IYYAZ.COM

Pictures of the Bird’s Nest in Beijing

Iyyaz — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:43:00 +0000

While I was in Beijing back in 2006, I happened to be staying in the North ChaoYang district of Beijing - in other words, I was a five minute walk away from Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. Check out the pictures of the final thing!

Are you lost?

Iyyaz — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:39:08 +0000

Back in July, I visited some Xerox colleagues in the US. Their office in Rochester, NY was an all ground floor building which spanned across several hundreds of metres and was full of intersecting and confusing corridors. Nevertheless, one clever individual made life a hell of a lot easier by putting up the following picture.

BMW 1 Series Coupe. What?

Iyyaz — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:00:44 +0000

Last time I drove a 1-series was about a year ago. My local dealer was kind enough to loan me with a 1-series while my car was in for a service. I’ve actually driven two 1-series cars and at the time, I hated them. I’ve never been fond of hatchback cars. The first 1-series I drove was a basic configuration 6-speed manual diesel variant. The second was a 6-speed auto (from what I can remember). It was new, good on fuel, roomy, versatile and felt very reliable. But I still hated it and wanted my 3-series back! God I was so glad when my car was ready!

So now, BMW have caughed up the Coupe equivalent of the 1-series. And you know, the coupe styling looks great on the 1-series. I must say I really like it. I haven’t driven this piece of work yet, but there are many options for this car. They don’t appear cheap! On the BMW UK site I tried configuring a top 135 Coupe with leathers, sat-nav, communications pack, front/rear parking sensors and all the possible things that were available. The total value of the car was in excess of £40K. For £40Ks worth of car (which isn’t going to save that much on fuel), I may as well stick with a 3-Series, or perhaps a used M5. The M5 is definitely a dog of a car.

Coming back to the 1-Series coupe. It looks good in Red. The usual BMW colours seem to hide its shape and appeal. I think Red gives it more of an untamed look. I’m interested to see who will buy this car and what sort of specification people will go for.

Make sure you backup your hard drives!

Iyyaz — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:23:16 +0000

“It’ll never happen! Hard drive’s are so reliable these days!“. Yes, even I’ve said this. Probably because I felt that my IBM laptop (provided by my company) was an indestructable piece of technology and that everything inside it is nicely cocooned in its robust shell. Well, it’s stronger than my personal HP nx7010 which makes strange creaking noises if you pick it up with one hand!

Anyway, when I returned to the office on a Monday morning after my little vacation, my trusted so called robust IBM (Lenovo) was struggling to sustain any Windows session for longer than 15 minutes. A good friend of mine who works in the group that looks after these little things came over and checked my Event Viewer. (Why didn’t I think of that?) Lo and behold, lots of red icons. My Hard Drive had lots of bad blocks. So there goes my Outlook PST file (which I hadn’t copied to the network in months).

I was lucky that I managed to recover everything using the CHKDSK utility. I simply left CHKDSK /r running all night. This managed to correct many index entries in the file system and also tries to recover things that had somehow become hidden. Once this was done, I copied everything to the network immediately and handed over my laptop to my colleague.

My point is, its easy to become complacent with hard drives. The hard drive is probably the most busiest component in any computer and since it is constantly moving, things are bound to go wrong.

Now everything has been sorted, I focused on my poor HP nx7010 (which is actually a really good machine in my opinion). My backup system at home isn’t too sophisticated. I use Acronis TrueImage which allows me to backup folders, partitions or the whole drive. The version that I use (which is now old) can write directly to a local folder (on another partition or drive), a shared folder on a network or directly to one or many CDs. My IBM (Lenovo) has this nice little utility that sits in the system tray and monitors the tilt of your laptop and puts any read/write activity on hold until the drive has stabilised. I tried looking for something similar for my personal laptop, but couldn’t find anything like it. What I did find was a utility that monitors temperature and the general health of your drive. It’s called HDD Life Pro and is available to try for 15 days before you buy. I think this is something I will buy!

Boeing 787, the Dreamliner

Iyyaz — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:28:34 +0000

This is the magic month for Boeing with their launch of its new flagship beauty, the Dreamliner, officially known as the Boeing 787. This isn’t just another plane from the mammoth company. This jet is so unlike its predecessors in many ways, the main one being that it’s constructed from lightweight materials making it a greener as it’s using less fuel. That’s all good for eco-friendly commercial airliner companies, but what’s in it for the traveller? Maybe I can answer this more fairly once I’ve travelled on it, but from the pictures that i’ve seen, I would say it has the correct name, “Dreamliner“.

