Disqus - Latest Comments for turadg

Re: Why Your Goals Will Fail, and What You Can Do About It

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 13:50:17 -0000

How do you track MEAs in Day One? I use Day One for journaling but I'm not familiar with the "simple interface to list out your MEAs and keep track of those you complete."

Re: Info-rich course planning apps may lower grades

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 16 May 2018 12:32:12 -0000

Could it be that while GPA lowered, students were more likely to meet their personal learning goals?

That was a tentative finding of my 2011 research: http://repository.cmu.edu/d... (Chapter on Nudge, sharing some features with Carta.)

Re: Coursera Co-Founder Daphe Koller To Join Alphabet’s Calico

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 11:24:42 -0000

When you say "not a good sign to Coursera" do you mean it's a sign that they'll find a way to derive revenue from "such good content" so that they can continue to provide it?

Coursera and its university partners have provided a tremendous learning resource in the world and always offered it for free to those without financial means. If it doesn't earn money from those who have it to pay, it won't be around to provide it to anyone.

Some of the people who complain about Coursera charging definitely have the means to pay for the valuable education. I hope they remember that their money helps sustain the overall mission to provide universal access to the world's best education.

Re: Tree-shaking with webpack 2 and Babel 6

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 11:30:10 -0000

babel-preset-es2015-native-modules and babel-preset-es2015-webpack have been suggested in this thread.

Babel 6.13 made those separate presets obsolete.

https://github.com/babel/ba...

Now you can simply:
```
{
presets: [
["es2015", { "modules": false }]
]
}
```

Re: Referencing DOM from JS: there must be a DRYer, safer way

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 15:19:13 -0000

This is one of the reasons I like Thorax (http://thoraxjs.org). Because of its integration with Handlebars, you can easily specify in your template what action gets fired in your view. E.g. you can avoid an event hash entry altogether for your submit button:

{{#button "onSubmitClick"}}Submit{{/button}}

or if you prefer to fire a semantic event:

{{#button trigger="submitted"}}Submit{{/button}}

You'll still have to declare your input change event, but those are generally fewer than click UI events.

Re: SJSU, edX, and Getting it Right/Wrong on MOOCs

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:37:15 -0000

Clearly the word "open" has been accepted as "open access" not "open source". There's no changing that the term MOOC will be used for closed content.

Is there another term that would signify open _content_? Libre MOOC is explicit, but lMOOC can look like capital-i MOOC. oMOOC?

Re: Better Component Packaging for Rails' Asset Pipeline Integrating Sprockets with Bower, Twitter's asset package manager

Turadg Aleahmad — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:00:32 -0000

Thanks for this! I'm looking forward to your future post. In the meantime I noticed some stuff has changed, like bower.json instead of components.json. I wrote up my experience in this StackOverflow question and answer, to make it easy for people to update as new info comes up.

http://stackoverflow.com/qu...

Re: Managing Rails assets with Bower

Turadg Aleahmad — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:59:12 -0000

Thanks for this post! I wrote up my experience with Bower so far, building on this post: http://stackoverflow.com/qu...

Re: Capybara and Poltergeist: Snap!

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:39:44 -0000

Thanks for this. I made a simple drop in support file for it, https://gist.github.com/tur...

Re: Geknowm development

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:10:18 -0000

yeah, definitely at some point. we can set route.rb ignore it

Re: Take a step back (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Turadg Aleahmad — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:54:20 -0000

The most broadly useful technique I've encountered and used is mindfulness meditation. Practicing mindfulness can shift the balance of power from your amygdala to frontal lobe.

Meditation can be hard. It's not simply relaxation; it takes intense focus to be still. Accordingly it can be much more transformative than simply learning something. Still, there are a couple idea that spring to mind as important.

The main one is: you are not your thoughts. I think a lot of computer-y people (like myself) get stuck in Cartesian dualist thinking that thoughts exist in some space, and our bodies are vehicles for connecting these thoughts with other thoughts in the world, mostly through language. You're not a ghost in the machine. You are part of everything.

As for how to live, a big issue in the information age is how to spend your attention. It's the most limited resource in your life. An important principle there is: put first things first. Stephen Covey describes most approaches to time management as mechanical—appealing to computer types who seek and invent better mechanisms in hopes of improving their time management—whereas the key to managing your time is clarifying your values to find your "true north", to which you can always look. He advocates moving beyond "urgency" to satisfying universal needs "to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy".

Re: 6.003z: A Learner-Created MOOC Spins Out of MITx

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:16:47 -0000

MacChester, it's not a zero-sum game. There's plenty of helping people learn to go around. (A lot more than any single institution can do.)

Besides, this isn't from MIT. It's from highly motivated learners. That's the exciting thing.

But really, I'd like to understand: Do you think one place Stanford's apparent success should deter others?

