Random Thoughts about Random Subjects

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Problem connecting to American Websites via TelstraClear

This was one of the most annoying problems I've ever had. Half of the usual websites were not opening properly in any of my browsers. sites like Yahoo mail, Facebook, eBay, Youtube were all getting partially loaded. After a long run around and trying all sorts of remedies suggested on the Web such as disabling all Add-ons, host firewall, clearing caches etc, I finally figured what the problem was and though it's best to share it before I forget:
The problem arises when you are accessing a cache accelerated website (such as those above) and going through a transparent proxy of your Internet Service Provider (TelstraClear in this case). Apparently if you don't use the same set of DNS resolvers as the Transparent Proxy the two nodes (your PC and the Proxy) will end up with different target hosts, hence not receiving a page properly.
To fix it, you simply need to make sure you are using your ISP's DNS servers and not any other ones like Google's or OpenDNS.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Free Enterprise Reporting from MicroStrategy

Whether the economic downturn has impacted MicroStrategy or they've got a more visionary leader now; this veteran of Business Intelligence and Reporting software solutions is now giving away its ReportingSuite for free!
All you need is a company email-id and yeah, you can get upto a 100-users license for absolutely no charge. It's a bargain for SMEs. So rush in before they close the doors!

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Go communication smart, Go Iranfone!

Iranfone.com is my next favorite online communications gadget that I was waiting for for long time.
I've been playing around with lots of different Internet Telephony service providers for the past year or so and none actually were as interesting as this one.
The reason being is most calling card vendors pick the cheapest available routes available which are essentially low quality and unreliable gray routes.
Most of the also are suffering FAS (False Answer Supervision) issue in which you are being charged for the time your call is not connected.
If one compares the wholesale rates of those low quality routes with the rate the calling card vendor is charging at, he/she will find out that the price is almost twice as the wholesale rate; and considering the FAS and extra charges involved, you are paying more than the cost of a premium quality connection.
Nonetheless, I guess that's the way it is, if you opt-in for premium quality service, they won't offset their profit for the customer's good.
Keeping the long story short, that's not the case with IranFone. It provides premium quality service at wholesale price which is a real bargain!
BTW, they also support SIP and I can get my ATA connected to it directly, which is fantastic.

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Friday, April 03, 2009

Sarbanes Oxley 404 in Enterprise Architecture Context

Sarbanes Oxley 404 compliance is all about adding accountability to IT governance processes. In other words, the organization needs to make sure any change to IT Infrastructure which has a significant effect on Financial Reports is authentic and genuine.
Implementing section 404 of SOX is an exhaustive exercise and quite often leads to one of those end-less projects.
That's why GAIT methodology is attracting more professionals everyday as it helps narrowing the scope of SOX compliance efforts to what's really important to the business.
GAIT is a risk management methodology with a top-down approach very similar to what most Security Architects use to create enterprise security blueprints.
Actually, GAIT is a slice of Enterprise Architecture process in which specific types of risk (as it is related to financial reporting) are identified in business layer and are then translated to the technology risks in technology infrastructure.
Unfortunately most of the times SOX 404 is driven by some irrelevant business units such as financial or legal without proper engagement of EA team.

Even though GAIT simplifies the identification and implementation of required security controls for IT components, it has no clear method for correlating business risks to the technology landscape. Whereas, EA models are extremely powerful in this area, that one can use them to assess the impact of a business process risk to its supporting IT infrastructure.

In my opinion, GAIT is great for IT professionals to understand what they need to address when it comes to SOX; however, without appropriate collaboration with the EA team, GAIT is costly and -ironically- risky methodology.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Wonder what data can do? check out Google Flu Trends!

Wow, Wow, god knows what people at google are doing. this latest breaking from google.org is shocking! google estimates the spread of the flu virus based on the search terms! http://www.google.org/flutrends/
I recall a Gartner analyst talking about the possibility of predicting earthquake by having hard disk sensors on all computers around the world send data to a central repository.
It's scary, inspiring and promising to see what you can do with data when you reach the critical mass.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Time to Start Your "VOLOG" ("VILOG" ?)

Another cracker from google: Audio Indexing!
Maybe its time to start posting voice (volog) and video (vilog) to our web logs instead of text (i hate typing you know that) and getting google to convert them to text...
One killer application that pops in my mind is for those large corporations to get rid of those bold men in Wall Street. 'Cause all they do is to listen to what other people are saying and map them to some actionable digital content!
Speech to text has been around for ages, but given the low accuracy and high processing power requirements their use was limited to sophisticated applications.
Now with google's monster content repository (youtube) and unlimited CPU power that it has, its time to re-think what can be done when "your computer can listen".

