Archive: 200207

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 The Geek Code

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!
Wed Jul 31, 2002   (05:46 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Does Your Weblog Own You?

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!
Tue Jul 30, 2002   (10:59 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 "Earth As Art" Pictures from NASA

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.
Mon Jul 29, 2002   (10:03 AM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Summary of the Last Week

Summary of the Last WeekThe 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.
Sun Jul 28, 2002   (09:04 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Happy Sysadmin Day

Happy Sysadmin DayBusy 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!
Thu Jul 25, 2002   (03:39 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Stocks Tumble Sharply Again

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!
Fri Jul 19, 2002   (11:54 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 University Student Charged With Hacking

University Student Charged With HackingA 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..
Thu Jul 18, 2002   (11:18 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Your E-mails Go Through a Yahoo! Filter

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!! :-)
Tue Jul 16, 2002   (10:11 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Hackers and Caps!

Hackers and Caps!- 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.
Mon Jul 15, 2002   (08:34 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 anvari.org on Graham Norton show

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
Sun Jul 14, 2002   (02:39 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Homer does it again!

Homer does it again!'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...
Fri Jul 12, 2002   (10:18 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Stock Tip

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.
Fri Jul 12, 2002   (01:44 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Find the Peach!

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.
Thu Jul 11, 2002   (10:59 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Words of the Year

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.
Wed Jul 10, 2002   (07:31 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 The Perl Foundation Needs Your Help

The Perl Foundation Needs Your HelpIf 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...
Tue Jul 9, 2002   (10:18 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Most Active Hotbed of Computer Hacking

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..
Mon Jul 8, 2002   (11:48 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Playing more and more with Google

Playing more and more with GoogleGoogle, 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.
Fri Jul 5, 2002   (09:42 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Fourth of July

Fourth of JulyHappy 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
Thu Jul 4, 2002   (11:18 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 Hilarious Story

Hilarious StoryCheckout 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

Wed Jul 3, 2002   (09:29 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 The Aircraft


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..
Tue Jul 2, 2002   (10:23 AM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

 The Worst Job

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."
Mon Jul 1, 2002   (10:07 PM) | Permalink | Keep Reading

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