Pooya Karimian

I was there in mozilla.org IRC with Asa, Blake and other guys when the 50,000,000th Firefox was downloaded. I printed out a grayscale version of this and put that outside my room. Some people are more focusing on browsers' security, as in this CNET News.com's story. This is my comment to that report:

"Well, while security is really an important matter but it is also important to have a browser which supports standards, actively developed and easy to customize. Open source software will never die as far as users feel the need. It is so powerful that it can even drive other companies to listen to the users and not just do what they want to do. That is were security fits too if looking in the correct direction: it is not that hard to imagine an open-source project to redesign the whole code if needed, but it is totally a fiction for big companies to do that. These are just some of the reasons why I believe Firefox is the best browser around."

I'm happy with how actively Internet Explorer is developing again, as you can read in IE Blog from the developer team working on IE7. It was Firefox's growth which urged Microsoft to restart actively developing IE and now it is MS's promise to have a IE7 release soon that pushes the Firefox forward in gaining popularity.

- IEBlog
- Firefox 50,000,000 Downloads

Finally this semester is finished, my second semester here in SFU. So till now I'm done with 4 courses and I still need to take one more course. I may write more about my research here soon. But for now some this is one of the things I have done during the projects and exams.
As you know lots of multimedia contents on the Internet are only streamable through different protocols such as RTSP or MMS. Unlike HTTP, MMS the Microsoft's protocol for streaming content is not easy to download. But one simple and useful utility I found recently is MiMMS. It can be used to download mms streams to a file. It can download both audio and video streams and wherever I tested it is working perfectly. It is good that it can be called from command line without depending on any other library so it is easy to use it when downloading large number of streams.
I was able to download music videos from Yahoo! Launch (recently changed name to Yahoo! Music) but I don't know whether it is legal to do so or not. I believe it is like recording from TV to VCR and as long as you don't distribute/sell that it should be legal. In Yahoo Terms of Service it is only mentioned that Resale of Service is illegal.
So this is my solution for recording some music videos from Yahoo. You need first to download mimms-0.0.9.tar.gz, compile it and put the binary in the same directory as the following script (which can be downloaded from: getlaunch.sh):

And for running that you need to find the video id of each video which you can find by checking the link address of that video or viewing the html source and finding the parameter to playVideo function call. Sample usage for Sting’s After the Rain has Fallen clip:

$ ./getlaunch.sh 2152289

This script is based on the note from Michael Clement and the script posted on Linuxforums.org.

A view of ocean and Lions Gate bridge from Ambleside Park, West Vancouver

Update: I was standing here when taking this photo

After buying Keyhole, Google now added real satellite photos to Google Maps.

- Where I live: Satellite View
- Where I live: Normal Map
- Google Maps: Satellite View
- Google Maps
- Keyhole