To solve this problem, I created one single page that loads up to 3 Google pages at the same time, each with their own search box. This way, I can load up the main page, enter the search phrases I want in each frame, and have all three search frames display results simultaneously. I like that! For lazy people like me, that saves me lots of [ALT-TAB]‘ing and [CTRL-TAB]‘ing.

MultiSearch 3

What’s even nicer is, depending on how your Firefox is customized, I can click a search result and have it open in the frame in which it was found, or simply [left-click] on the result to have it open as a new tab. No more [ALT-TAB]‘ing, [RIGHT-CLICK]‘ing, [MIDDLE-CLICKING]‘ing.

For convenience I’ve created two MultiSearch pages:

MultiSearch 2 - splits a page into two Google search frames, and,

MultiSearch 3 - splits a page into three Google search frames.

Now how cool is that?!

Questions I have are: how well does it work in other browsers, and how does it work on mobile phones.

I’d love some feedback!

Fear can stunt your career and personal development

By Anderea Morara

Where things are uncertain, employees may be fearful about a number of things. Some will be worried about losing jobs, getting demoted, not being promoted or simply not getting along with colleagues.

One of the most common manifestations of fear is people’s reluctance to voice their opinion on anything.

They just want to conform to whatever the “official” opinion is. This kind of behaviour is usually the norm in authoritarian or dictatorial states and organisations. However, democratisation is now permeating both Government and non-state organisations and becoming standard practice, and thus there are hardly any substantive autocratic managements.

In a scenario where one cannot voice their opinion; employees are averse to making any move on their own. In other words, employees will not take initiative. They will hang around like zombies until someone in authority tells them what to do, and even how to do it.

The other characteristic of people in this kind of situation is their fear to disagree with anything that they are asked to do by their superiors – even when it is abhorrent to their values and morals. They can even commit crime at the behest of management.

In true autocracies, due to the intricacies of the pecking order, even supervisors have to “read between the lines”. Almost everyone in this kind of work environment tends to mask their true feelings. This is all because of feeling insecure.

However, in modern times, the feeling of insecurity in the workplace is often exaggerated. It could be true in a number of organisations that the CEO and his top lieutenants are autocratic, but often times, the fear is a function of the victim’s background rather than the present workplace.

David had been already fired from two jobs, despite his star performance at college. While on his third job, the manager, a former high school teacher and career master, noted the inconsistency between David’s college grades and his performance. He called the college where David trained, booked an appointment and went and verified his academic credentials.

INITIATIVE

Next, he called his previous supervisor, who described David as “a person who neither showed initiative nor the ability to make up his mind.”

Nevertheless, in his own assessment, the manager reckoned that David could do much better if offered the appropriate guidance.

He called David to his office and praised him for his extraordinary performance at college and promised to assist him achieve good performance at his new job. He assured him of support and pointed out that all the great achievers had made many mistakes in their journey to success. He then gave him a specific assignment and asked him to figure out how to do it and provide him with the solution in three days. “I do not expect a perfect solution; but let’s see what contribution you can make,” the manager told him as he patted him on the shoulders reassuringly.

For the first time in his working life, David felt challenged to deliver at his own terms.

PERFECTION

The fact that the manager was prepared to accept a less than perfect solution gave him assurance that he would not be blamed if anything went wrong; but this edged him on to give his very best. He just did not want to disappoint this manager. His mind frame had changed from the fear to be wrong to the desire to make a difference.

David is now a valued senior executive at the company. This is because he was able to remove the spectre of fear from his work. Fearful people often lack initiative and are less efficient and therefore less productive. They frequently spend too much time worrying about what their superiors or colleagues might think of them and fail to spend enough time in thinking through and performing their jobs.

Managers generally do not deliberately set out to frighten their employees. Sometimes, however, some managers unwittingly scare their staff out of their wits – and occasionally impair their subordinates’ confidence enduringly. This is what happened at David’s first job. The manager, a hefty expatriate, shouted at him with expletives, embarrassing him in front of his colleagues and consequently undermining his self-respect for asking if the procedure for producing a 500-gramme loaf of bread could be shortened.

Good managers, as any smart leaders, should always encourage opportunities for continual improvement, even when staff suggestions may allude to the fact that their own thinking is less than perfect.

If you are a captive of fear, you must seek to overcome it – whether it originates from your home background, school or your initial work place – for it will set undue limits to your career and personal development.

The writer is the Executive Director of Capacity Development Africa Ltd. cdasedic@africaonline.co.ke

The page is here ( http://www.idigitall.com/honours-mini-theses/ ).

An article on calculating Salaah (Prayer) times to follow soon. I must just add that I’m not sure how exactly this feature (provided by islamicfinder.org) is to be used. I’ve tried all possible configurations for my country, and it just doesn’t produce the correct results. Maybe it’ll work better for yours.

