I thought, well, the atmosphere has captured too much heat and energy, leading to warming. Everybody talks about reducing the heat, by limiting the production, energy consumption and, loss of energy in forms of heat, by making things more efficient.

All good thoughts, but I thought, why don’t we find a way to release more energy into the outer space?! Think about it. All the efforts to reduce heat production have been good but not enough, what if we really design solutions for example to reflect some of Earth heat into the outside? Can it be done? Can we make huge reflectors to redirect some heat towards outside of the Earth atmosphere and so control the global warming?

Please spread the idea, maybe this is a solution to one of the biggest problems of mother nature.

Paymaan.

This is possibly one of the worst weeks in history of computers, first Steve Jobs, and now the more important Denise Ritchie, the father of “C” programming language, which is behind almost every type of serious application and OS, died.

It is absolutely not OK to me that his death didn’t get the attention needed for his importance in changing the world the way it is. He is much more important than almost any other person in the computer industry.
Without him, none of OSes and Applications could even exist. Even many other computer languages are made possible by C language. If it wasn’t there, most other software didn’t exist at all. May he rest in peace, and we remember him as a legend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

Paymaan.

RIP Steve Jobs Apple CEO and Co-Founder, PIXAR

I have never used an Apple computer yet except for emulations like ShapeShifter back on old Amiga days, We Amiga users were always in competition with Apple users, arguing etc. etc., But just like Amiga’s visionaries like the Jay Miner, Steve Jobs was a great visionary, a gigantically professional CEO and somebody who changed the world we live so hard.

Obviously, his products are far far better than Windows PCs and anything Microsoft based. and I doubt for sure Owners of Microsoft ever get such respect when passing, you know who I mean.

He died of cancer Yesterday 5th OCT. 2011, and I pray for him and hope he rests in peace.

Say something like a metal or composite material implant, or helping small flat bones like scales grow in front of heart, in a way not hurting the normal behavior of body parts?!

It is just an idea, but I guess it can have some futuristic, super soldier things in it…

Paymaan.

At about $120, I guess there are lots of better choices.  This one is illuminated in green and red, but I guess an ordinary 4×32 does much better.

Paymaan.

Notice the serial cable attached to it!

Actually I have its original box like  new as it was at those times,  and it still works perfect.  I used this modem with my Amiga 1200 machine, as well as an additional external modem for my old PCs, for a few years!

Old gadgets were made in a way they didn’t fail that easy.  While my first ADSL modem broke after 3 years.

Paymaan.

It is real, believe me!

Here is NASA’s proof, I guess this is second time I join the program, last time was when Spirit and Opportunity were being sent up there, but I can’t remember if my name was included finally or not, this time it is officially included for sure!

After entering login info, screen goes blank, and this happens to any of control panel pages, anyway you want to enter, while the blog works correctly.

Read about of a lot of solutions, but the simplest worked best.

With those with a problem alike, simply ftp to your site, rename the content/plugin folder to something, now you can login.  Now upgrade your wordpress automatically (it is v3 at the moment).  Then rename your plugins folder back to what it was before (“plugin” exactly ).

Problem will be solved. log out and log in to check. now you can also update your plugins if you need any.

Update: Your plugins will be deleted, you need to reinstall them, take a list of them before doing that.

Paymaan.

Right at  new years eve of Iranian calendar  (21st March 2010), and the start of the spring, my computer shut down and never turned on again

I didn’t want to rush to fix it, as everything is being rushed here just like what happens at the Christmas eve, so I thought I have to put myself on computer-rehab for the holidays, and I did. Well, I used my mobile phone to connect to internet sometimes

After a week, as soon as shops opened, I went to the market, bought a new main board (GA-EP45-UD3L), a core2 duo E5300 Intel processor (I have been stayed with AMD since 5, 6 years ago), and 2GB of DDR2 dual channel RAM.

Seems not much, but I didn’t want to consume a lot as the old main board can be repaired for about 12USD and I will possibly put it up as a second system.

I had to also buy a new power for the computer, as it needed more wattage and I wanted the system to be stable. I also lowered the BIOS settings to have an even more stable system and it is still fast enough for my purposes.

Hard Disk and GFX board are still the same, and optical drives as well. This new Main Board has more SATA ports, lots of USB (10 at back of the case, 8 on board and I added 2), but no 1394 and no visible RS232C and Parallel. It has them on board but I need to put sockets there myself. Better than nothing though, as most other Main Boards lack RS232 and Parallel these days.

The funniest part was that although installing new Main Board drivers was very easy, there was no sound. It took me three days (nights to be correct), until I found a solution, and the main reason was that Microsoft has been forgotten to include the UAA Microbus drivers for HD Audio in its WinXP SP3!!!

