.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Some tools you just cant help loving and Anapod from redchairsoftware.com is one of them. I dislike itunes and the reason is probably because Apple doesn’t really care how bad iTunes works with PC.

Anyways, I am sure iTunes is good for some people, but not me. So I have been using Anapod and it keeps getting better and better and it sure was worth the $25 I paid especially when I was given a whole year’s of free upgrades. And since the dev team of this company seems to use some sort of agile development method, they keep churning out new versions a couple of times a month which as a user I love even though the changes are small. For instances this latest version allowed me to directly sync my outlook contacts with my contacts in the iPod, instead me having to manually export them to vCard version and then drag and drop them. Very simple feature, and awesome!

Which bring me to another related subject that I think about a lot from time to time. What makes a tool a killer application? Certain things have to be there, like user friendliness, usefulness, flexibility and a number of other things that the every developer knows about, but at the end there is probably a few competitors out there that might slow down the pace that a killer app is discovered at. For instance, if I develop tool X that does something and has Y and Z as competitors, I guess one way of winning over users from Y and Z is to give them ability to import data from Y and Z to my app, otherwise they are not going to be as keen to give up their current application and start using mine. But that is also not going to be enough I think. You also have to give the user the ability to export their settings and data to other formats so they won’t feel locked in to your application.

This might sound idiotic at first but it makes sense if you think about it. For instance, when I look at a new software, the first thing I look at after actually liking the features, is to see can I import things from a similar application I am using? And also can I export them back to the same application in case I later discover I don’t like it? If not, then forget it, because I don’t want to be locked into this new application and later on find out that I don’t like it and have to redo everything in case I want to switch.

I read an article about history of Lotus 123 and Microsoft excel the other day and I found out that Lotus 123 TOTALLY dominated the market before Excel. So what did Microsoft do? Apart from lotsa marketing that was good but didn’t really bring about the mass conversion they built in the export/import features I mentioned above and that turned out to be the key to winning most people.=20

Fire fox is an example of an app that does this half way, ie, it imports things from IE but won’t let you export things which is starting to bother me more and more. Not because I want to take my cookies and history and change browser, but because when I want to reimage my PC all that gets lost simply because they have locked me in.

I guess on a philosophical level, one could ask the question if it is matter of honesty to allow the user to come over AND leave when they want?

[Outside of my blog, I am part of the Bahá’í Faith, a movement to unit the world through spiritual principles and based on the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh.]

Looked around a bit and downloaded a few themes for my site and finally settled on the Dark-Maple, so I am happy with it for now and if any new themes that I like come up, it won’t take more than 60 secs to change it.

Would love to hear what you think, so feel free to leave a comment…

I love it! I found http://www.customizegoogle.com/ and it lets you customize the result page of your Google search with many things (there is a screen shot). This is a Fire fox extension I should add. Very useful!

So Naw-Ruz is here and although it was a couple of days ago, I haven’t had the time to post anything. This year was my last Naw-Ruz celebrating it in Haifa and it was very special. I am going to miss it very much. I have about four months left before I will be bidding farewell from Haifa this time, so apart from work and trying to review material for a MCP exam, building a mini e-bay and a couple of other small projects, I have to start thinking about packing my stuff. With absolute most certainty, coming to serve as a volunteer at the Bahá’í World Centre has been my best decision in life and leaving it at this time was the most uncertain and difficult decision to make, but I feel the timing is right and hopefully I will have a chance to come back later in life, but for now this chapter is about to end and I look forward to the next one.

Oh, leaving here, means also I need to start dusting off my resume and a thought occurred to me, when I do apply for a job, it is very likely for the company in question to ‘google’ me up and they will find this blog. Am I comfortable with them reading this? I certainly don’t have anything I wouldn’t want them to read about, but at the same time the thought feels a bit awkward, probably because, here I do express personal opinions, that has nothing to do with how I perform or am as a professional. Now, for my future boss to read about it is fine, but it feels like they would know a lot more about me than I would know about them, ie on a personal level. It’s really not an issue, but it surprised me a little to find out that I wasn’t completely keen on the idea of just about anyone (= future employer) to read my blog. Funny huh?

Reading my feeds, I found out today that MSN now supports having 300 people on your contact list (used to be 150)…good news for me, though I already have two account to support more than 150. Apart from that, I came across Zoom info which contains info about people, I am not there but many of my friends are. Haven’t really bothered to try and figure out what info they catalog, but an interesting idea.

Another thought I am having these days is given I want GSM as a cell phone, what is the best option to have a combo device that has an organizer, is a phone, can read feeds on (GPRS), maybe plays mp3 and has a decent camera so I can take pictures when Kodak moments arise and all this with good battery, blue tooth, nice size display and fairly light. If you have any candidates, please do let me know!

