Slashdot: "Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting. Here's the notes from a presentation by a Yahoo engineer at PHP Con 2002."

Finally! These guys are getting rid of their own "proprietary" language (yscript) and use an open-source language to develop their new pages like remember (they have decided not to touch the old ones yet). But the question still remains, why PHP?!

Their pros and cons for ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, Servlet, J2EE, etc... are all acceptable to me, but why not perl?

They claimed perl is not good because there's more than one way to do it, poor sandboxing and being easy to screw up server and wasn't originally designed as web scripting language. I don't agree with any of the above reasons except it "might" be easy to screw up the server if you're not sober when writing the scripts. Otherwise, perl is a great fit for their web applications since their offline processing scripts are all done in perl (they probably have a huge library already) and its performance on freeBSD is wonderful.

But wait wait, PHP is great in terms of ready-to-use scripts, huge online community, language support and it's proven to be one of the most popular scripting languages on the web. But for the most popular web site of the world, it might be a risk to switch to PHP which is not yet proven to be robust, scalable and robust under the high load. In addition to that, the more popular your scripting language is, the more people know what's going on behind the scences and it certainly increases the vulnerability.

We all have heard of 'web marketing' through showing ads (like pop-up browser windows you killed yesterday), 'e-mail marketing' which is another type of spam meaning advertising the products, web sites, etc... through e-mail, but Wired News reports of the new phenomenon called 'Referral Marketing'.

Referral Marketing is the process of stuffing the referral logs with the advertising sites as the referrals to a web site, so they will show up when the author of the web site checks where the visitors come from.

"Unsurprisingly, bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines. Some search engines decide site ranking by factoring in the number of pages that link to a site. A site that's linked to heavily may appear among the first URLs returned in response to users searches."

On a different (but related) note, I was redirected to an e-mail marketing site through the pop-up ads today. The site was advertising itself: 5 Million E-mail address, easiest way to market your product, ..., but the funny thing was the little mailing list subscription area on their site. They think people are stupid enough to enter their e-mail addresses there and enrich their huge e-mail list! :-)

Going back to the Giants game. Go Giants!

It's again time for some weekly links:

Remember good old TV-Game box? Check out its Ping Pong [Flash]
Link from: HamedBanaei.com

Eric Myer Photography: Mix and match faces and bodies [from (blogdex) index]

Realistic Internet Simulator: How many pop-up spam windows can you kill?

Have a great weekend!

You might have seen some of the funny stuff for sale on e-bay (the online auction house), but this new one is so stupid: This guy is selling his WarCraft 3 Account (rank) on e-bay for 500 bucks or more.

Notice how all the good names are taken on battle.net? Want a nice short name that is easy to remember and has a nice ring to it? Want to own the #1 account for the most popular PC game in the world? - rank is ranked #1. Never hacked, totally legit account, #1 Ranked #1. Use the Rank account for fresh team play, free for all, arranged, or custom, and retain the level 26 level and #1 position. Instant fame! Simple transfer. Password is provided to you and you already know the login which is: rank.

Selling fame is one of the funniest things I have seen since selling soul and this funny kettle!.

What a great night in San Francisco last night. Drinks at the very well designed hotel "The Cliff" and dinner at the italian restaurant L'ottavo Ristorante.

If you happen to have dinner there, don't forget to try their Salmon, yum!

So, I'm gonna add a few interesting links here every weekend. I put some of them on the Cool Links page as well. Enjoy!

We photograph ourselves on June 17, every year. { link from daypop }

Blue Eyes (Word and music by Shel Silverstein)

Cool Symbolic Clip (Flash)

Yahoo! directory, for those who remember good old days of the Internet!

Off to dinner with my folks! Catcha!

Have you seen Smart Engine? It's a pretty fantastic search engine that tries to play smart and answer your multiple choice questions!! Pretty funny, ha?! The funnier thing is Smart Engine usually works! You do not believe it unless you Try it yourself!

Story from BoingBoing:

"Intelligent" software answers questions unintelligent you already know the answer to

Toolset's "Smart Engine" is a bot that answers multiple choice questions. Input a question like, "Who wrote The Hobbit?" and answers like "Tolkein," "Tolkien," "Lewis," and "Heinlein" and it will answer correctly.

