Rezaf Diary

Picasa for Mac

2009-05-15T04:44:00.000-05:00

I have been waiting literally for ages to organize my pictures. At one point I almost did it by using Picasa, but unfortunately it was only a few weeks before my transition to a Mac. Ever since, I have been trying to convince myself to change my picture storing habits from self-controlled folders to trusitng iPhoto to do the correct thing, but it never worked for me. I think I just need to have the control.

Any way, Picasa is finally available to macs. And it works quite well, especially since at its core Picasa is an image viewer, not an image organizer like iPhoto. By the way, I have the same problem with iTunes, I wish it could only monitor my music folders and show their contents, but that's a different story.

Anyway, hopefully this move will make emailing and Picasa-Web-Album-Sharing of my pictures much easier and hence pheasible. People who know me usually think my camera is a one way black hole, and even though my pictures are usually good (photography is one of my hobbies) they rarely get to see the final shots! Hopefully it won't be the case anymore.

To coelebrate this development, here's a picture of the sunrise in Galveston Island, Texas.

Enjoy!

Large Japanese soroban, belonged to John Nash.

2009-05-11T11:07:00.001-05:00

I found this soroban in an admin room. Now belonging to our university, it used to belong to John P. Nash.

Being impressed

2009-05-10T17:39:00.001-05:00

How technology has progressed! I'm on a conference call with two colleagues, sending SMS messages to another friend, taking a picture of my back yard and writing a blog post about it. All at the same time, from my cell phone. That's why I like to be in this industry. What you can only dream of one day will be accomplished in no time.

My motorcycle

2009-05-04T02:25:00.001-05:00

So here it is. Doesn't it look great?!

Let's hope it will provide me with countless hours of safe fun and excitement.

A post after a long hiatus

2009-05-04T02:07:00.001-05:00

Ok, here I am after a long delay. It's been hard to keep up with all the work. Well, I'll try to write more often. Anyway.

Today I rode on my motorcycle for the first time. What a pleasent rush of feelings! The wind, fast moving scenary around you, and the looming danger which requires you to be 100% aware of everything. Nice experience.

Well, yes, I had not mentioned it earlier. I did big a motorcycle a few days ago. And I'm so happy I did. I'll post some pics in my next post.

Software I cannot live without

2009-02-07T12:41:00.015-06:00

As a graduate student, there are a few software packages I cannot live without. They do an impressive job in organizing my tasks and projects, helping me in research and organizing my life in general.

They are also all Mac OS X applications. Some of them come pre-installed with a Mac, some you have to buy. Fortunately they are usually not expensive, and are really worth every dollar.

So, without further ado, here they are:

Apple Mail. Comes with Mac, integrated with everything else on the Mac. If you are a Mac user, you just "have" to setup Mail. I have set it up to connect to gmail servers using IMAP (DO NOT USE POP3, it is "inferior"!), and it works handsomely, almost like a poor man's exchange server! Also can read RSS feeds, which is invaluable.
iCal. Again a great application. Integrated with Mail. And everything else on Mac.
Preview. Great FAST application to work with PDFs and images.
Safari. I left firefox and became a safari user. It does have its quirks, but it has PDF viewing integrated at its core, and for a graduate student, nothing is more important.
OmniFocus. I "LOOOOOVE" this app! Cannot live without it. I got it as a gift from a friend (thanks Ellick!), but it is worth every single dollar. Gets your life organized. iCal is cool and everything, but it is only a calendar, and a calendar can go only so far. It is designed based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles, and does a great job doing it.
Papers. Creates a catalog of papers you have downloaded on your computer. Great searching functionality. Costed me $25, and is worth it.
Microsoft Office 2008 suite. Well, I use them, and they do the job. They are clunky compared to other Mac apps, but with docx and pptx files being sent around (and virtually being the standard formats), there is no other choice. I've heard good things about the new iWork 09, but for now I'm sticking to MS Office. Costed me $50 with educational discount, and I'm generally happy with it. Note: Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the standard ones, but Entourage is also useful as a newsgroup reader. I don't use it for its mail and calendar functionalities, Apple Mail and iCal are better integrated.
MacTeX. Great app for LaTeX users. Comes with great front end apps like TeXShop, LaTexIT (Mathematical Expression editor), and of course the TeX engine.

