Talib Kweli and Mick Boogie: MCEO

One of the finest additions to my mixtape collection - incredibly good music gifted to the masses for free - mixtapes such as these truly carry the spirit of a musician: music is like philosophy, and an accomplished philosopher would address a crowd of thousands without asking for a penny in return; all he seeks is a deeper insight into his mindworks by listening to himself and to the response of his audience. There're only a few Mick Boogies in the hiphop community but hopefully we will see them get the better of corporate music giants whose shortsightedness is outclouding the yeateryear shine of this crossover genre that is hiphop. Check out his mixtapes including this one at his website or at datpiff.

Talib Kweli's music will certainly be with me on my Noah's arc - first heard him on kanye's College Dropout and then went on to buy his album Kwality -- another great album. So when I heard he's out with Mick Boogie blacksmithing new music, I wanted in!

Practical UML modeling tips

I found Scott Ambler's site really useful in my work - he covers practical usage of commonly used UML diagrams -- I've gone through his writing on state machines and activity diagrams: clear, concise and illustrative. Here's the jumpoff page:
http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/

Technical search engines

Here're a couple of technical search engines that I've come to use frequently:

CiteSeer: This one's a true goldmine that I've been using since the last 5-6 years
Scientific Commons: This one's a recent find, acts like a frontend to CiteSeer and probably other engines.

Writing a Whitepaper

Did this Google search and found something for starters like me

http://www.mwknowles.com/free_articles/white_paper/white_paper.html

Security vulnerabilia

Some interesting wtf stuff on low-level keyboard hotkey rev-engineering
http://www.eeye.com/html/resources/newsletters/vice/VI20051005.html

Interesting stuff on Spied Piper.
http://blakewatts.com/namedpipepaper.html