Finally, managed to code my
Geek Code:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GB/IT/E/MC dpu s++:++ a- C+++ US++++ P++++ L+++ E--- W+++ N+ o+ K- w O- !M
V+ PS PE++ Y+ PGP t 5? X R tv+ b+ DI D+ G++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
To decode, use
the geek code decoder.
If you're reading this, you probably are a geek too! Why don't you give it a
try? You can read this joke to see
which type of
woman could be your girlfriend when you get bored!
In my case, it sure doesn't! However, according to
this test,
it owns 25% of me.
The Simpsons is gonna
be on any minute. Catcha later!
Look at these beautiful
Earth As Art
pictures from NASA. My personal favorites:
West Fjords,
Greenland,
Lena Delta,
Ganges River Delta,
and
Dashte Kavir, Iran.
You know I'm color-blind, so you probably enjoy them more than I do.
The very busy week is finally over. Work is done, I'm a week
older and a month more experienced. Now I know more about
Oracle Administration and software packaging.
Weekends are always good and relaxing. Went to the regular
weekend jogging program today and yesterday was the
wine tasting day at Napa Valley.
Had a great meal at the historic town of
Yountville, visited
V. Sattui and
Louis Martini
wineries and tasted a wide range of good wines in a great
weather to relief the exhausted body a little bit and
get ready for another busy week.. I just realized we missed
visiting
Darioush Winery,
the creator of some of the finest wines from the world
famous Napa Valley with an Iranian background and management.
Anyhow, the gift of beautiful Napa Valley, was a bottle of tasty
California Maderia
from V. Sattui Winery as you can see in the picture.
With a rich flavor tapestry of caramel,
hazelnuts, and dried plums, this wine is the quintessential
dessert wine to serve with a crumbly vein cheese, apples and walnuts.
Busy with work these days.. I mean, so busy that I even missed some of
the episodes of '
The Simpsons'
the last couple of nights!
Anyways, how is everybody with the down market? It was so cool yesterday,
rose quite high (biggest gain for Dow since 1987) but it fell down again
today. I think we're gonna have some mild days ahead and should wait for the
big news shocking the market in a few days.
Tomorrow is the last friday of July and hence it is
System Administrator Appreciation Day!
Happy Sysadmin day, Ahmad! Happy Sysadmin day all gurus!
The extend losses of stocks continued today as you may know.
Dow industrials plummeting more than 300 points to drop below
September 11th for the first time after that. The bad news
about some major companies and their accounting problems make
the feeling of expecting another sad week again.
Johnson & Johnson fell 13.7 percent after the news regarding
the investigation of one of its plants in Puerto Rico which has
been to some sort of ilness and
Microsoft fell
2 percent and Sun predicted a loss for the current quarter
and its stock fell around 25%.
So, what will happen next week? The analysts predicted a worse
week ahead, which may lead to a real market collapse. What
happens is the investors (and people) will take their
money out of the unreliable market after they see the
bad news, a lot of stock in the market and the stock fall
again, and it leads to people taking more money out of the
mutual funds and the story goes on..
Going back to continue working on my stuff from home now!
A university student broke into her school's computer system and gave herself passing grades in three courses, police said.
Darielle Insler, 22, allegedly changed her grades in a math and a science class from Fs to As. She also is accused of changing an incomplete grade to a passing one in an education class.
According to an affidavit filed by Officer Charles J. Wilson, Insler called human resources employees at the school and requested a new password for each instructor, then logged into the system.
Insler also gained access to the system by guessing another teacher's password, according to court documents.
Full Story on CNN..
If you're using
Yahoo! mail
(which you probably do, if you're reading this!), your incoming
e-mails go through a filter in an attempt to block client-side web scripting attacks.
So, for example,
Yahoo!
changes all the occurrences of
eval (which is a javascript
command) to
review and
mocha (another statement to be used instead of
javascript command) to
espresso.
To test it out: Open your Yahoo! mail account. Compose an e-mail in
HTML format
and type the words
eval and
mocha in the body of your e-mail. Then send it
to yourself. Now, open the received e-mail in your mailbox, you'll be surprised to see
the result.
At some point (which we're not really sure when) Yahoo! programmers compiled a
list of those dangerous
scripting words and applied and replace method on them. The equivalents
have been chosen so lamely that if you
look for the word medireview on Google,
you'll find a lot of results!!
Medireview is the replacement of
medieval,
created in the process of changing
eval to review and is used after
being pasted into university papers, book reviews, Indian newspapers and
endless enthusiast sites drop it "unseen" into texts. Now, it's time to push
the first filter-made word into the Oxford Dictionary!
This incident has been reported over a year ago, are they really willing to
change their codes and change the eval to
ev@l or something like that or
we'll see more occurrences of medireview on the web (and in the books)?
Another report of an actual mangled e-mail address:
> Someone [...] changed his e-mail address to "cheval" and several of us
couldn't get his new address straight because it kept coming up at
"chreview". Eventually, we realized what the word actually was, but it
took a while..