So here you go. There are other features in the Mac OS X itself that make life easier for me, but that's a different story.

P.S. Apple Mail (in IMAP mode) works great with iPhone's Mail. Same with iCal, and OmniFocus.

I'm worth....

2008-04-04T19:01:00.001-05:00

<span> Powered By Adult Toy Shop

I dreamed of flying

2008-02-19T07:14:00.006-06:00

Last night I dreamed of flying. It was such an awesome dream, such a nice feeling. Indescribable!

Part of it was because of my flying apparatus in my dream. Think of it like a motorcycle. A Kawasaki ninja to be more precise. Something like this one:

(Image from www.pashnit.com, all copyrights belong to them)

But it had retractable wings, each like 3 feet, and that was it! It also had a strange-looking helmet built-in, which would automatically place on your head, and had some HUD (head-on-display) stuff in it. Think master chief helmet:

(Image from www.videogamesblogger.com, all copyrights belong to them)

Now here's the best part of it: I bought it (of course in my dream) for a little bit below $3000! Yep, dreams! I flied to somewhere in Britain, and such a fly it was!

Man, I have to go to a flying school now!

Strange plants

2007-10-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

Computer Graphics have come a long way. Just look at these plants. They look soooo real!

I have come back, to my senses.

2007-09-17T19:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a procrastinator. Here, I admitted it. I spend hours and hours reading about gaming industry's rumors and news instead of playing them (Yeah, that's retarded!) I spend even more hours reading news, to see what's happening on the face of our poor planet. I kill time watching pointless youtube videos.

So, I may have come back to my senses. How? Well, it was a coincident. I came across this funny video from Digg. Well, it's certain that you'll feel something wrong with it after laughing for a few seconds: It's so kiddish! I mean, I haven't done any type of these "funny" stuff for almost 15 years now!

BANG! Reality suddenly hit me hard. Here I am, in one of the top national graduate schools wasting my time watching teenager stuff, and wasting my time reading the damn comments!

NO MORE, I say. I've gotta quit this, as hard as it may be. And the best way to quit something is taking it away. But wait, I'm a research student, I need google at least twice an hour! Well, the answer is this: BLOCK the sites you know are time-hogs!

As great as sites like Digg, Youtube, Google news and Balatarin (Persian equivalent of Digg) are, they just consume TOOOOO much of my time, and hence are blocked. Well, I've set them to be accessible 1 hour per day. If anyone wants my modifications to Gina's hack (add a finish time to the view limit), please say so in comments.

I hope this solution can help me quit my addiction to cyberslacking!

P.S. The rule of tolerable ten looks promising too!

Google is filtered in Iran?!

2007-09-17T01:34:00.000-05:00

This may sound unbelievable, but in the latest round of filtering internet sites in Iran, google.com and many of its services have been filtered. The filtering is not limited to a single ISP, and users in many cities who use different ISPs are experiencing the same. Even Gmail is not left out, and many users cannot even access their email accounts.

Aside for almost every political Persian language site, many popular sites such as Wikipedia and youtube are also filtered in Iran.

If you can read Persian, you can go to this link on Balatarin.com (which is the Persian equivalent of Digg) and read the latest news about this problem.

wii have to go?!

2007-09-13T00:22:00.000-05:00

So I got a wii, in a moment of madness! Saw one at the local Walmart and grabbed it without even thinking. But, it has left me unimpressed.

See, there are not many games I'd be craving to play on Wii, unlike XBOX360 or even PS3. I'll put a list of the games I'd like to play here, partly to try to convince myslef not to put the wii on ebay!
The ones that I pretty much want to play are:

Metroid prime corruption (which 3 of my best pals got me for my birthday, God bless their souls!)
Resident Evil 4 wii edition
The legend of Zelda, twilight princess
Mercury Melt down revolution (not out yet)
soul calibur legends (not out yet)
Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party (dance with a pad AND wii-mote, not out yet)

2'nd tier games would be:

Super paper mario
Super mario world (virtual console)
The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time (virtual console)
Super mario galaxy (not out yet)
Super smash Brawlz (not out yet)