Well, some good guy had a page to share his info to resolve this. Overall idea is to edit the registry so stupid Windows XP thinks it is SP2, installs the driver, and you again tell it that it is SP3!!!

Very idiotic I believe. I have never seen an OS so stupid

The other problem was with my Linux Mint.  Although I have not changed my Hard Disks, it can not find its /dev/sda5 partition to boot, although it is there.  I guess as main board is changed and probably I have changed the SATA ports for each of 2 hard disks, the UUID of partitions are changed.

I am working to resolve this one too, still no success.

and  I have turned 39 this last 4th April   and happy spring to all of you.

Paymaan.

The story is about somebody who taught me a lot through his website, and his near space electronic projects, who showed me lots of what I know about electronic and hardware design.

I have been forgetting his site name (which was also his HAM radio sign), and I was trying to recall his code, and when I finally recalled and googled it, the page told he has been killed when bicycling back in April!!!

May he rest in peace, Michael Gray, AKA KD7LMO, KD7LMO.net a real professor and engineer.

His website is now archived at http://www.ansr.org/kd7lmo/www.kd7lmo.net/index.html

I still believe this system is very unusual, but with the introduction of ActionScript 3.0 language and huge changes they have made into its basics, Now it is like a real computer language, to me.  Maybe I am wrong, but this is the way my brain works.

I tried two weeks and 5 books and lots of good hints on the web to find a point where I can understand the language and basically start the learning curve, which is the hardest point in learning a new language.  2 nights ago finally, I guess I did it.

Suddenly I had a feeling just like what Neo had, in the movie Matrix, where they upload the instructions to Jujitsu into his brain and he knows how to fight like a Jujitsu pro. And in the middle of the night, when my first pieces of ActionScript3.0 worked, I told myself; I know ActionScript3.0!

Believe me, aside from jokes, it is always very nice to know you have another language (or computer language) available in your brain.  It feels you are a little stronger in understandings.  It will take me a while before I’ll be using it like a pro, but I have already started using it for a project, and I know I will finish the project using this.

So, where to start?  Try this books and sites:

1- OReilly Learning ActionScript 3.0 A Beginner’s Guide.  This is a great book!

2- Flash CS4 for Dummies.  I guess this one is a good one as well, although it talks too much.

3- The Flash Blog http://www.theflashblog.com lots of articles

4- GoToAndLearn(), http://www.gotoandlearn.com lots of video tutorial on flash!

And lots of other sites like Adobe itself, although Adobe is containing the worst set of information, they are actually useless for an starter unless you try seaching though google on their livedocs, and that is still no use to somebody who still doesn’t know where to start.

Try finding small samples on other people’s site and be careful as they don’t put most of needed headers and starter code on theirs, considering everybody knows what they already know.  Find small, working demos and then read them and try to recompile them to get sure the code is complete.

Paymaan.

Lots of things are going on here, and I have been under lots of stress in the past monthes, two heavy website and multimedia software design and development at the same time, and some other unpleasing life issues.

Of course I don’t claim only bad things are happening, I am also having many good things happen to me, but ok, let internal issues aside

While I am developing this two projects, I am also exploring new topics in software and web design.  So far I have gone deeper into many languages, from deeper usage of Javascript, to CSS2, changing my priority web design language from HTML to XHTML and XML.

I am really going to like this change, XML is something I can not describe, but I feel enjoying using it, and for my other project, I am exploring things like Adobe Flash CS4, to Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, to Pure Basic and even some VisualC++ of Microsoft,  while almost everybody knows I prefer ANSI C/C++ over anything which involves some kind of work from Microsoft .

Some other changes in the past months have happened which I have really enjoied it. First, my daughter have gone to first grade and after almost 3 month now, she can read and write and I believe this is an evolution for every person.  This is were we got our power to learn more.

Then I did something really relieving. My Windows were killing me after 4 years of not being re-installed, it would crash several times a day and you know how dumb WindowsXP is, and it can’t even keept itself clean.  MY registery was 180 MB, can you believe that?!  I tried every piece of junk software I found to clean up my registery and Windows, to no avail, and it got worse and worse, and in the past 7,8 years which I have been forced to use Windows I have always been unhappy, and missed my good old Amiga.

I have been downloading several versions of Linux since end of summer, planning to make a really big change, and to ease the life, and to get rid of Windows, finally.

I had Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Novell’s SuSE and Open SuSE, Linux Mint Elyssa, and afew others.  I have been recently uninstalled my older SuSE as it was heavy and wanted to update it in whole, but my 160 GB hard disk was almost filled and I needed its space, but I changed my mind and got a new 320GB for more freedom and for those projects I mentioned in the beginning.

