.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

I am big fan NPR radio for multiple reasons, mainly its news is international, as apposed to all other news here in the States which is extremely city/neighborhood/state and nation focused. Further, they have a few good programs, such as Marketplace which this week is covering the Middle East this week.

On potentials of nano tech

In this day and age who wants to go to a photo store to take passport pictures? Take as many digital ones as you want and then use this guide to turn them into passport size and print away…

In our family we abandoned the paper calendar a while back in favor of an online one. This way you can access it from anywhere…this greasemonkey script gives you a integrated view of google calendar within Gmail. It applies only to FireFox and before doing anything you need to install the greasemonkey add-on to firefox.

And here is a guide if you have switched from PC to Mac….for faster acclimatization.

I was refreshing my mind about API design and wanted to see if there were any good resources online apart from the book that I have. Came across the following 3 hour lecture on how to design APIs which pretty much covers one of the better books I have read on API design. The presenter is the co-author of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries which I found to be good and useful book.

Some useful tools can be found here…and here is the list to replace built-in tools in XP[via Lifehacker]

A 30 minute interestingvideo on how your eyes actually work viewing a webpage/site. Mostly aimed at web designers and SEO people. Still, I learned a lot…

Can be found here…

Title says it all and here is a review…

graball.com is useful for those of you who are not satisfied with sticking to one search engine, or simply want to compare search results across the big players.

It also has toolbar you can install.

This documentary was shown on South African TV recently it seems…

I learned about HDRI technique a while back, but did not really bother to experiment with it as I didn’t have a DSLR camera (you can do it with a point and shoot camera too, but I figured I would just wait and get a DSLR). Anyways, I thought I would give it a try now that I have a DSLR and looked around and found two different tutorials (the authors disagree with each others ways strongly).

I know some of the friends HDR work on Flickr and you can get very nice results.

• Ryan McGinnis’s Tutorial
• Peter Carr’s Tutorial

Will post results of my experiments once I get around to it.

Then go to skydrive.live.com. Seems like the beta is finally open to public.

See link

Update: I stand corrected as Anne-Marie tells us how to make international calls with paying local rates (or free if you don’t pay for local calls)…read the first comment on this post. Thanks Anne-Marie!

Previously, I wrote a post about all the different ways I use to talk (voice) with friends and family. Pretty much all of them involved having access to a computer in one way or another. Here is one that doesn’t need you using a PC at all. In essence it is comparable to using calling cards but much more straight forward.

On Rebtel.com you sign up, then give the number you want to call, the site then gives you a (permanent) local number and whenever you call that number, it calls the international number. Benefit : Don’t have to keep track and punch in calling card codes (or program them), most local calls are free these days. Drawback: you still have to pay a international rate (which is very cheap) by charging your account, so no free lunch.

After much deliberation and research, I have come to decide that Nikon D80 will be the better camera for my needs. Yes, I pay almost $300 more for it in comparison to D40X, but the list of small extra features that D80 has adds up to this verdict. Now, here is another good tip that I came along in my independent investigation for truth: there are a bunch of good lens kits out there, most typical being 18-135mm. In order to avoid having too many lenses to haul around everywhere I take the camera, I will probably get a prime lens (probably 50mm) for portraits and casual everyday stuff and either a 18-135mm or a 18-200mm lens to cover the whole range. Oh yea, and add to that a polarizer filter.

Reasons for not getting the other two cameras: Pentax K10D - Needs to much configuration for simple casual every day shooting. Sometimes I want my DSLR to just take casual pics without too much fiddling. Nikon D200 - The price was just not right.

My main source for research: imaging-resource

PS. I just noticed the number of visitors to this blog increased by a factor of 5 (who would have thought)…and top search terms that led to this blog:

1. nikon d40x vs d80
2. d40x vs d80
3. nikon d40x vs. d80
4. d80 vs d40x
5. nikon d40x versus d80
6. d40x vs. d80
7. d40x vs d200
8. d40x versus d80

Came across an interesting post from Scott Hanselman on how you can migrate an entire family to Google apps.

Useful for future reference…

Title says it all. I found a couple of useful extensions here…

Very glad to see this finally happen…from a post on Yahoo!Search, we learn that as of today when we search for images on Yahoo!, results will include images from Flickr, aka eyes of the World. My default image search engine is now Yahoo!…

This is not that new, but a very handy free service. Go over to GrandCentral.com to see the demo or read this NYT article on it to understand it better.

Ever wanted to have a free phone number and voice mail service in USA? Or say you live here and every time that you are asked to give out your number (shopping, applications, selling stuff), you don’t want to give out your real home number? Then you can get a free number and voicemail (that can send your voicemails over email etc). Then go to aimphoneline.com and sign up. Skype has this feature and calls it SkypeIn, but it’s not free.

Title says it all…instructions can be found here

Google has taken one more step towards providing a personalized search engine. You can now have a customized search engine (CSE) to only search the sites you want results from including customizing look and feel and a lot more so you can include it within your own site. You can also invite others to contribute to your CSE.

Now, what I want is meshup of this CSE offer from Google and what Lijit offers.

If I had to complain about one thing why I avoid IE7 and prefer Firefox it would be because of its way of handling tabs. I want to open new tabs when I type in a new URL, or open a bookmark, I want it opened in a new tab. Further I miss not having built in spell check like firefox. It goes of course beyond that, but these were my top two pains which made me choose FireFox. Just came across a link for IE7Pro which takes many steps towards coming close to FireFox (in my opinion at least). See screen shots below [via Public Sector Developer]

I have previously written on the wonderful service that Callwave provides. Now, they have a widget for iGoogle so you can access your voicemail box directly from the web. love it.

For those who regularly search on one particular term using many different websites, sputtr.com should be useful.

As of today, MSN Hotmail, the popular email service becomes Windows Live Hotmail. So apart from pretty colors and pictures, what has changed? Here is a summary.

Time and again I tell people to always be aware of what you post on the internet about yourself. Here is an example of why. Imagine I am an identity thief and I have decided to target you for whatever reason…it could be that I saw your myspace page and got a glimpse of personal data on you there and decided to pursue and complete the rest of the picture and take advantage of that info. You might think this should be challenging.

I am afraid with all the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and these engines archiving things away, it would be fairly easy to do this. In fact I came across a tool that just does this and demos exactly my point.

Go to http://www.paterva.com/wizard/. Choose what info you have (person’s name, email or phone number) and it will give you probably more accurate info you thought about the person you search for. Now, this is just a prototype and as these types of tools get more powerful, imagine how easy it will be to find out a lot about you?

So next time you decide to publish any personal information about yourself, I would think twice before doing it.

As a FYI to all my fans (thanks mom), I have started a work blog on http://blogs.msdn.com/farshid. That blog will mostly talk about work related stuff. However the first post is about what it is like to work at Microsoft which you might find interesting as I have been very open about things.

Illinois state wanted to find its own 7 wonders and so people voted and after the results are in, among these wonders you will find the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois. More on this story on CBS Website.