Tag Archive
for Learn
Tagged as: Learn
Jul
02
Have you ever realized that there are so many things that you do not know? I mean, even besides the things that humanity doesn’t know (e.g. the cure to any of a whole slew of diseases, the details of all of the other planets and galaxies, where Amelia Earhart is), there are things that you just don’t know like how to program a complex program, how DNA works, how to create a bookcase from a tree, how to cook a perfect turkey for Thanksgiving, and the list goes on endlessly.
So in life, we’re always learning. You’ve probably heard that it’s pretty good for you to learn something new everyday. And I concur, that’s a great thing. Having an open mind, being amazed, willing to be taught. It’s all swell!
I’m interested, though, in how there are differences to learning. There is the kind that we learn because someone has taught us (i.e. in the classroom setting at school), but there is also the learning that comes out of a totally different intelligence/mind set. While the former is good, I’m apt to think that the latter is even better.
Newton, Socrates, Einstein among a few all had to come up with things on their own. They used logic, research, and intuition to arrive at the results that we now know all about today. And while there are many things that have been figured out already, it’s still pretty good for someone to separately arrive at the correct solution without having been taught it explicitly. At least I think so.
So do you know anyone that solved the Rubik’s cube without looking at the answer? Yeah me neither. Give the people that figure it out on their own their due.
Tagged as: Idea, Learn, Tip-For-Life, Useful
Mar
14
Remembering something is usually a case of you did or you didn’t. I’ve often found it amusing for things like birthdays when people will say that they remembered, but they just didn’t say anything about it. Really…well that’s hard to imagine.
The thing is, some people have better memories than others. Everyone is different and is able to remember things in different ways. Laugh if you must, but I remember wanting a photographic memory like Cam Jansen when I was a kid. Then I could rapidly flip through books and not need to study! How wonderful that would have been! But alas, my dreams did not come true. Even now I often wish for a better memory.
But just as remembering something is pretty binary (i.e. you did or you didn’t), those of us lacking in the memory department have to make do with what we have. Otherwise we will be mocked. Who will mock, I do not know. All I know is that mocking will occur.
3 Memory Aids That I Use:
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Remember The Milk
(RTM for short)
Besides having a pretty amusing name, this is a website whose sole purpose is to create TODO lists. It’s refreshing for a website to be so singular in its purpose in this day of do-everything-until-we-take-over-your-life websites. In any case, I initially signed up for an account on the site, thought it was cool, and promptly did not hardly ever use it because visiting another site everyday wasn’t too practical.
But then they developed a Firefox extension that changed that up! They developed an extension for placing an RTM pane whenever a Gmail tab is opened! It maintains the overall look and feel of gmail so you (or at least I) don’t feel like it’s out of place at all. Since I much more often have a browser tab open for Gmail, I was much more able to use the service. And I have. And it’s great!
The concept is nothing new, you just put in due dates. But since it’s in front of my face at least once a day (since I check my e-mail once a day), it’s actually useful. And it’s on a remote server so I don’t need to worry about losing it or keeping different lists in sync.
So there are 2 ways to use this baby:
Either will do, just do.
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Phone calendar
Okay so I don’t have a smart phone. But that doesn’t mean that my phone is dumb! (Ha…ha…)
But almost all phones nowadays have some sort of calendar feature. And that’s fine and dandy for checking what the date is. But there is often also the ability to schedule events. So I use my phone (a Motorola, by the way) and put in reminders for certain things that I need to get done.
This is especially useful when I’m out and about. Often my phone is one of the few things that I’ll carry with me. I could actually text message a reminder to RTM which is cool. But I’ll be honest, I’m cheap when it comes to text messaging. And Verizon charges $.15 per message. For the amount of reminders that I put in for myself, that could get pricey. Haha laugh if you want, but the calendar reminders are free.
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Google Calendar
Calendars have been around for ages. The print versions are still quite popular and understandably so. But as computer usage becomes more and more prevalent, we are transferring much of the things that we do in tangible form to things that we can do through using the computer.
Personally I use the Google calendar, but really there are many such applications floating around. I figure that I already have a Gmail account, so why not. (Of course, this line of reasoning sounds that in my post Google’s Taking Over The World…And I Don’t Like It.)
Anyways, a nice feature of Google calendar is that I can have it e-mail me before the event occurs. I don’t use the application everyday, but awhile back I input all of my friends’ birthdays. Now it will e-mail me the day before someone’s birthday, so I’ll never egregiously forget a friend’s birthday!
Granted, it’d be better if I just remembered. It would show that I care more. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I don’t want to make a mistake! It’s my failsafe, if you will.
Do you have other tips for fellow forgetful fellows (or gals)?
Tagged as: Learn, Life
Nov
14
When you hear a word or phrase and you don’t hear the entire context you are very prone to make a mistake about how it’s actually being used. You will apply your own thoughts and feelings and create a new context. And yet this is also a fun way to test out certain aspects of yourself.
Judging by what you think of the following, you can find out what kind of a person you are. So see what you’re made of!
List of ambiguous terms
- DB
- Apache
- Coupling
- CA
- Perl
- Python
And so think about this list and what you’ve thought about for each. Here are some of the possibilities that I’ve come to think of for each of them:
Possible definitions for ambiguous terms
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Diamond Bar, CA
The city is a possible definition that would indicate that you’re aware of this Los Angeles County city.
Database
This is what I think of usually since I’ve become more and more knowledgeable about them.
Decibel
Well usually it’s actually dB, but who’s checking?
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American Indians
This is likely one of the more popular thoughts. It was the first result on Wikipedia anyways!