I wanted to chose one of those Linux so I habe another option on this machine in addition to WinXP, and suddenly I tasted this Linux Mint, I have played with all of these diferent linuxes on different machines and none is as great as Linux Mint.  Some of Linuces can not read your Windows partitions.  Some can only read it but can not write to it. Some have fonts very different than what a WinXP user have experienced with.  Some are also very heavy, even being a Linux, consume your CPU power so hard your machine will actually work slower than with Windows!

But, Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu itself, which based on Debian itself, is almsot the fines of all I have ever experienced.

It is a Linux, who can read, and write to your Windows partitions so easily that I have shared all my pictures and music and video folders with it on windows partitions.

It is very efficient (I use the Gnome desktop on it and I am used to it very fast, it is very easy to use) and works much faster on my 4 year old machine, that I am relieved and feel no need for a new machine now.

Then its graphics power is so high, I actually have a much more fancy desktop effects on this machine using my old NVidia 6600GT than what you can see on most Vista machines.  The Desktop is actually liquid, you can make ripples on it, you can trun it and see the other 3 desktops with your mouse or key combinations.  It has some carousel like application chooser, a four side desktop cube etc. etc.

Then something really funny when you install it. It actually asks you if you want to import your windows accounts into it!  It can migrate your windows to Linux without any hassles!

Ok, I am not affiliated with authors of Mint, and they also provide it for free so this is no advertising, explore the rest your self, using its live CD.

After I installed Mint (version 5 is called Elyssa), I simply migrated all my email from Thunderbird on WinXp to Mint, also my book marks from FireFox to FireFox on Mint (and almost every software there has a twin sister here on Mint).  I also took a copy of my Windows main partition, formatted that partition, and reinstalled windows, just for when I need to play a windows only Game, or for when testing my web designs on IE, and for when clients want a Windows only software.

Now I spend most of my time on Linux, and have installed Apache 2 server as well as everything else on it, and when I am designing web sites, I design and run them on my machine and when evrything is fully tested, mirror them to the client’s web host.

I feel really free now, every tool you need, you go to package manager, search for the proper keyword, and when you find the proper program, you simply ask it to install, no money is going to be paid, and your software is ready in a few minutes.

And please don’t kill me before I say this, you have almost no virus there, although you can be extra careful and install a free virus killer like ClamAV, with just asking package manager to install it for you

Ok, enogh for now, my brain overflows are finished for now, I guess.

Paymaan.

This is a long time I have not written anything in here, but I am still alive (for those who prefer not )  but just either not have been in the mood to post, or havn’t had time.  Actually, as the name of the blog says for itself, this is the place for whatever which overflows from my brain, if any at all.  Sometimes my mood is not that exciting and so it makes some kind of hibernation to my brain, and it prevents me from being creative or making new ideas (even if they seem crazy ).

Anyway, I’ll try to be better soon, and I am aslo planning to release one of my embedded processor board designs, for Microchip PIC18 CPUs containing 4 wire LCD output, power stabilizer, dual serial (RS232) ports, I2C interface and a very low noise design.  If anybody has a need for this, let me know so I put it here sooner.  I want to release it under GNU licence for free, although it first ment to be a source of funds for me

Send me your ideas.

Paymaan.

I was always a fan of his, and while volunteer at project SETI, I could see how strong this man is, still help SETI sending emails to people to support the project in any form they can.

He was part of Radar development project, he was the man who worked on now called Clarke Orbits, actually making sending satellites to the sky possible.

His latest three wishes at his 90th birthday back in December 2007:  Extra Terrestrials be found some day, The civil war in Sri Lanka ends, and the world to go for cleaner sources of energy.

After a work on Great Barrier Reef, he moved to Indian Ocean and stayed in Sri Lanka till the end.  He also remained an scuba diving enthusiast; “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said.

Peace be Upon him.  World very rarely gets men of such quality.

Yahoo! news article.

Washington Post Article.

Paymaan.

Enjoy using the world’s best and fastest Open Source web browser!

Paymaan.

Since yesterday, I can surf the web and manage my sites as usual without getting disconnections and half loaded web pages.

But the question still remains the same, why everything is so fragile at this time of so called hi-tech era?

I talked to a very knowledgeable person from Renesys.com about the problems and he helped me to understand why while Iran is not enlisted as disconnected due cables problem, we still have such problems, and it seemed it is a matter of routing schemes through countries, and the fact we use a Turkish network (only, possibly) to connect to the outside world.

