I recently watched the film Rendition starred by Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep. While I’m not much of a film critic, I would say that this movie entertained me. That is, if you call being afraid, entertainment.

The film is about an Egyptian working in the U.S. as a chemical engineer wrongfully accused as a terrorist. This poor fellow travels to South Africa and maybe to some other countries as part of his job. One day, arriving from South Africa, this Egyptian was abducted by the CIA and his record in the flight manifest deleted. The story goes on to disclose that after 9/11 (the famous terrorist attack on the twin towers at New York), the U.S. government drafted a law(?) that allows them to immediately detain a suspected terrorist and/or deport them to a country that practices torture as a way of retrieving useful information. I’m sure all of us know that the U.S. don’t use torture to interrogate suspected terrorists. Yeah, right. Read more »

So, what is Microsoft up to nowadays?  No, not the bid to buy Yahoo.  It seems it is creating a new programming language code-named “D”.  “D” will be a declarative language – it describes what something is like, rather than how to create it.  Examples of declarative languages are markup languages like HTML, XML and to some degree Flex’s MXML.  It really is meant to be used by web developers who are not hardcore programmers.

I have no idea why we will need this language but I can’t wait to use “Z”.

So, you just bought a new desktop or laptop and it came pre-installed with Windows Vista. You decided to maintain a blog and you would like to customize its theme. You know that customizing a theme is tedious so you decide to setup a local version of your blog. You download the Windows version of Apache, MySQL and PHP. Problem is, with the supposedly more secure Vista system, you can’t make some of them to work with the other.

I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that I’ve experienced this. Using the ever trusted Google, I found this. It’s very neat – it has a video of how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on Vista.

How ironic is it that the man who probably made the phrase “open source” cool doesn’t even use a mobile phone? Does he really have a world of his own or is he just trying to invent a new way of being hip.

Do you have Linux on your mobile phone?

I don’t even have a mobile phone! I hate phones in general because I’m the kind of person that when I work I want to concentrate on my work and if somebody calls me that completely destroys my concentration. I hate phones because they just disturb you, and mobile phones are even worse because you have them with you all the time, so I don’t do mobile phones at all. I have one of the early Linux mobile phones in my workroom because I got it for free, but its not turned on. I have Linux on all my machines but not on any phones.

The full interview can be read here.

With the advent of information technology, multi-tasking has been a very abused word – writing code while managing a project, working on 2 or n different complex tasks at a time (and your boss expects both tasks to be accomplished the same day), chatting while working, etc.  Studies show that multi-taskers are probably doing a lousy job if they’re trying to do more than four things at once.  By the way, this looks like the story of my professional life, except for the chatting part of course.  Read this:

Researchers at the University of Oregon have concluded that the human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time. The limit for most individuals is four, according to the research team led by University of Oregon psychology professors Edward Awh and Edward Vogel.

The multitasking cap is not affected by the complexity of one’s thoughts. Surprisingly, as many complex concepts can be retained in short-term memory as simple thoughts, the researchers found.

They said that people with high IQs can think about more things at once but that doesn’t mean they have easier time passing tests or having successful jobs.  They can store more memory but not necessarily that clear.  I’m trying to think of how I can make a parallel example of a computer but… I can’t think clearly while watching the TV.