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

LiveMocha: The Power of WEB 2.0

You probably have heard a lot about WEB 2.0 and cloud computing, but what does it really mean to us?
Well, its all about giving the opportunity to web users to contribute their own contents and share them with others, like YouTube that you share your videos with others.
One exciting and phenomenal WEB 2.0 application that I recently came across is LiveMocha.
It's a social networking site just like Facebook, Orkut, Bebo and MySpace but with one big (and I believe winning) difference.
It is built to help people learn foreign languages from their native peers across the world. Based on a mutual agreement, simply you teach someone your mother tongue and the same person teaches you his/hers.
Livemocha is a guided social network, utilising a very natural skill of its contributors and that's how it has placed it self among top social networking sites.

Enjoy your mocha!

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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Why I love Digsby!

Digsby is simply an all in one messenger. For those older geeks, its basic features is almost like the good old Trillian.
I love this new gadget since it saves me loads of time and space on my desktop!, here are what it has for me:
1- I can logon to several gtalk (specially those on google apps), yahoo, icq, msn and aim accounts at the same time.
2- I can logon to several email accounts that I need to monitor gmail, yahoo, msn,... and view a summary of my emails right from the messenger
3- I can view feeds from Linkedin, Facebook and Tweeter, so no need for me to logon to their websites
4- It lets me group my friends messenger ID's in a single profile name (honestly I was sick of seeing a 100 names online in my roster while they were only 20 actual humans)
5- It has a fantastic Video Chat through TokBox

And yeah, I get all of the above in a single yahoo messenger size window!

The only thing i don't like about it is support of Farsi in its chat window, for some reason it doesn't show Farsi characters in there.

They probably need to work on update service as well, I'm not very comfortable downloading a 15M file every time a new build is released.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Enterprise Architecture in the Cloud

SaaS, Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Enterprise 2.0
Those are the buzz words of IT community everywhere in the world, but how they actually affect an organizations Enterprise Architecture?
Obviously there are significant changes to the way we architect the enterprise as we are no longer required to define standards and principles governing individual architecture domains, specially those in the technology landscape, like applications and infrastructure.
The final solutions are becoming more and more sophisticated and out of our reach as the tendency to buy and "rent" vs build increases between organizations. Even when it comes to build, in the cloud world, your bespoke solution sits on top of several proprietary components that - technically - you have no access to their internal architecture.
So how its being reflected in the day to day life of an enterprise architect?
As the cloud's main purpose is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration (or better say relationships), a forward thinking enterprise architecture should focus on inter-domain relationships rather than those between the components of an individual domain.
An example of this is SIPOC models that you inter-relate your information entities with your business processes. Though we have been creating such models from good old days, the new paradigm suggests the focus should be shifted to these composite models rather than those primitive ones.

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Sunday, March 02, 2008

Scoping Enterprise Architecture - Part #2

You can find the introductory post on EA Scoping here

In order to properly outline the scope of an EA exercise, you should follow these steps:
1. Conduct several meeting with key business stakeholders, try to avoid IT department as they may bias your findings. You should try to understand what IT is doing and not doing for them, capturing their future requirements or "wishes" can also be beneficial.

2. Review your findings about common barriers and try to a.rationalize and b.prioritize them.

3. Identify which architectural components are the most important ones, an example of this activity is: when you find information sharing is a common problem, developing enterprise content architecture and information ownership models are probably the best bets to address this barrier.

4. Based on the components you need to develop, identify which EA artifacts you need to create. You may use your EA framework to pick those artifacts.

5. EA Artifacts tell you how you should tailor methodology to deliver them. once you had your methodology ready, you can start the "right size" EA project with confidence.

John Zachman and Iran!


One interesting comment from Zachman was about the number of emails he receives from Iran; I wasn't really surprised since there are a lot of EA projects going on Iran and if you check google trends labs, you will see Iran is one of the top locations that people google about EA.
He showed a few emails from Iranian fans, inviting him to go and visit Iran. Hopefully we will see him there soon...

