Pooya

Download an album with Picasa broken?

For some unknown reason, Google's Picasa sometimes looses its external application registration with Firefox. This means that you don't see the "download this album" link when viewing an online album although you already have Picasa installed. I'm not sure if this is a Picasa 2.0 - Firefox 3.0 issue but I think I had the same problem with Firefox 2.0 too.

Searching for this, looks like many people have the same issue with hardly any solution at hand. For this reason I made an easy hack for myself which I thought worth publishing here as well. It is a bookmarklet.

Bookmark the follow link by dragging and dropping it to your bookmark toolbar or right clicking it:
Download with Picasa

Then, browse to the main page of the album you want to download and press this bookmark. You will be prompted to open a file with Picasa which if you accept will download the whole album for you.

If you have the same issue, let me know how this works out for you.

Bushehri Pipe Band

Run into Shanbehzadeh Ensemble through a Farsi weblog [*], I thought I would share it with you. Saeid Shanbehzadeh (Farazoo) plays traditional music of Bushehr, a southern city of Iran. The following four clips are from their 2007 performance in New Zealand:

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

- Shanbehzadeh Ensemble
- more on youtube
- Farazoo blog

Background history

While in the middle of moving the server that hosts this site and before I redesign my site, just wanted to show you something:

That's yesterday somewhere in Deer lake park. I took a photo of the very same stone pillar a year ago and made tiles from it for the background here. So yeah, don't think of this site as a simple dead one: there's a story behind every piece of it [wink].

See also:
- 8m.com Aug 1999 (I had a page from 1997 but can't find it archived).
- Sharif: Mar 2001
- Sharif: Feb 2002.
- Sharif: Aug 1999.
- SFU: Aug 2003.

and
- How to create seamless tiles in Photoshop.

Now what do you suggest for the new design?

My new DSLR camera

^{(Photo by HAMACHI - CC License)}

I have a new camera. It's an Olympus E-510 DSLR. I'm still playing with it to learn its features but so far not bad.

Here is a not so good shot at ISO1600 - 1/8 sec - f3.5 (too noisy):

Blog Action Day

Today was Blog Action Day. Fifteen thousand blogs wrote about the environment. Lone Sysadmin wrote a thought provoking post in his blog: Paying Billions To Never See The Stars Again. Check it out.

Also this is old news but I just read about it. It is the story of a small-city in Iran where people are so much into star gazing that some nights they even turn off all the city lights. Read it here: Stargazing Bug Seizes the Imagination in Iran.

- Photos: A Town with a Passion for Astronomy

Master's Defense

My M.Sc. thesis defense is this Friday. Here is the screen-shot of the title page of my presentation:

I have no job and no place to stay after I graduate. So I guess I will be searching full-time for a full-time job then.

- Abstract and place on FAS website.
- A Swarm of Chatterboxes, previously on FAS newsletter.
- Autonomy Lab.
- School of Computing Science.

Robocup 2007

Robocup 2007 started in Georgia Tech on July 1st. Roozbeh knows more about that, cause he is there. But I'll try to update this post with the links I find:

- The RoboCup Federation
- RoboCup 2007 Atlanta
- Robocup Flickr photo pool
- YouTube videos of Robocup
- Story on Slashdot
- WMV video of highlights of Robocup 2005 Osaka
- Robocup Nanogram competition and a video of that.
- Time lapse video for the venue setup
- Video of a quarter final game in the humanoid league.

New Robots

What would computer scientists do when they get to meet twenty brand new robots?

Program them.
Write a paper about them.
Lay down somewhere among them!
Do nothing with them and go write their belated thesis.

By the way, these are iRobot Create robots properties of SFU Autonomy Lab.

Yahoo! Mail source code

Update [July 3rd]: It seems like many people are running into this page and when they search for it they find my site. Just for your information this is a problem with Yahoo servers and your account has not been hacked or anything. This is basically Yahoo source code showing up. You can try contacting Yahoo! support if you want it to be fixed.

I logged out of Yahoo! Mail and guess what showed up instead of the normal flashy ads. Yes, their PHP source code:

A Chinese View of Iran

BBC Chinese reporter's story and photos of Iran:

- Article: Iran Overshadowed by the Bright Spot [Chinese]
- Photos: Street Memories [Chinese]
- Photos: Portraits [Chinese]
- Photos: Cultural History [Chinese]
- Photos: Black and White [Chinese]

Found via My Babbling Brain (In Persian).

Now Public!

I posted a photo of snow in SFU in my flickr account this morning. Right after that I got a message, which seemed like an automatic one, from a news site named Now Public. They asked for my permission for using that photo for a news story about yesterday's SFU closure due to snow.
The idea of having a news site where reporters are Internet users, is a nice idea. It may be the future of automatic news sites like Google news.

- The news is NowPublic.com
- Simon Fraser University Closed Due to Snow

MIT Museum

I am back from the States. Here are my photos and videos of MIT Museum. There you can see robots, holograms and fancy machines.

Moved to Dreamhost

I moved my hosting from 1and1 to Dreamhost. If you're reading this, it means that the transfer was successful. Here's a treat for you:

Woodpecker near Buntzen lake, Coquitlam / October 2006

Beijing

Last week I went to Beijing, China for IROS 2006 conference. I took a whole bunch of photos, more than 800s. But there is only a few good ones in there. I started posting some of them to my flickr page. Check them out.

Gastown Graffiti

Gastown, Vancouver