August rolling by...

August is about to blow right by and September is right around the corner. Oh wait, this September is going to be different because I am not heading back to school. I’ll be continuing with my co-op work term at PDFTron for another 4 months before heading back to school in January. The non-exciting news is that the rain is going to come back, weather is going to be cold and transit is going to be packed again! Luckily, Translink did mention that they will be increasing the frequency of Canada Line during peak hours. Not to mention, be aware of the new policies with the UPass. There are 20 UPass Machines available to get your UPass at the UBC Central (aka Bookstore) and so there’s no need to get into massive lineup for it.

I read an article on Hacker News the other day about whether 0^0 is equal to 0 or 1. http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/12/q-what-does-00-zero-raised-to-the-zeroth-power-equal-why-do-mathematicians-and-high-school-teachers-disagree/ It’s very interesting to see all the hot debates in the comments section.

HP Touchpad. $99. After HP decides the slash the prices, there was a high demand to get a touchpad. So, what are the implications to HP selling at such a low price? I personally feel that it would hurt the tablet market now that a lot of people have a tablet and no one would want to buy other non-iPad tablets. I never looked closely to tablets since I was never interested but I was surprised at how expensive tablets were. Most of them were being sold similar to prices of the iPad. Does this potentially mean the market is there as long as the prices are lower?

Too long without an update… :(

Writer’s block? No. As usual, I haven’t blogged in 2 weeks because I’ve been dead busy. Somethings that I have noticed in the last bit:

Want to view a minified JS file but don’t want to waste fixing the formatting yourself? Try http://jsbeautifier.org/. All you have to do is copy and paste your code and it will beautify for you. However, some minifiers (spelling?) change your variable names from “book_name” to like “a” to save memory space and time used for parsing so jsbeautifier would not help you in this case.

Love JavaScript but too lazy to write the code? Try CoffeeScript. It is a little language that compiles into JavaScript and might save you time when you write the code. One down fall that I would see is that I’m not sure if it’s good to debug code that you did not write.

Buying books for the upcoming school year? UBC Bookstore prices are not a good value. Although I understand that the bookstore is a business after all, I find it very sad that they’re trying to make big bucks off the college students. Luckily, there are always alternatives. Discount Bookstore on campus is one choice while there are Amazon and ABE Books. If you’re thinking ordering online, there are international issues that have the same content but different questions (check if this is okay) and make sure to order these books in advance. Shipping might take a while. If all that fails, the UBC library usually has a copy of your textbooks available for reading only (no signing out).