Get your phone number in Iran

Although this post might look like a commercial, I believe it is valuable enough to mention.
Those fellows who were using Skype for their voice communications might be familiar with Skype-in service. With skype-in, you can buy your own local phone number and have it diverted to your skype messenger (for free) or any phone number in the world (at cost). Since the voice traffic is transmitted over the internet, it is cheaper than conventional international calls. The beauty of this service is the convenience it brings to people who wish to call you; they just use your local number without worrying about where in the world you are.
The unfortunate thing is Skype-in is not available in many countries so not everyone may benefit from this service.
I've recently discovered that a company has started offering same service in Iran. After the huge upgrade to Tehran's telephony infrastructure, there are enough directory numbers for everyone living outside of Iran to have their very own phone number.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Enterprise Architecture Toolkit

I've started working on a toolkit for people who get mixed up in the "jungle" of EA articles on the internet.
Unfortunately its a commercial documents and I can't publish it here, but would like to outline what its offering to the users:
1. Understanding Enterprise Architecture
2. How to make the business case for an EA initiative
3. Prepare an RFP or statement of work for the EA project
4. Make decision about in-sourcing or outsourcing of EA project
5. Checklist to hire an EA consultant
6. How to coordinate an EA project
7. How to evaluate EA artifacts
8. How to establish EA governance structure
9. How to maintain EA relevant and up-to-date

Would be happy to receive your ideas on that.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Me and John Zachman!

I just came back from a fabulous workshop held by John A. Zachman on Enterprise Architecture, have captured a lot of niche ideas for discussion in the weblog, will start posting about them from tomorrow.
By the way this is John Zachman:

Monday, February 11, 2008

Scoping Enterprise Architecture

For those who don't know what enterprise architecture is, this wikipedia article might be a good start.
Looking closer to how enterprise architecture concepts has evolved during past several years, one can realize the whole story was around the scope of an enterprise wide plan.
Take Iranian market for example, it all started with IBM's BSP (Business Systems Planning) method offering by DPI (the Ex-IBM) around 15 years ago. BSP had a comprehensive approach on identifying and designing information systems for an organization; as expected, many of DPIs projects turned into never-lasting dilemmas; customers got frustrated and only small parts of plan got realized into software systems.
The idea yet was so promising that many companies and academic groups started rationalizing the key concept into more practical methods; this practice was generally called IT Master Plan. Interpretation of required figures to collect in an IT Master Plan was so diverse that you could find artifacts of a couple of hundred pages to several thousands coming out of exercise.
It was also an emerging trend toward business process engineering (re-engineering/redesign/refinement) with an intensive look at applications of IT in business consulting firms.
When Dr Shams in Beheshti University introduced Enterprise Architecture and later Dr Rahbar offered a more practical approach toward that in his bid on KWPA IT Strategy (2002) project, EA started to capture attention and the older methods started to fadeout.
Even though EA was trying to address several issues around its precedents, such as long exercise period and lack of direct strategy linkage; we saw several EA projects failing to meet deadlines, addressing the business and IT alignment, and providing a transparent portfolio of IT initiatives to the organization.
Beside some general factors that inhibit every project in Iran such as changes in management structure, improper budgeting, inefficient project management, etc.; there were one common problem with all failed projects: "Unclear Scope".

I'll explain how to identify the scope of an Enterprise Architecture exercise in my next post.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Google Apps and Future of Hosting Companies

100 user accounts, 6GB of mailbox space for each of them, Online calendaring, Document management, Publishing webpages and many more from google apps for free.
I didn't hesitate to move my company accounts to google when I found this out. ofcourse my hosting provider isn't so happy since I freed up a lot of space for our other stuff on the host server, no more upgrades!
Just wondering what hosting companies are going to do after a few years from now; obviously they should face the big boy in the battle.
Recommendation? well beside thinking about another business line, I would suggest them to work on more complex application offerings; business apps such as sugarcrm or vtiger are always demanded by small businesses who doesn't have the skills to get them up and running.

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Sunday, September 10, 2006

Getting an Impression of IT Business in Middle East

Knowing the culture and habits of a society before promoting a special service to their market is crucial when developing your marketing plan. Beside all hired research services and expensive reports that you can use for this purpose, the new utility from google called google trends lab is a handy tool to start with.
Having a massive database of search logs in the backend, this free utility lets you explore unknown markets by using your smart keywords.
Check it out, you'll find it playful.

That was the opening thoughts, still to come...

