Thus, when it comes to trying to go into higher education, one immediately encounters the first barrier: gaining understanding of where academia is. Everything taught in a 400 level course ends in the 80′s at best and the student is left stranded on an island which no longer is inhabited. Sometimes he sees smoke in the distance of a ship. Unfortunately in this world the speed of light is very slow and by the time the smoke is detected the ship is far gone.

As I dive deeper into ObjectiveC I can’t help to find it a remarkable language for internet applications. It offers both the functional capabilities for simple runtiness, object hierarchy which is part of almost all designs, and smalltalk like messaging. With the recent popularization of Javascript many extensions have been developed. Today Javascript supports both objects and functions, but what happened to messaging?

With the current usage of Ajax, messaging is a pivotal aspect of internet applications, yet none of the languages offer a simple and intuitive method for communicating in terms of messages. Both in the server and the client side have no language enabled for of communication leaving it up to the developers to find a suitable technique. This however not only leads to unneeded complexities but also numerous security and bug problems. A language which natively allowed for the sending and receiving of messages would be extremely beneficial.

Ruby thus far seems the closest to reaching this ideal. It does offer an RPC like framework which allows for easy implementation of server and client side scripts. Its solid backbone allows for the communication to be fairly secure and with enough checking to avoid trivial errors. However it has two primary faults. It requires a service to be running in ther server side which few servers have currently (ie. Ruby) and secondly it forces the usage of a language which has fewer support and extensions than other languages such as PHP and Perl.

Thus we are left with no solutions. A possible solution would be to implement a PHP/Javascript solution. PHP would be used for both the server side scripting and for the generation of the client side scripting. An internet application would be divided into three parts: presentation, server, and client. The presentation may be implemented in any language as long as the output is HTML in the end. The presentation is responsible for “connecting” the client and server parts together. Both the server and the client side would be implemented using a language similar to ObjectiveC. For example extending PHP much the same way ObjectiveC extends C. When a page from the internet application is called (from the presentation part) it would connect the server and client sides together. The connection process consists of building or loading from cache a PHP and Javascript program for the server and client parts (respectively). The connection would be, in the end, a converter that would convert a ObjectiveC/PHP script into either standard PHP or Javascript. The conversion would be responsible for picking up all inconsistencies between the server and client. It would also be in the advantageous position to add extra features such as compression, encryption, validation and etc.&…

To solve this annoying error you need to add the following extra parameter when calling any graphviz program

Exactly, what on Earth does t_paamayim_nekudotayim mean?!
Answer: Hebrew for two (paamayim) colons (nekudotayim). More compilers and interpreters should incorporate humor into their products for it makes errors and hair-pulling situations much more relaxing.

• Zaurus – the one chance linux had to be in a handheld. It is the greatest gadget I’ve owned in my life. Unfortunately it never got the care it needed.
• Magic Cards – classic part of any geek’s box of treasures
• Backup TI-83 calculator – I always carry a TI-89 but you never know when you will need a replacement
• USB extension cord
• Memory card reader
• Pads, bookmarks, plane tickets, receipts.. etc&.

So much of this box has already become outdated that its hard not feeling old. Imagine, twenty years from now the box will be worth thousands. Who even uses compact flash anymore? Or has seen a sharp PDA that actually works better than a Blackberry?

1. Adium – Objective-C addition that will be merged into the main project sometime in the near future. This was the most interesting project since it was part of a greater project which happens to be used by thousands of people all over the world.
2. mySemester – Since freshmen year I have been musing over executing this project. You would think that will all the tools out there there would be one for creating a schedule that looked good, was printable and sharable with others. After doing word, excel, and html schedules to share and print I got fed up and created this site just for that. It has all the bells and whistles to be a 2.0 site : )
3. Time Tracker – In order to accomplish 3 projects in one summer tracking how I spent my time was of essence and for that I had the urge to create this nifty project. It is in fact a simple copy of Harvest Time except its free and simpler to use. This is meant for a single user who has many projects and tasks with due dates and a limited amount of time to give. Couldn’t be any simpler to use.

<form name="login">
<label for="user">Username</lable><input type="text" name="user">
<label for="password">Password</label><input type="password" name="password">
<input type="button" value="Login">
</form>

Suppose you want to call a function called validate() when either the user presses enter or clicks the button. The trick I discovered with Prototype is as follows:

function checkForSubmission(element,func){
Event.observe(element, 'keypress', function(event){
if(event.keyCode==13)
func();
});
}

Now for the example above, when the page loads you simply call

checkForSubmission("login",validate);

If the user presses enter in any of the two text boxes or clicks the button the form will now validate itself. Simple solution to a tricky situation.

Update: It seems that in Safari events happen in a different order: onSubmit event takes place before the onKeyPress event. To get around this you need to return false when onSubmit occurs. Easiest solution is to add the following to the form tag.

onSubmit="return false;"

Recently however, due to many Ubuntu updates, my installation broke and I was forced with reinstalling a Linux distribution on it. Since I felt more comfortable with Linux I decided to try something new. What a disapointment.

First was Debian. I was impressed at how simple and extremely fast it was. It made my 5 year computer feel like new. What I found dissapointing was the fact that my NTFS partition simply was not recognized (even after trying to install special drivers).

Second was SUSE. In another extreme, it was extremely slow. The installation took for ever, the video card was never properly identified and it was just too slow. On the pro side, it had a very nice Gnome look and feel.

Finally I tried Fedora, after all I wanted something stable. Installation was so-so. It does boot up fairly quickly and the files are very well organized. Configuration was a barable level of Linux pain. But this by far does not mean I’m satisfied.

Conclusion, I’m still not satisfied with my half working Linux home server which its entire purpose is to server my MacBook. Samba works but only because NFS didn’t. Apache works well but I’ve got no sound. Oh well.. There really should be a Ubuntu version for home servers.

PS: The money incentive was a nice addition. Apple 30″ LCD here I come.