Attack Helicopter
Used during the latter part of the 1900’s and even currently, it is a pretty well-known and well-loved machine used on the front lines.
HTTP Server
That means it is the software used to serve you web pages. You see it everyday and don’t even know it as it is reported to serve nearly 50% of all web pages!
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Some arbitrary connection between 2 pieces
Used to identify the connection between any of a whole slew of objects, including those used in automobiles, between train cars, other mechanical devices, etc.
Well…sex
There is a good possibility this is what you thought of. Unless you thought of…
Good computer science practices
Good coupling in computer science is the loose dependence of a particular module on another module. This lends itself to the objected-oriented methodology that is predominant in programming today.
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California
Almost everyone in the United States will think of this unless you’re…
From Canada
In which case you’ll think of your lovely country. However another one that is a possibility is…
Certificate Authority
Used for authentication as a trusted third party, this is very popular in cryptography. When you visit a website prepended by “https” instead of “http” you look for that little lock icon in your browser. Well that lock indicates that a Certificate Authority has provided the website with a digital certificate and you are trusting that the CA has performed due process before you submit your important information to the website.
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Misspelling of pearl
Maybe the person just forgot the “a”.
Programming language
A popular scripting language that can be used for a wide variety of tasks. Often it’s extremely quick to construct usable scripts with this language and it provides constructs for easy text processing. There are plenty of modules available to do just about anything that you want to do. It has the distinct pleasure of allowing the programmer the write the most disgustingly hard to read code ever because its philosophy of allowing the programmer many ways to do the exact same thing. Super.
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A snake!
Generally not dangerous to humans, they are intimidating for their large size. They kill their prey by constricting them and thus are extremely strong.
Another programming language
Focusing on readability, it’s rather a joy to work in compared to other languages. This high-level programming language sits over C/C++ and allows for all types of extensibility. It also sits in contrast to Perl because it strives to only have a single method, and preferably only that single method of doing something. It is easy to learn and easy to read although it allows great functionality if you so desire. Can you tell that I like it?
Conclusion About Me
So what do all of these things have in common? I’m sure that if you’ve read them all (which, thank you very much for doing so!) you’ll notice that there is a disambiguation that tends towards the nerd in me. That’s right, they can all be nerdy. Haha I wonder if anyone else out there thought of the nerdy options for those phrases.
Tagged as: Geek, Learn, Software
Oct
25
Hard drives consist of many bits, configured in a particular way (of which the explanation is far far beyond the scope of this blog post). But needless to say we like to view the hard drive as a block of space that we can store things in. The hard drives each have partitions setup on them, the most common case being a single partition for the operating system and all of the data.
However this is not exactly what a lot of people want. Sometimes they want different partitions because they want different operating systems on the same computer, but more often it’s just because they want some kind of division between their data and their operating system, applications, etc. For more reasons, check out the purpose of partitioning according to wikipedia.
When you install an operating system for the first time, it has a partitioning tool that allows you to choose how you want to partition your new hard drive. Well often if you buy your computer retail then they’ve already set it up for you. But if you were to actually go through the entire process yourself, then you’d likely partition the hard drive with the operating system installer’s tool.
But then, what if your hard drive is currently set up differently than you want? What do you do once your data is all over your drive? Well you have a couple of choices. You can either completely format (and erase) your hard drive and start from scratch. This is obviously not going to be your first choice if you have data on your hard drive already as that would involve backing up and restoring all of your data. That seems like a rather long process unless you’re having serious errors and really do want to start from scratch (which is sometimes the desired outcome). So the other option is to use some software to re-partition your hard drive while maintaining your data.
Norton PartitionMagic Replacement
Many people know about Norton PartitionMagic in order to do exactly this task. But after eschewing that (in my mind) expensive software, I would highly encourage everyone to check out the free and open source Parted Magic. That is what I used! It’s a LiveCD (which means that you download it, burn it on a cd, insert it into your computer, and boot off the CD. It utilizes the Gparted application for the partitioning duties.
It was a snap to use when I recently upgrade my Ubuntu installation from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) (don’t you love the alliterative names, I know that I do).
In order to use just:
- Defrag your hard drive
- Download the .iso image
- Burn to a CD as a disk image
- Insert into computer
- Boot to the CD (you might need to change a BIOS setting or two in order to do this)
- Create, resize, modify your partitions and keep your data intact!
Tagged as: Geek, Learn, Useful
Sep
10
Have you heard of DNS? Well if you haven’t, in short it is what allows you to memorize “google.com” rather than “72.14.207.99″. Every time you enter a website address into a browser, the browser first has to retrieve the actual numerical address (called an IP address) that corresponds to it so that it can actually access the website.
A real-world analogy would be looking up a phone number in a telephone book. You likely don’t memorize everyone’s number. In fact, you probably don’t know all too many by heart. But you can easily remember someone’s name, right?
So each time you enter the address, your web browser has to ask a DNS server to give you the IP address. Very often, your ISP will have a DNS cache to more quickly give you the IP address.
Something everyone should consider using is OpenDNS. It is a couple of DNS servers that are able to specify on your own computer to always use instead of whatever it is that you would otherwise use. Why is it good? Well OpenDNS offers things like safety from malicious websites (e.g. a misspelled website that causes you to arrive at a malicious website) and speed (likely from optimized servers) to name a few. Try it out, and see if you can notice a difference. I have and I do!
There are instructions at the OpenDNS website for every operating system, and they take but a few minutes.
Courtesy of Flickr user 
Courtesy of Flickr user