-
Teaching my son to write software
The other day my 11-year-old son asked me to teach him on how to write apps. I was thinking on what programming language I can start him with. I didn’t want to start him with Mobile Apps as I feel that will curtail his possibilities. This meant Android Java, Objective C & Apple Swift won’t cut it. Being an ardent Microsoft language engineer I never liked Java, but that discussion is for the other day. My friends know well about my “affair” with Visual Basic. Going with VB6 (there is a charm to this acronym’s sound) will mean he will be learning more about GUI/Drag ‘N’ Drop rather than programming…
-
Learning Python
I have been reading about Python (programming language) for last few years and wanted to learn it. But over the years in my work I have become more of the Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Manager and haven’t done any actual coding for many years. So the idea to learn a language and start typing, doing real work looked daunting. As experts say, we humans are animals of habit and getting out of your comfort zone is difficult. I said to myself let me make the first step on this, even though I was not sure whether I will pursue it further. Python.org website has all the necessary learning materials, guides, manuals…
-
The Internet’s Own Boy (2014)
Ever since I read about the making of this movie “The Internet’s Own Boy”, I have been wanting to watch it. It is about the sad story of early demise of Aaron Swartz, the whiz kid of Internet who did pioneering work in RSS and galvanized the US public against SOPA. Last week when the movie was released it was available only as a Pay per view from Vimeo and geographically restricted to US only (later they had a different link for rest of world). It was an irony that both the restrictions (pay-wall and geography lock) was against the ethos that Aaron stood for and died for. On the…
-
The year without pants
Before you think the book is about something sleazy, it is about Software Project Management with a fancy title. Scott Berkun was a former Microsoft manager, in charge of first five releases of Internet Explorer. After which he turned to full-time writing. His earlier books on The Art of Project Management and Myths of Innovation are famous titles. WordPress is the Open Source blogging software that’s powering this very blog of mine. It is used by 60 Million other websites and is used by 22% of the top 10 million websites. So when I saw a book by Scott Berkun writing about his experience working for a year+ as a…
-
calibre ebook management
While I have used calibre – ebook management in the past, those usages were limited and I had mostly used it as a ereader. Books I bought from Amazon goes into my Kindle Touch and managed easily from Amazon.com. But I realized I have lot of ebooks from non-amazon sources especially PDFs of magazines I subscribe like IEEE Spectrum which needed better management than simply storing in OneDrive shared folders. So I explored the landscape. Since I use Apple iTunes to manage all my music, videos and iPhotos for pictures, I turned to Apple iBooks (now in Mac OS) but that didn’t work out. iBooks won’t help in Windows, which…
-
Use CDs in a PC with no optical drives
This is an old trick, but an useful one especially for new PCs & Tablets which don’t come with optical drives to read CDs or DVDs. The other day my son brought a book with a CD of “The Human Body” and wanted to know how he can use it in his laptop. His laptop being one of the new convertibles (Tablet and PC) doesn’t have an optical drive and it was running Windows 8.1 Update (what else you will expect in my house). First I tried copying the entire contents of the CD to a folder in a USB thumb drive, copied it to the laptop, tried launching…
-
Heartbleed–Internet Software should be polygamous
The last few days the news has been all about the Heartbleed internet security vulnerability that may have helped hackers to access thousands of users passwords and security certificates from websites around the world. This is a serious issue that has affected Internet due to the fact that over two-thirds webservers (Apache and nginx) run the vulnerable version of OpenSSL. WSWS explains at the software level on how 5 lines of erroneous code by not including a memory bounds check has resulted in this bug. If you look into the list of websites, services and devices affected by this bug in OpenSSL, you will spot many popular Linux & FreeBSD…
-
Ubuntu Live for Surface Pro and MacBook Pro
Yes, I do love Windows & I love my Surface Pro device. Having got few gray hairs has thought me never to leave office with just one device or one set of cables especially when travelling. Irrespective of the device & OS, something can go wrong with OS or the App you are using just before a presentation. I am not as paranoid as the master Dr.Nitin Paranjape on this, but it’s a smart idea to carry an OS on the go for emergencies. This will help you boot your device, connect to wi-fi, browse a website at the minimum when your device or OS fails. To do this, the…