Thursday, November 15, 2001


من این مطلب رو قبلا به انگلیسی نوشته بودم ولی چون به نظرم خیلی مهم هست دوباره تکرارش میکنم
فکر میکنم الان همه با این Acronym ها و Abbreviation ها (کلماتی که از به هم چسبوندن اول یه سری کلمه دیگه بدست میاد مثل HTML->Hyper Text Markup Language ) یا با اصطلاحات کامپیوتری، مخابراتی چه فنی و چه عمومی مشکل اساسی دارید.
چند سال پیش یه شرکتی به نام Gurunet این مشکل رو با یه نرم افزار کوچیک حل کرد، شما بعد از نصب اون میتونید با نگه داشتن کلید Alt و کلیک کردن روی هر کلمه ای روی صفحه کامپیوتر از سیر تا پیاز اون کلمه رو ببینید.
این ایده انقدر مووفق بود که چند وقت پیش شرکت Atomica گورونت رو خرید و الان همون نرم افزار رو به اسمه اتومیکا عرضه میکنه، و خبر خوب اینه که این نرم افزار هنوز مجانی هست (این خیلی عجیبه چون هیچ چیز تبلیغاتی توش نیست).
برای استفاده از اتومیکا باید به اینترنت وصل باشید.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001


این بلاگ چیز خوبی برای اینکه ادم دق دلیاشو خالی کنه، امروز تو رادیو ازادی یه گزارش بود از رده بندی کشورهای دنیا از لحاظ باز یا بسته بودن اقتصاد همون طور که انتظار دارید ایران با رتبه 151 بعد از کشورهای عراق و کره شمالی از اخر اول هست. جالب اینجاست که نیوزیلند تو این رده بندی مقام سوم رو داره که واقعا جای تاسف داره ، حالا چراشو بعدا میگم.
تنها نکته جدیدش برای من شاخصهایی بود که تو این رده بندی مورد استفاده قرار گرفته ، از جمله نظام بانکی کشور...، من به دولتی بودن یا ساختارش اصلا کاری ندارم چون اولا در تخصص من نیست دوما چیزی که عیان است چه حاجت به بیان است. میخوام بازم ربطش بدم به IT همه دیدیم بانک ملی بعد از اجرای طرح نیمدار سیبا چقدر مشتریهای یانکهای دیگه رو جذب کرد و چقدر کیفیت سرویسش بهتر شد (که این نشون دهنده سودی که نصیبشون شد هم هست) ؛ من بسیار بعید میدونم که اونا این وسط تغییر اساسی در ساختارها داده باشند و این Revenue تنها از صدقه سر اتوماسیون بوده.
این روضه ها رو برای این خوندم که باز روی گسترش صنعت نرم افزار و تاثیرات اون تو توسعه مملکت تاکید کرده باشم، همه گیر شدن و توجه به صنعت نرم افزار سریعترین نتیجه اش گسترش اتوماسیون تو سطح کشور هست.

Monday, November 12, 2001


قابل توجه نرم افزاريهای ايران
واقعا جای تاسف که شما اينهمه تو دانشگاه چیز ميخونيد بعد تو کار همه رو فراموش می کنيد. البته مثل همه چيزایه ديگه اينم ميشه ربطش داد به مشکلات فرهنگی. در هر حال ما حرف خودمونو ميزنيم
قضيه از اين قرار که تو مملکت ما هر وقت صحبت از اجرای يه پروژه ميشه همه فکرشون ميره سمت اين که حالا اين پروژه رو با چه زبونی بنويسيم يا Database چی باشه و از اين حرفها. موقع اجرا هم بسم ا.. چار تا Table نصفه نيمه و حمله به کد... مخصوصا اينايي که ادعا میکنن وب سايتهای دايناميک ميسازن . من نميدونم پس اين درس Software Engineering برای چی ميخونن. مراحل توليد نرم افزار (Software Development Life Cycle) اعم از شناخت،تجزيه و تحليل و طراحی رو انگار فقط برای خوندن و امتحان گرفتن تو کتابها گذاشتند. البته همه اين کارها رو ميکنند ولی اکثرا در ذهنشون و در زمان کد نويسی، دسته ای هم که اینکار ها رو مرحله به مرحله و سر جای خودش انجام ميدن نه از ابزار درست استفاده ميکنند نه درست طرح رو ثبت ميکنند. گذشته از مسايلی که بعلت نداشتن طرح ثبت شده در حين و بعد از Development پيش مياد اين يکی از شاخصهای کیفیت نرم افزار هست و ا گر ما ميخاهيم که با محصولات خارجی رقابت کنيم بايد به اين مساله توجه بيشتری نشون بدیم.
بعضيها ممکنه بگن «يه پروژه کوچيک که اين حرفارو نداره» ولی باور کنيد همه نرم افزارهای بزرگ هم يه زمانی کوچیک بودند ، وقتی شما طرح سيستم رو با يک ابزار مناسب طراحی تهیه کنيد خيلی از زوایای پنهان و مشکلات رو از همون اول قبل از اينکه حتی يک خط کد بنويسيد متوجه ميشيد و از خيلی دوباره کاریها جلوگيری ميشه، در ضمن اينکه بسيار مشکلات کمتری در زمان توسعه سيستم خواهید داشت باضافه بسیاری مزايای ديگه که اينجا فرصت بحث در موردشون نيست.
البته من وقتی تحقيق کردم دیدم چنین مشکلی تو همه کشورها حتی تو امریکا هم بوده و هست ولی با تلاشهایی که انجام شده سعی کردند این قضیه رو به صورت یک فرهنگ در بیارن و نشون بدن که چقدر مزیت پشت این کار هست.
به نظر من ما هم همین کار رو بکنیم، بهتون قول میدم وقت بسیار کمی میگیره در عوض نتایج بسیار خوبی براتون داره، ابزار های طراحی (Case Tools) هم الان انقدر ساده و خوشدست هستند که حتی کسانی که از مهندسی نرم افزار اطلاع زیادی ندارند به راحتی میتونند ازشون استفاده کنند. برای شروع شما میتونید از نرم افزار MS Visio برای طراجی یک وب سایت هر چند ساده استفاده کنید.
گرچه MS Visio رنج وسیعی از متدولوژیها رو پشتیبانی میکنه ولی برای پروژه های بزرگ کارامد نیست. برای اون دسته از پروژه ها میتونید از نرم افزار هایی مثل Oracle Designer, Rational Rose یا Sybase Power Designer استفاده کنید.
بیایید اصولی کار کنیم

