Archive for February, 2007

You’re probably scratching your head about why we haven’t had any new issues this week. If you haven’t figured out already, it’s the end of the month, and we always send out the Month-in-Review during the last week of the month. It gives a chance for our readers to catch up on all our issues. Colin and Kaiser have been working non-stop to send something out for later this week. So, stay tuned!

I wonder if I come off as contradictory: a reclusive tinkerer locked up in his lab (with pet fur and poop collecting on the floor), messing around with code and inventing his own better (or so he thinks) solutions to already ’solved’ problems, while shunning the latest technology fad like an outdated and lazy IT department at…the Department of Windows 3.1 [?].

For as long as I’ve been developing web apps, I’ve also been behind on trends and fads. It really isn’t a good thing for someone in my field, I know. Part of it is that I’ve come across too much badly written/organized code to trust apps written by anyone else. We’re using Wordpress as our blogging software mostly because it wasn’t a smart idea for me to put in the time to write our own blogging system. Wordpress is great for the end user, but while building the templates, I’ve found a ton of nuisances that make me wonder how they got the system working in the first place.

The other part is that I have a negative reaction to anything that’s hyped up so much. Take Ruby On Rails: I had a chance to experiment with at work a few months ago, and aside from the five frustrating days I spent trying to get it functioning correctly, I wasn’t at all impressed by it once I got into it. Yeah, it’s probably the best framework out there for anyone that doesn’t have much experience developing applications in an organized way. But guess what? I’ve written my own framework (which is what the site has been running on since the relaunch), and while it’s not as user-friendly as Rails is out the box, it does just as good a job, and has a few key features that Rails, for whatever reason, is sorely lacking.

Having said all that, I’ve been growing increasingly fond of Ajax. In a nutshell, Ajax makes pages more interactive by sending and receiving data in the background without reloading the page. You’ve probably come across it without realizing it: Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, and the new Yahoo! Mail make heavy use of it.

And now, TCC has it! If you’re logged in, just check out your preferences. (You’ll need to refresh to reload the new stylesheet.) I spent the last week working on a small Javascript library and tweaking the framework to be more Ajax-friendly (that wasn’t tricky or time-consuming, thanks in part to my foresight and skillz with coding).

It isn’t impressive, but now that the foundation is laid, it’s a good sign of newer and better things to come for the site.

Assuming I don’t get OCD with the details.

Woohoo! I’m impressed with everyone who posted events this past week. I have news to announce as well. The events page was the 4th most trafficked page this week. So, this could mean a couple things: 1) People are actually reading my blog posts and reacting to said posts; 2) It just naturally got more trafficked; or 3) Damn it. I had a third one. Ugh. Oh well.

Speaking of events. Sumaya is attending the NASALSA Conference tomorrow. If you’re in the Bay Area, make sure to stop by attend some workshops. I understand there’s a registration fee, so take cash.

I haven’t blogged in a bit, but I wanted to let you know of an event you have to attend if you’re on the east coast. I wish I could go, but I’m stuck here in a snowstorm in the Midwest.

The event is called Ehsaas ‘07. It’s an intercollegiate dance show from which 100% of the proceeds directly benefit schools established by Asha Philadelphia in India - be it providing funds for educators, school supplies, or any other means for educational betterment. Asha Philadelphia consists of both Philadelphia area schools as well as other individuals who show an interest in supporting the cause; the students involved in organizing this event are from: Cornell University, Drexel University, George Washington University, Lehigh University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The show itself will be held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium on February 16, 2007. Dance teams from Villanova, JHU, Lehigh, Bryn Mawr, Yale, UPenn, SUNY Genseo, Princeton, Temple, Drexel will be performing; as well as a guest appearance by a capella group GW Geet from George Washington University and a group of children from the Dancing Shiva Performing Arts Center as well as Brick City Bhangra - a conglomerate dance team of students from various universities in New Jersey. The show aims to raise at least $10,000 to support Asha Philadelphia schools, but to also spread awareness about Asha’s mission, issues including child prostitution, illiteracy, HIV/AIDS, and others facing the more than half of India’s children living in poverty.

The show is organized purely by students and hopes to engage a broad audience of various different ages, interests, and ethnicities, uniting for a common goal - betterment of education and socio-economic change in India through the promotion of basic education.

