I find people are often curious and ignorant of the social norms in Iran. Here’s a representative snippet in photos:

Unmarried couples of the opposite sex are not permitted to associate with each other in public. Women are required to cover their hair and bodies at all times when in public.

A very large portion of the Iranian population is young (under 30).

What does this mix result in? An interesting cycle easily observed in parks.

I’ve been following various learned discussions of housing prices and thought I’d add my own mini-view on the San Diego market.

In my neighbourhood there is a significant decline in housing prices (probably about 15% off the peak), and the number of houses for sale is significantly higher than it’s ever been (it’s a new neighbourhood). Houses are on the market for much longer than they used to be – a year ago they’d sell in a week, now it’s a matter of months.

The number of flyers I get from real estate agents has decreased significantly.

A friend who’s in the mortgage and loan business tells me business was quite slow but has picked up recently, mostly with adjustable rate folks refinancing to fixed to take advantage of the low rates.

Another friend who’s in the furniture business (which closely tracks the housing market) tells me the retail side is very very slow.

Yet another friend who’s in the construction business (windows) tells me the consumer market is so slow he’s had to lay off several workers that he wanted to keep. The commercial side seems to be doing ok.

New home builders, of which there are plenty within striking distance of where I live, have started offering significant incentives to buyers. I heard one builder is offering 4% commission to real estate agents, where a year ago they had zero commission.

And then there’s the historical housing prices graph…

Interesting talk from Dan Gilbert on the factors driving satisfaction and (Dan concludes) happiness in humans. This one is worth listening to help understand your own reactions to choices, as well as to help you decide how to present choices and options to users of your products, people you are negotiating with, and so forth.

Go listen to it first, but if you want the summary here’s the short version:

..

..

Humans are able to “synthesize” happiness when there is no choice, but become deeply dissatisfied when offered too many choices.

Actually that’s quite a poor summary of his point; go listen to the talk.

This was similar to but significantly better than Barry Schwartz’s talk.

Btw, the vast majority of the Ted Talks are worth listening to.

I’ve been a long time user of Bloglines, but I kept hearing good things about Google Reader and decided to give it a try…

Well, I’m a convert. The switch was fairly easy – just export OPML from Bloglines and import into Google Reader. The main selling point for me is the keyboard shortcuts. One feature I do miss is the ability to mark posts unread and have them treated in a special way (Bloglines would indicated posts you’ve never seen separately from those you’ve seen but marked unread).

I’m impressed that Google went back and made a product that was entirely unremarkable into one that is very usable with a second release. That’s unusual for a Google product.

Anyway, I’m a Google Reader user now.

Newsweek ranks UCSD as the 23rd top University in the world. From Pooya.

CalTech ahead of MIT and UCLA ahead of UCSD are a bit suspect, but…

I got sick of manually enabling and disabling my external monitor every time I docked the laptop, so I whipped up a quick Autohotkey script to automate it. Autohotkey is an excellent free open source (GPL) utility for creating hotkeys and macros.

You can download the script here. Note that this is tuned for my setup (1024×768 native LCD resolution) and you might have to tweak to get it to work for you.

To use it, makes sure you have Autohotkey installed, download the above script, and double click on it. To use a single monitor hold down the Windows key as you press 1. For two monitors use Windows + 2.

If you want to tweak it for your own system, run AutoScriptWriter (Start->All Programs->AutoHotkey->AutoScriptWriter) and hit record. Now right click on the top right corner of your screen (assuming that’s an empty spot). Press “r”. Press CTRL+SHIFT+Tab. Right click on the second monitor icon thing (where the number 2 is greyed out), and select “attached”. Press enter.

Stop recording the macro (hit Stop on AutoScriptWriter). Save the results. Repeat, this time disabling the external monitor as you record. Use the script below as the cheat sheet.

#2::

Send,{LWINDOWN}m{LWINUP}
MouseClick, right,  1023,  0
Sleep, 100
Send, r
WinWait, Display Properties,
IfWinNotActive, Display Properties, , WinActivate, Display Properties,
WinWaitActive, Display Properties,
Send, {SHIFTDOWN}{CTRLDOWN}{TAB}{SHIFTUP}{CTRLUP}
MouseClick, right,  262,  153
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left,  275,  158
Sleep, 100
Send, {ENTER}
return

#1::

Send,{LWINDOWN}m{LWINUP}
MouseClick, right,  1023,  0
Sleep, 100
Send, r
WinWait, Display Properties,
IfWinNotActive, Display Properties, , WinActivate, Display Properties,
WinWaitActive, Display Properties,
Send, {SHIFTDOWN}{CTRLDOWN}{TAB}{SHIFTUP}{CTRLUP}
MouseClick, right,  238,  141
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left,  259,  146
Sleep, 100
Send, {ENTER}
return

AOL releases Web based APIs for its instant messaging system. This is huge – having IM as a closed, non-pluggable island was a great waste. I hope the other majors (Yahoo, MSN) will do the same.

