Anas Ismail Khan

So, I’ve been up and laptop-ing for the last two hours or so, and all I’ve been doing is reading one article after another centered on programming languages. A good fraction of those articles lashed on how Javascript sucks. It’s been a lot of continuous reading, all thanks to catchy links located throughout the articles, and at any given time there have been at least 7 tabs (with articles) open at all times. Even as of now, there are exactly seven other tabs, besides Facebook, open in my browser.

It all started when I, scrolling through my news feed, out of sheer boredom, landed on a post by Richard Eng, an evangelist for SmallTalk whom I first came across on Quora, and while reading, I clicked on some other links and opened them in new tabs, and then the process repeated itself. The more I read, the clearer became Eng’s views on the different languages. It was clear that he hates JavaScript, and just the first part of this post by him shows that he definitely has a point.

While going through his list of his JavaScript alternatives, which are all basically Transpilers, I also discovered Brython, which is basically Python running in JavaScript’s place as the client-side scripting language. It’s pretty cool actually, although apparently the code is transpiled from Python to JS during runtime and that’s gotta take a toll on the performance.

Also, like countless other people, Mr. Smalltalk was kind enough to tell us that PHP is one of the three languages he can’t stand. While I agree that JS deserves to be on that list, my love for and comfort with PHP is too strong. It hurts when people constantly tell me that PHP sucks, and that it shouldn’t be used on any serious projects. Maybe they are right, maybe they aren’t, but I do believe that PHP is going to be around for a long time.

While reading about the desire for improvements to JavaScript, I wondered about what would be the best way to work towards them. They can’t just change everything like Angular did with the 2.0, that could break the web. But if they offer backwards compatibility, it would just keep growing and ultimately become a huge confusing mess.
I guess that it’s fairly safe to say, that with programming languages, it’s important to make the correct decisions during the initial stages of development.

You might be wondering what the point of this article is, or what exactly is the actual “dilemma.” To be honest, there isn’t a point. I’m just thinking out loud. Incoming opinions lead to indecisiveness, which in turn results in time going wasted.

The title might be a little too harsh, but I assure you, I’m not the only person who feels that way. I read the script and sometimes I wish I hadn’t. While there are some revelations in it that I like, there are other parts that I just can’t accept are canon.

if you have a motive. -Jason Statham (The Mechanic)

— Wayne Gretzky

which comes from bad judgement.

PHP based real-time dynamic-site-generator. Browse the code on GitHub  Demo

So, on Jul 22, 2016 I started off with a small project that I had been meaning to develop for quite some time. 

Grab a portkey!

There’s something of a silent war going on around us at this time, and it has been going on for quite a while. I know that I wrote “Virtual Reality” in the title, but that’s merely due to the fact that it’s the generally preferred term for all of those projects out there making headsets and goggles, but otherwise this post does cover my ideas about its brothers _that go by the names _“Mixed Reality” and “Augmented Reality.”

So, before we go on, let’s talk about how the brothers differ. Virtual Reality is where Oculus is the major player in the market, and has met fine success. The HTC Vive is another which may not have stirred as much excitement but so far, all things positive have been said about it. The idea of virtual reality, in terms your grandma could understand, is that you put on a headset and you find yourself in a different world altogether. You look around, and all you get to see is what the headset shows you, while you are completely distracted from what’s actually around you. Rather like the Nygmatech in Batman: Forever. _You put it on, and the next thing you know, you are in a forest; or perhaps in the middle of the _French Revolution?

Ever since it’s release in 2014, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”, _has often been compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”_

I was fairly late at watching both. Since I missed the release of 2001 by more than 30 years because I wasn’t at all close to existing around the time it was released and for the the first few years after I had started to exist, it wasn’t entirely possible for me to watch and comprehend it.
As for Interstellar, all I have to say is that I wasn’t really watching many movies when it came out. I guess it was because my internet sucked and because I was dealing with exams so I put it off for a while, since I didn’t want to ruin it by watching it in a hurry. It wouldn’t have made much difference, but since I had heard good things about it, I wanted to be relaxed and with ample time before I set about to watch it.

My reaction to both was: What the hell?

2001: A Space Odyssey,  is considered the ultimate classic and some would go as far as calling it the best one of Kubrick’s works_. (Having never watched any of his others, I can’t say much on the matter.) _ So it started off with a music that sounded pretty familiar and that’s all thanks to Toy Story, _and after a few minutes into it I was like what the hell? That scene didn’t have to be as stretched. And my reaction was pretty similar to the one in which a woman walks along a velcro’ed path carrying a lunch tray to a sleeping guy. The scene with the apes too was unnecessarily long so I fast forwarded through it and missed the actual punchline (_i.e. how they suddenly discover that a bone can be used as a melee weapon). Oh and the part at the end that is known as the “Stargate sequence” All you see for 10 minutes is landscapes with colors messed up and for what?
Other than that, the lack of a decent conclusion might make it a cool suspense for some, but for me, it makes it suck. Nothing was explained. Although the novels that were released, and the sequel that followed, and countless fan theories suggested that it was aliens leaving all those monoliths and stuff. Let’s face it though, who watched the sequel or read the novels? Not a lot of people. 

Minimalism helps. It always does. It’s clean, cool, beautiful and relaxing. Oh and it allows for security in software. Every single element in an application, every single feature, every program in an operating system could open doors for attackers to get in through.

The recently discovered Mac malware Eleanor, which opens a backdoor, works by exploiting a vulnerability in the MacUpdate application.

iPhone jail-breaking applications, not that I have anything against them, make use of similar vulnerabilities. The original JailbreakMe exploited a vulnerability in Safari in iOS 1.1.1, while the second version used a vulnerability in the PDF reader.

I do realize that it looks like I am suggesting that Safari or PDF readers or updating apps should not exist, but what I am actually suggesting is that the more an app grows, the greater the chances for an attacker to get in. We can always, at the very least, keep stuff simple. For example, smartphones could have less pre-installed bloatware? Samsung could stop shipping their devices with apps like “Papergarden” or “Flipboard” or “Samsung Apps”  installed by default?