Some friendly requests to professors and instructors everywhere

This probably isn't news anymore for some people, but I recently jumped ship to another college and I do not reside anymore in De La Salle University-Manila. Old news aside, I like my new school, and I'm going to be staying in it for a good two years or so. The place is great (the places around it are better though), and most people there have quite some eccentric tastes and are actually interesting.

However, there are some do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts though) that I'd like to point out regarding my professors and instructors there. These will probably apply to everybody else out who are teaching to at least one other person besides themselves.

Don't put your class's/section's group on Facebook.

I for one try to avoid Facebook like it is an ugly part of town, but sometimes it just comes back like a bad habit and I end up being there anyway. For example, this post gets automatically advertised on my wall and every unfortunate person on my Friends list's news feed. Other notable examples include looking for someone, trying to communicate with people I barely meet every week, and checking out a group my professor made for the class I'm taking.

And the latter isn't really supposed to be there. Facebook is still a long, long way from being a good choice to organize serious groups, like groups between co-workers or, in my case, groups between instructors and students. For one, every privacy issue associated with Facebook profiles apply to groups as well. You really don't want outsiders knowing what your little private group is up to. That's why some companies opt for private corporate "social networks" because apparently people can't communicate on the Internet anymore if it doesn't involve a news feed or an instant messaging platform. I still communicate through old fashioned e-mail, and handle most instant communication through IRC (and sometimes VoIP), so that probably means I'm old.

What's a good alternative for Facebook groups? I'd have gone and suggested Yahoo!, but to me Yahoo! is just a silly company trying to be like Google but instead became a Google clone for those with inept computer skills and awful English. Google Groups is a good place to start, and there are also a lot of other services out there besides Facebook and Yahoo! that you can try out.

Stop handing out documents to students in formats other than PDF.

I like the Portable Document Format ever since it became an open standard at around the year 2008. It does a great job of preserving the original content and format of documents and its sheer portability and commonness is due to Adobe pulling a Microsoft move and telling everybody that their PDF reader and authoring tools are the only things that matter, when there are actually a lot more better readers out there and numerous ways to create PDFs. I can read PDFs on my desktop, my ThinkPad, my tablet, my phone, and my Kindle. And that is good.

However, some instructors thought it was a good idea to hand out documents to their students in their original, editable document forms. The "editable" part isn't the problem here, I actually do not give a shit whether I can manipulate my copy of the document or not. The problem is, handing out documents in such formats hinders portability, because, for example, files that use Microsoft's new formats (*.docx, etc.) look messed up when you're not using something that has Microsoft's name on it to open them. Sure, LibreOffice has done a good job of at least trying to preserve the original formats and looks of Microsoft .doc and .docx files, but when I open these files in my tablet or my phone, things get really ugly. I haven't tried opening .doc, .docx, or .odf files on my Kindle yet, probably because I think that's a very stupid idea.

Instructors should save all the documents that they're going to hand out to their students as PDFs - this goes for presentations as well. This saves me (and other students as well) a lot of time trying to figure out the original format of the file when LibreOffice is having a hard time opening it. Don't know how to save a document as a PDF? Your (probably pirated) copy of Microsoft Office 2010 has that functionality built inside it already.

Don't upload your materials to Rapidshare (or some other bad "filehost").

Right now as I'm typing this, I'm also downloading an economics textbook encoded as a PDF about 69 megabytes big. The size really shouldn't be a problem here - 69 megabytes are downloaded in less than 10 minutes by my connection on average. But right now the estimate says it's going to take a bit like 40 minutes to download (not adjusted to compensate for how badly Chrome estimates remaining download times). The problem lies where the file lies - Rapidshare.

Rapidshare has earned its share of popularity for being the [probably most popular] site that annoys people trying to access it and ripping off people stupid enough to avail of their services by coughing up some euros. The site throttles down your download speed when you're just getting your files for free, and you can't even download more than 2 files at once; both problems are remedied once you've given in to your sanity and you've decided to pay up. They're also not the only one doing this, there are countless of other "file hosts" out there ripping off each other's business models.

The solution for this would be to use an actually decent file host, like Mediafire, or create a Dropbox account and share the files from there. And if the file is really big, it's not too hard to just make a torrent out of it.

Oh, and after finishing the first draft of this post, reading through it two times and doing some edits here and there, my download from Rapidshare isn't even done yet. That means I'm probably going to be staying up late again trying to create a very minimal presentation that no one can understand unless they listen to me talk while I'm presenting. Thanks a lot for making me lose my sleep, Rapidshare!

The 3 best and worst websites I have visited this 2011

With computers being one of my areas of expertise, it comes to no surprise that I'm an avid user of the Internet. I've been on the Internet since 2004 and from my experience, the standards in website UI design have changed dramatically over the years. There are some who took the aspects of design further, leading to beautiful websites that are also easy to navigate. However, there are also websites who disregard UI design, which impacted the overall usefulness of their websites.

Here are the 3 best websites I have visited this year, along with their bad counterparts.