A while back I worked at a small private college in Cape Town as a lecturer. We had an ADSL network which ran through the offices and connected staff (12) computers and a library with 3 internet connected computers, and an un-networked lab with around 50 computers. There was one specialist hardware lecturer (had very little programming but lots of hardware knowledge, a software principles lecturer who was very clued up with theory but knew little about hardware, and there was myself - a hacker. As in, I hacked my way out of a lot of problems that occurred in that college, from internet baddies to student cronies to blond lecturers to leaking aircons to mice.

All the tools are free, and I have included Portable versions of the non-portable items in the list. Portable means that the software can be run off your flash drive without installing on the pc. Have a look at the page for details.

Design an implement a “car counting system” that uses videos of highway traffic as input and extracts the number of cars passing the camera per hour.

Topics: image processing, object detection.

Programming: 30%
Research: 70%

System can be extended (by other students or as a separate honours thesis) to handle tracking of vehicles through a network of roads and statistics extraction (such as speed, number of occupants, time taken, damage(?) to vehicle), by maybe having multiple roadside ’stations’ at which the car counting system is installed.

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The above idea came to me whilst listening to Redi Direko on Cape Talk. She was talking about a gruesome murder that happened on a national highway in Gauteng province. I started thinking about road traffic analysis tools/software packages. There will be another article about crime in South Africa, as soon as I find some time.

Joomla definitely isn’t a blogging tool, there are hardly any blog modules, few blog themes even! Joomla’s a brilliant, and like wordpress, simple CMS (content management system) but it’s not a blog CMS. Joomla also has a higher learning curve, and unless you’ve used a CMS before, it takes a while to get around the idea that articles belong to categories, and categories belong to sections, and deleting sections can’t be done without deleting all the articles in all the categories that belong to that section. Which is really all just a schlep if you just want a blog. Joomla does however have a multitude of settings and tweaks that one can play with; It’s great for content management of small to medium size sites. And I’m sure you can forge a blog out from it but it would be like blowing up your house to kill rodents when all you need is the exterminator.

Installation-wise, both are equally quick and simple: joomla has a web form in which you fill out your database’s details, and wordpress has that stored in a file which must be manually edited. - that was practically the only step there was. Also, Joomla has a nice control panel that allows you to add a lot of features - but it’s not like you’d need those features if all you want is a blog. Wordpress is definitely simpler. I must also add that this wordpress blog displayed perfectly on my cellphone’s browser (LG KU 990 - Viewty) whereas Joomla didn’t.

Of course it’s still day 2 and I’m not saying that wordpress is the be-all and end-all of blogging. I still want to add more features to this blog - like a calendar feature and add new sections. I’m keeping my mind open on this - I’ve got a backup of my joomla installation if I want to go back. And there’ll definitely be changes on this site in the near future. I think this blog would have progressed much further had I installed Wordpress when i first registered the domain (about 5 months ago) instead of using Joomla. Anyhoo..

Today, I intend to work lots, we’re busy with eclipse rcp and osgi stuff (more about that later), as well as squeeze in some masters thesis writing stuff. I’ve got a chapter on Gabor filters (more later) due at the end of the week. I’ve also got some SVM (support vector machines) (more later) experiments - which have been running since Saturday morning - running on a very interesting parallel dual-processor (2 dual-core processors) machine, for which I’m expecting results, soon, hopefully. And I’ve got
pavers paving our back yard (more later). So I’m in for a very busy day.

Cheerz.

He went thru the first 25 years of his life, thinking, breathing, eating, talking, and dreaming IT. He went through various levels of college studying different fields in IT and worked at a couple of IT companies.

Table Mountain

This guy lives somewhere in the deepest, darkest jungles of Africa, more specifically, South Africa - yeah, the country right next to Zimbabwe - ruled by notorious animal skin clad warrior and president Robert Mugabe, and is an uber-geek, socially inadequate and completely paranoid. This guy also discovered women at a very late age in his development, was completely mind-blown away by his first kiss and … married her. Right there and then. Or something like that.

Now he’s stuck: at a critical moment in his career - slap, bang in the middle of masters degree in computer science - he realises that IT isn’t everything. In fact, Women are INFINITELY more interesting. Yes, Women! And Sex!

That guy is me. I’m trying to get thru a masters degree in computer science, while at the same time, working full time in a software development company, while being a full time husband to a gorgeous princess and master of the universe to 2 dogs: . And at the same time - I’m having a career crisis! zer univerze iz colling! it is saying to me: cum… zon’t stair so haRd et zer boReeng skreen - sink about zet aess! vudn’t you like to sheg it?! OooOOh Bayby! Write a pRogrem zet vill turn her On.

So welcome to iDIGITALL, translated however you want - i.dig.it.all. or I.digital.All or i.DIGITall or i.digital.l(?) or, really, however you want. You’ll find a lot of mixed (just like this blog post) posts about all sorts of things: digital and otherwise. Bewarned though, there might occasionally be some raunchy material here too. Stay, enjoy, bookmark this page if you want.

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idigitall

*: the phrase “sex, women and rock and roll” is a figure of speech, and is not intended to be taken literally. I am a Muslim and my beliefs are firm.