واقعا هر چی به ذهنم فشارميارم نميتونم درک کنم دولت چرا انقدر با مساله صنعت نرم افزار با بی تفاوتی برخورد ميکنه, حساب دو دو تا چار تاست,اين با توجه به حجم کاری که دولت بايد انجام بده ارزونترين و ساده ترين روش توسعه هست. نگاه کنيد به هند در سال 2001 ارزش صادرات نرم افزارش برابر 8.5 ميليارد دلار بوده اين رقم درست برابر نصف درامد مملکت ما از نفت هست. البته هر وقت به ريشه مشکلاتمون نگاه کنيم باز به مشکلات سياسی می رسيم. من وقتی از استعداد های اِيران و هزينه بسيار پايين تهيه نرم افزار(در مقايسه با اينجا) برای سرمايه گذارهای خارحی صجبت کردم بعد از کلی به به چه چه تنها مساله ای که به عنوان مانع ازش گفتند عدم امنيت سياسی بود. نا گفتثه نمونه من کلی در مورد سياستهای خاتمی در تشنح زدايي و اين چيزا براشون حرف زدم ولی درست دو روز بعد اقای شاهررودی با اجرای طرح اجرای احکام در ملا عام به تمام معنای واقعی کلمه ترريد تو هر چی ما کاشته بوديم. راهکارهايي که برای توسعه اِين صنعت به ذهنم ميرسه رو در روز های اينده مطرح ميکنم شما هم اگر نظر خاصی داريد برام بفرستيد


يادم هست چند وقت پيش يه حرف قشنگی خوندم یجا که می گفت اقای خمينی اول انقلاب گفته باید زندانها رو به دانشگاه تبديل کنيم و مرحبا به مسوولين جمهوری اسلامی که اين پيام قايد روبه گوش جان خريدند.
اين خبر نوروز امروز رو بخونيد سيصدوپنجاه هزار زندانی در شش ماهه اول امسال

Saturday, November 10, 2001

(من هم کم کم بايد شروع کنم به فارسی نوشتن سعی ميکنم هر روز چند خط اضافه کنم (جون کندم اين چار تا کلمه رو نوشتم

Thursday, November 08, 2001

Thanks Hossein for removing my name from the list :)
I think we'd better setup a BLog Hub and instead of listing all Blogs in each weblog using that link as a reference to other blogs, Additions to Hub can be automated or semi-automated with one vulenteer administrator.

Wednesday, November 07, 2001

Joke Line
This SatireWire website is bloody funny, look at this article about Afghanistan Mountains who have harbored terrorists!!!

Tuesday, November 06, 2001

Hossein - Hoder - has prepared a manual for those who like to have a Farsi BLog, Thanks Hossein.

VoIP is one of the fastest growing businesses in Iran 'cause of expensive international communication services provided by telecom company.
The open source community has been very active on this subject that could attract major IP telephony providers like Cisco and Dialpad to its work, One of the most successful communities in this area is Vovida,If you are planning to develop a VoIP services network I strongly recommend you to go through Vovida's web site, they've also very nice presentations on VoIP systems which are very good for beginners and Managers who want to get familiar with VoIP.