They’re even offering ways of creating IM bots as part of the offering. I’m definitely going to be putting this to use in side projects, will report on how it goes.

The project I’ve been working on at Yahoo, the new advertiser system code named Panama, is now live! It’s an absolutely great feeling to finally have it out there and have real customers using it. A lot of very smart people worked very hard to make this happen.

Here’s the blog coverage so far:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/10/yahoo-launches-panama-interface.html

“OK Andy – the billion dollar question based on what you saw – which one will be the better product in 1 year AdWords or YSM?”

Right now? Panama is pretty awesome and helps YSM leapfrog AdWords in terms of interface and tools.
Google still has the larger network, so it will be tough battle.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061017-174500

The new interface is snappier, more flexible and very sleek and user friendly.

http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/yahoos-panama-goes-live/

Among other upgrades, Panama has much-improved geo-targeting. The old platform didn’t allow local targeting other than by businesses with a physical presence in the particular market. Google had a much more flexible product. The new Yahoo! capability allows for expanded targeting by states (or provinces), cities and DMAs.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3907

First impressions are overwhelmingly positive

http://www.traffick.com/2006/10/no-turning-back-panama-goes-live.asp

I found the system intuitive to read as well as operate.

There’s a very simple method for getting data into Excel from the Web that’s surprisingly little known. Most people use csv, which works well, but has problems with UTF-8. I originally saw this on xml.com (see the Rendering Machinery section).

So here it is: you simply have to set the content type for your page to application/vnd.ms-excel and put your data into an html table. It works quite well, even maintaining formatting, colors, etc.

Here’s an example in php, and here is the script in action.

Ran across Flapjax via Lamda the Ultimate. A quick look at the tutorial has me thinking there’s something to this. From the Flapjax blog:

Flapjax has five important characteristics:

1. It is event-driven and reactive.

2. It reduces unnecessary code with an in-lined template system.

3. It provides a reactive, persistent store that automatically updates on all clients sharing the same data.

4. It enables convenient sharing of data with other users.

5. It implements access-control to channel this sharing.

6. It provides libraries to connect to external Web services (thereby enabling client-side mash-ups).

That doesn’t say much actually, but look at the tutorial to get a sense of what this language looks like. Another thing to add to the “check out at some point in time” list.

FoxyTunes is a FireFox plugin that allows you to control any of the popular music players right from the status bar on your browser. I just found out it supports the Yahoo! Music Unlimited player and installed it. It works great.

FoxyTunes is interface done right:

• It’s always available because I always have a browser open anyway.
• It makes use of screen real-estate that’s normally wasted – the browser status bar.
• It’s tiny. People, look at how much can be done with tiny icons. Can we stop with the giant icons? Hint: your application is not the only one I’ll be running at any point in time. Screen real-estate is valuable.

Nice app. Give it a try.

VentureBeat has launched VentureBoard, “a marketplace for startups”:

(1) It is a place where individuals or emerging tech companies can advertise their products, assets or teams for sale and where established companies can find them.

(2) It is a place for service providers, such as financial, debt, accounting, legal and PR companies, to advertise their services, and for emerging companies to locate services they need.

The basic premise is that most startups don’t have quite the exit that YouTube has had, and that a forum for finding acquirers and selling startups is needed. Brian McConnell describes it as MLS for startups.

Certainly an interesting idea. Several startups have put themselves for sale on eBay, and Kiko successfully completed the sale, so it’s not unfathomable.
I could see it working – plenty of startups will reach the point where they want/need to sell, and there’s no downside to potential acquirers monitoring the board. For the acquirer it’s like cheap outsourced R&D. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

I’m using Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 2.0 and I like it. A couple of features that are immediately useful:

• Built-in spell checking for text areas and forms: your text is automatically spell checked. Very nice.
• New links are opened in tabs by default. I don’t have to constantly control-click anymore.
• Each tab gets its own close button.

You can get the full list of improvements at the above link. Apparently the javascript performance is improved, which sounds plausible because the new Yahoo! Mail loads faster now.

It’s also stable, no problems so far. Give it a go.

I hope this guy sues and wins millions.

Via Schneier.