I'm Persian - General

Status update

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:26:59 -0400

A colleague reminded me that it's been over 5 months since the last time I posted something on this blog. I never really have been a blog person, and most likely never will be. Writing a blog post is hard enough in itself, let alone writing it in your non-native language, and things are not that much better in my other blog which is actually in my native language.

What kept me from writing something recently is by no means a secret. I bet most of you have heard about Iran's tenth presidential election which was held in June, and its aftermath. It's not something you want to be part of, or even to observe. In my childhood, Iran was in a war with Iraq ... I barely remember anything from that time, but I could tell what happened in recent months here in Iran (and mostly in Tehran) was worse than the war. War with Iraq ... it was sad, but it was all about militaries, about foreigners, but not compatriots killing each other. Let me tell you, nothing is worse than seeing a 16 years old plainclothes boy (which is of course authorized by governor) hitting people with a baton.

And I'd like to thank everyone in the community which I'm proud to be part of, the PHP community (and PEAR folks in particular). Great guys like Daniel O'Connor, Christian Weiske, Chuck Burgress, Brett Bieber (which unsurprisingly are all elected again to be part of PEAR group for 2009 and 2010) and ... I just could say, Thanks for showing concern and suggesting ways to support.

Seven Things

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:31:26 -0500

Thanks to Brett Bieber for tagging me in the "Seven things you probably don't know about me" meme. Unlike the others, mine are not interesting, not at all, but here goes...

I grew up in a small city famous for it's pistachio and rugs. I now live in a big, crowded city which suffers from severe air pollution, Tehran.

Not too many people know this, but I play Santur, and once was in a concert.

My first computer was a Commodore 128 at the age of 6 or 7. God knows how many circles I drew.

Never been in a party or wedding ... I'm actually uneasy in crowded places.

I don't drink alcohol... yet

I'm a big fan of Progressive rock... actually, I like 70's.

I really want to get a PHP user group started here in Tehran.

I can't find anyone with a blog who hasn't already been tagged for this, so I guess I'm the last one

Happy New Year to all PHPers

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:47:52 -0400

Happy New Year to all of the PHPers who use the Persian Calendar (also known as Iranian Calendar or Jalāli Calendar).
Happy Norouz!

PEAR XML_XUL at International PHP Magazine

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:59:44 -0400

Today I discovered that my first article finally hit the press (well, e-ones) and it's now available on newsstands (well, e-ones).

International PHP Magazine - March 2007 Issue TOC

How To Act Against Recently Made Movie "300" ?

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:26:15 -0400

Google bombing however is the very last thing we can do. Similar to what we done with the phrase "Arabian Gulf" if you remember.

Here's my link to that site:
300 The Movie

age += 1;

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:49:48 -0500

10110

Happy Yalda

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:18:19 -0500

Tonight (The last night of Autumn) is Yalda Night (Shab-e-Yalda) which is longest night of Year.
Happy eating watermelon!

GetFirebug.com

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:06:53 -0500

I just can't imagine how debugging was a painful task before being familiar with Joe Hewitt's (now is copyrighted for Parakey Inc.) Firebug.
Struggling with LiveHTTPHeaders or WebScarab for determining whether calls are executed at all or playing around with DOM Inspector to inspecting an element's various attributes or Venkman for JavaScript debugging, and Console² for viewing errors and notices were my daily jobs mainly at the debugging stage ... (oldishhhh days!)
But Firebug provides an "All-in-One Magic Box" to make all of these stuff, Just fun!
Firebug performs all of these in a very very neat UI, and the great news that made me to write this post is that:
"Firebug 1.0 is getting Close"

Parakey

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:10:45 -0500

IEEE Spectrum (November issue) Features Parakey on the cover, A new project from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.
Parakey tends not to be one of those WebOS loser projects which just aggregates informations and let you drag them across your browser, it's main goal is to make content publishing easy, very easy, as easy as making the content of your globally accessed page, off-line!

Ross wants independent developers to create a variety of applications for Parakey. To that end, he and Hewitt have created a programming language for Parakey that they call JUL, a mashed-up acronym that stands for “Just another User interface Language.”

... it looks like a Web site—down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section—it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera ...

Thanks Bogofilter!

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:58:29 -0400

Spam, spam and spam ..., Time for a migration.
I'm using Thunderbird for about 15 months when I don't like it at all!
I should admit that, the just reason made me to use it so far is the fact that Thunderbird is from Mozilla.
Anyway, with the amount of spam which I get daily and TB's poor anti-spam engine (even after 15 months doesn't seem a well-trained one), I decided to migrate and candidates were Evolution and Sylpheed(-claws), dunno why I can't be happy with Evolution at all, even with it's ton of integrity options with GNOME; Hi Sylpheed then!
Well, here, before emerging Sylpheed and downloading email messages I had to wonder in a way to reduce the spam-handling-by-hand.
Bogofilter was my choice.
And finally it's time to train it, as it does its magic based on the principles of probability (is a Bayesian one), I needed an archive of spam and non-spam emails, the best way was to download all of my gmail account emails, move junks to Spam folder and train it!

Well, although it took a long time, but now, the result is awesome!