Thanks to my friend Tekno for brining that up.
Related story from Need to Know..
A friendly reminder: Be careful if you're sending this article to a
Yahoo! mailbox!! :-)
- HeY th3r3!
- Y0! $up?!
Seems hackers love to sit next to each other and
chat with each other in IRC chatrooms. This picture
is taken in
H2K2 Conference in New York. Take a
deeper look at the photo, seems computer h@cKeRs love
to wear caps. According to this photo, 75% of hackers
tend to wear caps while surfing the net! ;-)
Those well known hackers gathered in NYC to target web
censorship and help people circumvent web browsing
controls and filters which censor the web content and
prevents them see the real web in some countries like
China, Singapore, etc.. (Maybe Iran?)
Photo from
Yahoo! photos.
Some of you guys asked about the story of the post about
the peaches. I'm writing this here instead of e-mailing to
everyboy.
Yes, that's right!
anvari.org
was featured on
Graham Norton show on
Channel 4 TV in
UK.
Apparently, he has opened up my web site and showed the
photo of the peaches [you probably know where that is, or
can look for it and find it!]. This was a great publicity
for the site, which drove a lot of traffic in a few hours
and increased the average of visits
(
guestbook).
An e-mail from a visitor:
Hello, yes I did see his show he is very funny he is gay, the programme
is called so graham Norton and he shows different web sites that are
funny, he showed a screen of find the peach when he clicked onto a
picture of a peach a persons bottom was revealed and it said wrong its
an arse. he has his own web site search for graham Norton and you should
find it easily best regards Joan
Another one:
he had a star guest on the program and was looking around your site and went to the bit where it asked if you can find the peach :) which i thought was hillarious :)
but im on there now and cant get it to work as when he was using it he was getting a image come up and tell him he hadnt found the peach lol but i cant get the same thing to work as it on allow me to click on the images. And yes that is where i got the web site address from so about 8 million people in the uk was watching :)
Andy
'I have no idea whatsoever what regional coding means.',
said Homer Simpson.
'But it's essensial that you buy
a multi-regional player. Do it now! Don't worry, we'll
still be waiting here when you get back.'
Doh! He did it again! Homer Simpson, the funniest cartoon
character in the history (IMHO),
made the above comment
in
The Simpsons
section of UK based version of Fox, the distributor of
The Simpsons.
They are recommending that UK customers bypass the
regional encoding system enforced by DVD manufacturers. And
guess who's giving the advice? Homer Simpson himself!
Remember
Apex DVD Players? They're the ultimate solution for those
who want to bypass the regional encoding system in UK, through which
the customer can also use the hidden menu to disable the Macrovision
copy protection to make copies of the DVD onto VHS tapes. :-)
Apex is originally made in China and imported to the United States.
Thanks lord they're in China, and Homer has made the comment
on a UK based site, not a US one, since
Motion Picture Association of America and movie studios are
pretty upset with both of them!
PS. I'm not giving any advice to buy or not to buy those DVD players!!
Last but not least, I hardly miss The Simpsons!! I have put together
a small script
which shows a random quote of Homer Simpson!!
Check it out!,
refresh, refresh and enjoy! [URL subject to change]
Picture from BBC.
Read more on BBC...
If you bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be
worth $49.
If you bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year
ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel/aluminum
deposit, you would have $79.
It is therefore financially prudent in these troubled times to drink heavily
and recycle.
Apparently, there has been a show on British TV last night, about
finding a peach
in a photo... So, a lot of people (1000+) came to my web site within a day, through a search
for
find the peach
on google! The fifth result redirects you to
this page on my web site!
I don't know about the show and what they said last night; if anybody does, please
let me know. For the first couple of
hours, those pages were password protected and I received tons of e-mails asking for
password. I asked one of those guys about how he got in, and here's his answer:
The TV show is a fun chat show, where the host does his best to embarrass the guests and the audience. It tends to be on the crude side, but is a good laugh. The host name is Graham Norton and he has his own web page on
www.channel4.com/sograhamnorton.
Each year,
American Dialect Soceity
chooses
words of the year
and publishes them on its website. A couple of months ago this year in San Francisco,
members and friends of the society voted 9-11 or September 11 in its various written
and spoken forms.including 9/11, 9.11, nine-one-one and nine-eleven.as the word
(or in this case, expression) of the year.
Some of the words were really cool, such as:
misunderestimate[!!] (President Bush's
coinage),
Osamaniac (woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden),
so September 10 (petty or oblivious to possible danger) and
assoline (methane used as fuel)!
Technology, online business and Internet have had the highest impact on the
selections for the past few years.
Web as the word of the year 1995,
is one of the most obvious ones, as well as,
E-,
Information Superhighway
and
Cyber as the words of the 95, 98 and 94 respectively.
If somebody asks me what the most pleasant programming language is, my answer
will definitly be
Perl.
Perl
is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by
Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. I just love it, strong syntax, great
file/text processing power and database access and wonderful regular
expression support.
