On The Margins

Tuesday February 14, 2006

[ Personal ] Alborz High School

A high school friend who now works as a professor of Mathematics in southern California pointed me to some family photographs he has posted on his online album.

This compelled me to go through some recent photographs of my own family available online, and I found a few suitable ones to share with him.

These photographs were taken at Alborz High School, which we both attended in the mid 1970s and which we left in the closing year of 1970s as the Islamic Revolution was unfurling in Iran. My excursion on the campus last summer was the first one after 26 years.

This High School was first built by an American, a Mr. Jordan. In its early days, it used to be called the American College of Tehran. That was during the days of professor Lotfi Zadeh. When my friend and I attended it, it was named Alborz High School, and it fed the top technical universities and medical schools of the country. (There were few such universities at that time. Many more exist in today's Iran.) The photographs show my wife, our daughters and I taking a stroll through the Alborz High School campus. It is still as beautiful as it ever was and very much worth preserving. The day we walked the campus, on our vacation last summer, it was hosting a teachers' association debate on a topic that seemed to be related to educational reform.

My brother, who was visiting from Germany in anticipation of a German architectural tour of Iran, helped us get in. He and the school guard still remember each other!

2006-02-14 22:37:11.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday January 31, 2006

[ Personal ] 7 Years @ Sun

This week, I'm completing 7 years at Sun.

Recently, I found a sheet of paper that I'd filled with names and e-mails of other new hires on orientation day at Sun's Menlo Park campus. Scores of other new hires were participating in the orientation ceremony, and for about 20 minutes or so, we were asked to go around the room and talk to other people at random.

On the sheet, I have about a dozen names. One of the names that surprised me belongs to a person I have only more recently come to know and work with: Craig Russell, the inventor of JDO.

I don't have much time to reminisce on my time here but I've written a brief review at my java.net blog and an earlier entry here at blogs.sun.com, touching on some highlights of my work and life here and earlier.

2006-01-31 15:17:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday December 22, 2005

[ Personal ] Friends and Blogsphere

Last week, I finally had the good fortunte of meeting Robin Wilton, a colleague at Sun and one of the bloggers on blogs.sun.com who was visiting the Bay Area on a business trip. We have known each other through the reading of our blogs, a few exchanges of e-mail and some common areas of technical interest. Meeting in person, we had a chance to exchange some other ideas about our work and personal lives and find greater common ground. So, if we view blogs as correspondence, and they can be correspondence, I would say this is a classic case of correspondence leading to friendship. Always, having something already in common (like our work for Sun) can help establish a ground and context against the background of which, we can build greater common ground for friendship.

This is a season of traditional holidays, and holidays are a great time to think and remember friends and family (and after all, gifts are nothing but a way of remembering), and I thought it only wise to remember Robin's visit from the U.K. and the extra effort he made to meet me while he was here on his business schedule. Let's hope I have the good fortune of reciprocating this act of friendship next time I'm on business in Europe!

2005-12-22 04:43:54.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday December 12, 2005

[ Personal ] Robust Wireless in San Diego

Wireless connection, including GPRS, seems to be much better here in San Diego, where I'm attending ApacheCon, than in San Jose.

IM messaging application as well as the web browser work very robustly. I have not yet gotten any of the annoying "Network Services Not Available" for any of the internet applications on my mobile device since I arrived here.

2005-12-12 08:05:07.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday December 06, 2005

[ Personal ] The C130

Gareth Smyth of Financial Times writes about the C130 crash in Tehran's airport district.

Every one visiting Tehran, if they land at the Mehr-Abad airport, which is commonly the case, will pass through the close vicinity of this district.

I have an aunt who lives nearby and who has just retired from teaching high-school physics. Fortunately, she is in a totally different building complex but I'm sure her building may have been caught in the fumes. I also saw some of the reports on the IRI News Network, which I can pick up by satellite here in San Jose. The "rescue" and body recovery attempts seem to have progressed quite quickly. Several of the News Network's journalists, mostly young professionals in their mid-20s and 30s, were on the plane.

