Pooya Karimian

The idea is simple, and its implementation is eye catching. Another podcast (audio weblog, audio feed) listening application but this time it is web based. I'm talking about Odeo (pronounced like rodeo), the beta release. There you can subscribe to feeds and listen to them easily. There are three ways to listen to audio posts: either by listening online using a Flash app, syncing files using the application provided, or pointing some podcast listening software to your Odeo XML feed. There's also an option for creating your own audio feed which is still not working in this beta version.
I'm on a broadband connection but I don't see anything keeping users from enjoying that even with dialup, but it will be better if Odeo add some on the fly bit rate conversion, this will also solve Flash problems with non-standard bitrates.
Odeo is still in Beta and so the registration is closed but you can fill a form on the front page asking them to invite you sometime.
Odeo is built with Ruby on Rails, I should spend sometime learning more about it.

- odeo.com
- Odeo Screenshot
- Ruby on Rails

If you have an IMAP based email account with hundreds of megabytes storage space (like the one I have at Fusemail), it may seem like an infinite space at first. But after using that for sometime you will find it filled up with a lot of small emails 1~2megabyte emails. That's what happened to me until I used IMAPSize. With IMAPSize you can easily see how much space each folder is using, sort the message based on their size, and delete messages or only remove the message attachments. It can also be used to get backups and some other tasks.
Btw, why don't GMail sort messages? Or at least I don't see any option for it.

Wikis as collaborative authoring tools are really popular between technical people but not that much in scientific environments. UniWakka is a simple and easy to use and install wiki engine which is mostly intended for a scientific environment. It has some cool features such as export as LaTeX or Open Office, MathML support for typing mathematical formulas, easy management of bibliographies and many other cool features. Andrea Rossato released version 0.5.2 of UniWakka last week. It even includes some of the patches I submitted. Check out the Change Log.

- UniWakka on SourceForge.net
- A test intallation of UniWakka that you can use
- Sample MathML formulas
- SFU Autonomy Lab's Wiki

Do you remember /~karimian/check? It is coming back!

My Greasemonkey script for playing Yahoo! Music (previously Yahoo! Launch) music videos is getting popular and I see some people blogged about it. So today I released version 0.3 which has the ability the select bandwidth and also resizing capability. You can read more about the script and download it here in pkLaunch page.
The script should even work with players other than Windows Media Player, but last time I tested that it had some unknown problems with mplayerplug-in. I will investigate that to see if I can solve it.
It seems that it is not possible to resize a media player object after it is initialized so what I did was to attach an event to onResize event which reinitializes the player every time on a resize.