Re: 6.003z: A Learner-Created MOOC Spins Out of MITx

Turadg Aleahmad — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:48:56 -0000

Great development!

Re: A Few Thoughts on “Pay a Blogger Day”

Turadg Aleahmad — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:27:09 -0000

(iPad gave me trouble continuing that last comment)

Another option worth considering is subscriptions. Some people would pay to get your posts earlier or an extended version. Maybe a badge when they comment or their name on a list of supporters? That worked for Slashdot.

Just brainstorming here. I'm not sure yet I'm well-equipped for the business world either. ;-)

Re: A Few Thoughts on “Pay a Blogger Day”

Turadg Aleahmad — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:23:47 -0000

You may not have out it there but there's a Flattr button on the posts in your RSS feed where I get your articles (the ones I don't see in Zite first). I clicked it to try "paying a blogger". I was hopeful but I don't think their model will work. It was pretty involved to set up, probably especially so because I'm on an iPad. But the biggest problem is once you finance your account (which you must) your money bleeds away monthly. I don't expect to be putting more in. I'm also confused as to why they chose the end of the month as their monthly "means" are prorated. Ie the funds to bloggers will be much smaller than if people signed up at the beginning of the month. Maybe I'm missing something.

So I wouldn't bank on Flattr. I understand hating ads, but what I really hope this blog can be sustained because it's great. What if you used AdWords. Those are algorithmic so they wouldn't compromise your integrity even if you wanted to, right?

Re: Penn State and Berkeley: A Tale of Two Protests

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:08:25 -0000

Striking contrast. As a Berkeley alum, I regret the association of these protests with the free speech movement of the 1960s. Why occupy the Cal campus to protest Wall Street? The university is also a victim of Wall St. While the PSU rioters had ugly motives, at least their anger was directed at its source.

Re: Capybara (and Selenium) with RSpec & Rails 3: quick tutorial

Turadg Aleahmad — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:53:37 -0000

Hannes, I take it back. :) I think your solution is better (and the one I linked to was from the comment right above, which I foolishly didn't read when I arrived at your comment by Google.)

In any case, here's my experience:
Capyabara project page "solution 3" worked until I used Spork. Then in sqlite it would abort with "prepare called on a closed database". Similar for Postgres.

Switching to Hannes's concise solution, Capybara and other specs are working in with rspec, spork and guard.

Is there a gotcha I'm missing? Should this be the canonical solution?

Re: Capybara (and Selenium) with RSpec & Rails 3: quick tutorial

Turadg Aleahmad — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 03:44:50 -0000

Hannes, this is the analogous solution recommended on the Capybara project page and it seems a little less hacky. ;)

class ActiveRecord::Base
  mattr_accessor :shared_connection
  @@shared_connection = nil

  def self.connection
    @@shared_connection || retrieve_connection
  end
end

# Forces all threads to share the same connection. This works on
# Capybara because it starts the web server in a thread.
ActiveRecord::Base.shared_connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

Re: Two things about deploying a Rails 3.1.rc4 app to Heroku — Rendered Text

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:06:12 -0000

Thanks for posting this.

An alternative to including rake/dsl_definition is to lock the rake gem at 0.8.7.

Re: http://blog.duostack.com/post/4366169121

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:45:15 -0000

Nope, I did that. I did find the bug though. The RACK_ENV was missing the remote parameter. I'll update the comment with a working script.

Thanks.

Re: http://blog.duostack.com/post/4366169121

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:31:53 -0000

Oops, Duostack did I do something wrong in that script? Because in the console (with --remote staging) when I evaluate Rails.env it comes up as "production." I also tried setting RAILS_ENV=staging.

Re: http://blog.duostack.com/post/4366169121

Turadg Aleahmad — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:24:45 -0000

Thanks, I've been looking forward to this. StackOverflow has some guidance on setting up staging with a git-based deployment: http://stackoverflow.com/qu....

For anyone not clear on how to use this, here's an example for a Rails app:

# create the app
duostack create stagingyourapp --remote staging

# set to run in staging mode
duostack env add RACK_ENV=staging --remote staging

# push your current master to it
git push staging master

# migrate the DB
duostack rake db:migrate --remote staging

# connect to the console
duostack console --remote staging

Check that "Rails.env" evaluates to "staging".

Duostack, now it would be really useful to have a way to copy the production db to the staging db for testing on the latest state.

Re: Plone tips

Turadg Aleahmad — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:48:37 -0000

While I appreciate the supportive comment, why do you keep posting here with
a link to register-web-domain.in? Are you doing Mechanical Turk jobs?

Re: About

Turadg Aleahmad — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:39:24 -0000

Thanks. You can find my published papers in my CV,
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tale...

Re: Hoptoad now supports GitHub integration!

Turadg Aleahmad — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:10:49 -0000

Does this require Capistrano deploys? Does it work with Heroku or Duostack?