idin.net

plagiarism by ahmadinejad and his cabinet

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 09:23:00 +0000

ahmadinejad is one of the three authors of a book titled "safe room".
more information about the book can be found here: adinebook and vice-chancellor for research and technology of iran university of science and technology

the patent that this book talks about, in fact, belongs to farzad salimi and mahmood hosseini and is illegally registered by the authors of the book.

according to hamshahri newspaper, salimi complained against mousa mazloom and ali-akbar mehrabian (minister of industry and mines in ahmadinejad's government) to the court and the evidence proved that authors committed plagiarism by registering the idea as their own patent. salimi, the co-developer of "safe room" had provided the idea to the authors who worked at municipality of tehran. the authors later registered it as their own.
source: hamshahri newspaper

four years ago mehrabian -the coauthor- had given some details about the development of the idea by ahmadinejad:
"this project was first developed by the ex-mayor of tehran [ahmadinejad] the 9th president; it is a short-term solution for earth quake that is based on realities of the society and is developed by a group in municipality of tehran.
source: urban development and revitalization organization

e-reading 2

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:41:00 +0000

finally i went to the sony store and bought a prs-700 reader. when comparing it to the prs-505, the first thing that gets your attention is the better finish of prs-505 models. the prs-700 has a simple black finish while the prs-505 comes in two colors: metallica red and silver. aside from that the prs-700's touch screen causes serious readability problems. sony has put the touch layer on top of the e-ink layer lowers the contrast. in addition to the lower contrast, the extra layer (which is like a double layer glass) makes a shadow of the screen as if your eyes cannot focus correctly. the side-lights does not help at all because they do not light up the words that are in the middle of the screen. overall it is very hard to use prs-700 indoors.

i tried prs-700 for about a day and exchanged it with a prs-505. with a hunder dollars in my pocket, i gave up the touch screen technolgoy (which i am not a fan of) to take care of my eyes. i will use a regular pen and paper for taking notes and i won't leave oily finger prints on the screen to keep my ebooks clean.

e-reading

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:15:00 +0000

i am becoming more and more interested in buying an ebook reader. there are a few brands in the market but none of them is great. i think the eink technology limits them a lot because the ebook readers are not comparable to other consumer electronics in terms of resolution and speed. my guess is they are trying to lower the cost of processing to bring up their profit margins while paying too much on the eink side. on the other hand, resolution seems to be very costly when using the eink on the screen.

amazon's kindle and kindle 2 may seem a better choice than sony readers: prs-700, prs-505, and prs-500 in terms of the number of the available books and kindle 2's internet connectivity through amazon's "free" 3g network. sony on the other hand gives the option of adding external memory to the unit. in addition, prs-700 has a touchscreen that can be used for gesture commands, touchscreen keyboard, and highlighting. this means more screen realstate and more functionality. kindle's design is a lot bulkier than sony's.

kindle's internet connectivity is very tempting. however, amazon's ebook reader does not support open formats such as pdfs which is a shame. therefore the user should convert them to amazon's own format. the irony of the story is that users can use amazon's "email and convert" service which is not free. this is nothing but an attempt to monopolize the ebook market. a novel reader may prefer kindle 2, but for someone like me that reads a lot of technical papers and magazines in pdf format sony reader seems to be a much better match.

there are other choices for ebook readers such as irex. irex has 3 different models with "irex iliad" being the most famous. there is a big disadvantage for irex devices which is their terribly high price.

among the three sony readers prs-700 seems to be the hottest naturally. however, a few people have complained about the low contrast of its screen compared to prs-505. now the question is: do you prefer a black prs-700 with touchscreen and side-lighting to a silver prs-505 with a higher screen contrast which is also a lot cheaper? i am going to figure it out soon.

aside from ebook readers, i looked for a software to easily merge several pdfs into one. this was mainly because there are many free books and newspapers that are split into pdfs, chapter by chapter or page by page. luckily, i found one. it is very fast and very easy to work with: pdfsam short for pdf splitter and merger.

xp vs os x

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:25:00 +0000

with all the respect for apple's design in terms of materials, form factor, and classy look, i still believe microsoft is doing a better job of addressing users' needs.

