Rezaf Diary

I'll write about my daily life, as a PhD Student at the University of Illinois. I'll put some photos from my town, Urbana, and some music.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

SAMAND in Venezuela

It seems that they have finally started manufacturing the Iranian SAMAND car in Venezuela, and it's interesting that their president is driving the car! wow!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Struggling with Ubuntu 6.06

Thanks God it's the thanks giving break, otherwise I'd been so busted! I've been trying to install Ubuntu linux 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VIA Epia based mother board (with a 667 Mhz Eden fanless processor, sweeeet piece of technology!) with a 1 Giga byte compact flash card as its hard drive, and as such I had to use the server edition of Ubuntu (since the desktop version wouldn't event try to install unless you have more than 2 GB of free hard drive, and I intend to use this computer as a server anyway). The installation process gets finished painlessly, but then the installed system wouldn't boot. After showing the message: "uncompressing linux ... ready to boot", the system just freezes. Damn...
My (10-hours) online search resulted in believing that there is something wrong with the initrd initiating process. But before doing something as insane as downloading (gasp!) slackware linux, I came across a small post in a forum with a user with the same problem. Somebody had posted in reply that with installing the server edition from the alternative Ubuntu CD, the problem would be solved. So, right now I'm downloading it. I would be extremely happy (and yet totally quizzed) if it works.

I'll keep you in touch, now it's time for sleep!

Updated on 11/20/2006:
WooHoo! Ubuntu dapper drake server edition got installed. As I said earlier, the alternative CD should have been used. Now that's strange; well, not that much, it's kind of the common case in linux world. Even a very well polished linux distro like Ubuntu has these problems.
Any way, my new (fanless, dead quiet) server is running in a cardboard box! I'll post a picture of it in my next post.

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Holy Moly! A Playstation 3 for 14,900! Wow!

Wow, this is crazy! A Sony PS3 is sold on Ebay for $14,900. I have no more comments (I'm speechless!), here's the link from ebay.
(Well, the bidding may be fake though, just to sincrease the price...)

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

Monday, November 06, 2006

Animated history of the Iranian Empire

What part of the world is Iran? What has been Iran?

Currently the official language of more than 110 million people is Pesian, which is the official language of three countries. iranian culture is spread among many people of middle east, even though they don't speak Persian.

To show some little piece of history, I've made this flash animation, which shows some of the borders of Iran in its long 5000 year history. It starts with Elamites, continues with Medians, Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids, a period of Islamic Caliphate (though in this period Iran was part of the bigger Islamic Empire), Safavids and finally the current Iran.

Although far from complete, this short history review shows the reason of the widespread Persian culture in the whole middle east.





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(As a side note, this is my very first 'flash' animation ever, so apologize me if it looks amateur. I've done it with a demo version of SwishMax, which is an awesome flash authoring package. I strongly recommend buying this software, which I also intend to do. For you college students, there is also a special discount of 80%, which is exactly the reason it became so appealing to me!)

I plan to make this flash animation much more complete in the future, perhaps with maps of other major empires. But until then, I'm happy with this one!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!