I finished reading Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam recently. The author is French with a number of previous works in the area. This book was originally written in French in 2000 and was translated after the September 11 terrorist attacks with small changes incorporating them. The main thesis of Kepel is that… Continue reading Book Review: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
Author: Zack
Dad, gadget guy, bookworm, political animal, global nomad, cyclist, hiker, tennis player, photographer
Stupid Security Measures
Privacy International has come up with a list of the stupidest security measures all over the world. They have divided them into five categories: Most Inexplicable Security Measures Most Intrusive Security Measures Most Counter Productive Security Most Annoying Security Measures Most Egregious Security Measures Here are a few of the choice measures: Last September 2002,… Continue reading Stupid Security Measures
Mountains in Pakistan
I promised some time ago to write about interesting non-political stuff in Pakistan. This is the first post in that series. I hope that I can continue this series for some time. We’ll start with the mountains. The northern part of Pakistan is mountainous and there are three main mountain ranges there: Himalayas, Karakoram and… Continue reading Mountains in Pakistan
Book Review: Neuromancer
I finished reading Neuromancer by William Gibson this weekend. I am a big fan of science fiction, but don’t particularly like cyberpunk. Hence, this book was a surprise for me. I liked it a lot. It definitely grabs your attention. I read it in two sessions, on the way to Jersey and back. And guess… Continue reading Book Review: Neuromancer
Miscellaneous
If you are wondering why the posting recently has been sparse. Wonder no more. Spring semester winds up May 2. My teaching assistantship is more demanding work during the last month of the semester as the project is assigned and then graded in multiple steps. We usually break up the project into multiple steps so… Continue reading Miscellaneous
A Small Accident
I had a somewhat weird accident in my car a couple of days ago. A pedestrian hit my car. My losses: the driver’s side mirror. His losses: none. I was turning left on an intersection with a traffic signal at night. When I had almost completed my turn, something crashed into the front pillar of… Continue reading A Small Accident
Endorsement
Andrew Northrup for President in 2004.
Haloscan and Donations
Haloscan is down again: I’m working on the server scripts so for around 1 hour comments will be unavailable. That was definitely more than an hour ago. I don’t understand why they go down for maintainence so often. I’ll probably regret this later, but because of these frequent outages of the comments, I was thinking… Continue reading Haloscan and Donations
SARS
The major signal processing annual conference has been cancelled due to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). The 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) scheduled for 6-10 April in Hong Kong has been cancelled due to the recent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The annual conference is sponsored by… Continue reading SARS
Savannah
A friend and I visited Savannah, GA on saturday. It is an interesting town with a lot more history than Atlanta. We wandered around in the historic district and the riverfront. We visited Savannah history museum which was kind of small. It had some good information about the history of the city. It seemed to… Continue reading Savannah