first of all, windows is very customizable. you can change its look not only by changing the wallpaper, but also by changing the desktop and toolbar font sizes. in addition you can move the toolbar to any side of the desktop. the fonts in mac os x cannot be customized. they look great, but you cannot change their sizes without changing the resolution of the screen. even if there is a way to do it and i don't know it, it means that most people don't which is a usability disadvantage for mac.

second of all, windows is more universally usable. it can run on almost any pc from manufacturers all around the world. this means a wider variety of softwares and games.

most importantly, i prefer the mouse movement on windows a lot more. some people tell me to change the mouse speed on mac os x to make it feel like mouse in windows. you cannot believe how many times i have tried that. it just doesn't work! i believe there are more parameters to tune than are available in either windows or mac to customize mouse movement. i spend very much time on my computer and i use the mouse a lot. a mouse that doesn't move the way i am used to frustrates me to hell.

the fact that apple's advertisement is only based on attacking the software developer by talking about the disadvantages of the hardware builder proves them not to be very transparent. they attack pc makers in an ambiguous way that doesn't even define pc makers and then confuse the audience with an image of microsoft (probably because microsoft windows is pcs most important thing in common). pcs are dell, toshiba, sony, and ibm. you cannot combine the cons of all to compare every single one of them with apple to show microsoft defeated. in fact, windows runs on all of them and it gives the consumer the option to choose between good customer support, endurance, great sound and graphic, customizability, and low cost which is not the case with mac os.

i have a mac and i have both os x and windows xp on it. by the way, i rarely log into mac

file synchronization tools

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:01:00 +0000

i have a few external hard drives and some duplicates of some of my files on them. some files have unnecessary duplicates while others just get lost because i lose track of their location or i erase them before i make sure about the duplicates. trying to manage them more efficiently is almost impossible without spending too much time playing with the windows explorer. duplication is useful to some extent; e.g. having a mirror of your email messages somewhere in case of accidental deletion, which might simply be deleting an unused thunderbird profile which points at the same directory as your actual profile. another example would be a folder of the music files you carry on your laptop's tiny little hard drive that should also exist on your huge external hard drive just in case. ;)

there are some version control tools that are used by companies and more sophisticated home users. a simpler method that can be helpful would be mirroring or file synchronization.

the basic idea is the contents of two "synchronized" folders are exactly the same and remain the same. if you copy anything to one, the other will also get an exact copy with some exceptions: if the synchronization is offline, the user needs to trigger it. the same thing happens when you delete files from one. there are one-way methods of synchronization which have minor differences in concept.

anyways, i googled file synchronization and checked the results. www.allwaysync.com was the first non-sponsored link.

allwaysync is a freeware closed-source software. so is microsoft synctoy. in addition to them i tested freefilesync and dirsync pro. with all the respect for the open source community the two open source candidates where not comparable to the closed source ones. they did not support multiple synchronization jobs which is the least you would expect from a good synchronization tool.

synctoy, which has an extremely simple interface, missed file modifications (i.e. when i modified a file in one folder it did not update the mirrored file in the synchronized folder) and that is sad because the free allwaysync has a limitation: 20,000 files in 30 days.

i guess i will try to find out if i can make synctoy smarter by changing the settings or to explore if freefilesync has some hidden functionalities.

an apple a day keeps pcs away

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:36:00 +0000

after my ibm thinkpad's screen got really dim and red i decided to look for a new hardware on a friday. ironically enough, an apple store was going to be opened the next morning. i paid a visit to the store and bought a macbook-pro on sunday which i exchanged for a black macbook after two days.

i thought ibm was the best pc maker three years ago when i got my t42 thinkpad. guess what! i am not happy with it. the lcd had defects on sides since the beginning which is common among t42 and t43s! in addition, it has the darkest screen in the world. it was very unfortunate because i believed (and still do) that ibm is the best pc maker.
why didn't i switch to mac three years ago? well, i really didn't like os x. i still don't. call it stupid or not, the interface just doesn't feel right. all applications sharing a manu bar which should always be on top blocking the view.... os x's look is like seeing the world from behind a glass. in addition, in terms of universal usability, windows has been far better than apple. os x only runs on apple computers, windows runs on anything even the new apple computers.
since apple started using intel processors, i was hoping to try windows on mac. although i don't like os x, i like mac hardwares very much. especially now that pc makers have focused on making cheap computers.

