Yaser Sulaiman’s Blog

a.k.a hit the “Mark all as read” button.

Yes, you will feel bad about it. Yes, you will miss things that are great, helpful, amazing, interesting, and cool. Still, you will survive (at least I did).

Why should you do it? Think about it: How can you find peace of mind when you are being constantly reminded that you have 1000+ items to read? Maybe you are an information junkie, but information overload can have drastic effects. For many of us, life’s just too short.

I used to keep good, long articles that needed concentration unmarked to read them on a later time, but the number of unread items kept increasing. Google Reader automatically marks an item as read after 30 days. So eventually, those articles were marked as read and I never got the chance to read them.

Engadget is a great blog, but I only manged to keep their RSS feed in my subscription list for less than a week. It was just overwhelming to receive around 40 posts/day from a single site. Armed with that little button, I will subscribe to it again.

What if you are not comfortable at all with hitting the “Mark all as read” button? You can subscribe to category feed(s) instead of the main one. This will reduce the number of posts you have to read and will help you avoid the ones that you are not interest in.

If you have 300+ subscriptions and you are able to manage them with ease, or if you don’t mind having 1000+ unread items all the time, then you don’t have to do it. But remember: When things get overwhelming, the “Mark all as read” button will always be there for you (hopefully!).

30: the number of days I set to accomplish the mission.

158: the number of subscriptions in my Google Reader account.

0: the number of unread items I was hoping to reach at the end of the 30-day period.

3780: the number of items I read.

126: average number of items read per day.

255: the number of unread items at the end of the 30-day period.

Conclusion: Keeping up with the Web is impossible!

At first, it was quite easy, but things got complicated as I entered my final exams period. The whole thing fall apart after I spent an entire day without an Internet connection. I tried to make up in the last day, but after reading 316 items, I raised the white flag!

Lifehacker was (and still) the most frequently updated among my subscriptions with an average of 16.5 items/day. It is repeated in the list because I subscribed to their full feed recently.

What should I do now? Maybe I should organize the subscriptions according to their priority.

How about you? How many items do you read per day?

In addition to being a nuisance, spam (junk) emails waste user time, disk space and network bandwidth. On my way back to KFUPM after the summer vacation, a simple idea regarding spam filtering hit me.

It all began with a simple question: “Why don’t you want to see spam emails?“. The answer was straightforward: “Because I’m not interested in whatever subjects the email is talking about“. Then, I started thinking:

We can’t use the subject header of the email because it can be totally unrelated to the body. So, we have to look at the content itself. How about if we extracted keywords that represent the main subject(s) of the email, and then compared them with keywords that represent the subjects that the user is interested in? After that, we should come up with a predicted “level of interest“. If it is too low, then the user will (most probably) not be interested in seeing this email (i.e. it’s spam).

This idea is now the core of my senior project. It will be a research-oriented, AI-related project. Regarding the first phase (keyword extraction), my teammate and I will most probably use some of the available services. We will focus our efforts on the second phase (keyword comparison). We have to figure out exactly how to do it and how to incorporate machine learning in it. We also might improve it by using Bayesian Belief Networks and/or Functional Network classifiers.

Spam filtering is one of the hot topics in the application of data mining and AI techniques. By working in this project, we hope that we can contribute to the ongoing research and develop an approach that will hopefully be taken as a basis for a new filtering technique or as an addition to existing ones.

Phew!! I was so close to forget that I have a blog that needed to be maintained regularly! I didn’t intend to leave my blog for more than two weeks without updating it, but things got out of my hands… sort of!

I had two weeks to spend relaxing in Syria before coming back for my last semester as an undergraduate. For my surprise, my PC there (an old one) wasn’t working properly. I tried to fix it myself but I didn’t have the necessary equipment. I didn’t take to be repaired because I was… too relaxed! I said to myself: “I can survive two weeks without a PC, I only need to go to an Internet café from time to time“.

My first (and only) visit to the café was terrible! The DSL connection was literally slower than a dial-up! I started to panic: “I HAVE TO check my e-mail, publish a post on my blog and update my status on Facebook. I just HAVE TO!“. Then, it hit me: “What if I left everything and tried to enjoy my vacation without worrying about anything related to technology for once?“.

And that was exactly what I did. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed before. I admit that catching up will be hard (1000+ unread items in my Google Reader!!), but it was worth it.

Now that I’m back online, I’ll continue blogging regularly. I won’t be publishing posts at the same rate as I did in the summer though, because I have a lot to deal with right now

Well, it seems that my blog survived the Web Crash 2007 . So, let us do something different today.

For the last couple of days, I was feeling that I had blog addiction. I needed some numerical value to see how severe my addiction was. Today, I stumbled upon this site. So, I took the quiz, and my result was (take a deep breath):

64%?! I think that I need more practice!
Go and test yourself!