Very small TWI this week, heh.

Don't like the NSA? You can foil it if you use VOIP. Speaking of things on the net heres another link about the net neutrality front.

That's it.

Notable: Chatology

It's a massive totally random one this week.

An argument raged last week about the media's coverage of the US occupation of Iraq characterizing it as one sided, showing only the bad things. Some people actually tried to say journalists in Iraq were reporting from their balconies rather than going out on to the ground to report on the good things going on in Iraq. I think this argument is distasteful and call shame on those who are making this argument themselves from the safety of America. These reporters in Iraq who are constantly under threat of death, as is evident from the many reporters who have died in Iraq, are reporting what needs to be reported about Iraq. A school or hospital opening is well and good but when its the backdrop of constant violence which is the most important things to the people in Iraq and people back here in America.

If you have not seen this video you should: mime torn. Also you should see this one too: French Horn Guy. Oh and Ask A Ninja is funny as hell.

It can be hard to grok the open source movement and in particular Richard Stallman but here is a transcript from groklaw of a recent keynote Richard gave about the future of free software.

I smell some bullshit coming from the direction of the FCC. Speaking of stupid things from the FCC, FCC Chief Kevin Martin has come out and sanctioned tiered internet.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's a spy drone!

Am I the only one who thought they knew what caused Asthma? Well I guess they do now. Also apparently hot peppers can kill cancer.

The hugely successful PSOne with 100 million shipped worldwide is produced no more.

While many continue to not recognize global warming the rest of us know it is a real threat. Even NASA acknowledges its effects. While perhaps it does no one any good to talk in such overtones like DOOM, it does no one any good to ignore it and wait for 100% 'evidence' when such will likely be damaging and way too late. Better be safe than sorry and start now to clean ourselves up. We don't have to be smug about it though. Smug can be just as bad as smog.

And yes the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42!

What has happened throughout the history of earth? What happened in the past to put us where we are now? What has happened in the past of man?

Throughout history we have learned many things in the areas of science and technology, have heard many people of philosophy put forth their ideas, and have endured great tragedies of war. Some people say it is important to learn history in order to learn from past mistakes. Others have said that we are doomed to repeat history. Some have said that it is important to learn about our history so that we can know where we come from and understand where we are going into the future. Yet others have said the only thing that matters is the here and now.

Flash of History of Empires
A Peoples History of the United States

A Trip Through the 5000 Years of World History

History means dates of happenings and names of people. History began in the Nile Valley, in Egypt, where a priest called Manetho wrote about it, naming the ruler or pharaoh of the country as Menes.

The Years Before Christ (B.C.)

3200 Menes and the First Dynasty of his successors the pharaohs in Egypt.

2500 The Egyptian Pyramids built

2000 The Code of Laws of Hammurabi in Babylonia in the Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.

1250 The Invasions of the People of the Sea. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the Achaeans' Siege of Troy. Aryans by land in Persia and India (the Rigveda). First dynasties of kings in China. Moses led the Jewish tribe of Israel out of Egyptian slavery into Palestine.

750 Homer lived and the First Olympic Games were held in Athens. Romulus and Remus first kings of Rome.

500 Rome a Republic. Greek civil wars and against the Persians. Athens against Sparta. Herodotus the Father of History. Socrates and Plato in Athens. The Persian Empire - Zoroaster. Buddha in India. Confucius in China.

333 Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire and penetrated India.

44 Julius Caesar assassinated in Rome after conquering Egypt and dealing with Cleopatra. Civil war.

31 Caesar's nephew Octavian became the Roman Emperor Augustus.

The Years (A.D.) Since the Birth of Christ in the Reign of Augustus

33 Jesus Christ was crucified in the reign of Tiberius

325 Constantine the Great converted the Roman Empire to Christianity and then dedicated Constantinople as his capital.

452 Attila the Hun threatened Rome, but was warned off by Pope Leo the Great. Invasions of the other Barbarians across Europe.

476 Romulus Augustulus last Roman Emperor in the West.

622 Mohammed and the beginning of the Moslem Era. The Arabs overran North Africa and penetrated Spain. Great Tang Dynasty in China. Imitation of China in Japan.

800 Revival of the Roman Empire in the West by Charlemagne, King of the Franks. The Viking Age began. Canute the Great. The Varangian Rus and their conversion to Christianity

1000 Leif Eriksson discovered America in Newfoundland.

1066 The Norman Duke William conquered England. Feudalism. The Crusades to recover Jerusalem from the Turks.

1233 The Mongols of Genghis Khan overran Russia, but in China, Kublai Khan began a dynasty, and was visited by Marco Polo.

1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks, but in Venice, Milan, and Florence the Renaissance continued in full flower.

1492 Conquest of Granada from the Mohammedan Moors under Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and they sent Christopher Columbus to discover America anew.

1519 Charles King of Spain first Habsburg Roman Emperor. Luther began the Protestant Reformation against the Popes of Rome.

1588 The defeat and destruction of the Spanish Invincible Armada by the English under Queen Elizabeth.

1643 France supreme in Europe under Louis XIV - the Sun King.

1760 Canada and India ceded by France to the British Empire.

1776 Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A. from Britain.