I talked to my aunt the night before last when I placed my first Skype call from my iMac to my daughter's great grandmother. (My youngest daughter was doing a family tree for her class, and we needed to go back a couple of generations.) The rapid connection, sound and reception of Skype on iMac were superb given what the service costs—and it was a great pleasure for us to hear my grandmother speak.

Within the context of the economic boycotts and other causes, the history of Iranian air accidents (including this one) strikes quite a many sad notes.

2005-12-06 23:10:50.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday November 16, 2005

[ Personal ] Tonight in Europe

Tonight, in Europe, many national soccer (football) teams will play to fill the last remaining spots for the 2006 World Cup. As I write this, I finally have a bit of time here in Trondheim, Norway, to watch an amazing game between Turkey and Switzerland.

2005-11-16 11:47:03.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday September 23, 2005

[ Personal ] From ECB to Yazd

One of my two brothers is an architect who has settled in Germany. The other is a city planner who has settled in Turkey. I'm very proud of both of them. One has an architecture firm in Darmstadt and the other has an art shop in a small tourist village on Turkey's southern coast. I'm the oldest, the one in Turkey is second and the one in Germany is the youngest.

We are particularly proud of our younger brother. Not only did the architecture firm in which he is a partner do extremely well in the architecture competition for the European Central Bank (ECB) last year (coming out among the three finalists), he has also most recently done something quite innovative by taking a group of young architecture students form Darmstadt for a 20-day tour of Iran to explore its architecture and city planning, old and new, with some particular attention to ancient cities like Yazd but also with a look at newer architecture. It is very stressful to manage such a big academic tour but I'm sure he can manage it.

If an image is to have value for orientation in the living space, it must have several qualities. It must be sufficient, true in a pragmatic sense, allowing the individual to operate within his environment to the extent desired. The map, whether exact or not, must be good enough to get one home. It must be sufficiently clear and well integrated to be economical of mental effort: the map must be readable. It should be safe, with a surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failure is not too high. If a blinking light is the only sign for a critical turn, a power failure may cause disaster. The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure be communicable to other individuals. The relative importance of these criteria for a "good" image will vary with different persons in different situations; one will prize an economical and sufficient system, another an open-ended and communicable one.

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City(1960)

2005-09-23 00:11:24.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday September 22, 2005

[ Personal ] iBook, iMovie, Bam and Me

To write all those papers at the SJSU's one-year MBA program, my wife has purchased an Apple iBook with a 14" display (Model M9848LL/A). It's a little larger for her purposes than the 12" but it does have a "SuperDrive" which gives her the ability to burn DVDs.

Well, a couple of nights ago, at the prompting of my wife who was running a little late on a deadline for a presentation to a non-profit organization and with no manuals on hand, and almost zero prior experience on OS X, I was able to make a relatively good documentary about the children of Bam and burn it on a DVD, with menu items and music in the background, all in less than 1.5 hours (excluding the last DVD burning step, which took a bit of time).

Can doing creative work like this get any faster? I still remember helping with documenaries at the School of Journalism at Berkeley. It would take literally for ever to put a master tape together.

I found the courage to do the work on Mac partly watching what my older daughter, Yasmine, had been able to create (a little movie of her own on Ali Karimi, the FC Bayern München offensive mid-fielder) while lying on the sofa to get over a minor cold. (I've been encouaging my daughter to finish up the little piece and post it on her blog. She wants to add some "credits"—what for, I'm not reallly sure.) I do have to say that without Mac OS X's very user-friendly environment I would have only continued to dream about doing anything like what I did the other night.

With a $19 retractable Firewire cable bought at Frys on the way home that same day (Tuesday), I connected the miniDV camera to the make. I pushed the "import" button on iMovie to import the video from the miniDV Sony camera. All the clips on the miniDV were recognized as clips. I pulled the clips down to make a rough cut in iMovie and add some background santoor music to one of the scenes and trimmed some of the clips. Now, I had a rough cut. I moved the clips from the rough cut into little named chapters on the iDVD application. Then I turned to iDVD, created the menu items for the DVD, using other remaining clips, bits and pieces. I pushed the "burn" button and went to sleep. Next morning, I got up and watched the DVD on my home DVD player. It was one of the easiest and most pleasant things I've done since my summer holidays, and it confirmed my decision to purchase a 20" iMac for the girls.

