I’ve heard the word twitter, politics, social media, arabspring so many times last week (again) – so I decided to finally yield to some temptation and do some analytics on how some politicians are using twitter by generating fact numbers.

From the tweeps,  @BarackObama seems to be doing a good job and is an international figure and such, I also wanted to take a local look on twitter and politics, but turned out that the Lebanese president twitter account is not that active and I was not sure it is verified.
So instead I did the analytics for the next person i could think of, Prime minister Najib Mikati, a friend told me he is tweeting himself and that his tweets are really good.

So here it is, a twitter analysis of “What are those politicians – now tweeps – tweeting about?“ (click full view mode arrows to actually see the thing)

There are way more details i could digg out, like make the list of tweets, the list of links, the list of images and such available for download – but I am bit too impatient with my internet connection to do this unless someone drops a comment and begs asks for them ;p

It’s been a sad sad sad week – another tech industry giant passed away.

I can not help but feel deeply sad and moved – it’s true Dennis Ritchie is another complete stranger, but his work shaped computing and tech as we know it. He is truly the modest giant whose shoulders we stand on. He is the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system.

In Dennis Ritchie days, computer hardware was way more diverse then we see today. Industry standards and regulations were not even born. Computers had differences in things we can’t imagine today, things as fundamental as character bit widths (8 bits per byte doesn’t suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?)
In those days, to code something, you had to do assembly code, in other words custom code written specially for each hardware.
So what did Dennis Ritchie actually do? He comes along and decides to specify a language that will let people write programs that are:

(a) high-level, with structures and functions

(b) portable to just about any kind of hardware

(c) efficient on that hardware so that they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware.

A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language.

In English words, instead of humans “speaking” machine languages, he made the machines “understand” a high level human language. It made it totally easier for us to tell machines what to do. It is literally like inventing communication between machines and humans in a way that suited humans.

He also created that language in a way that made it possible for all machines to understand it despite their fundamental differences.

The best of it all? It was not a huge performance hit on the oh-so-precious and oh-so-expensive hardware then.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done..

Obviously, Dennis Ritchie didn’t know that, after writing the world’s first portable and efficient programming language he went on to help build the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.

Can you now just imagine the “big deal” Dennis Ritchie was? can you imagine tech without him?

Today, C remains the second most popular programming language in the world (or at least the language in which the second most lines of code have been written), and ushered in C++ and Java; his work on Unix led to, among other things, Linus Torvalds’ Linux.

Ritchie’s desire to avert attention despite his contributions to computing, are among the first things most people who knew him point out. Perhaps for that reason, he was often the first to poke fun at his creations even while recognizing their special place in computing:

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”

And, of UNIX:

“It is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.”

Yet my favorite quotes remain :

“Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad — from prospecting to mining a known lode. These pressures manifest themselves not only in the disappearance of faculty into industry, but also in the conservatism that overtakes those with well-paying investments — intellectual or financial — in a given idea.”

“More than anything else, the greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance…As the intensity of research in a particular area increases, so does the impulse to keep its results secret.”

Ritchie is one of the most important, if not under-recognized, engineers of the modern era and to him, i give this meaningless small tribute.

I am not a TV person, but if John stewart is on, I gladly join for a good laugh (Watching over internet is still a luxury here). So when his book : Earth (the book) was announced – I was excited to get it… and by get it, I mean download it from the internet and read it on kindle.

I shared my enthusiasm with another bookworm (yes, when we get together we talk in shushed voices about what kinda stuff we are currently reading or planning to). This other bookworm also got excited about reading the book too since she is a John stewart person as well.

My procrastination and her zeal ensured that she got the book ordered and shipped from amazon across the seas before i managed to click “download”.

Few days later, the book was resting in my hands – I flipped thru it, it was shiny and colorful with images and all… the book is meant to be a guide for the aliens once they find earth. It explains everything and I seriously mean everything about our planet,humans, animals, plants, civilization, art, adverts…seriously, everything…

The start of the book was very slow – and i mean very slow – it looked like a bad version of Adam Douglas – Hitchhicker guide to the galaxy and it kinda reminded me of science classes in high school, except that I already knew this stuff.

First reading session and I started yawning – closed the book and went back to reading Gebran. A few months later (yes, months) and I still didn’t get the urge to complete reading the book… few more weeks and my bookworm friend wanted to give the book to another bookworm, so I had to find the book, once I held it there, I felt the need to “read a few more pages” – as i read, the thing became more and more interesting as it touched stuff about sex, civilization, religion, marketing, music and almost every aspect of life etc… what struck me is that there are some nice info-graphics in there! I specially loved the infographic in the marketing chapter.

So my final word is that the book is not jaw dropping yet has some priceless remarks and smart jokes that make it worth reading, It is definitely a book that took a lot of time to put together and has lot of attention to details (specially the images). I recommend reading it because it bluntly visualizes the history of mankind in all it aspects and I guarantee that after you close it you will get in a thoughtful mood and just by thinking about it all together you can get a fresh and new perspective on things or at least you can get a few new good jokes to tell to friends ;p

My sister(jocy) is a graphic designer, and the best thing about having a graphic designer in the family is that our afternoons “jalata” gets translated into visual images and illustrations to share on facebook.

To explain what i am talking about here are some samples from one of her facebook albums called “3al Lebneneh” – first i thought that she was collecting them from the internet – but it turned out that she and her friend were making them …. so from facebook walled gardens to the open blogsphere, enjoy some jalata 3al lebneneh !