The reason perl is free is because the original culture of the
pre-populist Internet and deeply-held belief of Perl's author, Larry Wall,
gave rise to the free and open distribution policy of Perl. Now, it's
supported by its users.
But it looks like
the grants to fund Perl
have pretty much run out,
Please
donate here and
keep the open source community going if you like perl, feel generous and
don't want to spend 100 times more money on future commercial software!
Read more on
Slashdot...
Ok, I'm finally back to California. A 9 hour drive from Portland, OR
to San Francisco today, beautiful road (specially first 5-6 hours),
no traffic at all and extremely hot weather. Just dropping
a few quick notes here:
Remember the short article I wrote a few days ago regarding
hacking
training classes in Iran?
Reuters
had a very long article today, about the countries having the
most active hotbed for computer hacking. The study showed that
two well known countries for hacking,
Israel and
Hong Kong still top the list, while
Kuwait and
Iran are the leader of the same list but for the countries
with fewer Internet users.
Cyber attacks, which include everything from the spread of viruses to
hacks used to cripple Web sites, were 28 percent higher in the first half of the
year than attacks recorded during the second half of last year, a projected
annual growth rate of 64 percent, the study found.
Guess what now? Me, very tired of the long drive arrived
home tonight, unpacked my computer and connected it to the network
to check e-mails,
and got no response! Began investigation, could ping the router if
it wasn't connected to the Internet, otherwise, got no ping response
or very slow response. Tracked down the packets, most of them were
ping, and huge ones, all received successfully, all sent unsuccessfully!
And, what could it be? Yea,
DoS attack! Quick solution: blocked
ping at the router level temporarily to come online write this..
So tired, going to bed now.. God bless all baby hackers..
Google, as the most accurate
search engine (by the way, is there any other search engines
at all? I wasn't aware of any..) has recently been more and more in the
center of attention. So many programmers use their
new public API and play with it these days to develop their
ideas into practical applications.
Three quick examples:
elgoog:
an exquisite geeky Google mirror! Use the link and search the net, it's
a cool joke! kcul doog!
Touchgraph
GoogleBrowser version 1.0: shows related links to a particular
web site in a visualized way (useful for
link: addicts).
Google Setvista:
A similar project to visualize
Google Sets. To learn more
about Google sets, please read
our previously
published article.
Happy 4th of July! More than 200 years ago on this day,
America claimed its independence from England and Democracy
was born. It's now called the Independence day of America.
A lot of celebrations take place on 4th of July, fireworks,
good music and people do some outdoor activities. It's
22 Bahman (victory of Islamic revolution in Iran),
13 Bedar (going out
celebrating new year) and
4 Shanbe Soori (celebrating last
Wednesday of the year doing fireworks) all together!
The picture: fireworks during 4th of July, I'll add more
photos of these paintings in the sky of Kirkland, WA after I have
them developed and scanned.
Alberto Navarro is known around the world for his spectacular fireworks displays. Now, his company introduces a new software that allows pyrotechnists to preview their shows on the computer.
Story from wired...
4th of July Cards
More 4th of July Cards
Fourth July Greetings and Ecards
Checkout the very
funny story
about
Shahin, Ahmad
and their 14 years of friendship,
written and directed by
Ehsan
in Farsi.
Picture: WC signs in Afghanistan
In opening the session, NarayanaMurthy(Infosys)
mentioned a
hypothetical situation where 20 executives
board an airplane and are told that the
flight that they are about to take is the
first-ever to feature pilotless technology:
It is an uncrewed aircraft.
Each one of the CEOs is then told, privately,
that their company's software is running
the aircraft's automatic pilot system.
Nineteen of the CEOs promptly leave the aircraft,
each offering a different type of excuse.
One CEO alone remains on board the jet, seeming
very calm indeed. Asked why he is so confident in this
first uncrewed flight, he replies: "If it's the
same software that runs my company's IT systems,
this plane won't even take off."
Speaking of computers and IT stuff, I received
an e-mail from an Iranian company a couple of days
ago. The e-mail contained one of the funniest
advertisements I had ever seen, advertising private
hacking training. The subjects are
hacking Yahoo! mail
accounts and
how to hack Internet users' accounts. :-)
Some of the even have prerequisits!! Check out their
website!
And, this is how some teenagers empty their parents'
pockets to learn the hacking art(!), abuse the
science to find credit card information and it takes
a century for the country to convince people of the
security of credit cards and issue them. So glad they're
not advertising in English, otherwise, the world would laugh
at us..
It's the first day of school in Paris and the teacher thought she'd get to know the kids by asking them their name and what their father does for a living.
The first little girl says: "My name is Mary and my daddy is a postman."
The next little boy says: "I'm Andy and my Dad is a mechanic."
Then one little boy says: "My name is Jimmy and my father is a striptease dancer in a cabaret for gay men."
The teacher gasps and quickly changes the subject, but later in the school yard the teacher approaches Jimmy privately and asks if it was really true that his Dad dances nude in a gay bar.
He blushed and said, "I'm sorry but my dad plays football for France, I was just too embarrassed to say so."