.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

As I was eating lunch today, once again I couldn’t stop thinking about the huge amount of trash this country (U.S.) produces. Not to say that every other country is better, but it absolutely amazes me how every single paper or plastic plate, bowl or utensil here is so solid and sturdy that you could put it through the dish washer and no harm would be done to them. How can these things be called single use kitchenware?

An add to this that the concept of recycling here is a joke. Growing up in Scandinavia, I am used to separating recycle material very carefully and deposit them in separate stations. you have to separate brown paper from white, colored glass from clear, different types of plastic and a lot of people also have compost. Here in the States, we you toss everything that is supposed to be recycled in one giant bin, and there is no proof that all of this gets recycled (even if they wanted to, they would have to separate things first), and when talking to people about recycle, you can tell that overwhelming majority have no clue about what can or can’t be recycled. people think for instance a pizza box can be recycled, even if it has left over pizza or cheese stuck to it, or that styrofoam can be recycled and so on…

And while i am on the topic, the amount of absolute unnecessary wrapping and packing pretty much anything you buy comes with really is tragic to see. All (mostly) because of marketability of the products

It breaks my heart to see this much waste on a daily basis everywhere I look….

Found a cool Firefox extension that makes searches a lot more efficient. It’s called PeteSearch and shows whether your search terms are included in the results or not including if files no longer exist (see below image to get an idea). Works for a host of search engines.

The Swedish Professor, Hans Rosling gives a very captivating and fascinating talk on the world health, population, finances etc purley based on data. Although 20 mins, it flew by watching the video.

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.

For my reference, next time I want to go Jamba Juice.

http://www.mightyfoods.com/archives/2006/06/trend_secret_menus_jamba_juice.html

So I decided to sell my old digital camera. After 5 days of excitement it was sold and shortly after the drama started. First I get an email from the winner asking me to be ship it to Nigeria despite the fact that I stated in my listing that I don’t ship outside of USA and UK. The fact that it was Nigeria was a red flag in my head immediately since I have seen many spoof emails from there. Also the user threatens with bad feedback which also was a red flag. Here is the email:

Shortly after I got an email, supposedly, from PayPal that the winner has deposited the money. The sender email (highlighted in yellow) below was not from PayPal, so I proceeded to read the fine print and it says that I won’t get the money until I provide PayPal with a tracking number. Here is the spoof email:

I reported it to Ebay and PayPal and they confirmed that this is not from them. We will see what the outcome will be.

So you know those bubble wraps that most of us just looove popping? Well, now you can do it online and there is even a manic mode you can blast through it. Enjoy!

Update: JaJah has a Firefox Extension which is pretty handy as it highlights phone nrs in a page. 

Came across www.jajah.com yesterday as I was looking up a friend’s number on my plaxo account. There they had a icon to call your friend the JaJah and I tried it and it was super smooth and good voice quality. On top of that it was cheaper than the provider that I am currently using.Simply put you type in the number (anywhere in the world) you want to call on the website and click a button. The service calls up your phone first and then calls the receiver and connects the two phones together. Everyone who visits the site gets three mins of free trial, so feel free to test it.

If you have other similar services that you are using and are happy with here in the States, please drop a comment and let me know.

Once in a while I post something about being different characters - Today’s is South Park and this is how I would look like if I was on the show. Try it yourself. [Thanks Peisser]

For those of you who like to contribute to global research, here is one. BBC has created a screen saver that model the earth’s climate change based on distributed computing (very much like the SETI project). You can read the FAQ as well as download the screen saver to contribute to this project on this site.

In other findings, here are a few links I came across the last few days.

• List of free software - from antivirus to 3D graphics
• Microsoft’s answer to Craigslist
• Improving your linksys wireless router

Photography is a dear hobby of mine and although I don’t quite have either the equipment that I would like to have nor that much time these days to enjoy it, coming across sites like World Press Photo really reminds me of my love for photography and how powerful conveying a message can be through this medium.

Looking at the top prize winners though, the winning contributions are telling only stories of misery, terror and war. A good refelection of the state of the world I guess…

Following a few blogs over the last few months a few links have grabbed my attention and here they are:

• Yahoo Research-Shopping Scrollbar Search - Try it for yourself!
• Yahoo Audio Search
• Yahoo Search Shortcuts or Open Search Short Cuts

On two completely different notes, for those of you that have wanted to learn regular expressions but still struggle, here is a good link explaining regular expressions. Also, if you are looking for a good calendar that is available online, can send reminders to you cell phone (sorry again this only works in US) and many other useful features Airset.com is a very good candidate.

