The Iranian root ...

"... و اين مردمان را رسمهايي ويژه و قوانيني سخت باشد و بر حسب اين كه چه اندازه خرد اندوخته و كردار نيكو كرده باشند، پايگاني در ميان خود دارند. گويند كه در ميان خويش پيمانها و عهدها دارند كه كس را نيازارند و جز نيكي به خويش و بيگانه نكنند و از آنچه تن و جان را افسرده و رنجور كند پرهيز نمايند. خدمت كردن به ياران رابر خويش فرض گيرند و هر آن كرداري را كه توانايي و فرهمندي و خرد و شادماني را افزون كند را ارج گذارند و بستايند. از ديرباز ايشان را نگهبانان رازهاي بسيار و دانشهاي كهن دانسته­اند و نام پارسيان را از آن رو به ايشان نهاده­اند كه در ايران زمين هر بلا و زوالي كه برخيزد، ايشان مانند درختي در توفان بر ريشه­ هايشان استوار مانند و بقاي اين فرهنگ و تمدن را ممكن سازند. از ميان رازهايي كه خزانه­دارِ آن هستند، يكي مهر است كه..."

برگرفته از "كتابهاي گمشده­ي مغان- كتاب سوم، فصل دوم، برگ 66"

Special thanks to Shervin Vakili for his endless efforts in leading us to our roots ...

Here I come I come I come ...

So here he is, you can see the little dude (aka. my son) in the picture.
Today is his 4th day living in our dimensions and I feel I've gained a lot baby handling skills already ;).
He was code named "Daanaa" for a while, the pre-release code name was "Maahyar" which might be the actual name.
I might as well open up a "baby" category from now on in this blog!

Big brother is watching you ... run ... run ..

Computer vision is an interesting field, well, first of all the name is interesting... it says computer "VISION".. like vision is something which is very basic for computers and has had a long history :).. the field is very young though and still a lot of areas which needs to be covered or uncovered in fact.

A recent application of computer vision recently has been in the Euro 2008 games. I was shocked a bit the first time I saw a player was being substituted and they showed the amount of kilometers this guy had ran. The first guess I had was that they use one of those little gadgets that you can attach to your waist and run with.. but a bit of investigation revealed that the technology uses several cameras to cover the field and stream the video into a few computers that basically analyze the scene, find out the needed information and do the necessary calculations. Quite cool and interesting.

Like MJ like Kobe

In the heat of the NBA finals, lets look at this picture from game one last night. Kobe going against Ray Allen, showing one of the most perfect moves in basketball offense, the Fade Away shot.

The most important feature of this move is that the shooter gets farther away from the basket and the defense as he executes the shoot. Making it really hard to defend and making it one of the hardest techniques. But there is something very special about the fade away shot you see in this picture and that is it isn't a normal one where the right handed player moves clock wise and turns on the right foot, placing the left foot a bit behind and shooting. In this picture, Kobe is executing a counter clock-wise, left foot as a pivot fade away shot which is in fact the trade mark of the master himself, Michael Jordan. The picture below shows MJ executing the move and its interesting to see how the defense has formed against this move. The helping defender on the left indicates that Kobe (Jordan below) was on the low post, and the helping defender coming down to double team (Pierce above and Sir Charles below), making the player turn on the left foot, place the right foot behind the body and just elevate in the air and go backwards, twist the body and make the shot. I've really only seen Jordan and Kobe show this move as it should be done.

If youre interested to find out more about this spectacular basketball move, check out this link and in this video, the master himself tells us how it should be done. (Although he talks about the right foot pivot fade-away, but somehow Kobe learned the trick himself)

Planting the code in the Cyberspace

The Soshiant code base has now moved to a new repository. The new home is on the web, thanks to SVN and not local in the SourceSafe repository of the office anymore. The SourceSafe repository might come as a back up, we have to decide on it.

The main code base living on the web now would mean that the developers can help the project evolve in a distributed fashion, geographically and also modifying the concerns from the risk of theft, crash or any kind of malfunction of the local repository server in the office to major disaster, extreme malfunction of the online server hosted by a web hosting providers which should have a much much less magnitude of risk (m = p * i), hopefully, fingers crossed.

Sketching life

Ever taken a blank sheet of paper and tried to draw something on it? What happened? Did you draw something which you liked, or maybe drew something you hated, or did you just not do anything and stare at the blank sheet?

Life is so much like the simple act of drawing. You have every other day in which your actions can create something great, or something which you regret or yet you can be like most people in the world and just stare at the day and show some passive reactions (notice the RE..), a lot of times it can even cross the border of meaning and seem like the blank sheet of paper is drawing us.

It takes some courage to draw on the blank sheet, just like the courage needed to make things happen everyday. It needs persistence to erase the ugly sketches from the paper, just like the persistence needed after every mistake in life, hope makes you draw again, hope makes you take the action one more time. Fear of screwing up enables you to stare at the sheet for hours, just like what this fear does to you everyday ... and maybe most important than all, the more you draw, the better you become at drawing.

The distance in the space of meanings between a blank sheet of paper and one with a nice sketch is millions of miles ... so can be the difference between a normal "yet another passive reactive-deterministic-conservative" day and one where you chose to make decisions, chose to change something, chose to break the symmetry and take responsibility.

Feeling the city

There are a lot of things going on in the cities and many details which you can enjoy, but it will be all take away from you if you drive everyday in order to reach your destinations. Now that I've sold the car and have a chance to walk or take the cab for going to places, I've found the chance to really see many parts of Tehran. Its really interesting, the stores, the streets, the people, the trees, the traffic. By the way, the subway experience is very unique too. The people in the subway are in a very special state, sitting or standing in a closed space, knowing they have to be there for some time, witnessing other people like them and a lot of times facing these people, unlike a bus where you will see the back of the heads of others. I had a similar experience few years ago when I had to walk down Wilshire Blvd. in LA and although I had passed it a dozen times before, I was able to really see it when I had to walk.