A long time ago I switched to Firefox mostly because of its extremly useful plug-in model (which also includes add-ons such as ieTab). I do use Internet Explorer (IE) from time to time since certain sites still are optimized (or only work) for/on IE.

Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.

A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.

So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.

I don’t have an iPhone but rather a Nokia E71 which for my needs is better than the iPhone (maybe I will write a comparison later).

Nevertheless, what I really dislike is that many carriers (e.g. AT&T) lock the phones they sell to their own network. I am paying for the phone and you are already making me commit for 2 years to use your services, so the only way I interpret your move to lock the phone beyond our agreement is that you are insecure of the quality of your services, hence you use this method to shackle me down to continue using your network. Of course there is more to this as carriers usually pay through the nose to get exclusive deals with (hot) phone manufacturers and this is one way for them to try and get back that money. Bottom line though, it is not very customer oriented.

Anyways, for all you iPhone fans who are not on AT&T but still want want to be able to use an iPhone, here is a method to ‘unlock’ your iPhone and still keep your warranty (which other methods such as jailbreaking can’t do)

Moogle.com offers an unlock adapter to achieve this for $29.99. I am sure there are other sites that offer this service and the way these work is that they don’t modify any part of the phone itself, neither by hardware nor by software. The only thing they do is they intercept the data traffic between the SIM card and the phone, and when the phone asks for sim card’s operator code it gets a “fake” code back (basically, the phone thinks it’s using ATT sim card although it is not). That check is done once upon phone boot, sim insertion and/or signal re-acquisition. The other parts of the phone do not care (so they display proper operator logo, connect to the right network etc.) and do not ask for the code again.
Then again, I am sure it is a matter of time before Apple & the carriers who have exclusive deals with Apple tighten up the model further through the software updates so this stops working.

I heard of qik.com a while back and been wanting to try it out but unfortunately it was not available for Windows Mobile phones. To summarize it in one line: the site allows you to stream live video from your phone on the net.

Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.

With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.

And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.

It’s been a while since my last post and multiple reasons for it. Primarily because other things in life have higher priority (e.g. our daughter Carmel who just turned one). But I have also noticed that my initial purpose for this blog which was to note down items, links, thoughts etc that I suspect I would want to come back to (and be reminded of the context) and the same time share with whoever that might find it interesting are being served through other means, be it I posting on Facebook or sharing through (Google) reader which enables me to still track things down. These channels enable better distribution, quicker feedback and since far from majority know how to subscribe to a RSS feed or care to do so sometimes it’s quicker to just do things in those forums.

Still, there are many instances where I do wish I had something on my own blog, so to all my 22 subscribers  out there (according to feedburner.com), I will be posting a bit more frequently going forward.

ABC primetime had a very interesting and moving segment tonight. It was a social experiment taking place in a bakery. A Muslim woman (ABC’s actor) dressed with a head dress wanted to buy something and the clerk (also ABC’s actor) was refusing her on the grounds that she was a terrorist, non-american and was being insulting. Here is the interesting part as they did experiment several times: 22 customers said nothing, 6 sided with the clerk and 13 stepped up and defended the customer.

As I watching this, it certainly saddened me to see ignorance and/or indifference when a human being is treated that way. It also reminded of a more tragic fact. In this case, let’s assume the by standers were apathetic or sided with the clerk because of ignorance and understood all Muslims to be terrorists because of the actions of a few rotten eggs. At least they had ignorance or being misinformed to blame it on.

What about all the Baha’is in Iran who have been and are being terrorized in countless ways? How can recognition of mankind to be one and wanting to unite all the people and races of the world possibly be used as a reason for persecution, imprisoning and killing? Further, how can this be justified to systematically vilify and subject innocent children to cruel treatment??

At least when I grew up in Iran, the government just expelled me from primary school (for being a Baha’i) and that was the end of it, rather than now humiliating and ostracizing in different ways before expelling.

Make no mistake, this is not prejudice. This is certainly not ignorance. This is nothing other than systematic attempts to eliminate human rights, and force people to stop believing in oneness of mankind, oneness of God and oneness of religion.

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.

Pretty funny video