This is something I came across that could be of use. If you want to send a text message to someone’s phone here is the states and you know what provider they use all need to do is to send an email to one of the following addresses (change 1235556789 to the desired phone number):

Cingular: 1235556789@mobile.mycingular.com T-Mobile: 1235556789@tmomail.net Verizon: 1235556789@vtext.com MetroPCS: 1235556789@mymetropcs.com Sprint: 1235556789@messaging.sprintpcs.com Virgin Mobile: 1235556789@vmobl.com Nextel: 1235556789@messaging.nextel.com

Check out (works on on FireFox) this very cool XUL app to search books on Amazon. http://www.faser.net/mab/chrome/content/mab.xul

XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Like UIML, it is an application of XML that describes user interfaces. The acronym is pronounced zool, to rhyme with “cool”.

For those of you who read the digg.com RSS feed, as you know when you want to read an article, you get sent to digg.com website and then have to click on the link again to get redirected to the link. No more of that with this script as it will directly redirect you to the website of the article.

I am publishing it here since the original script did not work and I had to fix it. Hope you find this useful too. Also for many more greasemonkey scripts visit userscripts.org

For those of you who may be subscribing to the RSS feed, you may have gotten all the recent feed again simply because I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and for some reason this was a side effect.

Other than that, I really like the new features of WP and generally speaking like the feel of it, especially the rich text editor that I have been wanting to see for a while.

Back in 1996, when I visited the US for the first time, I visited Vegas as well. Fast forward to now and we found a really cheap deal, too good to pass and went on to revisit the sin city.

I was curious to see how I would feel about it this time around, 9 years later, given that my perspective on many things has changed. And sure enough I did feel different. The city no longer impressed me as I remembered it back in 96. Even though the population and the hotels and attractions have exploded in size and numbers, if you take away the giant hotels and gambling, free drinks and not so cheap food buffets the city would has very little to offer.

In any case, the highlight of the trip was definitely to see two very different yet, fantastic shows and if Vegas is good its the shows. We saw KA by Cirque du Soleil and The Blue Man Show and I highly recommend both of them.

1) Since 1.5 was release some of my extension have stopped working and there are no upgrades for 1.5 (e.g. spellChecker extension). To adress this use the following trick (and be aware that it might make your firefox less stable, though I have no problem on this matter, yet at least)

1. At the location bar, enter: about:config. This will show you a list of Firefox internal preferences.
2. Right-click on the list, select New > String
3. Enter “app.extensions.version” (without quotes) for the preference name.
4. Then, enter “1.0″ (without quotes) as the value for app.extensions.version.
5. Restart Firefox 1.5, then enable those disabled Firefox extensions.
6. Restart Firefox 1.5 again to active the extensions. Done.

2) Chrome Cleaner Extension - Very Likely to help speed up your firefox (both mac and pc)

3) And here is and excellent list of extensions for your pleasure.

A few links as I go through my blogs for the last few days

• Google Maps meets NYC Subway map
• List of all Xbox Games that you can run on Xbox 360
• Google Base - Lets you share anything with the world. Kinda hosts things for you.
• Google Analytics - Tells you everything you want to know about how your (site’s) visitors found you and how they interact with your site. I registered my site, and three days later, it says it still waiting for data even though 12 hours should have done it.
• True Local - A local search that has been under radar so far, but is out in the light now.
• Riya - Nafis told me about this one. A face recognizing software that automatically can organize your pictures. Keep an eye on this one. It will be huge.

So the last day or so I have played around a little with Google Analytics and Google Webmasters. There has been some complaints about them, but they have worked for me and I found the information very accurate and very detailed in Analytics. So as you can see from the image, I have reader(s) from all continents except for South America…gotta start a fan community over there…(click to see larger a picture)

A while back reporting about life on this side of the water, I mentioned the way a person’s credit history and score is built. As a couple of comments indicated and I heard it elsewhere that it was not the complete story, this is how it actually works:

A credit score is a numeric value between 300 and 850 here is the States. This scoring system which is the most widely used was developed by FICO, Fair Isaac Corporation and it tells a lender how much of a risk you are to be able to pay back the loan as agreed. The higher number the better score.

Once you’ve opened a credit account, the issuer sends periodic reports to three national credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — about the status of your account. They show whether you are paying on time, the amount of your balance, and how much your limits are.

The key to managing and maintaining credit score is understanding the following five factors that go into calculating your FICO score.