In order to send 100% of the ticket sales directly to Asha Philadelphia supported schools in India, we encourage donors and sponsors to donate money to Asha for Education Philadelphia with a memo statement to contribute funds to administrative funds of Ehsaas ‘07. The more money we raise to pay our technical charges (lighting, sound, etc) the more money we can send directly to the children from our ticket sales.

I wish they have events like this to better education in other countries. Hope you guys can attend!

I moved us away from TextDrive and over to DreamHost last night. It was a painless process, since I mainly needed to change the DNS records and synch the files (there was an old version of the site already up and functioniong earlier in the week).

The entire process last night took maybe an hour, and that includes the nameserver updates being propagated [through America at least].

I don’t think there was any visible downtime, which is awesome. And there won’t hopefully be any frequent downtime from here on out. Such a nice feeling…

So since my post about events earlier this week, I’ve received a lot of emails in regards to how readers can post events in our magazines. Great question!

All you have to do is go to www.theculturalconnect.com/events. On the right you’ll see this…

I’m sure you’re asking, “What if I don’t have a login?” Easy solution. Just go to www.theculturalconnect.com/signup to signup. So, after you’ve signed up and logged in, you’ll see this…

And there you go! Click on Post an Event, and you’re good to go!

Another press release I got in my email a couple days ago. Thought you folks might like this.

Immigration Slows Rate of Racial and Ethnic Intermarriages in United States
New American Sociological Review study shows increase in Hispanic and Asian intra-ethnic marriages.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Immigration played a key role in unprecedented declines in interracial and inter-ethnic marriage in the United States during the 1990s, according to a new sociological study.

The findings, published in “Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage,” suggest that the growing number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants to the United States has led to more marriages within these groups, and fewer marriages between members of these groups and whites.

“These declines in intermarriages are a significant departure from past trends,” said Zhenchao Qian, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University. “The decline reflects the growth in the immigrant population during the 90s; more native-born Asian Americans and Hispanics are marrying their foreign-born counterparts.”

I’ve been busy tonite prepping the events listing that we post for The LatinConnect. I’ve always assumed that nobody read any of the events across all 4 magazines and was hoping to propose to Kaiser and Sumaya to drop the events section from our magazines altogether. So I just looked at the statistics: it’s the seventh most popular link. Who would have thought? Now, I want to improve it. The goal is to break the top 5 on a regular basis. I’m going to be enlisting all of your help. Give me some suggestions on how I can improve the events listing. Alright, I’m going to start finding things for The AsiaConnect.

So I’m still recovering from my trip to Michigan. Sumaya and I spoke last Saturday at the SAAN Conference in Ann Arbor. Let me just say something…This was the most organized conference I’ve ever been to. I was amazed by these University of Michigan students who organized the conference. You could really tell they put a tremendous amount of dedication, planning, and effort into EVERY detail. I met almost every single person who helped organize the conference, and each one of them told me that this event was one of the best experiences of their college lives. Special thanks to all of them! Especially, Sarwat!!!

I got to see some of the other workshops by the other speakers, most notably Moushumi Khan who we profiled a couple weeks ago. It’s great when you get to meet the people you profile. I think there’s always a sense accomplishment when we profile someone who’s been doing great things. But it’s even more rewarding knowing that the people we profile will be doing even greater things in the future. I can definitely say that about Moushumi Khan. If you haven’t read her profile, make sure you do and remember where you read it first

We’re going to end up profiling a lot of the speakers we met at the conference. Stay tuned for this…

Oh, and one more thing. If you’re a college kid reading this, make sure to attend the SAAN Conference next year. If it’s anything like it was this year, you have to attend.

I’m sure people have been noticing frequent site outtages in January (and in the last week, multiple emails). Unfortunately, we’ve been having issues with our hosting company. Hopefully, we’ll get stable again soon. (Our host says that they’ll start migrating accounts to more advanced servers with better debugging tools starting this month, so in theory they can actually track and diagnose the specific problem. That’ll be a joyous day!)

We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing everyone. Maybe in the near future I’ll be able to get a dedicated T1 into my apartment and just host the site from here. But that’s a bit unrealistic at the moment.

Disclaimer: the contents of this entry are provided as a public service announcement and do not reflect Kaiser’s first official post.