And finally, here is the current most overused buzz words according to 150 senior execs.

I finally bit the bullet and re-imaged my laptop after some 5 months. Anyways, last round I tried Google and Microsoft’s desktop search engines and although Googles was good I never really trusted it as it didn’t seem to index everthing I asked it. Also it doesn’t give you much options in terms of where to store your index etc. Microsoft has a better integration with windows and was very good but I constantly had to snooze it as it would try and index things instantly and using FileMon from sysinternals I realized that it is constantly writing to the disk.

So this round I am trying Yahoo’s which is powered by the fast X1 and so far I must say I am impressed and prefer it over the two I mentioned.

Also, in case you haven’t seen this, here is a list of killer apps (by Scott Hanselman) that I would say most of them are must have, especially if you are a little on the geek side.

For those of you who use Firefox as default browser, a while back I came across StumbleUpon extension which is a great one. Basically, the way it works is that by pressing the button in the toolbar, it open a new website, one that has been suggested/voted by a number of people that also use this.

If you think about it, these days you don’t randomly surf the net, and I would barely know where to start even, but with this you are presented websites that other people have come across, found interesting and suggested it and as a site gets more votes the chances of it being presented to you is higher when you. Another great thing is that all the websites that you come across and like, gets saved so you an revisit them later on and they even offer a RSS feed for the ones you have voted for. Here is the list of websites I ‘saved’ by voting for them.

I thought my right side of the brain was pretty good. But then when trying out twinoo I got all the math problems solved but kept losing out on the color questions. It boosted my geek side though.

I found a few cool flash movies on the finalist of Flash Forward conference in San Fran. And finally this is how a model can be made. Most of it is in Swedish but I am sure you wont have that big of a problem to understand what to do.

I am sure you have read about the website freeipods.com. If not, basically the site is about :

• Sign up by creating a free account.
• Buying one of the offers from a list of sponsored offers (from 5 DVDs for $ 0.49/each to online fax account to teeth whitening stuff).
• Convince 10 friends of yours to do the same

And a couple of months later you get your iPod. When I heard (a year ago mabye) about this initially, I thought, what a lame idea for scam, surely no one buys this story. Anyways, the other week I got an email from a friend in the states asking me to sign up for a FREE Mac Mini. Again, I thought my friend either has a virus of some kind that sent out this email or he has been suckered into it. Another few days later, I got the same email from another friend in the states (these two friends know each other as well, so I am guessing the first email went to him as well). So I did what I did the first time, pressed the delete button faster than I could think and went on with my life.

Today, I got an email from both of them, telling me that that got their free Mac mini!!! I guess if you think about it, this would be possible since each of these offers makes you plus 10 of your friends buy stuff for around $10-20 which comes down to $110-$220 before they have to cough up a mac. And add to that the price they charge their sponsors to get a spot. Still, a Mac mini is about $485 so it doesn’t add up quite, but what to do when people do get their Mac minis?

First one is about why the Hungarian notation in writing code should no longer be used. Second one discusses developers that are attached to using IDEs vs. the no IDE developers. And lastly, this one is an interesting idea but it’s doable only in .NET 2.0.

I came across Beaterator that you can potentially waste a lot of time on. Basically it lets you create your own beat. Very cool design. [via Geekdojo]

Also, I learned that Microsoft is offering a 2nd free shot if you take an exam with them and happen to fail and since I already was planning on taking one of the MCSD .NET exams this works out perfectly. Details on 2nd free shot.

I just love how easy to use and good this album creating application is and is the one I use to put up pictures online. To give you a sample, have a look at the sample album I created for a friend’s wedding using this tool.

When waking up this morning I thought to myself, I am tired of waking up either to the annoying ring of the alarm clock or the music on the radio that I can’t control. Why can’t there be a alarm clock with mp3 functionality. Well I guess Philips must have heard me. They have one now so you know what I want for my birthday.

Also, I came over these two sites that are handy to have bookmarked www.connectionstrings.com and free dev tools

Checked my Ad sense account today for stats of yesterday since it was my first day. 28 visits (# of times the Google script in the page was loaded), 7 clicks on the ads and $0.00 in income. Maybe I am too optimistic about getting a dollar in 6 months.

Reading a bunch of blogs, I have seen that Google’s AdSense program is popping up like mushrooms on my favorite sites and since I wanted to be part of this and don’t miss out on earning 2 cents a month I decided to join and see what the big deal is. So now you can enjoy a commercial look of my blog/site. For those of you who are using feed readers, have a look at http://farshid.sedghi.org to see how I sold my site to host ads. Cant wait to cash in maybe a dollar in, oh say maybe 6 months, if I am lucky.