1. Payment history (35%) - Paying your bills on time is the best thing you can do for your rating.
2. Outstanding debt (30%) - i.e. if you have credit cards you’re close to maxing out, that doesn’t help your FICO score
3. Length of credit (15%) - The longer you’ve had an account and handled it well, the better.
4. Credit mix (10%) - Having a mortgage, a car payment, and student loans is preferable to having just credit cards.
5. Searches for credit (10%) - FICO research has shown that a flurry of simultaneous applications for credit indicates an unsettled, and risky, financial situation.

And once a year you can request a free credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com or by calling 877-322-8228. My source for all this info? Reading an article in Stages magazine.

My new favorite app on my Audiovox cell is Google Local for Mobile Virtual Places is a mashup of Virtual Earth, and various Internet Connected Components (including Amazon, Weather.com, Flickr, Feedmap, GeoBloggers, GeoURL, MSN Search and MapPoint Meebo - This site allows you to login to your MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Jabber, ICQ, AIM….you name it and the good thing…no pop ups and you can login with more than one msn login (which messenger doesn’t allow) Orbitz.com - I know, it is old but I really like this travel site. Text Twist - My favorite game. Warning! can be addictive (press space to scramble the letters)

Once again it’s time to book mark a few things for my own future reference.

-ASP.NET Development Helper is an excellent tool that makes ASP.NET development easier. - Become a Photoshop Expert; provides links to a few good sites on getting tips on working with PS. Useful for an amateur like myself. - FreeDNS - Free DNS, Dynamic DNS, subdomain and domain hosting - “Why is it free? It’s quite simple. We wanted a challenge… that’s it.”

And finally I came across an article about Le Parkour, some sort of sport where you do move that I would hurt myself doing (like jumping off the roofs, running up walls, jumping and spinning around at the same time over an obstacle. For a introduction check out this video that I found on video.search.yahoo.com. Pretty impressive…

With 512 megs of ram om my laptop and having installed some 100+ applications it doesn’t take long until I have 10+ tabs open on the Firefox. This came with a cost until now, ie huge amount of RAM being consumed (if the websites you go to have any sort of flash). This fixes the problem though:

1)Type about:config into the location bar and press enter 2)Right click any line to bring up a sub-menu 3)Choose “new”>”integer” 4)paste this into the dialogue that appears: browser.cache.memory.capacity 5)Next click Okay 6)Specify the amount in kb (about 70000 should do) 7)Restart Firefox and voila.

Once again, the time has come to post a few link for future reference :

UPDATE: Good advice for phone plans and comparisons including links Compare cell phone plans about.com - Packed with articles about anything you might need/want to buy as a consumer and other stuff Cool uses of Google Maps Google Ranking Patent Revealed? Answers.com/X where x can be any term you want to find out about and it will give you an answer. wayback machine - gives snap shots of websites over the years Urban Legends Reference - You see pictures and read things on the net and some are just unbelievable. These guys dig deeper to find whats really true and what is being spread around the net for fun.

After about a week’s time of reviewing and studying, today I took my first step towards getting my MCxD (x = A or S, Microsoft Certified Application/Solution Developer consisting of 5 different exams) certification by passing an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) exam in Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET . I have been planing to do this for some time, but you have to know the subjects fairly well in details before writing such an exam and on a day to day basis, you don’t wonder around the entire .NET framework exactly.

Going to the exam this morning I didn’t feel too hopeful after another late night study having not passed the practice exam, even though I felt I knew the subjects well. The real test didn’t start too well either with the four first questions being completely vague and difficult to understand what I was being asked about. Past that though it was nice and smooth until I went back to review the four first questions before submitting. Once I pressed the review button, I got an I/O disk write delay and failure followed by the crash of the exam application. Not a nice feeling after 2 hours of answering questions. So after the help of the staff of the Mediatek test center here in Haifa, thankfully, the application was keeping the state so I could continue where I left off with 10 minutes to go. And the score, 870 out of 1000 where 700 was needed to pass. You can even authenticate my passing here

Watching the video from hellogamer, here is a screen shot of the prototypes that were considered for Xbox 360 before they finally chose the far right one. Also, I came across the official fact sheet that Microsoft released.

The bummer part is that I don’t know when it is coming out, because even though I have not negotiated anything with my fiance, if it came out soon, I could have maybe gotten it on our registry. I guess it will have to wait since it won’t be out until Christmas.

if you have x.y@gmail.com and your friend happens to write to xy@gmail.com by mistake you still get the email. Vice versa works as well.

You can’t log in with xy (since it seems to be an alias only), but that means you are running less risk of getting your email sent to someone with same name as you.

So today, the new design of the official website of the Baha’i Faith was unveiled and I must say I like it very much. If you haven’t seen it have a go on www.bahai.org

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.]