I tried asking about color of different things, writers of different books, capitals of the countries and presidents and it answered all of them correctly (obvious ones), but couldn't answer mathematical questions! ;-)

Oh, my god! That was so fantastic! The giants beat St. Louis Cardinals at Pacbell Park today in the ninth-inning, 2-out rally!!! Lotfton's big third hit in the last inning finished the Cardinals in San Francisco, so we don't have to go to St. Louis for the rally.

They celebrated in every possible manner, from the stoic Barry Bonds to the teary-eyed Shawon Dunston, but deep down, the players felt the same exhilarating sensation shared by every fan: The Giants are going to the World Series. Game 1 is on Saturday where the World Series opens in Anaheim. Go Giants!

By the way, on another story, Eangelica's birthday party was so great! Delicious Kabab, yummy Sangria (what else do you want in your life?) and wonderful dance. See pictures. Happy birthday Eangelica!

A link from Jenny: Help protest racism

Went to Axiom of Choice concert last night. It was great to listen to their wonderful performance and seeing old friends at Stanford. The concert was held at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University, sponsored by Persian Students Association.

Axiom of Choice are emigré Persian musicians with their roots in the repertoire of traditional Persian music. Led by guitarist and Music Director Loga Ramin Torkian and featuring Mamak Khadem on vocals, their music is conceptual and combines Eastern and Western instrumentation in original arrangements bringing a new sound to Persian and world music.

Mpeg Movie | Windows Media Movie

It's only the beginning of the weekend. Tonight is gonna be a fun birthday at Eangelica's!

A Tehran University, an Isfahan University and a Sharif University student were in an airplane that crashed. They're up in heaven, and God's sitting on the great white throne.

God addresses the Tehran student first: "What do you believe in?". He replies,...

Read the rest here... Thanks to Ali Parhami for sending the joke. :-)

I was checking the statistics of anvari.org a few days ago and saw a dramatic growth in the number of visitors. With a little more investigation, it turned out that Heise magazine has linked to STOP sign at Microsoft campus picture in their October 1st featured article (Microsoft bläst zum Großangriff auf AOL).

Ein Verkehrsschild auf dem Microsoft-Firmengelände gibt die Marschrichtung vor: Aus STOP wurde mit drei Klebebuchstaben die Parole STOP AOL.

Which means: A traffic sign on the Microsoft firm area gives the march direction: The STOP sign became STOP AOL with three sticking letters.

Heise is the most popular online technology magazine in Germany. The STOP sign picture was taken at Microsoft campus (Redmond, Washington) a few months ago.

Watched Sweet Home Alabama last night. It wasn't that good. The only good thing about that movie is probably Reese Witherspoon! :-)

The world's funniest joke was unveiled by scientists today at the end of the largest study of humour ever undertaken.

It reads as follows: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"

Full Story

It's now official. Annapolis Based company, TeleCommunication Systems [Symbol: TSYS] has now officially aquired the assets of Open Telephone Network [OTELNET], TCS announced a few hours ago.

I'm pretty sure they can advance their alerting capalities using the carrier-class alerting engine they bought from OTELNET, the company I was working for throughout the last year. We had a powerful alerting engine every company would love to have!

TCS is a provider of software and solutions to wireless telecommunications carriers and to government customers requiring high reliability and security.

So you thought the Internet was shrinking and there's less traffic than it used to be two years ago during the dot com boom? No, in fact, it's still growing dramatically as Capsian Networks reports quoting one of the true fathers of the Internet:

Traffic across the core of the Internet quadrupled over the last year, growing faster than ever, according to new research on the Internet traffic by Dr. Lawrence Roberts.

Roberts' data shows traffic has been doubling every six months on average across core IP service providers' networks, or in other words, growing by four times annually. This is an even faster rate of traffic growth than the average of 2.8 times per year carriers had been experiencing across the core since the Internet began growing aggressively in 1997, spurred by mainstream interest in the web.

Link: Internet traffic in the last 30 days

Link: See some Internet traffic numbers for the past years

Yesterday was the last day of the month and last month seemed to be the first month anvari.org's number of visitors decline since it's been started two years ago. But, thanks to Google update, September's traffic exceeded August's by 1% on the last day of the month as shown in the graph. This is the last year's performance of anvari.org, however, the actual numbers are eliminated for competitive reasons.