I have lost count how many times I have told people that “going to a shooting range and renting a gun when you have a non-immigrant visa (F-1, H1B, TN) is a bad idea.” To avoid having to find the material over and over, I will post it here and start sending the link. I […]
Category Archives: General
Occupation Changes in San Francisco
San Francisco is going through a face change, where people are being evicted to make room for the new workers. There is demand for finding residence in SF, while many many regulations restrict construction of new residences. Since tech giants (Google, Apple, Facebook) started to offer shuttle services to their employees for a better commute between […]
How do apps Telegram and Signal compare?
Telegram is an app well known for instant messaging in certain regions of the world. Today, they announced Telegram was taking down many channels belonging to ISIS. The media, eager to paint ISIS as a sophisticated group, quickly called the channels “encrypted.” But, how true is that statement?
Some Diversity Comparisons In and Out of Tech Industry
Diversity in Silicon Valley has been topic of much discussion recently. There is no need to look at the statistics to know tech industry is suffering (severely) from lack of diversity. To fulfill my curiosity, I decided to add up the numbers from some random companies I was interested in. The results for both gender and […]
Iranian Identity and Issue of Flags
When you are from middle east, everything has a political flavor to it. And when you try to get people together and represent all, all these small differences suddenly erupt! I was in New York this week and was able to attend the annual “Persian Parade” event in Manhattan. It was definitely something of interest […]
Smartwatches: To Get or Not To Get?
The questions of getting a smartwatch is slowly getting to minds of people who are not exactly the geeky type. Having used 3 different types since last December, I thought maybe I should narrate my opinion and share my “wish list” for the devices that will come. Summary of My Inventory LG G2 Garmin […]
Google’s Commitment Issues, Miracast, and Android Fragmentation
I bought a recently released HP 7 Plus tablet, a very nice device with bare minimums and a decent price tag ($100). But it still is on Android Jelly Bean. What it means is some (popular) apps, such as Instagram, no longer support it. It makes some sense, as it is not the latest flavor […]
what did you do in your Ph.D. again?
Recently I was asked to provide an overview of what I did through my Ph.D. in UTD. Although my research work is mostly wireless networking, I realized the “embedded systems” topic fits my development expertise the best. I will repeat that summary here too. My experience with programming embedded systems can be divided into two […]
Symbol Table Manipulation in TinyOS
I realized one of the hacks we had used in our testbed is of use to other researchers as well. When running an experiment using MEMSIC Motes, it is possible that you need a large number of images which only differ in some variable values. For example, only the variable indicating start time for each […]
Finals week in Austin
Nice view 🙂 Thank goodness I don’t have exams anymore.