3'rd tier ones:

Mayby Warioware?
Super Mario 64 (virtual console)
Sonix 3(Just because I couldn't get to play this as a kid!, virtual console)
Golden axe (brings back memories!, virtual console)
Mario kart 64 (virtual console)
resident evil: umbrela chronicle (On rail shooter, similar to the house of the dead? not out yet)
Loony tunes:ACME arsenal (not out yet)
Mortal combat: Armageddon (not out yet)

As you can see, there not much game for wii currenly that I crave, and for that matter even games who are supposed to be released in the coming months. I can easily get away with not playing the 3'rd tier games, and maybe with a bit of cursing I can ignore the second tier ones.

Well, maybe virtual console can make me keep it. Then again, I can subscribe to console classix and get many of those games much cheaper! Also, I'll get to play it on my laptop then, which frees me from bearing with never-ending rants of certain female family members, whining about a soap opera or something being played on the TV when I play the Wii!

Not sure yet, but I think it's a goner!

Apple store on iPhone day

2007-07-03T23:33:00.000-05:00

There has been so much haloo baloo about the iphone I'm not even going to start, and this post is not about it at all! You see, I went to buy a macbook on exactly that date, Friday June 29th (yeah baby!) So I go there while awaiting a huge mess and tired sales people. But what I saw positively surprised me! About 3~4 Apple sales people were clapping and congratulating people who would enter the store! WOW! Take a look for yourself:

By the way, this is my very first video ever uploaded on youtube! And of course yes, I made it with my macbook (took the footage with my cell phone, a palm treo).

Entering unknown waters

2007-03-08T17:04:00.000-06:00

So I've been suddenly pushed into the world of linux kernel hacking. I've been waiting for this for a long time now, but now that I'm struggling with some kernel and device driver books, I feel soo confused and lost! Well, I hope after being exposed for a longer period to this type of material, everything make sense at some point.

I just did the first step, I'm downloading the linux kernel source code right now. It is 50+ Megabytes of zipped information, which is really scary! OK, download completed, I'm off to new unexplored (for me) terrains!

My new cell will make me feel like a president

2007-02-19T22:16:00.000-06:00

I bought a new treo 680 cell phone on the president day, so I'll be feeling like a president from now on. I'm still waiting for my newly bought treo to come in a few days, but I've been using a Nokia smartphone for a 3 years now. With my Mp3 Player in a pocket and Palm Zire organizer in another (and the big chunky Nokia in a third) I felt like anybody excpet an executive!

So, how my treo is supposed to make me feel like a president? First of all it's going to eliminate three humps on my pants! With a leather case on my belt and my trousers finally fitting on me, I'll definitely LOOK more like an executive.

Then whenever I pull my treo out, I'll feel as exclusive as a president, cause I went through all the troubles to get an exclusive arctic white treo. Not a bland grey or silver, but the absolutely great looking white one!

Aside from aesthetics, I've been relying on my Palm to organize my life for a long time now (my first Palm was an m105 back in 2001, and I never felt OK with the Symbian. Stylus rocks!). I simply can't live without my calendar, and the occasional missing of an appointment due to my laziness (of finding in which pocket I've put my Palm) or bad luck (oops, I forgot to bring the Palm!) should totally vanish with my treo.

I'm going to set my three different email accounts to be popped automatically on my treo, so no more running back and forth between my office and seminar rooms. I'm still a (grad) student, and it would be nice if I can get my emails in the classrooms or seminars too.

Let's see, so many times I had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation in 20 minutes because a professor just decided to visit our group! Yep, treo can do that too! I write reports and papers a lot, so maybe the Microsoft word compatibility can help me sometimes, although I confess the cramped keyboard hinders fast typing. Well, we live in a world of compromises, right?!

Let's not forget about listening to 8 giga bytes of MP3 (treos now accept SDHC cards, and they're cheap!). No more Ipod! Oh, let's not forget the Nintendo emulator software! Mario, where are you?! (See, us Gen. Nintendo kids have to keep Mario near). Life of a president is not all about work after all, even a president needs some entertainment once in a while - ask Bill Clinton about it!

