Category: Books

MIT OpenCourseWare

There is a saying that goes something like: all new is just forgotten old. Sometimes it is very useful to go through old news and refresh your memory. There are things which were not important before but are now. There are things that you skipped accidentally. There are things that passed the edge of your memory.

I’ve mentioned MIT OpenCourseWare, I think, to everyone I know. Moreover, I did it several times. For those who still don’t what I am talking about – MIT OpenCourseWare is an effort of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make all its study materials available for the general public free of charge and in open formats. They have started with this program several years ago and they are following the plan until now.

Here is a quote for you from their recent mailing.

How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site?

The MIT OCW Web site now offers free and open access to 914 courses, ranging from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT schools — Architecture and Planning,Engineering, Science, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. With more than 900 courses available, users frequently ask, “Just how much educational content is really available on the MIT OCW Web site?”

MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 48 gigabytes in size; offering courses that contain 14,717 HTML pages, 15,640 unique PDF documents, and 16,078 images — overall 55,171 total files for use by MIT’s global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 536 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles.

Worth checking out – don’t you think?

Cryptonomicon

I have just finished reading “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson. It is a great action book for people interested in technology. There is a lot of stuff about cryptography, UNIX and computers in general, but it is also quiet an entertaining read.

You can read a proper review at Slashdot. There is a website for the book here. You can read few excerpts there aswell.

And, of course, you can get it from Amazon here for a mere $8 USD.

Rough Guide To Cyprus

Saturday again. :) This time we follow the instructions of the newly acquired by Hazard book – The Rough Guide to Cyprus by Marc Dubin at al. So, we go to Akamas all the way behind Polis and very close to Baths of Aphrodite. There’s a little tavern with fish meze on the menu. :) And then the sea – first, it has this magnificant dark cyan coming into dark blue color. Then, the waves. Waves are rather big, but very friendly. It’s like the sea is in the mood for swimmers today. :) Riding the waves is fun for those who don’t care to swim to much. :)

Back to Limassol for everyone to fall asleep suddenly.

Construction work in the office

It’ve been very noisy in the office for the lasts couple of days – there is a revolution and huge restructions. Partitions and cubicles get moved around, my boss is moved around, lots of staff from the cupboards all over the place.

It’s surprising how many “useful” things you can find in places that you haven’t looked at for few years. Things like yellow pages for 1990, 1992, and 1996… A box with some acient version of cc:Mail. A bunch of CDs with MS Office 97. Lots of floppy disks. Lots of license agreements. A bunch of books, which are all version specific, apart from an excellent “Unix Unleashed”.