Security Line
SSH has announced its IPVia family of VPN solutions. it doesn't seem they have done major changes in the infrastructure and core communication technologies, I think they have just developed some utilities for administration and deployment of Virtual Private Networks.

Huhu!! Again Microsoft,
It's not more than 10 days that Microsoft has officially announced Windows XP that several bugs has been figured out.
A security vulnerability has also been mentioned in Windows XP client platform regarding DoS attacks.

MS IIS, a sad story
A research that netcraft has done shows that more than 130'000 websites has ripped IIS and replaced it with another web server.

I should apologize that I couldn't update the E-Diary in last two days,I was really busy

Sunday, November 04, 2001

Iran Politics
Mr Ghasemi's review of Amir Mohebian Papers, A must read for Iranians

Saturday, November 03, 2001

Battle of Sun vs Microsoft
This competition is getting more serious,I got couple of newsletters from some major consulting companies on this issue, so I decided to find out whats happening there, the actuall story started when Microsoft didn't ship the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with Windows XP edition, have a look at this Open Letter(!) from Microsoft about Sun's concern on this issue. After Microsoft introduced .NET as a unified architecture for enterprise solutions in front of Sun's J2EE architecture, Sun decided not to give up very soon, so they introduced ONE (Open Net Architecture) based on J2EE for enterprise solutions shortly after Microsoft's announcement. but the story didn't finish here when Microsoft announced JUMP as a solution to migrate from Java architecture to .NET, here is an article from Sun about JUMP.
Anyway, Sun realised that this is a real challange, so the two IT giants decided to battle and see what customers will go on with finally.
I went through couple of comparisons from different kind of experts, here is the summary of which I went through:
Will .Net take down Java in 2002? In this article vendors like ComponentSource show their feedback results from developers that most of developers will use .NET next year, but no one claims which technology is better.
WHERE ARE WE GOING... VB.NET vs. JAVA Mike Landau the CEO of SetFocus think regarding the scalability of .NET and its support for several languages and its more common Platform, .NET has more chance to win
J2EE vs. Microsoft.NET An in-depth comparison of both technologies I recommend you read this one if you want to choose one of them.
After reading all these articles and some others that you can find easily by searching the web,I myself think like before Microsoft will win with its greate marketing campaign but it can't go up from a rigid point over, Basically Microsoft products are not performing well when the size of a business is larger than a mid-sized Enterprise,and this is true because the underlying layers(Like Operating System itself) of .NET are still suffering from unstabillity, lower performance and other known problems.

Friday, November 02, 2001

To IranASP.NET guys
I think your next step will be a simple job advertising facility for companies to advertise their vacencies regarding ASP and .NET stuff, I recommend you do it for free at least for first step.

IBM to buy CrossWorlds!
This is a true story IBM is facing serious problems after Sep 11 attack and is trying to keep itself alive, I think IBM has always been one of the luckiest companies in IT Industry's history, from the time the PC industry broke its back until now,it has survived several hazards.
Anyway CrossWorlds is a business platform solution provider and has worked in conjunction with IBM before, IBM wishes to promot its middleware solution with the aid of CrossWorlds platform as IBM's Websphere and Lotus Notes are losing the competition in front of Sun's J2EE and recently Microsofts .NET

Big MPLS Trial !
reading the news line one of Belgium infrastructure suppliers, Belgacom, is going to deploy Alcatel's MPLS enabled Router Switch Platforms (RSPs) to expand its ATM network, the easy integration of protocols with the aid of MPLS is going to make it the next generation's protocol, but as I said before still no one rely on MPLS,these mixed solutions are pretty good to start, having MPLS as the plan B resolution for integration and infrastructure development is more logical.
I found a good Tutorial for those who like to get familliar with MPLS.

Thursday, November 01, 2001

I'm going to change my job, returning to source, I'm originally a Telco engineer with exposure to data communications, so you will more find about networking stuff from now on in here.
I don't know when we can destroy this stupid Telecom Company, I think all of our problems in development of the Data Communication infrastructure of country raise from this fact that PTT is still being ruled by government, deregulation is the survey but they don't want to hear, as Dr Jalili said in one of conferences in Tehran "Be Omide Naboodie Sherkate Mokhaberat"
The funny thing is that the TAE fiber is running exactly underneath of DCI building in Tehran but we still use low quality and expensive satellite connections, I've heard that they are building the country's infrastructure by laying high capacity fibers between major cities, when do you expect this to finish?! , another Metro project lol.
Something about that which is interesting from technical point of view is that they are going to deploy ATM in the network,another saying is they are going to deploy MPLS which is a fantastic protocol but the problem with that is no one in the world has tested it before, some of its standards are still under review and haven't got any RFC, I hope this don't turn to another 3-Bit CAS ( a custom implementation of R2 signaling which is not compatible with any switch/router/.. in the world) , I hope they realize that this is not an academic project and Iran is not their R&D Lab.

