I recently had a discussion with some of my friends about the electoral system in Egypt. During that discussion, the merits and demerits of the party-list proportional representation system as compared to the individual candidate system came up. In this post, I will try to explain why I prefer the party-list system. However, for the sake of being impartial, I also enumerate some of the disadvantages of the party-list system at the end of the post.
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Unix pipes
Recently, I was asked a question about how Unix pipes works. This post is meant to clarify some of the most important points on how pipes are set up between two processes. Traditional Unix pipes consist of two file descriptors, one representing the “read end” of the pipe and the other representing the “write end” of the pipe. A program writes to the pipe by writing to the file descriptor representing the write end of the pipe, and reads elements from the pipe by reading from the file descriptor representing the read end of a pipe.
The dangers of the filter bubble
Personalization has become a new buzzword. All major websites are now offering personalization services to make your experience on their site unique. Also, there are several social news apps, like Flipboard and Zite, that personalize your news-reading experience by serving you articles that they believe you would be interested in.