Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

4 steps for Speed Reading

I've recently heard lectures, gone through audio programmes like Paul Scheele's PhotoReading, and various other related text, inorder to find out, if there is anything like "speed reading". And yes indeed there is, it is not a myth. However what I've learned from different sources always boils down to the four basic steps which I'm going to list here, following these steps may save you $100s in saving on lectures, seminars or books on speed reading, and hours on reading text.

1. Quit "Auditory reading": Many people I know tend to read a text, by pronouncing individual words. This is a bad habit which can seriously limit your reading speed. Humans can speak only about 300 words/min, so if you tend to read the text out aloud then you are seriously limiting your reading speed.
2. Quit "Regressive reading": Regressive reading is an act people perform while reading, when they go over a portion of the text again and again, like repeating a paragraph they just read. This obviously limits reading speed, but someone may counter by saying that they read a paragraph repeatedly because it contains some important information and they want to focus however this is a weak argument if you consider this with the next point.
3. Anticipate the purpose: By anticipating the purpose of an article, chapter or a paragraph, we can read across them very quickly. Because if we set our mind to anticipate a certain purpose in reading a paragraph then your mind automatically discards irrelevant information in the text and just concentrates on the main highlights. If we anticipate that some important section of the text is coming up then you can slow down to read it more carefully, and then speed up when redundant explanations start coming.
4. Use peripheral vision: Peripheral vision is the area of vision which is surrounds the thing you are focusing on like while reading this text, you might be focusing on a single word, however you are actually seeing more than a word, you are also seeing the surrounding words. By concentrating on more words in a single glance you can significantly improve your reading speed. For example, most newspapers come in multiple column formats, ever wondered why? This is to facilitate speed reading of the material. By presenting a limited number of words per row, we can focus on the entire row in a single glance, and read the entire article more quickly. Many research publication formats do this aswell. The IEEE two column format is very "speed reading" friendly. However the LNCS/LNAI single column format is not, because a single row contains more words, one has to read a single row via multiple glances.

A note for computer readers, like me, is that reading off computer monitors is a bad idea, because time and again I find myself being interrupted and stop reading in order to scroll the page. I prefer to have papers printed so I can speed read them without having to scroll the page every once in a while. However because there is a lot of stuff I read on the computer, that's why its pretty expensive for me to print everything, so in these scenarios I really recommend in getting a high resolution LCD monitor, which can display lots of text in a single view, with appropriate brightness and sharpness.

Once I started speed reading, my eyes would start hurting this was due to the fact that my eye muscles were under developed and could not move quickly enough. However like any muscle, it evolves and improves with usage, the more you read the less it will hurt the longer and more you will be able to read.

You can take a speed reading test from here . My score was 822 Words/min with 91% comprehension.

Yahoo! Mail Beta does not support Firefox 2.0 anymore

This is been happening since early morning. I've been using Yahoo! Mail Beta on Firefox 2.0 since Firefox 2.0 came out. However since early morning I can not access my mail account anymore because Yahoo! Mail redirects to a page, which states

"Sorry, Yahoo! Mail Beta does not support your browser.
You can either download a compatible browser or proceed to the original Yahoo! Mail."

I've tested using 1.5.0.9, and it does work in it. Anyone else with similar experience?

Work arounds for the mysterious openSuse 10.2 lock-up on Dell Inspiron 6400

Since I installed openSuse 10.2, I've had an extremely annoying problem. The problem was that mostly when I started my machine,  the booting process would jam at the place where it says "Activating Device Mappings" or "Loading Kernel Modules". I've asked about this twice on the opensuse official forums, they are aware of this, but they say the occurence is so rare that it never got investigated! Sometimes it used to happen that openSuse 10.2 would keep continually hanging at the boot process, that I would simply restart into Windows.

However since I removed Windows from my laptop, it was imperative for me to find a solution, and I have!

There are three primary work arounds to avoid the mysterious lockups:

1. Disable ACPI: This has worked for me pretty well, to do this you just have to pass the acpi=off to the boot parameters to the kernel, this disable power management; The software can no longer tell if it is running on battery or AC power, and the worst side-effect of it was that it disabled multiple cores! I have a Core Duo Processor, with this solution it detected only a single processor. I reported this effect to the openSuse mailing list, they speculated that the boot lockup problem may be related to my power system.
2. Disable DMA: This has worked aswell, just pass ide=nodma to the boot parameters and it disables direct memory access from the hard disk to the memory hence involving the processor in every memory transfer. In this solution, I noticed a slight performance degradation which was obviously due to disabled DMA, but atleast openSuse started!
3. The third I discovered today! From a friend who happens to run the same installation on the same hardware. He discovered a work around this problem which I will use from now on: As it does not involve disabling any kernel features. Just enable Wifi/bluetooth, and the kernel boots properly! If its not enabled the boot process locks up!

Whatever solution you choose to adopt, it eventually means that you can be assured that from now on, everytime you boot up a Dell Inspiron running openSuse 10.2 it will not lockup in the boot process!

PS. This problem is not present in openSuse 10.1, and other distributions I've tried on the notebook.

Linux Rocks!

This is not another article where I'll go about saying why Linux is cool etc! I came to this conclusion when I was running simulations on a highperformance UltraSPARC IIIi system running Solaris 10. Sure its faster than any Linux workstation we have in the lab (UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5 Ghz beats Pentium4c 3.0 GHz hands down!). But when a Linux workstation is running the identical simulations as the SunBlade 1500 Workstation, the speed is obviously faster in the SunBlade station, HOWEVER more crucially in the Linux system the quality of service, in terms of the response to the user's actions like mouse moves or opening of some application is not at all affected whereas in the solaris machine the interface behaves as if the machine has jammed, its only through SSH I know that it is running!This is a failure of scheduling, the Solaris OS probably doesnt give higher priority to the user input than executing compute intensive tasks. I'll try to publish some results comparing the affects of compute intensive applications on the QoS of both systems. Maybe some geek can recommend me some tests to perform?