let's get back to the story. i went to the apple store on a saturday, carefully looked at macbooks and macbook pros and the time capsule (which i may buy later). i made my mind the next day and bought the cheapest macbook pro with some hesitance. i loved it. but i was thinking why, instead of buying a macbook, i paid 400 dollars extra to get something bigger and heavier? of course i care more about the weight than the display size.
the next morning when i pushed the latch of the lid to open the laptop it jumped up so fast and vibrated. i slowly closed the latch again and felt that i had to apply extra force because the lid just didn't want to close and they had made the latch to keep it down!
i went online and looked for reviews and complaints about macbook-pro. voila! many people had complained that macbook-pros' lid bend over time. macbook-pro fans argued that any metal lid would bend which is correct but does not change the fact.
not only the bending problem but also electrical conductivity of the aluminium case made me go back to the plastic option: macbook.
with the extra money i upgraded the ram and bought a cool big backpack.
i should admit that i paid one hundred dollars more for the colour. i have an old mac-mini at work which is almost yellow and i had read about discolouration of white macs.

after all, i am happy with my black macbook and i have both leopard (os x) and windows xp on it.

google transit

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:03:00 +0000

finally, google made peace with non-car-owners! just pick up your city backpack, check the public transit trip planner and go out, and don't forget your bus pass.

it was always nice to use google map; much more user friendly than yahoo map and mapquest, but still lacking one thing! no public transit routes. okay, some people added metro/subway stations to their "personal" google maps but it still did not work the way we wanted it to. instead we had to use the old, slow, inconsistent trip planners provided by the transit companies.
the good news is, google map now gives direction for public transit users. that is called google transit.
it only supports three of the canadian cities including vancouver (where i live) and montreal (where i used to live), and a few american and european metropolitan areas.

it actually works well with vancouver's translink, but instead of supporting montreal's cheaper transit option stm, it uses amt. for example i could take the bus 165 which stopped in front of my building (10 seconds walk and 20 minutes on the bus) to go to concordia university but it suggests me to take a 35 minute walk to canora station and take a train which costs me more money and a lot more time. i hope this is just a bug and will be fixed soon.

tagscanner - file management

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:23:00 +0000

tagscanner is a free software that helps in organizing large music collections.
it has two groups of functionalities: id3 tag editing functionalities and file name generating tool.
id3 is a metadata that is mostly used for mp3 files. it normally contains information about the title of the song, the artist, the composer, the album name, album year, track number, disc number, and sometimes the album cover art.
there are two versions of id3 tags: id3v1 and id3v2. among all the subversions id3v2.3 is the most popular.
many audio players like winamp or itunes let you edit tags. itunes is even stronger in the sense that it lets you edit multiple tags but it is a bit confusing because it will not save them into id3 tags by default and you need to convert them to id3 tags. neither it provides a direct way of renaming files. tagscanner however has tons of functionalities related to the file names: generating some or all parts of the id3 tag from the file name and generating all or some of the file name from the id3 tag.
example: let's say i have downloaded roger waters's 1992 album, amused to death. the files have no tags but their names contain song names and track numbers in a bad formatting* ( e.g. roger waters-01-the ballad of bill hubbard.mp3). everything can be fixed in two simple steps:
step 1, generating tags from file names: define "-" as delimiter; artist=%1 (1st part of the file name); album="amused to death"; year="1992"; genre="progressive rock"; track number=%2 (2nd part of the file name); title=%3 (3rd part of the file name); and so on.
step 2, generating file names in a standard form: define the file names to have track number as their first part, titles as their second part and " - " as the delimiter; simply as: %7 - %2 (%7 stands for track number and %2 stands for title).