I’ve travelled on a few Airbus models and many of the 747 derivatives and the popular ‘triple seven’ (777). I’d like to be fair, but I’d have to say that I haven’t been too impressed with the Airbus models. The triple sevens from the same airline have always been substancially better equipped. Getting back to the Dreamliner, I’ve heard that the Dreamliner will (re)introduce a different kind of flight path model. The typical ones are ‘hub-and-spoke’, where an airliner will fly from its home airport to another and then return back home. The Dreamliner (so I have heard) will visit several airports before returning back to the home airport. I guess the idea is that it wouldn’t require re-fuelling at every stop since its a ‘cheap to run’ plane. So what’s the future of air travel? If many airline companies take this approach, you could be flying from Tokyo to Singapore with British Airways! It makes perfect business sense!

BMW with Mercedes-like behaviour

Iyyaz — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:44:43 +0000

I’ve heard people say that its often the case that some random electronic system is bound to go wrong with BMWs, but with Mercedes, if one system goes down, everything goes down. Well yesterday, it seems my car is behaving like a Mercedes.

I’ve had some strange behaviour with the braking system recently, which apparantly isn’t necessarily linked with anything mechanical. In addition to this, the car decided to shut up completely. No dreary speech from the navigation system, no chimes and no audio. Yes, no music! So there’s me driving around with only tyre noise to entertain me and the occasional statistic about the altitude of my car.

Fantastic!

It’s all under the glove compartment

Yes, the solution seems to be related to Fuse number 41. The fuse is perfectly fine. For some reason, the computer experienced some kind of ‘glitch’. The only way that I managed to resolve this was to insert the key into the ignition and turn to position I. The navigation screen should greet you with the bold BMW opening screen. Once the screen is active, pull out fuse 41 and re-insert it. After a few weird electronicy type noises, everything is back!

Now it’s time to make some noise…. “At the end of the road, turn left….” no not that noise!

Pedrosa Rides Determined Race to Stay in Title Hunt

Iyyaz — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:18:52 +0000

MotoGP World Championship Grand Prix Round 04: Chinese Grand Prix
SHANGHAI, China, May 6, 2007 - Dani Pedrosa rode a determined race to keep himself in the title hunt with a fourth place in China as Casey Stoner won from Valentino Rossi.

Full Story:
http://world.honda.com/WGP/2007/04china/race/

Photo Report (5 photos):
http://world.honda.com/WGP/2007/04china/race/01.html

The Ultimate Driving Machine

Iyyaz — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:38:15 +0000

BMW are dropping the slogan? I never heard about this. I was probably less bothered at the time. I probably still am. I agree with the author from Autoblog, who says that BMWs will always be the drivers ultimate machine. I can’t help but think their new slogan “A company of ideas” just doesn’t cut it. BMW has always had a bit of a bad boy image, with the threatening looking kidney grill job on the front. “A company of ideas” just sounds… well… it sounds like they’re pushing themselves into the ‘posh’ arena like Mercedes. I guess it’s something to do with their drive for innovation.

Happy Easter

Iyyaz — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:44:23 +0000

A nice long weekend - no office, no six-million e-mails, no chilled air-conditioners etc etc etc. Work is not so bad, but having a long weekend is a great thing to have, especially after the long visit from Japan. It’s not the only good thing though. Even at my age, I managed to pick up one of these.

Daylight Savings

Iyyaz — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:21:42 +0000

Very early this morning in the United Kingdom, all of our computer systems advanced their clocks forward by 1 hour for British Summer Time (BST). Well, there’s no real change to the clock, just an offset is adjusted. Computers aren’t the only entities that make such changes. We humans must adjust our watches, clocks, cars, mobile phones and wherever we have some kind of time teller.

A friend asked me what benefits are gained by simply switching everything by 1 hour. Me being me of course, I have an answer for everything. From an economics perspective, apparantly, there are fewer road accidents because when all of us folk are driving back from work in the evening, it’s still nice and bright…. well… it depends what time we all leave the office of course. The classic I heard was “It’s good for peoples’ well-being as they have a perception of a longer daylight”. Rubbish. I think we have a greater chance of seeing darkness in the early hours of the morning because of Daylight Saving. Perhaps I will test this theory tomorrow morning. I have just adjusted the Daylight Savings option in my trusty Sony Ericsson. The alarm time is still the same. Last week I was waking up at around 5am because my body clock hadn’t quite adjusted to GMT since my arrival from Japan.

Anyhow, if it is dark at 6am tomorrow morning, that proves that we don’t have a longer day.

It has also just occured to me that we are now 8 hours behind Japan (7 hours behind Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore). If I was in Japan during BST, I wouldn’t have needed to wait so long for my colleagues to get into the office. Wonderful.