Must have Live Packs (Free or cheap!)

• Ableton Live Packs Downloads
• The Covert Operators
• Free Ableton Live Pack by Composer Dennis DeSantis
• Five Dollar Bass, Atmosphere Expansion Packs for Ableton Live
  If you’re finding massive soundware libraries to be a little overwhelming — on your hard drive, your brain, and your wallet — you’ll like the idea of the new expansion packs from Tone Research. The first two are 13MB downloads priced at US$4.99 each. They work with Live 5 and get bonus features from Live 6. I’m still waiting on my copies, so I can’t yet comment on sound quality yet, but I’ll report back once I’ve thrown these into some songs.
• Ableton » Synthtopia
• PureMagnetik
  Great Deal.. pay a $5/monthly subscription and get a great Live Pack every month

Learning Resources

• AskVideo.com
• Ableton Live 6 101
• Ableton Live 6 102

VST / Plugins

• Native Instruments Komplete 5
  KOMPLETE 5 is the high-end collection of 11 ground-breaking synthesizers, samplers, emulations, and a virtual guitar studio. Perfect for both studio and stage - this is the industry-standard bundle for serious musicians, producers and sound designers. KOMPLETE 5’s instruments can be heard on platinum-selling records and in underground clubs alike, all over the world.
• Major Malfunction
  A sweet plugin for mangling, glitch, distortion and and much more in a easy to use interface.
• Sounds Online
  A top site for massive collection of samples from many sample studios with most of the tools available via VST or other host plugin technologies and sometimes also raw samples .
• KVR Audio
  I check this site to stay up to date on the latest trends in Audio Plugin technology.
• Dblue Glitch Freeware Plug-in: Free .wav Deconstruction

Cool Hardware

• Sonica Labs
  I recently purchased the high end HUSH-QR Quadcore after doing research on all the top tiered custom DAW vendors around the world. Sonica Labs’s price point for a QuadCore Xeon loaded with memory, disk and expansion abilities has been a great replacement for my old DAWs. Talk with ‘Guy’ at the company to find out more, I was sold even before I asked them a thousand questions which they gladly answered to satisfy my curiousities about investing in their products.
• MonoTouchLive
  A brilliant tool to allow you to control your DAW with your TabletPC’s remote touch MIDI interface application!

To be honest with you, I don’t think I have time to list every tool that I use on this post since there are so many but I’ll try to do a follow up post or possibly create a dedicated page so you can come back to it for updates. Enjoy.

For those of us wishing the iPhone included GPS receiver built in, this is a short term solution that’s a hack at best but even if it is ‘off’ by 100 yards, I can at least avoid the time wastage that occurs with putting a starting address into the driving directions feature of the iPhone Google Maps application!

Find out more from Gizmodo.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same user flow tests on a website or web application, try out this extension today!

In the recent past I’ve posted about Google Maps mashups with heat map technology but there are many powerful tools out there (some web based, others not) that intrinsically yield powerful trends that may not even have been discoverable with simple charts, graphs and basic visualization tools of the past era.

An article in SmashingMagazine.com has catalogued and captured screenshots of the most amazing and beautiful data visualization models out there including everything from 3d heatmapping/contouring, content clouding, to mind mapping.

One of my favorites is a 3d visual population hill/spike density map from Time Magazine:

If you are in the business of analysis of any kind, you should definitely read this article and check out the screen shots. You might find the technologies that these companies are creating useful to your endeavor.

Personally I find that a certain amount of ego is complementary to your professional reputation. One of the first answers in the interview suggests that if your ego has been boosted by success in the past, if one is not careful, that success creates the illusion that it was them alone that achieved that success. And the more publicly visible they are, the more they believe the headlines that attribute their success to just them.

I firmly believe that if you work hard on something and achieved success, your reputation will be increased naturally because word will get around eventually. So keeping modest and being humble of one’s success is not a bad thing at all. The author suggests that a potential combination of ambition, ideas, and healthy ego drives one’s success. So as with many things in life, finding the right balance is something one may just have to learn by making mistakes.