Oh, and let's not forget I can SSH into my home Linux server using pssh. This one rocks!

The fact that there are thousands of third party apps to choose from (for cheap of coarse!) and my ability to write Java programs for my treo is just the icing on the cake!

The cars I would like to get

2007-02-17T14:31:00.000-06:00

Acura TL or RL
Mercedes C280 luxuary or an E class
Lexus IS 350
Lexus GS 350
Audi A4
Cadillac CTS

BUT, I'm pretty happy about my Honda Accord, it's awesome!

Palm is screwing up its users

2007-02-13T15:42:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm feeling angry and upset! I finally made up my mind to pay $400 and buy this new cell phone, Palm treo 680 in arctic white color (The second phone from right in this picture). I believe it's much more interesting than the bland graphite version (First one from left). I decided to go and buy it on Wednesday last week, and I checked the Palm website to make sure they have it. Yep, they had it.

Now, on Friday I took my credit card and went to their web store to buy what I've been craving for the last month. But,.... it's not there! To be more exact, they only had the graphite version up on their website! It turned out that Cingular has bought all color treo 680s for itself, and it seems that their deal gives the exclusive rights of color treo 680s to CIngular. So, Palm just decided to screw their customers who are not on Cingular, like me. Now my only option is the dull gray (graphite) one. BOOOH!

Listen Palm, I use T-mobile, and I was going to add $400 of my hard earned money to your pockets. NOT ANY MORE! Unless you give me an arctic treo 680, I'm not going to get one! Are you listening Palm?! You screw your loyal customers (I've been having Palm devices since 2001. This makes me a 6-year loyal Palm customer), YOU GET OUT OF BUSINESS!

Take a look at these photos too and see for yourself why I want the arctic color! (The two following pictures are copyrighted images taken from engadet website.)

Open loop vs closed loop control

2007-02-04T14:01:00.000-06:00

Do you ever wonder what the hell is a closed loop control system? How doews it differ from an open loop control system? If so, read on!

Theoretically, an open loop control system should be able to do whatever their closed loop counter parts do. All you need is a 100% accurate mathematical model of your system, and every other environmental factor which could affect the systems operation.

Ok, we want to control real stuff. In reality you can never model a system accurately 100% (it is just too hard!) , and it's even harder to account for environmental factors (or noise if you like). Thus you see a good amount of deviation from what you modeled in your real implementation.

How does a feedback control system work? It doesn't care about the internals of the system, just looks at it as a black box. It will look at the outputs of the system and will say: "hm... I'd like the output to be 10, but it is 8, so let's increase the input a bit. ok, now it's better, we're getting to 10... oh oh , we passed 10 and are now at 10.5, oh boy, let's decrease the input a bit. Ok, that's better, output is at 10 now, I'm done! But I'll keep an eye on the output in case an unknown noise comes in, in which case I can compensate for it by changing the input."

Now the problem with the feedback control is that since our systems are real (the tech word is causal) and our controller cannot foresee the future (DUH, we're talking about real world!) and moreover it doesn't know that much about the system internals and noise, We
will usually have overshoot (like the scenario I told you, i.e. we want 10, but for a short period we get 10.5) and oscillation (like 8...9...10...10.5...9.75...10.... unless you set your feedback controller to work really slow.

So to sum it up, open loop should work fine and beautifully, but only in your dreams! put an open loop controller before a real system, and you'll see deviations, which the controller cannot even correct. In real world we use feedback control systems all the time.

As an interesting side note, our brain controls our limbs in a feedback control system, which is set to overshoot and oscillate a bit for fast responses. Check it out: stretch your right arm, and then try to quickly bring your palm in front of your face, and stop it there. You'll surely see the overshoot and oscillation!

Odyssey of a good Bath.

2007-01-14T15:10:00.000-06:00

Bath (n.): process of soaking the body in water or some other aqueous matter such as mud, steam, or milk. The bath may have cleanliness or curative purposes, and it can have religious, mystical, or some other meaning. A bath is often used as a technique to temporarily reduce the symptoms of illness or pain of drug withdrawal.

Shower (n.): a bath in which water is showered on the body; also: the apparatus that provides a shower.

