(Public Draft)

Many people have eaten my cooking & gone on to lead normal lives.

Lately, I’ve been baking. A lot. It’s quite rewarding and a lot of fun. Baking is a lot like programming, and the two complement each other quite well. I could be waiting for code to compile and start mixing some batter, or waiting for some dough to rise and be coding away at my latest project. Either way, something tasty always results.

Programming and baking are very similar in a lot of other respects too. Programming is like baking a cake: you start with start with some ingredients, mix them together appropriately, let them bake, and enjoy the result. In programming, the ingredients are variables (“nouns”) and functions (“verbs”). You use these to select parts of your computer (like a harvest) and then you mix them together (coding). You “bake” the code into something the computer understands, (even in python or ruby, the interpreter is still translating to machine language).

public draft, as I am likely to revise these statements…

When I was in Grade 12 I had always wanted to start a philosophy club. Although that idea never took off, I was fortunate enough to encounter a book, 101 Philosophy Problems. This book led me to start asking myself more serious questions about my attitudes about life. More importantly, I started asking questions about Truth itself.

Death is the absolute end of an individual life. Although I’ve often wrestled with these ideas in a philosophical way, I’ve never had to face the reality of death. Until now.

Earlier this month, I found out about a car-crash had claimed the life of an SFU student. For two days I sympathized with the loss, wondering who’s life had just been ended. The hill I had repeatedly found refuge in was now tainted with the knowledge that a human life had ended there.

A lot has changed in the five years I’ve attended university. When I started in 2006, a few students took notes on their laptops in class (myself included), while many took notes on good ol’ pen and paper. In my math classes I was never without my pencil, binder, and graphing paper. I used Windows XP for most everything and only dabbled in Ubuntu. When a student owned an Apple Computer, it was more of a status symbol (unless they were in CompSci; in which case they just got ripped on by their peers). Now I can’t walk into a lecture without immersing myself in a sea of laptop logos. Apple computers are no longer an alternate lifestyle, they are a status symbol, and students know less about how to use these machines than ever before.

I’ve also noticed that my fellow students were using any piece of software they can get their hands on. Piracy is rampant in the halls of the dorms. Being more computer savvy than most, I’ve decided to give a tutorial of open-source tools for university students. The page you are presently reading is the third iteration of this pursuit. I’m adding and adjusting things all the time, it just takes a bit of effort to clean up and publish these findings (notwithstanding that my site has been floating around in DNS-limbo for the last few months). I used to have this list separated by operating system, but so many applications now either work across operating systems or are web-based that I just separated them by App vs Web.

biolyrics is back!

So for those outside the know, I have pretty much the best birthday in the Universe! I’m now 20, and once again all the 8’s in my life line up again. Apparently 8 is a lucky number in China (which is one reason they start the Olympics today).

Happy 08/08/08 everyone!

Well, before I begin this post, let me first fill everyone in on my new academic pursuits. Namely, Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For those not in the know, (like everyone I met from Syria, and numerous others here in Utah) Cognitive Science is the study of the mind that combines the main streams of linguistics, philosophy, computational science, and psychology. One of the main pursuits is building a computational model of the mind: AI (artificial intelligence). Along with this, I’m hoping to add the little biology experience I have in order to pro gress this field. With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot ab out our definitions of Artificial intelligence lately.

So, on this fateful day, I have installed a CMS system. This will make it easier to manage biolyrics, and hopefully allow posts to go up more quickly. Also, Com ments, FTW.

Let me know your thoughts.