1. Good: Newsmap.jp

URL: http://newsmap.jp

Don't let the URL fool you, the site is not in any way written in Japanese. Newsmap is a small website that grabs news from various news feeds around the web and displays them in a neat, color-coded grid boxes. These boxes are arranged according to importance and popularity using size. So essentially, the most breaking and controversial news are displayed in large text, while the not-really-that-popular ones are in smaller text. You can untick categories in order to hide them and give more space to other categories. Finally, news feeds can also be arranged according to country and region, although support for all countries and regions are still incomplete (unlike Google News).

Bad: Inquirer.net

URL: http://inquirer.net

Inquirer.net is the web site of the Philippine newspaper "Philippine Daily Inquirer". Like most other Philippine websites, it has lagged behind in terms of UI standards. For example, it uses an awful lot of tables for its layout, resulting in too many columns and rows displayed on the homepage. It makes navigation difficult, despite multiple navigation bars in the top and bottom of the site's home page. However, they are successful in their efforts to put the most breaking news on the front, where they are easy to spot. Additionally, they use a pleasant and well-balanced color scheme that is easy for the eyes. They need some work on the layout, though.

2. Good: Reddit

URL: http://reddit.com

Reddit is a place where people share links and rate them by giving upvotes and downvotes (similar to Youtube's like/dislike system), and give comments to content posted on the site. One good feature of the site is giving the users the ability to create sub-reddits, which are similar to subcategories. There are subreddits for different kinds of topics, like gaming, worldnews, etc.

Bad: Digg

URL: http://digg.com

Digg is a competitor to Reddit, since Digg also allows its users to share, rate and comment links. However, content on Digg has been recently monopolized by large media outlets, leading to most of its users leaving and finding more "open" link sharing sites (a large number of them migrated to Reddit). Digg had a good design before the "Diggpocalypse", however, after that everything became too blue and it was a lot harder to navigate than before.

3. Good: Imgur

URL: http://imgur.com

imgur is an image hosting site. The description probably ends there, but what I like about imgur is its very minimalistic approach to hosting its users' images. You just have to select your images, upload them either individually or as an album, and when it's done, you will be given links of all kinds. And those links are free from URLs to imgur, unlike other image hosting sites like Imageshack...

Bad: Imageshack

Imageshack is another image hosting site. It is reliable, however, the interface of the whole site is very, very messy, with advertisements everywhere and such. Also, the interface is not very intuitive, and new users can get lost trying to navigate its screens. Worst of all, Imageshack adds URLs to the links it gives to you for your images. For example, its pre-generated BBCode for forums has a link to Imageshack ("Uploaded with Imageshack.us"), and if you remove that part, the BBCode and the image will not work.

Learning a new language: A great way to tell how much you hate yourself

Recently, I've been studying 日本語 (Nihongo), because apparently I've decided that two languages weren't enough to make myself look presentable in polite society and that I don't already hate myself enough.

To anyone who've tried to study Nihongo like me, we both know that installing that language as one of your own is like trying to stab yourself with a plastic spoon. It's difficult and ineffective, but not pointless. For starters, you will have to memorize two new "alphabets" (or writing systems), Hiragana (ひらがな) and Katakana (カタカナ).

That shouldn't be too hard wouldn't it? After all, you only have to memorize 192 characters, and that includes their だくおん (dakuon) and はんだくおん (handakuon), as well as the よおん (yoon) combinations. While that seems like a feat that requires months to accomplish, I've managed to read (albeit at a slow pace) Hira and Kata without peeking into a reference sheet every ten seconds in three and a half weeks. Also, don't forget that you have to learn how to write that shit as well.

Memorizing the "alphabet" doesn't end with Hira and Kata. You will now have to go through memorizing Kanji. Kanji is basically Chinese characters borrowed from the...Chinese. The sad fact in getting your Kanji on is that you have to able to read, write, speak, and understand 1,945 of them. Now I didn't pull that number out of my ass, that's actually the number the Japanese Ministry of Education expects people living in Japan to know in order for them to be considered literate in the language.

Oh, and keep in note that Nihongo uses a completely different grammatical structure when compared to English. Saying "I am awesome" would turn into "I awesome am" when written in Japanese grammar. That's why no matter how great your translation program is, a clean automated Nihongo to English translation is almost always never achieved. Good translations are provided only by people who master both English and Japanese. Combine that with the fact that there are no Japanese syllables that constitute to the sound of "L" (hence "Engrish"), you might want to use a metallic spoon to impale on yourself than a plastic one, or you could use a lot of plastic spoons.

In addition to learning Japanese part time I'm also trying to get a grip of the Java programming language, as well as get acquainted with scripting languages like Python and Lua. While these languages are only used within a circle of geeks, the Java language is actually quite difficult, as it requires people to grasp an entirely new concept of programming which is called "Object Oriented Programming", also known as the sad attempt at making programming simple by attributing stuff in your code to real life entities.

At the rate I'm studying, I should be able to at least understand everything I need to understand so that I may pass the JPLT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the exam designed to test a foreigner's proficiency in Nihongo) in all levels, in about a year or sooner if I focus hard enough. Then the time will come when I successfully did everything I had to do then stare into the horizon, thinking, "What the fuck did I just do?", then spend some time thinking what language should I learn next. I heard Russian and Deutsche (German) is pretty cool, though, might want to put them in my list.