I have never been a big fan of bathing; I always took a quick shower. It is much faster to take a shower, and it fits well with my hectic lifestyle. So, yeah... Everything was fine until last week. I was quite tired, physically of course, after a Sunday picnic in which my buddies and I tried to play some of our childhood games. I came back home with my body tired and battered, so I thought: well, a hot bath would be your cure!

Well, not quite! The bath turned out to be a disaster! See I always take a shower; I never cared about how my bathtub's walls are filthy, because usually water never reaches that high anyway! Needless to say, the bath got filled with numerous small pieces of calcite (and other things which I'd like to think of them as calcite!). To make it worse, hot water ran out in the middle of my bath (I live in a small apartment with my own heating system, not a big central one). While the lower half of my body was warm, the upper half was freezing!

Okay, bad experience. So yesterday I scrubbed the whole bathtub and bought and installed a new shower curtain, and now the bath tub looks much cleaner. Not as white as I would like it to be (you know, like a new bath) but it's clean and white enough. I'm thinking of buying a rotary scrubbing power tool to make it cleaner. I still have the hot-water problem, which for now I remedied with a trick. I fill the tub with about an inch of hot water, lie down in the bath and turn the shower on, so that I get hot water raining on me! Again not as nice as I would like, but at least not a disaster anymore. Yet, my odyssey of a good bath continues...

White and Nerdy!

2007-01-01T23:48:00.000-06:00

You know that I sometimes think of myself as nerdy. If you don't remember me mentionin it, just look at my nerd score of 97 on the right hand column!

So, naturally I get delighted to see this clip by Al Yankovic.

Wow, this is awesome!

Waiting for my new car to come!

2006-12-31T21:21:00.000-06:00

Well, not exactly a new car, but my new car, and I'm so proud of it! I'll later announce to the whole world what it is, as soon as I have it under my name to be exact, but let me tell you that if it passes the mechanical inspections on next Wednesday, I'll be a proud owner of a .... um, wait for a few days!

Awesome act by Jerome Murat

2006-12-14T01:05:00.000-06:00

1. With no comments, just watch this awesome video!

jerome murat
Uploaded by segalier

2. Life sucks! In 7 hours I have an exam :(

SAMAND in Venezuela

2006-11-30T01:44:00.000-06:00

It seems that they have finally started manufacturing the Iranian SAMAND car in Venezuela, and it's interesting that their president is driving the car! wow!

Struggling with Ubuntu 6.06

2006-11-19T03:44:00.000-06:00

Thanks God it's the thanks giving break, otherwise I'd been so busted! I've been trying to install Ubuntu linux 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VIA Epia based mother board (with a 667 Mhz Eden fanless processor, sweeeet piece of technology!) with a 1 Giga byte compact flash card as its hard drive, and as such I had to use the server edition of Ubuntu (since the desktop version wouldn't event try to install unless you have more than 2 GB of free hard drive, and I intend to use this computer as a server anyway). The installation process gets finished painlessly, but then the installed system wouldn't boot. After showing the message: "uncompressing linux ... ready to boot", the system just freezes. Damn...
My (10-hours) online search resulted in believing that there is something wrong with the initrd initiating process. But before doing something as insane as downloading (gasp!) slackware linux, I came across a small post in a forum with a user with the same problem. Somebody had posted in reply that with installing the server edition from the alternative Ubuntu CD, the problem would be solved. So, right now I'm downloading it. I would be extremely happy (and yet totally quizzed) if it works.

I'll keep you in touch, now it's time for sleep!

Updated on 11/20/2006:
WooHoo! Ubuntu dapper drake server edition got installed. As I said earlier, the alternative CD should have been used. Now that's strange; well, not that much, it's kind of the common case in linux world. Even a very well polished linux distro like Ubuntu has these problems.
Any way, my new (fanless, dead quiet) server is running in a cardboard box! I'll post a picture of it in my next post.

Holy Moly! A Playstation 3 for 14,900! Wow!

2006-11-14T04:20:00.000-06:00

Wow, this is crazy! A Sony PS3 is sold on Ebay for $14,900. I have no more comments (I'm speechless!), here's the link from ebay.
(Well, the bidding may be fake though, just to sincrease the price...)