Servus Humillimus

Changes

Lots of changes going on this month. Just completed my class, moved, and now summer is here. Really hoping for a nice summer.

Oh Justice! Where art thou?

It seems to me that just about every other day when I read the news, the world in general is getting more immoral  people are getting more callous and the number good folk who stand up for the defenseless and oppressed seems to be diminishing  Even those who consider themselves good, loving, caring, don’t  want to get involved and therefore will simply look the other way.

I sometimes get discouraged and just want to shout from the rooftop, oh justice, where art thou!

We need more room in the building!!

I haven’t done this in a while but I want to get back to posting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, my favorite new (and old) tracks. Stuff that I think is new, fresh, might be old but at least awesome and worth spending your hard-earned dollars on. So without much ado, this week I present two really amazing tracks. these are:

• Skanks by DECiBEL featuring Flowdan  (ENiGMA Dubz Mix): This trak is simply amazing, It’s a mashup of dubstep, dancehall and bass! The line the keeps getting repeated on this track is “we need more room in the building”. I don;t
• Zim Zimma by Joker: A truly amazing, amazing dubstep track! I don’t know what else to say.

What’s interesting about the Zim Zimma track is you listen to the Zim Vision version, that track should immediately take you back to BBC Radio 1′s 2010 Mista Jam Dubstep Soundclash show where he pitted dubstep crews representing Manchester, Bristol, London and The Midlands. These included folks like Doctor P, Plastician and Flux Pavilion among others. I remember hearing Joker tracks back then that have elements of Zim Zimma, both in the original version and more so in the Zim Vision version.

I can only say that I will be looking to buy these tracks when they are officially released. In the meantime you can fine samples of these tracks on Sound Cloud and on YouTube.

Yesterday I went swimming

Yesterday I went swimming. Its been over a couple of years since I last swam… and I can’t really remember clearly when I actually swam on a regular basis. I was originally going to swim for about 20 minutes then leave but instead I swam for an hour and a half… taking breaks of course.

I have to say that afterwards I felt really good. I was rather dehydrated but I really felt energized. I have decided I am going to get back into a regular swim routine like in younger days back in my hometown when my lap swimming was something I did on a twice weekly basis with a couple of buddies of mine.

Visualizing User Authentication Logins

For a while now I have noticed the new type of login that certain touch screen devices including certain Android and Windows 8 devices. This is the swipe based log in method where the user will swipe their finger drawing a specific pattern across the screen. This pattern may be drawn across a number pad or an image depending on the device and is predefined by the user.

I know a few people who use this on their phones and they love it because they feel it is a faster way to log in and supposedly more secure?

I on the other hand think it is a really lousy form of password protection. Why? Because from a distance it can be pretty easy to see and memorize the log in pattern left behind when the user logs in. Let me explain. Most of the implementations I have seen this method are such that when the user swipes their password combination the interface will leave a trailing pattern. This pattern is relatively easy to memorize and will give one an idea of what the password combination is. For example if the pattern is in the form of the letter ‘Z’ and you know the keyboard layout was a number pad then the combination could likely be ’1235789′.

What really struck me about this method was that as I was watching this person unlock their phone on the bus, the image of the pattern immediately stuck in my head. As a result I felt that had someone asked me to guess what the unlock number combination was, I am fairly certain that I could guess it. It would have been a lot more difficult for me to try to guess the unlock code had she simply typed out the combination.

I suppose you can always argue that removing the trailing pattern would help alleviate the flaw and I think that is true… however I feel that there should be better ways of authenticating a user. I just started using Google’s 2 step authentication which I am really liking and will blog about it soon.

How to Develop Good Study Habits

Growing up I never really liked studying. this was especially so in primary school and in the first part of high school. In part I was rather lazy and preferred to bury myself in books… books such as Billy Bunter, the Chronicles of Narnia and just about anything by Enid Blyton. The other part of the equation is that I didn’t have very good study habits. I just didn’t know how to study effectively and so it took me twice as long to really understand my schoolwork. I especially hated math which was ironic considering that my mother was a math teacher. However, things did turn around for me. There were two significant points in time that actually helped me immensely to become a much better scholar.

The first of these incidences happened when in primary school I came home with a less than stellar math report card. My mom took one look at the report and declared that it was ridicules that I would come home with such grades when there was a math teacher in the house. That school vacation she began to tutor me in math. What was interesting was besides that fact that I was actually paying attention (its my mom so how could I not pay attention), her style of teaching was very different from the other math teachers I had in the past and many to come. The lesson I learned here and this was reinforced years afterwards in my other classes, a good teacher can make all the difference. This is true not just at school but also in all areas including at work. There are those who are really smart but when it comes to teach or explain a concept, they do a really poor job leaving students and/or the audience lost and mystified.

The second significant incident happened years later while I was in boarding school. The boarding school I went to for the last half of my high school experience was really, really strict. For example, if your socks were not pulled up, or your tie was not straight, you would immediately be called out during the morning assembly and sent to detention right after. The school performed well academically and that was in part due to the fact that every day (except Saturday) after dinner there was mandatory study prep time. This was from 7:00 pm to 9:30 PM. Lights out was at 10:00 PM. Students were woken up at 5:00 to do chores till breakfast. The final year students were exempt from the chores however they had to go to class and study till breakfast time. What I found out after about two to three weeks of this routine was that once it had become a habit, studying like this was actually fun and easy to settle into this sort of routine. I suppose it also helped that in a rural boarding school in Kenya, there were no disruptions like TV, Cable, Internet, Facebook, etc. The lesson learned here is that setting aside a timetable that you stick too and creating a routine free of interruptions and disruptions will help you develop better study habits. The key is that the first 2 or so weeks will be akin to a stumbling block but once you get over the hump then the rest becomes a lot easier. I believe this concept can be applied to anything you would like to get better at, for example getting an exercise routine to keep in shape and/or lose weight.

These two concepts outlined above will help you go a long way towards attaining your goals of developing better study habits.