Thoughts

As they always say "Sharing is caring",  However, it struck me that for new generations, specially with those heavily using Facebook , that it might need emphasize on the different meanings that the term sharing started to have. "Sharing is caring"  means allowing others to use or consume something that belongs to self. usually food or toys among children. The term has evolved in the modern Facebook sphere. Sharing on Facebook started as actually something similar. You find something nice, you share it with others because you care about those others. However, when "others" become a mass, things gets different.  You can care about someone but you cannot care about "others",  that's why we call them "others". The caring implied by sharing drifted from those to whom we share,  to the person who is involved in the topic of sharing. Or the voice of original author of something, who will be offered more exposure and outreach by you...

Nearly a couple of weeks ago, I got system update of Android 6 , Marshmallow on my  Google Nexus 5 . Having system updates early is one of the things I like much about  Google Nexus devices. There are several wonderful things in the new android, but I was eagerly waiting for this update, specifically for the selective permissions module. Lots of android apps use lots of excessive permissions. too much than necessary IMHO. However, let me tell you about how I found things. One of the things I liked a lot since my last version of android is the launcher app menu,  I used to have to swipe left several times to get to apps with names starting with letters coming late in the alphabet (Z, x, S,  and arabic names).  Android 6 default app menu avoids this horizontal scrolling. and: 1) Uses vertical scrolling which is more natural and usable for users 2) Allows you to search apps, to reach the app quickly by typing a couple of letters form its name 3) The mo...

While working with data, we tend to deal a lot with CSV files. It is more efficient and trivial to manipulate csv data either through command line tools or through programming languages like ruby. However, occasionally we need to convert files to MS Excel format before sending them to 3rd party. Gnumeric is a wonderful opensource spreadsheet program.  It contains a command line convertion tool called ssconvert that can be used to perform direct conversion among lots of supported formats easily from the command line. For example, conversion from csv to xlsx can be done via ssconvert  file.csv file.xlsx OR ssconvert  file.csv --export-type=Gnumeric_Excel:xlsx It can be installed in ubuntu via apt-get install gnumeric In order to convert lots of files, I wrote a simple bash script that will process all csv files in the current directory and generate the corresponding xlsx files.  The script came pretty handy in data preparation. I believe i can be h...

According to a note from Google Adsense website,  starting last month, they rolled out new beta inventory of ads that might be bothering to some people, which is "Social Casino Games". This includes poker, bingo, lotteries among other games. If you are like me, do not like showing such ads even with the slightest possibility that they could be seen by the ads engine as relevant to some of your content,  you can opt out of them.  Simply by clicking "Allow and block ads" at the top, then choosing "Sensitive Categories", and block the categories you do not like. (see the image below)