Posted: March 21st, 2009 | Author: khosrow | Tags: iran, Life, News, Politics | No Comments »
He was my age. I’m not sure what he studied, and what he did to make a living. But on his time off he was a blogger, and criticized Iranian society and government openly. Last year he was sentenced to two years in prison for “insulting the authorities”. And now he is dead. Just before the new Iranian year. Many bloggers are lamenting his loss: here, here, and here and here’s an English language post. And the interview with Omidreza’s lawyer is here.
Posted: March 3rd, 2009 | Author: khosrow | Tags: linux, opensource, Technology, windows | No Comments »
Yesterday I went to my home theatre pc to be greeted by an endless barrage of error messages. In my efforts to fix the problem, I forgot to take a snapshot of the error, but suffice it to say that it was some odd error about svchost.exe being unable to write to a memory location.
I tried a reboot hoping it would fix the problem, but after the system came I was bombarded by pop-ups! Good old adware! It was years since I was a victim of one of those…
I saw this chance to put one of my diabolical plans into action: Install Linux.
So, I didn’t even try fixing the computer. I quickly backed up my important files, and knowing my media files were safe in a separate drive popped in the latest copy of Linux in – which happened to be Kubuntu 8.04. The install took no more than 45 minutes, and right away the difficult stuff was over with and the Logitech diNovo Edge was detected with all buttons working!
As we speak the system is updating itself to the current version of Kubuntu: version 8.10 and soon I will be able to install MythTV and have a proper HTPC.
Man, I remember the days when I had to scour the internet boards to get info on get X working on my old 90MHz Pentium. Or when a simple install was a frustrating experience.
I just like to say great success!.
Posted: February 26th, 2009 | Author: khosrow | Tags: internet, Life, Productivity, Technology | 10 Comments »
Yesterday I was feeling a bit unproductive, and a bit guilty for not doing more during the work day. So I looked at my trends on Google Reader and realized I could improve by looking at its data.
So as the data above shows my websurfing is at its highest on Mondays after coming back from the weekend. This statistic makes sense to me, considering I don’t read any news over the weekends and I try to catch up on the news. But on the other hand, I think the opposite would be better for my productivity. Where I work getting the bulk of work done on Mondays and Tuesday is more beneficial and leaves me the rest of the week to debug and troubleshoot.
This graph is a bit embarassing and I could do a lot to fix my work habits just based on this. Here’s what I see along with my excueses in italic:
- I do most of my browsing during the work day. I guess it’s a form of a mental break at work!
- At 9am and 10am I do a lot of websurfing, along with 12pm (during lunch) and at the end of the day. I just start my day a little slowly that’s all!
- My surfing remains high during the work day and is never that high in the evenings. I prefer to chill at home!
So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Can you interpret these graphs?
Posted: February 5th, 2009 | Author: khosrow | Tags: internet, iran, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
Balatarin ( Farsi: بالاترین ) is a farsi website dedicated to social information sharing and link aggregation. This site is much like digg but mostly for the Iranian internet sphere. (wikipedia article)
A couple of days ago, the site was hacked (most likely their DNS or the registrar info) and suddenly the importance of this site to Iranian internet users became quite apparent.
Well, the good news is that the site owners have now gained control of the site. It will come back soon, but in the meantime here’s the message on the front page:
