I'm very excited that some colleges and universities around the US are interested in adopting our book. Guity Ravai and I actually wrote the book "Step into programming with visual basic .NET", because we never found a good book for introductory programming classes. We never wrote the book with the intent to make money. Actually, I had two motivations for co-writing the book 1) I was sick of not finding a programming book that fit our needs 2) I felt that it would be a great experience to go through the process of writing a book at a young age because I foresee myself publishing a couple of books during my life. Most people that write programming books over explain things, or under-explain things for that matter. Also, most .NET books focus on teaching the language, not the actual programming concepts themselves. Right now, we have 2 adoptions that are finalized, and 2 other ones in process. Interestingly enough, even Borders ordered one book in New York! I hope that we get more adoptions because a) I'm a poor college student and b) If the book becomes successful, we will be able to revise it and produce a third edition c) The success will give me a thin entering wedge into getting another book published. If you are reading this and you are a programming educator - you can go to the following website http://www.kendallhunt.com/ravai and request a review copy for free!

 

The new bond movie 007, is by far the worst James bond movie I have seen. It lacks some of the James Bond essentials. I just wanted to put that out there. There were no cool investigative techniques, neither were there any cool gadgets. It was simply an action movie... I give it a 3 thumbs down.

 

Lately I have been doing some interesting work on forensic linguistics. We are working on an interesting project called SMIRK that we shall reveal after the publication, or while its in pub. One thing I have learned is that the best one can do with authorship - (being able to detect the author of the system) is to get an accuracy rate of about 70%. We have been able to get that accuracy rate with a small training set of text also, which I believe is great. The concept of forensic authorship can be very useful when an investigator does not know the author of a message. This can be very useful. I also learned about n-grams which I feel could  really aid in forensics, especially because the concept of n-grams can help in achieving a language independent authorship system.