UPDATE: Well, it seems another ranking thinks better about UTD. It is again announced here. This method of ranking is more based on publication count and academic participation. Computer Sciences program of University of Texas at Dallas is ranked 3^rd in Texas and 29^th in the United States.

Moral of the story: measurement and ranking is never complete, and so not reliable. But since it gives you one single number to consider, it is easier to use. So, many people do rely on the rankings with a confidence much more than the way they should.

UPDATE2, six months later: Just a quick note: UTD has no school pride. The only type of sport it has is CHESS and DEBATE!! [a suggested fight song] There is no social life going on in the university housing. The bookstore does not even have enough stuff (like wallets) with UTD logo on them. We don’t have a football team, although even Rice with 5,000 students has one. You don’t see students in the campus, no one walks. Everyone is either in their car or in class or lab. The student union is small for the 14,000 students school has. So most people lunch out. The food courts all close very early, so at night or in weekends you *should* dine out. Without a car, life is not possible. The school is in the suburb, and is literary in the middle of nowhere. Compare to SMU which is in the middle of Dallas. UTD is not known in the DF/W area, you tell people you study in UT Dallas and they get surprised that UT has a branch in here. Isn’t all of these depressing?

In return for all this nerd and unkind atmosphere, I really expected the school to have a higher ranking. So such low ranking is really disappointing.

•  The UTD Mercury: Seeking a solution to the UTDoldrums

It dies when a page has too many elements, like Wikipedia pages. Also, it does not like more than 1 or 2 YouTube videos in one page. It simply crashes, even in safe mode with no plug-in running. Sometimes it does not crash, but it sort of “stalls” while loading a tab, and you cannot click a link or change tabs with mouse. Honestly I am using Internet Explorer more and more each day. It works fine on all those pages and in same conditions.

Update: I did the following:

• un-installed Firefox
• removed any folder remaining from it
• restarted my laptop and
• then installed Firefox again

The first page I visited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number and guess what? It crashed! It used to crash on the same page before too. Internet Explorer works fine in that page, and I am using IE for all my surfing now.

Update2: Pooya just directed me to the right IRC [ irc.mozilla.org #firefox], where we figured out what was the problem: a font! Yes, one font named Xerxes [see it here]  could not render CTRL+L character correctly. So, I removed the font and all the pain was gone. I posted it here as a comment to a bug report in 2006. Thanks Pooya!

300 is a 2007 film adaptation of the graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller about the Battle of Thermopylae. The film is directed by Zack Snyder with Frank Miller attached as an executive producer and consultant, and was shot mostly with bluescreen to mimic the original comic book work. 300 stars Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro, Andrew Tiernan and David Wenham. The film is scheduled to be released in both conventional and IMAX theaters in America on March 9, 2007.

The film is a close adaptation of the graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller in which Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and 300 Spartans fight to the last man against Persian King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his massive army of one million soldiers. Facing insurmountable odds, the Spartans’ sacrifice inspires all of Greece to unite against the Persian invaders. The story is based on the Battle of Thermopylae which took place in 480 BC.

But why should I, a sort of should-be-busy student, be attracted to this one? Well, in this one Persians are shown as ugly creatures, not even human, who do know nothing but to kill. There are two parts which annoy me:

• obviously, as a current Iranian Persian I do not like my people, specially my ancestors, be called non-human and killer machines. Persian empire has been a civilization of it own. With ugly and pretty faces both. I am not going to compare this to any other civilization since some countries do not have much of a past, say 300 at most, compared to around 2500+ years of our history
• the timing is really interesting: at this very moment United States and other countries are considering attack to Iran, and this movie shows enemies of Iran as heroes and Persians as non-humans! What a coincidence, eh?

Anyways, I do not really know about politics and do not like wars. But, do not like smell this movie an interesting thing too. This site “300 the movie ” is going to provide more information soon. Some collective artistic things, historical information and so on.

P.S. #1:By the way, at this very moment I thought people may not know Iran is the mainland of former Persia!

P.S. #2: My recent posts have all been about Iran and these things. I really try not to think about there much, not as much as it seems at least.

• The auto-refresh by AJAX is only useful for knowing about new emails. When my Yahoo! messenger does the same, why should I risk browser crashes cause of the JS overload?
• look at the way Yahoo! mail beta advertises, and the way Gmail does. You see very apparent differences. Yahoo’s way is far too annoying.
• The view pane in Yahoo! mail is too small. So is the messages pane. Opening in a new tab is cool, but isn’t the classic method better then?
• On a poor connection, JS loading takes way too long. The dancing geek animation is not interesting enough to make it fair.
• For security reasons, Yahoo! login expires very often. So if you have a browser tab for your Y! mail open, it is no good. You should switch to it once in a while, re-login, and then go back to work. I think the point in showing unread messages in title of the page was to “make checking new emails in multi-tabbed browsers easier”. With this login timeouts, this goal is not achieved.

As a matter of fact, Yahoo! mail beta is defeated with its own messenger, while Gmail is promoted with G-Talk. While working with Gmail, you really enjoy it as a reliable real time communication method. Just look how it has handled threads, ads, live talks, offlines (which are delivered as emails when you are not available on G-Talk), spread sheets and many more features.

I should add that the only reason I still use Yahoo! mail is their messenger. Nothing more. Google is much much better in many ways.

From inside Iran:

• your internet connection is filtered for as stupid things as Orkut.com and FreeOS.com:
  Also, your internet connection is limited to 128kbps because government says more of that might be bad!

And from outside, *everyone* filters you out:

• Java.Sun.com:
  Sun Main Login, for Solaris OS download:
  Oracle Technology Network Developer License TOS:
  Google Web Accelerator:
  Google Pack:
  AND here comes the latest of the these. Since bad bad terrorists might use Google to access to nuclear codes, “Google code search” is also not available in Iran. They really think that sort of stuff is found on the web? Or they think missile run based on perl scripts?

Access Denied

You don’t have permission to access “http://sdlc-esd.sun.com/ESD28/JSCDL/…….” on this server.

Reference #18.9e1ef648.1161982038.4aaef4


A required IP lookup revealed that your IP address is originating from an embargoed country.





– You are not a citizen, national, or resident of, and are not under control of, the government of Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Libya, North Korea, Syria, nor any country to which the United States has prohibited export.



They feared so much that the whole pack.google.com is closed to me. See the Google logo is missing. Probably some subdomain-wide access policy restricts access to Iranian IP addresses:

All of the above, or most of it, is due to the US embargoes and sanctions against Iran. I really don’t think a free software package from Oracle, or a Solaris OS means anything in the process of war on terror. I actually see that the only people who are caught in between, filtered by both Iran and US, are the poor computer geeks. These guys in turn have no other idea than harmlessly do their jobs, mostly running software and networks for the comfort of their people.

I fear that one day, out of a sudden, even Google and Yahoo! close their search services to Iranians based on these rules. Google and Yahoo! have been online training cyberspaces for all we Iranians. They are gateways, they can’t be closed. They shouldn’t!

This is a crime. This is …. just unacceptable. Somebody please tell me how can this end. I am really thinking about a way to at least show protest to these.

Update:As of 1^st of December 2006, the list of filtered sites by Iranian ISPs include the following:
• BoingBoing.net
• Wikipedia.org
• Amazon.com
• Blogger Photo hostings

Some previously filtered ones:

• Flickr.com
• YouTube.com
• LiveJournal.com
• MySpace.com
• Craigslist.org