Lot’s of technical talk, so don’t bother, unless you are a network engineer

Paymaan.

Last week, 2 data cable out of 3 which connect Middle East from Egypt to central Asia like India, were simply damaged by possibly ship anchors at somewhere near Alexandria port in Egypt. Almost all of internet connection of this part of world has been blacked out since then, and companies have told it will take a few days (to a couple of weeks) to repair the problems.

Even worse than that, yesterday another cable around Dubai, UAE, was cut off to worsen the problem even further. I have had even huge problems with updating this blog, almost 100% of data is being lost, and all data is being rerouted through Japan to US, possibly on very slow and bad networks.

You see, in digital age we are related on 2 inch cables placed at sea bed, and if a shark tries to brush his teeth with them, half of the world will lose billions of dollars of funds.

So let me be scared that much, we are walking almost on hair-thin ropes, and be prepared, we may lose everything so easily we may not gonna believe ever!

Paymaan.

P.S. I am still having problems sending this post, this is third time I am trying, so the problem is real!

Yesterday, I got nostalgic (again, I know) and tried to remember a song from W.A.S.P I used to listen back in early 90′s. Anyway, I got a copy an hour ago and it was “The Idol” from “The Crimson Idol” album. The song or even lyrics are not that important, it was the acoustic nature of the song which grabbed me. Ok so you say why in the hell you liked heavy metal, when you liked their acoustics?! Don’t ask me, my brain is as complex as yours, I just listen to what I feel I like.

Then listening to that song, made me remember something else, I don’t know how, again

I normally don’t believe I have done enough back in my life to be proud of, but sometimes even small things makes you happy. I remembered I designed a hardware dongle for a friend (and money of course), which nobody could unlock, it helped him sell some hundreds of his “IRANA” persian/farsi writing program for Amiga computers, and that made me very happy. The friend was “Ali Aarefi”, in case you or himself are curious

I have not revealed the design in more than a decade, but you’ll be amazed for sure, if you know what it was. I even prevented telling friends and competitors that I was the designer, taking any chance from them to even try to guess the design based on my style.

I talked to people about how that dongle was, and people continued to tell me yes that is a simple dongle and I can unlock it if I want etc. etc., but nobody did, and in that market full of pirates, it was a good thing I did, I feel. I myself have always been a victim of software piracy and I almost lost a full luxury life to it, so I know I did something good to a friend.

ok, so what was the dongle?! I am revealing this secret here:

Amiga computers’ hardware is something amazing, I can never forget it and I still have my A1200 and I love it. The joystick ports of Amiga, also have an analog input, unlike other computers of those times. My dongle idea was simply this, I used a high tolerance resistor on that port, inside a joystick connector, software would read the analog port, and if the proper voltage exists it worked, it was that simple!!!

A piece of code, would read the ports, about 3 or 4 lines of C, because it was Amiga and programming was a pleasure rather than a torture. Ali Aarefi would embed the code somewhere in his program, and I also filled the connectors with epoxy, so nobody could reverse engineer it.

An small success, still something you feel good when you remember it, it even made today a good day to me

Paymaan.

I love nature, plants, animals, most of them. Actually there are not many animals I dislike, I believe every existence has a reason to exist, and all should exist. I can’t set a preference here, but I surprisingly like the giant animals a little more. Mostly those have lived the earth for millions of years, like crocodiles, turtles, whales, and especially Rhinos!

Well, I am not like Hagrid, but those animals lived the earth so long I believe they own the earth more than we do.

Anyway, I like plants, and I like planting. I have no private land, and actually not even an small yard (live on 2nd floor actually ), so since three years ago, I plant in containers.

I have about 20 to 30 containers, all in my balcony, I plant vegetables in them, yes you heard it right, vegetables in containers!!! and those produce real vegetables, in quality much better than those you buy at market!

The story is like this, you buy a few 8 liter containers, fill them with good and light soil, buy some quality seeds, and take care of them. You see for yourself how they cultivate, grow, flower, and produce real vegetables.

Plants are also so beautiful they double as decoration, and just imagine how pretty they can be having red tomatoes or green bell peppers hanging from them. Last but not least, you can’t believe how good peppers smell, even if they are not yet any peppers on them.

To make it healthier and more fun, I only use natural heirloom seeds. By heirloom I mean seeds which are original types, NOT modified genetically and are really natural. This way, fruits taste natural, smell natural, and you will notice the huge difference between them and those tasteless ones you buy from market.

In this category, I would like to talk about these kinds of stuff, and we may have some interesting discussions for every other nature enthusiast, so be my guest, and tell me what do you like to hear!

Paymaan.