* anyone has (or should have) a standard format for their audio/video collection. my standard for file names are
a) tracknumber - songname.extension
e.g. 13 - it's a miracle.mp3
when the files are within a folder that contain songs of one artist/band.
b) tracknumber - artistname - songname.extension
when the files are withing a folder that contain songs of different artists/bands. it might be a compilation album.
of course when there is no record of the track numbers or some other information they are unintentionally omitted from the file name.
c) songname.extension

pidgin - instant messaging

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:13:00 +0000

the story goes back to 1997, maybe before that, when i experienced online chatting in bbs's like peyam.net. i didn't know the internet and i used my rockville 56k modem for chatting, sending emails (only to the bbs users of course), and posting stuff to forums. it had a very simple command line interface. we used "/#" to see who are online and "/p [username] hello!" to send greetings to them. we loved that. it still seems more intuitive to me than the current instant messengers. when the bbs's were overthrown by the internet (perhaps because they employed the same resources: the modem and the phone line, and not because of the superiority(?) of the internet) yahoo messenger was not as popular as it is now*. in fact i and many of my friends started chatting over the internet with icq. after some time a few icq users branched out to yahoo and some to msn. there were, and still are, other networks like mirc which uses the irc protocol.
the newest instant messenger worth trying, in my opinion, is google talk. many people left msn and yahoo for google talk. after all i ended up having some friends in yahoo messenger, some in google talk, and some in msn. the first software i found which supported more than one network was trillian. unfortunately the free version does not support google talk which was my main reason to look for alternatives. among them i tried pidgin and miranda im. miranda has a nicer look but pidgin is now my favorite because it has a magical ability: logging in with multiple users. i don't have to switch to my old yahoo user name to check my "non-forwardable" messages. i have two yahoo user names and two gmail accounts and all the four work with pidgin on one client and at the same time.

*first version release dates:
irc: 1988
mirc: 1995
icq: 1996.11
yahoo messenger: 1998.03
msn messenger: 1999.07
trillian: 2000.07
google talk: 2005.08

converttube

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 04:22:00 +0000

youtube is a wonderful website for uploading videos and watching them online. the bad news is some youtube videos become unavailable after a while. also, it is impossible to watch them when you are not connected to the web.
the good news is there are many tools on the web for downloading youtube videos. among them are these three firefox add-ons: youtube it, video downloadhelper, and video download. there is also a website called youtube database that downloads the video file from youtube. all these tools download an .flv file. flv stands for flash video. you can certainly download a free flv player and see those videos but there is a website called converttube that makes it much easier by converting the original video file to standard windows and mac video formats. it gives you the option to choose between many output formats including: .mpg, .mov, .3gp, .flv, .mp3, and .mp4. you don't have to download the .flv file at all. all you need to do is to copy and paste the url of the video and then, after some time obviously, a link to a downloadable file pops up.
i just converted bobby mcferrin's "don't worry, be happy" video clip to .mpg and i'm enjoying it.

simpsonizers

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:26:00 +0000

i am planning to post brief reports about web-tools and softwares here. yesterday i found these two very cool websites for "the simpsons" fans:
"simpsonize me" and "the simpsomaker".
the first one asks you to upload a picture of yourself which makes it a lot faster to do. the second one however, lets you design a character, of yourself probably, with many options. the portrait you are seeing is me simpsonized by the first tool.

keywords: web tools, internet tools, the simpsons, simpsonize

sidekiq

noreply@blogger.com (idin) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:07:00 +0000

have you ever tried different search engines? probably not when you are sure that google gives you the best results. but when you are looking for a picture, or video, there are many websites like flickr that have their own search bar.
instead of opening tons of firefox tabs or explorer windows you can use this easy to use search tool that employs many search engines, virtually, in parallel. by a simple click you can switch from google to altavista, or from picture search to video search.
the sidekiq page is split up to two parts. on the left side you can see the sidekiq search bar and the many options for your search. e.g. images, videos, etc. on the right, the results are displayed.
for example, i use sidekiq more often when i am looking for a picture. i type the keywords in the search bar and hit the "images" button. by default it uses the google image search. after spending some time on the google search results i choose "flickr" on the left and get high resolution pictures on the right side.

keywords: search tool, search engine, image search, internet tools