1789 The French Revolution, which produced Napoleon.

1815 After failing in Russia, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.

1837 Queen Victoria began the Victorian Era in Europe.

1914 The First World War began, with Britain, France and Russia against Germany, Austria and Turkey

1917 Lenin seized power in Russia. The Communist International

1918 The end of the First World War, and the end of the Austrian and Turkish Empires. Hitler came to power in Germany.

1939 The Second World War began with the conquest of France by Hitler, who then invaded Russia, whilst Japan struck at the U.S.A.

1945 Germany was defeated by Britain, the U.S.A. and Russia

1945 Japan was defeated by American atomic bombs, but then began the Cold War in Europe, with Britain, France and the U.S.A. against the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. The U.S.A. was to fight the Korean and Vietnam Wars, in effect against Communist China under Mao.

1991 The U.S.S.R. and Communism were found to be completely hollow after Gorbachev had come to power and introduced Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Reconstruction). The U.S.A. became the sole great power in the world, but the European Community led by Germany, France, and Italy prospered economically, as did Japan, whilst the United Nations reaffirmed its universal role in politics.

Other Resources

• World History
• WWII in Europe
• History of the World
• Windows on Italy
• Ancient Roman History
• Ancient Mesopotamia
• Internet Ancient History Book
• Roman and Greek map
• Brief History of Rome
• Internet Modern History Book
• Hannibal Barca and the Punic Wars
• Ancient Nubia
• Persian Empire
• World History Timeline

MPAA gets ripped a new one during an sxsw session. Listen to the audio. Organ harvesting Chinese Concentration Camps. Did the Blackstar exist? Should we have open internet tests?

Notable: Chatology

Part of the passion in my life, besides life itself, is programming and computers. I especially like the idea of smart computing through smart programs and smart OSes. Which is what I want to focus on in my career, creating intelligence to various degrees to help create better and more efficient user experiences using computers.

Bellow is a table of various code snippets and articles organized by language.

C/C++	C#	Java	JavaScript
Returning an Array of Pointers			javascript trim

15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language

This is an exercise to both learn a language, but also to compare different languages. The original idea can be found here.

1. Display series of numbers (1,2,3,4, 5....etc) in an infinite loop. The program should quit if someone hits a specific key (Say ESCAPE key).
2. Fibonacci series, swapping two variables, finding maximum/minimum among a list of numbers.
3. Accepting series of numbers, strings from keyboard and sorting them ascending, descending order.
4. Reynolds number is calculated using formula (D*v*rho)/mu Where D = Diameter, V= velocity, rho = density mu = viscosity Write a program that will accept all values in appropriate units (Don't worry about unit conversion) If number is < 2100, display Laminar flow, If it's between 2100 and 4000 display 'Transient flow' and if more than '4000', display 'Turbulent Flow' (If, else, then...)
5. Modify the above program such that it will ask for 'Do you want to calculate again (y/n), if you say 'y', it'll again ask the parameters. If 'n', it'll exit. (Do while loop)
   
   While running the program give value mu = 0. See what happens. Does it give 'DIVIDE BY ZERO' error? Does it give 'Segmentation fault..core dump?'. How to handle this situation. Is there something built in the language itself? (Exception Handling)
6. Scientific calculator supporting addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square-root, square, cube, sin, cos, tan, Factorial, inverse, modulus
7. Printing output in different formats (say rounding up to 5 decimal places, truncating after 4 decimal places, padding zeros to the right and left, right and left justification)(Input output operations)
8. Open a text file and convert it into HTML file. (File operations/Strings)
9. Time and Date : Get system time and convert it in different formats 'DD-MON-YYYY', 'mm-dd-yyyy', 'dd/mm/yy' etc.
10. Create files with date and time stamp appended to the name
11. Input is HTML table, Remove all tags and put data in a comma/tab separated file.
12. Extract uppercase words from a file, extract unique words
13. Implement word wrapping feature (Observe how word wrap works in windows 'notepad')
14. Adding/removing items in the beginning, middle and end of the array.
15. Are these features supported by your language: Operator overloading, virtual functions, references, pointers etc.

C#	Java	Python
Learn 2 C# 1	Learn 2 Java 1
Learn 2 C# 2
Learn 2 C# 3
Learn 2 C# 4 and 5
Learn 2 C# 6
Learn 2 C# 7
Learn 2 C# 8
Learn 2 C# 9
Learn 2 C# 10
Learn 2 C# 11
Learn 2 C# 12

I've been doing TWI... for a couple weeks now. TWI... is sort of a play on TWIT though I never could cover as much as they do and as good as the people over there could. However, the point of my friday TWI... is to post the various things of interest that I find on the internets every week as well as any comments I've made on other peoples posts.

The guy over at Erratic Wisdom wonders how anyone could not understand the importance of studying history. (My comment: here).

I take this post to heart. Part of the reason for my site is communication with the outside audience. Not necessarily for personal gratification of other people viewing my content, but being genuinely interested in peoples comments about various topics I am interested it. Whether that's some bit of philosophy, science, code, or application I put out there I wanna hear what other people have to say about it.

Doc Searls continues to talk about and advocate the new journalism.

Notable: Chatology

I continue to expand the code for indeepthought and have implemented more of wiki markup. If your curious about wiki markup you can see two competing standards here and here. Which one am I using? Neither really, there are parts of both I don't like and since neither is an excepted standard by the community of wiki I am basically using my own derived form based off wikipedia itself.