As I said, the movie I made was about the children of Bam. Here is a little more about that.

My wife took the video in July on a Sony mini DV camera when she visited Bam with my younger daughter, Negin, along with some friends who have been working with NGOs to bring assitance to the children of Bam.

The city of Bam had been known for its world's largest and oldest adobe structures and neighborhood (estimated to be at least 1500 years old). Not only the historical site but also the whole city was destroyed in an earthquake a couple of years ago. (When I was a child, we remembered Bam as the city that had the best dates in Iran not so much for its historical uniqueness.)

So, I'm still pleasantly surprised how easy it was to put together such a simple documentary so quickly. I do have to say that Liana, my wife, did have some very good footage and clips to work with.

And now, I have to wait for the reviews by the audience—and that will depend on how generous they will be with their check-books.

Now, will the children of Bam ever be able to get to play with toys like the ones we used to make the documentary?

2005-09-22 11:48:25.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday September 12, 2005

[ Personal ] Is One Chicago Worth A Dozen New Yorks?

You and I may disagree with the maxim that one Chicago is worth a dozen New Yorks but it seems, at least, that author and historian Studs Terkel, 93, maintains otherwise, as evidenced by his recent interview with Financial Times. (Online edition of FT requires a paid subscription.) I am happy but not surprised to see that Studs has some partiality with respect to Chicago and says what he thinks so very boldly, with not any bit of rust to cloud his clarity. In fact, I've often wondered why Chicago receives so little attention in the products of American media and entertainment industries, which have traditionally focused their energies and stories on certain parts of Los Angeles and New York City, taking them to be the quintessential examples of the Americana.

My own impressions of Chicago are based on the few trips I have taken there in 1999, 2002 and 2005, all on business. I also went there in 1980 on the way to a student conference in Washington D.C. Of that trip, I remember the brick building with wood flooring where we spent the night with some friends. It was the first brick building I had laid my eyes on since leaving Tehran and coming to Ojai, California, in late February of 1979.

Twenty years later, in 1999, I was the chief architect for (and then briefly running) a DARPA-funded research project. A number of university professors from MIT, UIUC to OGI working on DARPA-funded distributed and operating systems research and a number of Silicon Valley professionals and researchers like myself had gathered for one day in the airport hotel where we were having our meetings. The organizer who was a professor at UIUC had chosen Chicago because, she said, "it is a great transportation hub."

I was there only for one night in the middle of a cold January but the trip to downtown on the train, the Vietnamese restaurant and the live Blues and Jazz back at one of the airport hotel restaurants stuck in my mind. Everyone was kind, the service was superb and people seemed to live real lives, not California dreams. That was just a month before I started working for Sun in Cupertino, California. In fact, I had my offer letter in my bag in Chicago.

Later, as a Sun employee, I visited a Goldman Sachs research group looking to build a highly available, highly performant platform for their asset pricing models based on actual, real-time market transactions in equities and derivatives. They wanted to explore how they could scale the computational system horizontally. It turned out, at least in my opinion, that either they had to go back to the drawing board and reconceive the financial models with some greater sensitivity to the issues of scaling or to spend more time to compartementalize the computation network into "islands" that could be scaled horizontally, and then connected to other "islands" of computation that are themselves so scaled. That was in 2002, and I got to see a bit of the city in the spring. It impressed me again with its hospitality and the realness of its people's attitudes.

Chicago, June 2005

Finally, I visited Chicago earlier this year during the Supercomm 2005 show. On this occasion, I had very little time to visit the city but a little walk landed me in a public library / community center, where children were getting ready for their auditions. The mix of colors and ethnicities spoke of a great city in relative balance. So, I've only seen things that confirm Stud's claim and nothing yet that would undermine it, even if I might not verbalize it the bold way he has!

In the same interview, Studs talks about the importance of uniqueness to cities.

