April 28, 2004

GmailMart

Well, at last the gmail arrived!
actually it has net yet been made public. but since google has bought blogger.com. blogger users who have been active users in the past can get gmail account upon going to their blogger.
My blogger acount was not active too much and therefore I did not receive this message. Thanks to one of my friends Ali Azimi I got mine.
I was looking around the service and thought to share my first experience. Obviously the system is different from other free mails on the net, not just because it is offering a huge 1 GB space, but in the way it makes you think of your emails.

The first point is that the service as other services by Google is designed real simple, and therefore very efficient. Although it might not look very fancy, but it is absolutly usable.

There is no pop3 or forwarding facility currently available, but in the helps section they have promised to deliver this options in near future, BUT! probably with some costs!

The idea is simple, when you receive a new mail, it comes in your inbox. you can then delete it or archive the mail. when you archive the email you will no more see it in the inbox. you may also set some tags or add it to a favorites style folder which is called starred. there is no folder thing available. you may also define some automated filters, so that upon receiving a new mail, an action would be taken.

there is no such a thing as sorting the mails. you have to search for the mail you are looking for, which sounds rational. the bad point is that you can not search the archive or inbox with message size! you can just search for those emails that have an attachment or not.

This way if someday your quota would be exceeded, it would be almost impossible to do anything! you can not search for the big attachments that have taken your quota.

another bad thing is that the archive is not a compressed entity. I have been using outlook for about many years now, and all of my emails, that are not few, are compressed and archived therefore overall they don't take a big storage. defenitely not a gig.

Although I am yet impressed with 1 Gig storage, and yet have to play with other functionalities of gmail, it seems like a wallmart that is trying to give you everything bigger! but who will win at the end? do we get addicted to use big storage?!...

Posted by Shauheen at 01:54 AM | Comments (1)

April 22, 2004

Free Service

Updated

Probably you have recently seen or heard about the news on different weblogs that the spymac.com is providing a 1GB email address for free plus some extras such as a weblog. The news came just after Google announced testing a similar service. probably the spys in spymac had a prior knowledge of the project or anything. One would expect a very powerful and dependable service by Google, but to be honest although the spymac's job looks perfect but I couldn't be so sure of spymac! until today that I got this error while trying to login to my new spymac mailbox.

spymac_error.JPG

can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult a manual for a possible OS-dependent bug
check the global configuration file (libs/Atmail/Config.pm) for the correct database details

I wonder what is their OS! well, probably one in a thousand might have got this chance to view this error message (that I was proudly one - I have to buy a lotto ticket tonight!) but have you ever seen an error message while searching something on google!!!

That makes the difference!

here is another error!!

another day - another error

spymac2.JPG

Posted by Shauheen at 10:37 AM | Comments (4)

April 19, 2004

Culture revisited

red_eid_bigger_fishes.jpgPersian New Year comes with a set of many different celebrations and traditions. there are many arguments regarding the origin of some of these traditions, some believe that the traditions are ancient persian culture and resemble old religions of people living in Iran, such as zoroasterianism (M-W:a Persian religion founded in the 6th century B.C. by the prophet Zoroaster, promulgated in the Avesta, and characterized by worship of a supreme god Ahura Mazda who requires good deeds for help in his cosmic struggle against the evil spirit Ahriman).

But there are also some arguments regarding the way people have tried to reject arabic influence on the persian culture. Anyways, It is obvious that these traditions have changed some a little, and some alot during thousand years. there is not much effort on critisising these parts of the culture, perhaps because it seems not to be very harmful to anybody at least in comparison with some other beliefs, or perhaps due to the ancient history of the culture, it is not much anticipated to ask if it is a fair tradition or not.
I'm not asking about many things, let's just take one! There are many items that each one resembles something in haft sin, one of which is the redfish. each year millions of these fish are bought by iranians as a part of the tradition, unfortunately most of these misrable creatures will die due to lack of attention to the way they are kept. Also because some people use to throw them into rivers after the celebrations the ecosystem of those areas would be dangerously perturbed. I wonder why no organization in Iran makes a decision in order to think of and create a reasonable replacement for this tradition?
the photo is a cropped image from Sam's daily does of imagery.

Posted by Shauheen at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2004

Sky Captain

UPDATED

SkySky Captain and the World of Tomorrow casting Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie will be released June 25th, check the official website and it's trailer.
It should be specially interesting for those who love Pilots of World War II!

The correct release date is Sept. 17th! I don't know where did I got June 25th!?

Posted by Shauheen at 10:29 PM | Comments (3)

April 07, 2004

Inside Out

Though I hate to give a link to such sites, but there was a bit of interesting point in it! and afterall, you don't need to click on the link (I'll put the image)!!
pic1.JPG
The Office of the leader of Iran (Ali Khamenei) in Qom used to have a website long ago, I remember seeing it like 2 years before. the site which is in six languages, often refers to him as "Ayatullah al-Uzma Khamenei, The Leader of Muslims"! and has different information as his Bio, Istiftaat (Islamic questions answered) and speeches.
Recently a new site has been launched, which is meant to be his personal website.
there are 3 interesting points regarding this new one:

1. The publisher of the site is "The Islamic Revolution Cultural-Research Institute for Preserving and Publishing Works by Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenie"!

2. The site is in 3 languages currently, (arabic - english - persian). In the persian site the title used is:arabicname.JPG "Ayatollah al-uzma" [Grand Ayatollah], when he is referred to as "Ayatollah" only in arabic and english.

3. The site contains his speeches, bio, and islamic questions answered.

Question number one: Does the leader of the Reveloution have problems in managing subordinate organizations, that there are two parallel organizations doing the same thing, or he is maintaining redundancy in order to gaurd the accuracy of sacred words!!!
Question number two: Does the leader himself know that (or think that) the islamic clergy world does not accept over night jumps in rank, and assumes that well, since he can enforce the power inside Iran , and shut the disagreeing mouths, so he would introduce himself, as Udhma in Iran, and modestly!! without Udhma outside.
Question number three: Institute for Preserving and Publishing Works is normally something that activates after ones death! as in case of the founder of the reveloution!

be ghol e hossein! baba tavazo'!

Posted by Shauheen at 11:33 AM | Comments (4)

April 04, 2004

New Year

Wolfram has a very very rich knowledge base for mathematics.
I came across this link while reading something else.
It's a good description of Persian Calendar although it names it as Iranian Calendar.

Also This is a translation of Omar Khayam's Rubaiyat by Edward FitzGerald on amazon.

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the WHITE HAND OF MOSES on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

Posted by Shauheen at 08:32 PM | Comments (3)