Remembering Aaron Swartz - Raw Thought

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

 - Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)

Last week, I was saddened to hear the news about the death of Aaron Swartz. While I have never met Aaron in person but I was a regular follower of his blog and work for many years. Both of these led me to deeply admire and respect him. His tireless work against the passing of the SOPA bill was of significant interest to me because of the serious implications of the bill. As a programmer his talents were legendary and as an activist his tireless efforts admirable. His passing is indeed a great loss. The Economist has a nice obituary here that perfectly reflects this sentiment. 

As an avid reader of his blog, I am deeply saddened to know that there will not be anymore updates to the site. So I decided to collect all of his blog posts over the years and compile it into a PDF/Ebook. So this past week, I wrote a simple Python script that crawled Aaron's weblog and retrieved all of the posts one by one and complied them into a single file.

Happy Holidays!

Its time for the holidays and the normally bustling campus is now relatively quiet. The weather seems to be quite erratic though. Its sunny, rainy and chilly all within the same day and on most days the skies look like this. 

Not that it dampens the spirit of the holidays though. Happy Holidays!

Getting Flash to run on Tor for Mac

Tor, by default does not support third party Firefox plugins such as Flash and Javascript and this makes it difficult to view websites such as YouTube and other sites that require flash. This tutorial aims to address the issue for Tor Browser running on Mac OS X.

We already assume that you have Tor browser installed and running. If you don't have it installed, you can download it from here and follow the installation instructions. 

Step 1: Download and install Flash Player for Mac.

Anatomy of a busy month

February 2012 was a very busy month for me. I have survived numerous busy days and weeks in the past, most of which usually culminate in important deadlines, but I don't ever remember having had a hectic month in recent memory. The trend has however been the same though - it usually results in me compromising my sleep. This past month was going to be something similar, but this time I decided to keep track of my sleeping habits for the month. Initially, it looked like just a fun thing to do, but as the month progressed the data I gathered showed some interesting patterns. It wasn't until the end of the month that I decided to analyze the data that I had collected and study it.

Interview for IES

Back in August, I conducted an interview for IES (Institution of Engineers, Singapore) as part of their National Engineering Day 2011 (NED 2011) efforts to encourage high school students in Singapore to consider engineering as a career option. While I have conducted many interviews in the past for my school and college magazines, this was the first time I did a project that is outside of school and up for display publicly. It was fun and exciting and I enjoyed the process even though wrestling with semantic nuances was challenging at times. 

I wanted to share this now that its up on their website.

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National Engineers Day 2011

Interview with Ms Wang Ai-Chie Principal Package Design Engineer, Micron Semiconductor Asia Pte Ltd Written by: Mr Rohit Menon (Temasek Polytechnic). Ms Wang Ai-Chie. I was invited to meet Ms. Wang in..

30 Day Challenge for October

My 30 day challenge for October is to 'learn a new word everyday'. Its been nine days into the challenge and I have been consistent in my effort. I shall be updating this post daily with the words that I have learnt. The list goes as follows:

Report on 30 Day Challenge for September

My 30 day challenge for the month of September was to 'stay away from carbonated drinks'. I have always loved drinking Coca-Cola (and other aerated drinks) and been hooked on to it for so much time that my dentist began to complain. I used to drink at least three cans of cola on an average day and this was the case for quite a long time. I could actually differentiate between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So to try and beat this habit, I embarked on this challenge. Initially during the first week and a half it seemed unpalatable, particularly when the weather here is so hot during the day. I substituted my regular choice of drinks with iced tea, cold chocolates and smoothies. Eventually, it turned out better than expected and I was able to stay away from the cola for the entire month except for one instance at the F1 Singapore GP, where the only other alternative to coca-cola was beer.

This challenge might seem a little mundane but the idea was to break out of this habit. I am glad I did. Its been more than a month now and I still haven't really felt the urge to pop a cold one.