The Official Blog of Ronald Ishak

Recently I have been trying to figure out how to twitter more efficiently. Something really fast like a dashboard widget but still full featured. Then while googling around today, I found out about the Fluid web browser. This application lets you turn any URL into its own program by creating “URL specific browser applications”. So then I added Hahlo (the iPhone twitter webapp) as one of these programs and now its sitting nicely on my menubar! Checkout this Lifehacker article on how to do just that! Fluid works only on Mac OSX.

Apple released their long awaited iPhone 3G yesterday and wow it was a stellar introduction. I stayed up until 3:30AM just to listen into the live audio feed here in Singapore. Sure its an amazing new product with new colors, but its really nothing stellar. I’m on the Apple iPhone developer program just to get the new firmware and really, theres nothing new. The only new thing is the new 3G (with HSDPA 3.5G and GPS). Other than that, stuff like the rotating calculator turning scientific, is old news. Here’s why I’m still looking forward to the Bold.
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Every now and then I come across a speech that inspires me. From Steve Jobs, to Barack Obama’s latest speech on racism. This is probably one of the best speeches done by a 12 year old. Amazing!

With third-party apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch looming, games (for once) could become Apple’s killer app. There’s only one company on earth that has come back from behind to wrest a multibillion-dollar market away from Sony, beat back a grasping Microsoft and delight tens of millions of customers around the world in the process.

read more | digg story

JOEL OSTEEN’s sermon on embracing change:

We have to stay open for change. Don’t approach change from a negative point of view to where you automatically assume its gonna be bad. It may be negative on the surface but remember, God wont allow that to happen if it didn’t have a purpose for you. He’s gonna use it to stretch you. Don’t be discouraged over the people that leave you life. you need to realize it is only the beginning. You may think that they are doing you wrong but they are actually doing you a favor. God would not have stirred it up if he doesn’t have something better in store. When things start stirring, thats a sign transition is coming!

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Peter Morrissey is one of the Go-To persons in charge of the AirOrange network at Syracuse University, basically the campus ISP. I recently got to sit down and chat with him to talk about AirOrangeX, the new 802.1X secure WLAN on campus. Here’s some interesting facts I found out:

The university has 2x 200Mbit connections to the internet (both upstream and downstream) and also a 200MBit connection to Internet2 (the lame education network nobody really uses). The university also throttles its traffic, so when you think your bittorent is getting its full university bandwidth, its really not. Its nothing new for a place that needs to protect its users from RIAA legal notices.

This just got me thinking how fast my internet is at my apartment. University has a 400MBit downstream and my Verizon FiOS Business class gives me 50Mbit dedicated downstream. I get a full 6MB/s when I download my torrents. I cant even imagine how fun it would be to use 400MB for myself! Thats 8 times faster that what I have, and prolly like 48MB/second! Wow, thats like downloading Ubuntu’s ISO in under 20 seconds! Gotta love university networks~

I was just being sad and I tried so hard to smile. I stumbled on this clip and its very beautiful and inspiring. Sometimes we all need a break from everything. Smile and you’ll be ok!

This one directly of ValleyWag:

An anonymous software engineer who says he used to work on AdWords, Google’s lucrative if straightforward ad-selling system, has written a blog post explaining why he’s leaving the search giant. Unfortunately, his tenure at Google did not include a tutorial on the use of the “Return” key, and most of his post is one long paragraph reaching 1,422 words. Here’s the 100-word version on why he split for a social-networking startup.

There are the perks: health benefits, free food, on-campus gyms, a beach volleyball field, the tech talks. Disneyland for three days. There’s Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, or Calendar. I felt proud to work at the company that built these. Every engineer gets either two 24″ or one 30″ monitor, as well as a company laptop. Then there’s the community. In general, Googlers are a great bunch, and smart. But I am more a startup person than a big-company person. At a startup, every individual has a impact. As a recent Google employee, I would have never gotten rich there, even if the stock had doubled or tripled in price. Other Google-specific problems: it is unlikely to work in an area that one is passionate about. Another scale-related problem: Due to the size of the code base, it takes a long time to actually become productive at Google, which can be frustrating at times.

Google recently introduced the preview release of AppEngine, a new development platform that utilizes Google’s power to help people create amazing web applications. All this technology was introduced last night but unfortunately their limit of 10,000 applications have already been filled! Time to go on the waiting list. *sigh* But don’t get discouraged yet! The AppEngine SDK is available here and it can build applications locally on your machine.

Google’s AppEngine tackles one of the biggest problems in making creating webapps, namely the platform and its costs. Building a Webapp requires a lot of work, from putting together you linux machines, setting up the SQL database, customizing Apache, etc. After that you have to build the application and worry about uploading it to a hosting server that can handle it. Even then theres more things to worry about such as hardware failures, scalability issues, etc. Google’s AppEngine fixes all these and lets you focus on building your webapp! All for the price of free, until you need more resources.

Unlike may webapps that run on PHP & mySQL, Google’s AppEngine runs primarily on Python making it integrate seamlessly with Google’s services! This is an amazing opportunity for people who want to create enormous webapps without having all the necissary computing resources. The website says it plans to support other language and platforms in the future.

So for now, its time for you to prepare and learn some Python! There are many places on the internet to start of with learning python.For starter’s try Python.org’s official beginners guide. You should also plan to attend Google’s I/O conference happening May 28 and 29 in Moscone West San Francisco. It costs only 50 bucks for students!

Transcript for Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

I’ve always thought that becoming successful meant having to get good grades, going to class on time, making sure you pass the class and sucking up to professors. But in the end, does it really matter? What is college all about? What is the promise of going to college?

Alan Watts, a philosopher from the 1950’s, thinks we’ve been deceived into thinking that taking on the traditional route in life will bring you success. This promise is why people go to school:

Do good in pre-school then move to first grade, then second grade, until you reach high school, then do well on your SATs to get into a ivy league university so you can get a good internship and finally a six-figure-income job.

You get the point. Realistically, it’s a promise with no guarantees. There are so many factors that can change your success rate weather it be the industry you’re in, the economy, and many other things we might not have seen coming. The things you really learn in college is your survival skills, not what you read in the textbooks. Its things like how you interact with people, handle stress, time planning, doing your laundry, etc.

Your professors and teachers don’t promise you how to get rich. If they knew, they probably wouldn’t waste their time on you. Remembering that private universities are very lucrative businesses is a sure way to make you think twice about your major. Times have changed, especially with the internet, you can learn many of the things you want to know by just searching Google or YouTube. Some of us just don’t bother looking for it.

The sooner you take control of your life and direct it, the faster you will get to your destination. Break out of your mold. Stop relying on the promise of educational institutions. There is no promised route to your success. The only sure way is to do what you love doing. Learn what you love to do. Somewhere along the way, the dots will surely connect.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

- Steve Jobs

Music and Life - Alan Watts