FOR AUTODIDACTS

The best way, i believe, is by learning yourself. Having a thirst for knowledge is a great gift.

Here is a link for people who are interesting in a path to learn CS.

https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science

Happy Learning!

WHERE IS OUR HUMANITY

Yesterday i came across a video of a girl being beaten and burnt by a crowd of people somewhere on our planet. How much far we have come from what we really are. We are humans and our first and foremost duty is humanity. To respect each other. To show affection to each other. To help out each other. It seems like we have totally forgotten all this. One of the reasons for this is our education system which is only filling us with ignorance. Ethics are no more a priority or not even a part of our system at some places. 

 I tried to place myself at that girl's place to feel what she might have felt. It was hard for me to stop my tears and it will be hard for any human being once he starts to think like that. But no one from that crowd was a human i guess. How mercilessly she was burnt afterwards. The crowd of made a proper circle around and watched that poor girl writhe in fire. The person in making video was more interested in making the video. Technology is also playing a major role in making us lose our humanity.

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." Albert Einstein

Some so called open-minded and rationalist people might try to argue about the crime of that girl. I didn't pursue for finding that out. No crime deserves such punishment. We cant blame the Human Rights Organizations for this because no matter how much work they do our condition will not improve unless we want to improve and change ourselves. Every other day there is a major human rights violation. Nothing really happens in response. We have become numb and we are living in a delusional state. We have become egocentric. We don't care unless something happens to us. We will never achieve happiness unless we overcome this egocentricity. Once a man came to Buddha and asked "i want happiness". Buddha replied "remove i and want then what is left:happiness".

I usually don't like to talk about religion because thats not my work. That's the work ulemas. Here i just want to mention one of qualities of Prophet(PBUH). And i am sure that same would have been the quality of prophets in different religions. That is Empathy. To put yourself in others shoes. To try to feel others pain and happiness. Situations like these can be avoided if we simply adopt this quality.

In the end a "human" comes running and throw some extra petrol on her and... girl's body becomes still and scorched. We need to think and we need to become humans. That's what we really are. And we have to learn to control ourselves from the things that take us away from our HUMANITY.

CRUSADES

Recently i started reading a book on Crusades. Its actually a 3  volume collection from Steven Runciman. I have finished vol 1. I was always amazed by the word of crusades. So it was a very interesting experience for me. Book is very well written. Runciman gives an excellent pre-Crusades analysis to explain the the reason and need for Crusade movement. Besides all the enjoyment in reading the book i also learnt some new things. I concluded that even all the crisis we are facing today worldwide we are still living a much better life than those times. I read how human beings have massacred the earth and butchered each other. Some things i read it was hard to imagine that such a thing humans can do. So we have  lost our humanity for quite a long time now. This thirst for power is not new in human beings. I hope that one day a better day will come and world will be a better place. Although some say hope is a sickness. We should learn to love to each other. Nothing in this world is better or has more worth than a human being.

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” 
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” 
― Mother Teresa

Internet of Things (IoT)

With advancement in embedded technology and microprocessor technology, it is now the dawn of IoT. This technology is going to impact on our lives in massive ways. It is going to change the way we think, we eat , we shop and alot of other things. The impact on industry might be equal to industrial revolution of 19th century(to be precise). So IoT has become a buzz word nowadays. Just google it and you will realize it importance. You cant see some of the investment and ROI stats from Gartner. They are interesting. 

              Okay enough of beating around the bush. Actually i recently had a chance to work on IoT. It was a suggestion from one of my teachers. My CS50 course was almost complete final project remaing and i was searching for something to work on for final project. It was good timing and a good suggestion. At the beginning i wasnt even aware of the term. So i started my research and soon started to get some idea about it. I started to get bore soon because of my ignorance of theory always. I like to practical in CS related stuff. So i bought some hardware which included a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, a credit card sized microprocessor, an Arduino UNO, some sensors and other related hardware. I will telling in detail when i will publish my project. I started playing with this hardware. It was amazing once I set a very basic IoT with the help of Ubidots Cloud and Android SDK but it was tough especially the android part. I will be explaining in detail later. If someone is urgent, email me. 

          Later i moved from Ubidots to Thingspeak for some reasons. It has some powerful features specially the analytics thing. Okay enough i guess.

Take care. 

A TRANSFORMATION

I have no added any post for some time now. Today finally i made up my mind after so many days procrastination. I have been actually going through a period of transformation recently. Thats the simplest way to say what has been happening. I actually had a interest in books but i was detached from them for a long time. In my this semester i started reading again and they are changing me in amazing ways. I like reading about the topics which normally people dont like even to discuss. Topics like Philosophy, History, Other Complicated type of books. I also like to read about computer science. Although i have not read many books. But I know that reading is a hobby i am never going to leave in my life. I would be reading Liberal Arts in future as well. I think everyone should read books because they liberate you. But not all books. I signed up for goodreads in 2015 and i have been adding books since then. You can see my lists here. I will be explaining further about this transformation and dilemma the people nowadays are living in. I think everybody should start asking some questions from himself. Like about purpose of life and about the things we do. How us and these things effect others. Just some food for thought. Excuse me for my English. I will be learning that as well. Okay i think its enough. Thanks.

