30 Day Challenge - July 2014 and a brief summary

July has arrived and with it comes 31 new days to attempt another 30 Day Challenge (with a one day buffer ;) ). For those of you who are not familiar with the 30 Day Challenge, I would encourage you to watch this TED talk by Matt Cutts, who heads Google's webspam team. The idea, the rationale and the aim have all been wonderfully presented by him in less than 4 minutes.

Here are the list of 30 day challenges that I've attempted in the past. I've had fun doing some of them and have blogged about my experiences.

Report on 30 Day Challenge - Read 15 books in 30 days

This past year during the month of June 2013, I attempted a 30 day challenge - to read 15 books. While I got off to a good start with 4 books in 11 days, however, I managed to complete only 11 by the end of the month.

This post has been long overdue but considering that I did not attempt to complete the remaining four books until now, I guess this post is not so ill-timed after all. I should mention here that my previous (best) failed attempt at this same challenge was 12 books. I am hoping to beat this sometime in future but that would depend on whether, and when, I would get my hands on a stack of books this engaging.

During the course of the challenge, I read a few great books which I would gladly recommend to any fellow bibliophile. The list goes as follows (in no particular order):

Remembering Aaron Swartz - Raw Thought

Be curious; Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

 - Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)

Last week, I was saddened to hear the news about the death of Aaron Swartz. I have never met Aaron in person but I was a regular follower of his blog and work for many years. Both of these led me to deeply admire and respect him. His tireless work against the passing of the SOPA bill was of significant interest to me because of the serious implications of the bill. As a programmer his talents were legendary and as an activist his tireless efforts admirable. His passing is indeed a great loss. The Economist has a nice obituary here that perfectly reflects this sentiment. 

As an avid reader of his blog, I am deeply saddened to know that there will not be anymore updates to the site. So I decided to collect all of his blog posts over the years and compile it into a PDF/Ebook. So this past week, I wrote a simple Python script that crawled Aaron's weblog and retrieved all of the posts one by one and complied them into a single file.

Happy Holidays!

Its time for the holidays and the normally bustling campus is now relatively quiet. The weather seems to be quite erratic though. Its sunny, rainy and chilly all within the same day and on most days the skies look like this. 

Not that it dampens the spirit of the holidays though. Happy Holidays!

Getting Flash to run on Tor for Mac

UPDATE: In OS X Mavericks, these steps aren't required. Tor automatically locates and configures the plugins. You only have to enable it in the Settings (see Step 3 below)

Tor, by default does not support third party Firefox plugins such as Flash and Javascript and this makes it difficult to view websites such as YouTube and other sites that require flash. This tutorial aims to address the issue for Tor Browser running on Mac OS X.

We already assume that you have Tor browser installed and running. If you don't have it installed, you can download it from here and follow the installation instructions. 

Step 1: Download and install Flash Player for Mac.

Anatomy of a busy month

February 2012 was a very busy month for me. I have survived numerous busy days and weeks in the past, most of which usually culminate in important deadlines, but I don't ever remember having had a hectic month in recent memory. The trend has however been the same though - it usually results in me compromising my sleep. This past month was going to be something similar, but this time I decided to keep track of my sleeping habits for the month. Initially, it looked like just a fun thing to do, but as the month progressed the data I gathered showed some interesting patterns. It wasn't until the end of the month that I decided to analyze the data that I had collected and study it.

Interview for IES

Back in August, I conducted an interview for IES (Institution of Engineers, Singapore) as part of their National Engineering Day 2011 (NED 2011) efforts to encourage high school students in Singapore to consider engineering as a career option. While I have conducted many interviews in the past for my school and college magazines, this was the first time I did a project that is outside of school and up for display publicly. It was fun and exciting and I enjoyed the process even though wrestling with semantic nuances was challenging at times. 

I wanted to share this now that its up on their website.

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