Wednesday, October 31, 2001

IIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEE !!!!!
PAYANDE BAD IRAN

Attn:Hossein Derakhshan and other ASP developers!!
What do you think about this, I do not deny ASP but when PHP exist in the world,then why ASP?!! (Begravid be sooye PHP ta rastgar shavid)

Are you tired of this mess of Acronyms and Abbreviations? then you need Atomica on your desktop,when you set it up,where ever you see a word that seems Odd! to you just hold "Alt" and click on the word ,Atomica will tell you whats that, remember you must be connected to the Internet, I knew that as Gurunet since 2/3 years ago, as you can expect, the successful small business has been baught by Atomica, a larger company, Jungle Rules!!!

It uses a remote buffer overflow vulnerability in Internet Information Service (IIS) Web Servers that can give system-level privileges to a remote user, thereby compromising network security...Yes CodeRED, I was reading an article on how multi-tier information systems are more vulnerable of attacks than two tier systems in techrepublic website (you have to register there to read the article), As I always do I recommend you' to read the people's opinion on these sort of articles,normally you can find more information there than the actuall paper!!!,anyway in one of the replies one of the guys in addition to rejecting DMZ resolution to this problem mentions that CodeRED V. II & III are working in the same way, its a very important tip that people might not realize at first that "the Man in the Middle" attack can turn to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Services) attack easily if the hacker is clever enough. So take care of your multi-tier Information System servers, I think DMZ would help a lot with some fine tunings.

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Greate move boys
Look at here, A full Farsi website dedicated to ASP and .NET developers.

God Bless Linux!!!!
Are one of those who still do not trust linux in mission critical systems? if yes then read this before saying anything.
Its about the deployment of Linux on a super computer,a cluster of 280 833MHz Compaq Alpha workstations!!!!,It's going to be used in a weather forcasting system,it can forcast the weather of next 4-6 days in less than 6 hours!!!
since last year clustering has attracted the experts attentions after hardware companies like Intel and AMD couldn't provide the processing power needed for new software technologies with their CPUs, one of the old and I can say most efficient linux based clustering system is Mosix,It integrates with linux kernel to gain the highest performance in process accounting in a cluster,its easy to use and once you set it up the expansion is a piece of cake.
Do you know how weather forcasting systems work? I know one way to do so,It can be a good project for a Master's or PhD student in Iran to develop such system,or it can be done as a commercial R&D project in "Edare Havashenasi". First of all the weather records(like wind speed,humidity,temperture,...) including sattelite images should be collected covering a period of at least 5 years in a specific region, After that an image processing module will change the sattelite images to computer readable data (like cloudy regions,...) it's kind of OCR actually, after that all these data with the actual state of the weather in next day(s) will be feeded to some Neural Networks,these networks will be trained (like human brain) regarding those data and finally they'll be ready to be used in forcasting system. The actual research part of this project is the design of Neural Network classifiers and evaluators and also the image processing unit ,in which ,the more accurate it works,the more reliable the predictions and training will be,I'm very interested in this project if you want to start it I'd be glad to join you so drop me a message if you keen.

Microsoft is trying to compensate his previous mistakes, I think .NET was a greate step toward this aim, In front of Sun's J2EE technology .NET has alot to say, the competition would never end!
From my point of view (which is very important!!) .NET would win the competition from performance point of view, unlike Java, .NET codes will be compiled twice, the second level compilation will produce smaller code,more efficient regarding the platform architecture and totally with higher performance, but(!) I'm not trusting Microsoft's products from reliability point of view,the future will show.
One of the very obvious points one can realise from these technologies is the extensive growth of XML, both Sun's "One" architecture based on J2EE and Microsoft's .NET have outlined their unified architucture based on XML. But where ever they are, Apache XML group is still ahead, This group will be one of the most successful open source groups very soon,wait and see.

It's very funny, these Australian guys think they have a very exciting technology in web development, but they don't know why other companies outside AU haven't got enough exposure to use their technology, I'm talking about Cold Fusion, I think they lost the competition when Microsoft first introduced ASP with IIS 4.0, I'm saying its funny 'cause even ASP is better than Cold Fusion!!