We are not our Khakis.

 We buy things we dont need to impress people we dont like.

(Have you seen Fight Club movie. If not go watch that one.)

I am Back(also with CS50)

I was gone for some time. I can say that some transformation was going inside me. My very old love of books is back. I have a "mini library" with me now. So as I was busy in reading couldnt give much time to my CS50 course. But after giving it few days I have successfully completed my psets upto pset8. All I am left with is Final Project and pset0. Yes i didnt submit pset0 before I dont really remember now. Below i am giving my workspace link. You can visit and take help :). Also i am figuring out what i should do next. Have googled and found some good links .... lets see. If you have any suggestions you can say so. Thanks in advance. Take care,

https://ide.cs50.io/shahzadb13/ide50

 

50 Greatest Hits of Abida Parveen

I am very fond of music. Any genre. Recently I was trying to download a good album of Abida Parveen. Abida Parveen is a Pakistani folk and sufi singer. She has a great voice and and is one of the masters of her genre. You can read more about her here. So i did find a good album on iTunes Store namely 50 greatest hits of Abida Parveen. I wasnt really looking for that. So I found that album in same quality for free here. Take care.

NOTE: Not promoting piracy. You are responsible for your actions. 

Network/Socket Programming 

In my fifth semester in MIS I have been given peer to peer software as a project by my instructor. This is a very new topic for me and I took it as a challenge. Although sort of regretting now :p. So i started searching for a nice tutorial regarding this topic. One thing became clear to me in my hunt that for every network involving software you have to learn socket programming. So in one of the replies of the question asked by me in Quora someone reffered me to Beejs guide to Network Programming which is proving to be very good. You can visit that here. Take Care :)

CS50 INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER SCIENCE

HARVARDx

I started this course on edX in mid January this year. It is my first online and CS course. I learned a lot so far and hoping to learn even further. I am pset8 right now which is the last one and then final project. I have time till end of December. David J. Malan is a great teacher no doubt. It used to get quite tough some times but I took that as a challenge and worked my way through. The toughest pset for me was pset5(dictionary). At first I couldn't even understand what is hash table and this trio thing.

But after working bit by bit and completion I have a very good understanding of Data Structures. The transition from C to Web Programming is tough too but my experience in dictionary helped me go through that. I believed that I could do it. Same is going on as I am starting pset8. JavaScript is giving me a tought time. a lot of new things are introduced like underscore library and twitter's typeahead. I am beginning to understand the logic but syntax is a little hard to swallow. 

The decision of taking CS50 is the one of my best decisions of life. I am learning what I love. The main thing I learnt is problem solving. I would advise anyone going to learn CS to not even think about taking this course just go for it.
You can view my workspace  at https://preview.cs50.io/shahzadb13/ide50.
I thank Harvard and especially David for this great course. 
TAKE CARE.

SPECIAL OLYMPICS/SPECIAL CHILDREN

"My disability is my greatest ability "
"THE ONLY DISABILITY IS BAD ATTITUDE"

Today i attended an event at my Pakistan Navy Engineering College about Special(disabled) Children. It was a great experience and an eye opener. There are people out there working for these children. Very nice to see that. I also learned about Special Olympics an organization which holds sports events for these children. One of the representative from the Special Olympics Pakistan was guest. In his presentation he explained about their work and their participation in the international event and how they are helping families to deal with their disabled children. GREAT WORK!. You can read more about them here.
The team which participated in the events was here too. It was great to hear each of them how they have participated. They are children with great courage. They are really SPECIAL.

I truly hope that I somehow help them one day.
TAKE CARE.

Data Encryption System

Today I learned about DES. DES is a block-cipher encryption algorithm. I googled for DES and finally found a link quite helpful. To learn more about DES go here while i focus on its implementation.

Why I started this?

I created this blog to serve me as a diary of some sort. I will add everything I learn new about CS. I started my journey with CS learning in Jan, 2016.Currently I am doing CS50 from edX(on pset8 now). I learn things but soon I forget and I have to go to man pages or google things to remind myself. So to avoid doing that and doing a lot of google searches in some cases i will just head for my blog. The things that i write can be anything new i learn(even outside of CS sometimes). Others may find this helpful. For that i will include useful links too which helped me. But they might not be helpful to some because people have different styles of learning.THANKS