Awesome Cupcakes

It's been more than five years I haven't visited Iran and yesterday I felt I've really missed Yazdi Cupcakes! You may ask why from all the people I love, places I've been to and foods that I've tried in Iran, I'd miss Yazdi Cupcakes!!! Well, I asked the very same question too but after all, Google ranked Yazdi Cupcake at the top of my search result and I felt I should miss it more than American Brownie. I'm a bit confused now, did I googled it before or after I missed it!!!?

Despite the proven record of failures in preparing Iranian cuisine, I was sure it'll be better than the one I baked last time because I couldn't remember how bad the previous one was.

So I found a recipe on Sweet Napa which was originally from a book called New Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij. The ingredients were easy to find and preparation steps was simple to follow. It took me less than 20 minutes to have everything ready to put in oven and another 25 minutes before I've had the best cupcakes that I'd ever baked.

OK, they might look a bit different from the photo in Sweet Napa but certainly good for the first attempt. Have a look at the recipe and enjoy!

The Remedy For HDD Issue

I've just posted a detailed configuration and procedures that I followed to solve the clicking noise of my laptop's hard drive in oxplot. So check it out if you have the same problem and I hope it'll help you too.

Also if you are interested in more detail about this, check out this bug report on launchpad. You can find several useful links to discussions in the bug report comments.

The Unpleasant Clicks

If you happened to run Ubuntu on a laptop, you've probably noticed the annoying hard drive clicks every few seconds. I've only recently got a laptop so I didn't know this problem existed so long without any out of the box solution. However, it didn't take me long to find a reasonable workaround for it.

The whole issue is around the fact that hard drives with aggressive power saving feature park heads after just several seconds in idle but a frequent disk access in Ubuntu causes it to unpark the heads shortly after. This leads to an annoying click noise and shorten drives' life. In Gutsy, enabling laptop-mode with noatime and hard disk power management option and disabling Tracker daemon fixed the problem for me. I actually changed the power management on battery mode from 1 to 128 because I didn't want it to spin down the disk too often. I'll post the configurations in more details soon.

I just want to add that the issue is still not solved in Hardy as of this writing. In order to get rid of the clicking noise in Hardy I had to change disk power management up to 192 but keep in mind that Hardy is still in beta and the issue might be solved by the time it's released. Fingers crossed!

Let's get started!

Hey. This is going to be difficult since it's my first post and I should add that this is my first blog too. So things may turn out really odd! Despite my poor English and lack of writing skills, I try my best to make these posts as readable as possible. I've been living on this planet for a long time and so far haven't understood the purpose of it! In contrast, I've learned and understood to various degrees a lot of other stuffs which might be useful to other species like me. In short, I thought it'll be a good idea to share with you some of the things that I've learned and return back something to the people and the society that have taught and tolerated me so much.

Well, I guess it's not that bad for the first post. I'm a university student of computer science and naturally computer is my no. 1 hobby, so expect many posts about it.

I found this wonderful wallpaper on deviantART, you better have a look at it too.