Monday, October 29, 2001

Have you ever thought about how you can burn a bootable CD ? or even better a multi-OS bootable CD? have a look at this,just remember to follow the instructions carefully otherwise you will lose your CD :).
I was seeking for a good software to keep my secret (!) and critical data encrypted and archived properly,after spending some time searching in download sites I found BestCrypt, its a really cool utility it creates a virtual drive upon an encrypted file,you can mount/unmount your virtual encrypted drives whenever you want and use them exactly the same as your logical drives, to make a backup of your data you can easily backup a single file (which is basically your virtuall drive) on CD and mount it as a virtual drive from the CD whenever you need it. (ghofl shekanesh too dehkade jahani mojoode ba jostejoo too google peydash konid, che secure!!! :) )

One of my friends asked me a question on how to cluster two web-cache servers running MS Windows, I knew how to do that with Squid (through hierarchical caching) which runs under POS*X compatible operating systems, but had no idea about MS cache servers unless using a third party cluster server, I found the answer quickly with a simple search on Google's specific search for Linux, a very simple solution with the aid of new Linux Kernel v2.4 capability, called Netfilter(IPTables), it has a cool feature that is called DNAT (Destination NAT), I did know about that but using that for clustering is a really neat idea, anyway the problem solved with deploying a very cheap Linux server (A P133 with 64MB Memory) just before two cache servers in the network acting as a Linux Virtual Server.

One of the problems I was dealing with recently was about how to build a communication medium between two systems running on two different platform,as an example imagine you have an online sales system, accounting systems and critical financial information are kept in an Oracle on a Solaris server with its all related management resources, On the other side you have the website running on MS IIS on a Windows 2000 or NT server,this can also be Apache on Linux/Windows, anyway the only data which is needed to be transferred between two systems are Purchase information and transactions,which you can call it generally business data.so the question is is there a secure/efficient/standard way to do so? I found the answer XML Messaging Protocols are best suited for this purpose specially SOAP with its very simple structure. After I read about that carefully I realized that no security issues were considered in SOAP implementation so I searched again and found this good article.
SOAP has two implementation one from Microsoft and one from IBM ,As you expect IBM version is more stable and is used to implement Apache's XML connectivity.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

I'd like to start my blog with one of the best projects that is being done by valuable Iranian volunteer computer engineers for IT society of Iran,I'm talking about IRSDN the Iran Software Developer Network, the word Software is just added out of coercion (IRDN domain was not available). as its obvious from its name its a developer network just like Microsoft's MSDN or Oracle's OTN or -my favorite- Developer Network OSDN but IRSDN is in Farsi and its customized to fullfill Iranian IT people's needs.
Every Iranian IT professional who is interested to help is welcomed to our community. You can read about the project's specifications in IRSDN's official website and if you were interested you can join by filling out the Form available there.
I found a good Bookmark Manager and I'm transfering my huge archive of bookmarks to this new system it looks cute you can see my personal archive here .
By now I think you can guess whats my favorite language in web development,yes! PHP and my favorite database is MySQL I'll talk about them later.
Basically I'm doing all my codings in C/C++ even for server pages I used to develope ISAPI dlls or CGIs ! but when I got familliar with PHP, its C style structure and extremely easy to use functions, made me forget all about C and C++ when talking about www.

At Last!!!
I joined the BLoggers community. I should thank you Hossein Derakhshan for his very nice blog that made me (and I'm sure several other guys) to at least think about this bloody good thing. It's very funny or let me say our pride that most(or all) of Iranians living outside Iran are thinking of Iran and try to do their best to help Iran,I think everybody leave his/her heart in Iran when leaves the country.yes IRAN. Ok,thats enough I think everybody realised how nationalist(!) I am.
A very important question: why I am writing in english? I've several reason's for that ,which are logical for me,and I don't mind if they seem logical for you too :p
First of all,my Farsi typing speed is very slow (I reckon around 5 WPM ,lol) that I prefer to write in weak English rather than Literal Farsi, another option was Pinglish that I personally don't like it,unless there is no other way to communicate with people. Its also good for my English writing skill to be improved. The final reason refers to the contents of this BLog, The people who know me will tell you that my life can be expressed in only one word "computer", so as a quick result of that this web log will be about computers,so it will be in english,I'm also interested in politics so you might sometimes find couple of paragraphs concerning those stuff.
please write me about your opinions, comments,.. like all Iranians I'm practicing democracy, so do not expect me to accept whatever you say!