has been a vital source of information for me and hardly a day goes by where i don’t use it to read up on something. Amazingly, topics covered on it range from the down right silly to the most advanced technical topic. All reviewed and scrutinized by the mass public…. Read more“On Wikipedia and freedom of access to information”

Update: I removed the source code from the blog post. You can now find it on my . Most Hadoop tutorials use the wordcount application as a demo application. And while this might be a good demo application, it is not particularly helpful. So i wanted to think of an… Read more“Working with Hadoop: My first MapReduce App”

Last week, i sat through a demo of a certain document management system provided by a vendor. The system in itself is pretty good. Although if it was up to me, I would never choose a proprietary system for a vital project. Since you essentially would be putting yourself and… Read more“On Licensing Terms”

When working as part of a team on a Django project, it is often useful to have a per-host settings file. There are many ways to do this but the approach that I liked most is creating a local_settings.py file in each environment. I’m often the only programmer on web… Read more“Per-host settings.py for Django projects”

My has a subscription to . So I’ve been having a blast looking at the different books over there. I found lots of books that are on my Amazon wish list and so i was like a child at a candy store. The problem is that the books are provided… Read more“Joining SpringerLink pdfs”

It just occurred to me today. Running your own business, you try to optimize the hell out of everything to make as much use of your time as possible. Employees on the other hand, wish to be as unproductive as possible. But i have to say, I still don’t understand… Read more“On Producitivity and running your own business”

Dialing a USSD code from a custom activity is straight forward using a DIAL or CALL intent, but listening to the returned result is not due to Android not having proper support for intercepting USSD calls within the platform, but partial though undocumented support exists within the native dialer application…. Read more“Intercepting USSD calls in Android”

BarCamp-Lebanon was great yesterday. Met some interesting people. Attended some interesting sessions(except for the 3rd one which was a waste of my time, notice no coverage) and was surprised at the abundance of geeks and geekets attending. And speaking of things that were good, that veggie pizza was great…. We… Read more“#barcamp-lebanon Conclusion”

discusses Non-Disclosure Agreements and how the author has decided to react to it. I think it is brilliant. Also of interest are the other linked articles such as My stance on NDAs is that i only sign specific ones that actually relate to confidential information. And i only do that… Read more“On NDAs and My NDA Policy”

I still get a lot of searches and hits on my “Mytube” page as well as some inquires by mail…which tells me two things. One is that people still do not fully understand how to fully use flex and the other is that RIAs are pretty popular these days. To… Read more“On Adobe Flex and dynamic websites”