Several obvious tell tale signs of breaking the barrier to becoming an egomaniac that I found interesting in the article:

• Seeing someone you work with as a rival and think about how to “beat” them.
• Taking disagreement with your ideas personally.
• Compulsively following a competitors “lead” so they’re not doing anything you’re not.
• Criticizing competitor’s strategies and prematurely discard them as irrelevant.
• Disagreeing with someone’s point just because they’re the one who said it.
• Feeling worse about where you are when you see what others achieve.
• Seeking acceptance: desiring respect and recognition interferes with success.

So now you’re probably wondering what might be considered a “healthy ego”? The following interview excerpt might enlighten you:

Genuine confidence; confidence that doesn’t have to exert itself to “prove” it’s confidence. Healthy ego keeps us from thinking too highly or too little of ourselves and reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be. But to understand what healthy ego is, you have to understand the relationship between ego and humility. For most people, tradition holds that the opposite of excessive ego is humility, when in fact having too little ego is just as dangerous and unproductive as having too much.

There are also those people who say that extremely confident and ambitious people can also show signs of being an egomaniac. I can’t argue with this idea either, but if you can balance the image of the ego with your humility and remembering how you achieved success in your life (if you started with humble beginnings), then you might just live a more harmonious life.

In addition to the recent price drop from Apple for the 8GB iPhone model, an open letter from Steve Jobs gives any first-to-buy iPhone owners a $100 offer towards other Apple gear.

Are you loving apple yet?

These mistakes can easily be made by design firms and other outsourcing companies as well so this doesn’t just apply to potential freelancers.

A lot of it is common sense but the gist is as follows:

1. Missing deadlines.
2. Charging too little.
3. Lack of preliminary research.
4. Choosing the wrong clients.
5. Getting too personal.
6. Letting off steam.
7. Not proposing a follow-up idea.
8. Not having multiple income streams.
9. Allowing yourself to slack.
10. Failing to be yourself.

If you’re interested in what you’ve read so far, I recommend you check out the original blog post.

In addition to this post, there are several other good articles at FreeLanceSwitch.com:

• The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling To Clients
  

  Do you have loads of clients fighting with each other for the chance to hire you? If so, you can skip this article. If not, you likely spend some time selling yourself to potential clients. So read on, because we’re going to talk about the dos and don’ts of selling.

• Balancing Employment and Freelance Work
  

  Not all of us have the guts to freelance full-time right away and you can count this intrepid journalist as one of the cowards.

  As self-employment can be slow to begin, some of us do prefer the security of a steady pay-cheque while making the transition, so here are some of the ways I’ve found to make it work while working for The Man.

• 10 Essential Habits for Freelance Workers
  

  The key, I’ve found, is to develop certain habits that will keep you not only disciplined but successful. Simple habits, to be sure, but ones that can go a long way towards taking you from a broke freelancer to a happy and productive one.

Also if you’re not yet a TabletPC lover and are thinking about getting a laptop PC in the near future, I recommend you review and compare the prices / features of your choice notebooks and also the top TabletPC’s out there. I own the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 TabletPC which I believe to be the best TabletPC out there by far in comparison to the others.

Now here are your tools. Enjoy!

