Pooya Karimian

For listening to Iranian traditional music and not getting depression, I use PaceMaker plug-in for winamp. It changes the tempo of any kind of file playable with winamp (movie, music) easily and without distorting the original frequencies and tones, so that you don't even feel that it is not the original speed. It is also good for listening to podcasts or news if you don't have time or even for seniors who can't tolerate the high energy songs. There are plugins with the same functionality avaiable for other players too.

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

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

- Oct, Suse 9.2
- Nov 03, Thunderbird 0.9
- Nov 06, FreeBSD 5.3
- Nov 08, Fedora Core 3
- Nov 09, Firefox 1.0

Enjoy the november!

I've bought this small mouse for my laptop (that's also new, a Dell Inspiron 600m). It is a nice small, easily portable mouse, with a self-contained wireless dongle.

I had some problems with using that on my Fedora Core 2 Linux installtion which is solved by applying this patch to kernel. I wish this patch is applied to the kernel with Fedora Core 3 which will appear in two weeks.

- BenQ M310 Wireless Optical Mouse
- ThinkGeek :: BenQ M310 Optical Wireless Mouse
- BenQ M310 PC Magazine Review

Update (2005-08-07): This patch is applied in newer kernels, but seems like there are some people out there having problem using m310 mouse with Gentoo. Check out this thread in Gentoo Forums. It may help.

Although still lacking a good navigation and archiving system (or at least I haven't found the way to use it yet), Tehranavenue.com is one of my favorite readings.

This month's editorial and feature is about Linux and Open Source in Iran. Take a look at them.

And I've bought a Dicota BakPac Jump for carrying my notebook. That's what Payam suggested me (and actually lent the money).

Finally I bought my new laptop: a Dell Latitude D500. The one I bought have Centrino 1.3GHz, 512MB Ram, 40GB HDD, DVD/CDRW and 14.1" SXGA+ LCD.
Take a look at it's 3D demo, Technical Specifications, and Reviews : [1], [2].