So Chicago was unique, it was the archetypal American city, it had these immigrants who did the hard work and the labour in all these steel and farm equipment plants. Actually every city had its uniqueness then. You'd get off the train and see this was Pittsbugh or this was Detroit. There'd be some landmark.

Studs complains that American cities are becoming more and more alike. With New Orleans destroyed, we can only expect one more city looking like the rest: "Today, you get off a plane . . . You can't tell one city from another," he says.

The importance of landmarks and architecture to navigation in the city can hardly be overemphasized.

To me (and also to Studs as he says later in his interview), Chicago is still a unique American city not like any other, and it is a city in which I, as a person raised in Tehran, would feel very comfortable living, just as comfortable as living in London or Berlin.

But Chicago has a uniqueness it maintains — "Second City". People still think of Chicago as the Athens of American architecture. But I think it also has an aspect of excitement to it, because of the work history to begin with: blue collar, getting a job.

2005-09-12 23:19:14.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday August 27, 2005

[ Personal ] What a Pleasure

O.K. This one comes from my old and only home machine, a 5 year-old 700 MHz e-Machines, now with Suse Linux installed. It's much faster than the Windows 2000 OS running on it.

I've already set up my private e-mail account on it, as well as my wife's.

I've already checked my access to documents on the Windows side. The .doc files work really well from within OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 which came with an update patch installation downloaded from the Suse network. (I've not checked any of the other file types.) I could even play videos from my favorite source of video news, Reuters: http://tv.reuters.com. RealPlayer installed during OS installation (perhaps it was one of the updates the OS installation grabbed from the network) works wonderfully after it was configured for the proper DSL speed available to me.

It's amazing how quick and smooth this was! I've never experienced any better O.S. installation!!!

This is how a good O.S. can gradually take over another. The machine refused to start with the Windows 2000 OS on its hard disk. Frustration led to this solution, and it turns out to be perfect for my purposes.

Now, I hope my read access to the files on the Windows side will allow me to retrive those files and then take over the Windows partition as well . . . I'm sure the kids will love the KDE, too. Only if there were a few cool games to add, which I'm sure there are.

Any you recommend?

Linux, Home.

2005-08-27 02:23:02.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Back To Life with Suse Linux

I'm bringing my 5-year-old home machine (a 700 MHz e-Machines) back to life with Suse Linux 9.1 CD, which I purchased last year.

So far, so good!

The system is installed and all the problems I have been having with booting Windows 2000 OS (from the disk) are gone.

My Network Card which had also become dysfuncational under Windows 2000, seems to have come to life. (Previously, under Windows 2000, I gave up fixing the card driver problems and I installed a USB connected Ethernet card from Hawking.)

Suse installation detected the healthy Netgear Ethernet card and is using it to get the most recent patches for an update. The smoothness of this all is quite amazing when compared to Linux installations of the mid 1990s.

Linux.

2005-08-27 01:25:09.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday August 18, 2005

[ Personal ] Anti Jet Lag Diet

If you travel across time zones as often as I have been doing in the last 5 years at Sun, you might want to consult this entry on a famous anti jet lag diet, take a look at the Argonne National Lab report and read a related paper on using the Argonne Diet for jet lag prevention.

A Sun colleague told me about the diet. My colleague also notes that the Argonne published a book on this diet some decades ago.

2005-08-18 15:29:19.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Mac Mini w/ a KVM Switch

I'm seriously thinking about buying a SuperDrive Mac mini.

For accesseries, I can use what I've got if I follow "The Mossberg Solution," i.e. a KVM switch: "PC and Mac, Joined at the Switch." (The online edition of The Wall Street Journal requires a paid subscription. "The Mossberg Solution" is Walter Mossberg's column discussing personal technology.)

Walter Mossberg who reports on personal technology for The Wall Street Journal says he has got some good experience with MiniView Micro USB PLUS 2-Port KVM Switch by Iogear Inc., $69.95, www.iogear.com.

2005-08-18 14:28:23.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday August 09, 2005

[ Personal ] The Cold Breeze in Campbell

The cold breeze in Campbell tonight meant to say "summer is over and fall will be here soon."

