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.

A few days ago, I received a free copy of the new book by Mike Gunderloy called “Painless Project Management with FogBugz”. This is for FogBugz 4.0 and for those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a bug tracking system done by Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek. As I enjoy reading both of these two authors and the fact that I have done some research into bug tracking systems for work recently, it was nice to have a go at this book. Also, I should mention I knew a little about FogBugz and had tried it out a few months back.

Generally speaking, I guess before going for such a system you have to define your strategy as to how it fits into the big picture. By this I mean as your organization is trying to climb up the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) ladder you will need processes and tools for request analysis, requirement gathering, design and development work, testing, and maintenance and for this purpose you will need to define how you want to approach this. There are a few ways to approach it but by now I am starting realize more and more that the best strategy is to be able trace things between different phases For example if you find a bug you should potentially be able to trace it from bug to test case, design and all the way up to a request. I don’t want to go into too much details about this as it is a separate discussion but my point is to think about your strategy and don’t evaluate products for source control, project management or bug tracking by themselves but rather how they fit into your overall picture.

In any case, after that little intro, here is what I thought of the book. I will avoid talking too much about the product itself as I have not played around with this version, but rather what I thought of the book and how it’s written.

Mike starts with a top down approach by giving us a an overview, thoughts and philosophy of FogBugz and does this by giving you a feel for what it was created for with a few scenarios. Drilling down, you will then read about how a case is managed, what the pieces are, how you create them, filter, attach files etc to a case. This is then followed by a whole chapter for the administrator of FogBugz and another one for the software manager on how to deal with deadlines, estimation of time and so on which I found interesting and useful. FogBugz also handles communication with customers through discussion boards and email and he dedicates a whole chapter to this which I just skimmed through to see what features it offered.

After that, he tells us how FogBugz integrates into your source control product. This one was important as bug tracking and source control are in my opinion step 1 if you find yourself to be 0 on the CMM and want to do something about it. And finally he shows us how FogBugz is installed.

While the book is well written and easy to get through, even though this is a product reviewing book, I would have found it more useful if Mike had given us a little more about his views on strategies regarding project management, bug tracking and source control a bit like I mentioned above and how FogBugz relates to it, its limitations and advantages. This is because, if you haven’t done your home work on the big picture and are not sure how a bug tracking system fits into it, you will find it more difficult to see the drawbacks and advantages that FogBugz will bring to the table.

And finally, “A Guide To Evaluating a Bug Tracking System”

As the geek in the family I am also the private computer support for my sisters and parents and from time to time it ends up in frustration as it takes too long to explain over Skype and I can’t do remote desktop these days due to their ISP limitations. On one of the blogs (can’t find it now since I deleted it seems) I found out that you can record actions on the computer along with voice on a regular wmv file and all this using the free to download and use Windows Media Encoder 9.

So now I can have my family download instruction videos on how to install firewall or mail merge in outlook. I guess other areas of use would be for demo to customers or peer developers…you set the limit. And if you want to do it programmatically, I found this sample article on Codeproject.com

WinDirStat (via daily Grind) saved me a few gigs on my HD and there is something to be said about data that is presented visually in a nice and useful way and this one does it for sure.