My Favorite TabletPC Software

• ArtRage - It’s free (limited features), and it’s amazing. Kids, adults alike have loved this application that I’ve had on my tablet they love the ability to be able to paint on a canvas just like an artist would do. You can create some AMAZING art with an organic quality I’ve just never seen on a PC. Try installing it now and use the “Load Tracing Paper” feature and show off your masterpiece to everyone
• Microsoft OneNote - This is the most used tool on my TabletPC. I use it for meeting recordings and notetaking. I use it for brainstorming ideas, designing business requirements and workflows for my ventures. I love the ability to OCR anything (screen clippings from other apps or websites, and even what I doodle or jot down). The software allows you to organize yourself in hierarchical groups of tabs so you can organize your notes the way you want. Honestly I’m not trying to make a sales pitch here, but just try it out, whether you’re a student, a doctor, or engineer you’ll appreciate OneNote’s power.
• Alias SketchBook Pro (now owned by Autodesk)- It’s not free, but it is different from ArtRage. The tool is more for penciling, concept drawings, sketches, illustrations, fine art, drawings, annotation, education. Check out what people are doing with Sketchbook Pro.
• Mindjet MindManager Pro - MindManager software, a mind mapping tool that’s also optimized for the TabletPC, inspires people and businesses to align individuals and teams, engage and excites employees, accelerate business processes and win new business faster.

TabletPC Software Directories

• Microsoft TabletPC Powertoys - All of Microsoft’s Powertoys made just to take advantage of the TabletPC
• TabletPC Post
• TabletPC2.com Software Directory

TabletPC Enthusiast Related Blogs, News, and Forum Sites

• Scott’s List of Great Tools for your TabletPC
• TabletPC Buzz
• Student TabletPC Blog and News Site - An excellent blog for students to keep up to date on the TabletPC world
• TabletPc2.com -
  The Place for Tablet PC and UMPC Comparisons, News, Reviews and Information

TabletPC Developer Resources

• TabletDev.com - Essential information for Tablet PC developers and users.
• TabletUML.com - A UML tool for Tablet PCs (that I highly recommend if you’re a software engineer or architect)
]]> http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/19/essential-tabletpc-tools-and-software/feed/ http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/ http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:18:45 +0000 omar Technology Physics http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/ Technion Israel Institute of Technology researchers have developed a theoretical model of a time machine that, in the distant future, could possibly enable future generations to travel into the past. An article on this research was published last week in the scientific journal Physical Review.

By tweaking Einstein’s space time and general relativity models these researchers are becoming more confident with the idea of travelling back in time, something that most scientists believe to be improbable because of the paradoxes and other reasons that could happen if one did so. Curving space time, as is the basis for wormholes to travel instantaneously from one point in space to another, is the basis for this research. So instead of going to another space point in your time, you go from your point in time to another point in time.

Several issues with the stability of such a curve of space time that can cause disturbances are at the forefront of the research which the scientists hope one day the world will be able to solve.

Many people believe that if a time machine using such technology were ever possible, then why isn’t there any evidence of people coming back and telling us about it? If the positive benefit of time travel into the past is to undo our own mistakes in this world, why hasn’t it already been done, or would we even feel the effect in our reality?

The arguments on all sides of the subject bring up good points, but if we are to expect any evolution in this technology we should continue the discussion until these theories can be completely thrown away, by doing scientific research to rule it out.

]]> http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/13/a-new-theoretical-model-for-time-travel-being-imagined/feed/ http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/ http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:39:22 +0000 omar Music Technology Google News Web Mash Ups Games Mobile iPhone http://www.omaruddin.com/2007/08/07/the-fun-begins-on-the-iphone/ Here are some great tools, tweaks, hacks, and other cool stuff for your iPhone.

I’ll probably be posting more stuff like this so stay tuned.

If anyone has any good tools that may be useful, feel free to drop a comment with the url(s).


• 199 wallpapers for the iPhone by ^manicho on deviantART
  
• iWeathr - iPhone Doppler Radar
  
• MacMost iPhone Games
  
• iPhonify - Google Reader
  
• iPhone RingtoneMaker
  
• iPhone TadaList
  
• AppMarks
  
• iFuntastic - Tweak for your iPhone (requires OSX)
  
• NES Emulator (Native for iPhone)
  
• iPhone Fluther -Tap the collective
  
• FastApps
  
• FlickIM
  
• BBSNews for iPhone
  
• i.del.icio.us
  
• iChess
  
• iPhone Music Discovery
  
•