Seasons.

2005-08-09 22:43:01.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday August 06, 2005

[ Personal ] Azeri Restaurant

I just uploaded some photos from Azeri Restaurant on Flickr. The photos are from last month. The restaurant is of the classical Persian form. It is in a large yard, with people sitting and resting on hard beds covered with carpets. Food is brought to the beds, and there is live classical Persian instrumental and song music, which stops at midnight.

2005-08-06 01:00:16.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday August 01, 2005

[ Personal ] A Poem

I just discovered that, besides the short entry on bicycling in Santa Cruz, I've also written a poem about Santa Cruz.

I had posted it as a comment to Dango's weblog entry, and I quote it here again:

Once a forgotten town with ocean-blue eyes,
Full of fog, rain, clear skies and redwood trees,
And the smell of the rain on the dirt and the leaves,
The roughness of the earth's skin,
And the ocean waves beating softly on the shores at night,
And a heart beating with life,
Once, a town in drunken walk of a sleepless night.

It is rather odd how we forget some of what we write, as we move on from weblog entry to weblog entry. People who write essays and books that have staying power keep returning to those books and essays. We may have a little gem, put it in a shell, and let it drift in the ocean of the web. If it returns to us, it may simply be a new, accidental find.

2005-08-01 19:05:12.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday July 31, 2005

[ Personal ] Fog in Santa Cruz

This morning from 8 am, when I arrived in Santa Cruz, until about noon, there were large stretches of fog covering the coastline. The fog was just thick enough to make for a nice, cool, long bicycle ride along East Cliff all the way to Portola and beyond. I spent quite a bit of time in the harbor, and on the way back, visited an old house on Lego Lane (511A) where some friends of mine used to live. It is totally amazing to me that the house still stands. Now, a Mexican family seems to be occupying the second floor, where my friends lived back in 1981 (and some of them continued to live there much longer). Back in the early 1980s, the first floor was occupied by a John Lennon look-alike who worked for the U.S. Post Office. I still remember it was in that house that my friends and I listened to some Beatles songs the day John Lennon was shot.

Santa Cruz, John Lennon, Bicycling, Fog.

2005-07-31 15:58:34.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday July 27, 2005

[ Personal ] ACT

Lotfi-Zadeh may not like to admit it (I'm just kidding!), but he went to the same Tehran high-school as I did, except that back in his time, it was called the "American College of Tehran" (ACT). The name, I believe, was changed some time in the 1930s to "Alborz." There are many other distinguished Alborz alumni. Of my own class-mates and good friends, I can name a few—Ali Nadim, Hossein Haj-Hariri, Ali Borhan, Jamshid Moaddeb, Mehryar Grakani—among those who now work and live in the U.S. When my family and I dropped by last week, quite accidentally, we noticed the heated debate among some members of the education community in its main hall, where I remember, back in 1974, sitting and waiting to be admitted into the entering middle-school class. (The Alborz high-school and the middle-school were located on the same campus and part of the same system of education.)

As we walked, we could hear the heckling and the rousing speeches through the windows of the main hall—democracy in action!

2005-07-27 14:55:39.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Tehran Cafes

Some of my readers asked me to post some photographs. I'm beginning to do this at Flickr. You can take a look at some of these recent photos (last week) taken at three different cafes in Tehran. One is from a tea house in Darband, some are from the Artists' Garden in mid-town and a series are from Naderi Cafe in down-town Tehran. Enjoy them.

2005-07-27 07:51:35.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday July 26, 2005

[ Personal ] Damavand

Next summer, I'll definitely have to climb Damavand.

Here are some great photos from another climber.

This summer, just about three weeks ago, I went to the Gosfand Sara station—"the home of the sheep" station, a little place run by a haji from a stone home. I would have attempted to climbe Damvand to its third station this past Saturday had I not suffered the bad slip I wrote about earlier. The slip might have fractured my rib and I couldn't risk the climb with the pain.

Climbing, Damavand.

2005-07-26 23:28:34.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.