Protests in Egypt

As you may know, there have been a series of events occurring throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. Many people have been, and still are, rising against what they feel are unfair conditions. The protests have been a source of hope and empowerment for many, and perhaps out of the ashes of chaos, a new beginning will come for many.

I found this video of a man shot in Egypt to be particularly powerful. I could feel the desperation, anger, and fear. It is a tragedy that people around the world must endure situations like these in an effort to create change. 

HP Photosmart Essential 3.5 Freezes as soon as I open it (solution)

In order to resolve the freezing, you must either disconnect your internet before opening the program, or add a blcok of HP Photosmart Essential 3.5 to your firewall (such as Norton). The easy way is to physically disconnect the Ethernet cable from your computer, and then open it.

The freezing was probably caused by trying to send information over the internet. It seems to freeze up on sending some data. If you look at the program, it is not actually frozen, so the hangup from data sending seems to be the likely culprit.

Eclipse on Ubuntu: Trying to Install Eclipse Communication Framework

If you're trying like I was to install the Eclipse Communication Framework on Ubuntu 10.04 and getting dependency errors, I have no easy fix for you. The work around I found was to not use the Ubuntu Package manager to install Eclipse. Instead, make sure you have a java runtime installed, and download eclipse straight from eclipse.org. When you get it directly from their site, the issues with the plugin go away.

If you're not sure how to install the java plug-in, the simple graphical way is to go to the synaptic package manager, and search for jdk/java. Then mark default-jdk for installation and install it.

When you download eclipse from the site, it's ready to go. Just put the folder where you want, and run it. Everything should work fine after that.


I hope this helps someone. Good luck!

Space X Falcon 9 Successful

I just finished watching the Falcon 9 launch. The rocket appears to have made it into orbit. It was a spectacular launch, and it appears that Space X has really started perfecting their system of rockets if this launch is any indication. Congratulations Space X!

link: Space X

Open Education (Education Aggregator)

I wrote a very brief blog article some time back about an education aggregator. That aggregator is still up and running, but I figured I would also write down an actual education website you can visit to expand your knowledge.

The site I visit the most often is MIT's OpenCourseWare. Here you can find, as the site says, "Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT." You can search through the content in many different ways, such as by class and topic. It has an impressive array of videos, assignments, tests and solutions. For instance, if you are taking first year calculus in University and are having trouble or are trying to go over certain materials, checking out their single variable calculus might be a good idea. For many of the lectures, a textbook is not required; generally a textbook is only needed for the assigned problems. The exams provide another conduit for practice questions when you are studying for an upcoming exam.

There are many more sites dedicated to providing and organizing course material to help you learn. I just thought I should post MIT's, as I have found this to be one of the most useful. Has anyone else found other sites on par with MIT's?

Oh, OpenCourseWare Consortium has an impressive list of institutions that are participating in the open learning movement, so checking this out can give you a huge list of new schools to explore as well.

Learning: Knowledge, the Future, and the Universe

Learning has always been something that I enjoyed doing. I remember as a child, I would look forward to getting a new workbook. I would sit and do it for hours on end. Learning has just always felt great to me. When I was in Grade 9, I got my first science textbook for class. The moment I got home, I sat down and started working through it. I worked for the rest of the day and had it entirely finished. The science classes for the rest of the year did seem quite slow after that, but there were always enough interesting facts thrown in by the teacher to keep me paying attention.

It's hard to describe how learning makes me feel; I find that very few people ever understand. I will be learning something new, when all of a sudden, I can feel the pieces fit together perfectly with other things I had learned, and I get the most amazing feeling. It is an addictive rush that I imagine is quite similar to the rush a sky diver or mountain climber gets. I will get tingly all over, overcome with such a great amount of emotion. Sometimes my eyes will even water from my amazement. It's one of the greatest feelings I have ever felt, and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

An example was in a calculus class. I was sitting in a lecture, and all of a sudden I got to a point where I realized that almost all the math I'd learned throughout my life had just been applied in a problem to come out with a solution that, to me, fit perfectly together. It gave me this immense sense of awe over the universe. It made me feel so tiny and so large instantaneously. On the one hand, I felt that these amazing laws fit so naturally together that everything must be guided by them, including myself, and that I was just a pawn of these forces. But on the other, I felt as if I had just taken a peek at the gears of the universe, and that anything was possible.

I like to think of the people who derived the ideas I'm learning. Often, the underlying ideas come from hundreds of years ago, which is astonishing to me because they didn't just learn it, they were enlightened enough to see that it needed solving, and created a method to figure it out!

The more I learn, the more frequently I find that I become amazed. When you're little, very often, you find yourself wondering what the point of the work you're doing is. But, as you get older, if you stay the path, you find out that all these seemingly worthless things you've acquired turned out to be the most vital aspects of understanding life. Thus, life long learning is not only important for your future career, but also to maintain a certain amount of awe for the world in which you live in.