - Compromising kernel.org, - Steve Jobs' death, - Dennis Ritchie's death... But I found that I won't be adding any thing new nor useful to the internet nor to my readers. So, I decided to change the topic. What usually attracts me right after humans' morals is their minds. The more open, welcoming and optimistic is a person's mind the more my respect towards that person. After all, it blows me out of my mind how many young people I find reading and willing to share and positively discuss ideas and how sadly our country has become. May be because of the under estimation of our capabilities that was instilled in us during childhood? Why most of us succeeds at something good, innovative and useful only after studying or working abroad for a while? For me, Egypt is one of the most rich countries in the whole world......