Intuitive Strums

Eid Mubarak

2010-11-16T18:36:00.000+03:00

Eid Mubarak

Funny Digg Error Message

2010-09-02T03:51:00.001+03:00

Got this funny error searching on Digg. Love the humor.

Funny Digg error message

BTW, who's Mariano?

noSQL databases

2010-05-07T12:40:00.000+03:00

Ever wondered what databases power the likes of facebook.com, digg.com, and amazon.com? Do you want to know more about alternatives to relational databases like Oracle and MySQL? Are you skeptical of the noSQL movement? Do you want to know if document-oriented databases perform as well as RDBMS?

Then my presenation on non-relational databases this Saturday 8th May 2010 is for you. Details are published on linuxbahrain.com

Stadium vs. Stadium

2008-08-19T23:32:00.003+03:00

Stadium in Doha, Qatar

Stadium in Barcelona, Spain

No Sweat College Degrees

2008-08-18T18:44:00.013+03:00

While we bust our heads day and night studying hard to get a degree, 12 Bahrainis, according to Arabian Business, paid money to get certificates in the mail. It is so despicable that I had an immediate urge to publish the names in BOLD. The disclaimer on the American magazine that published the list made me retreat.

Coincidently, University of Strathclyde, where I'm doing my MBA, sent us an email invitation for a very important meeting this weekend to address a similar issue. It seems that some of their students have been buying custom written assignments from individuals in Bahrain who make a business out of preparing bespoke MBA assignments. No wonder we have all kinds of morons in executive jobs all over the country.

Track Your Comments

2008-08-17T20:43:00.011+03:00

The moment you leave a comment on a blog post, you are actually engaging in a multi-way conversation. That conversation spans days with different people from different time zones having different views. The blog needs to be revisited again and again to keep up with the flow of ideas. So how do you keep track of these conversations? Some blog engines like blogger.com and some wordpress implementations give you the option to be notified by email of any changes happen after you leave a comment. This is a nifty trick but it is not used by all blog engines.

The solution I use is called Commentful from Blog Flux. It is a web service that keeps track of changes and updates on any blog post you ask it to monitor. You add a blog post to a watch list, and the system visits it every ten minutes to check if new comments are added. If a blog post is not updated for a month or so, it gets moved to an archive page so only the active ones are shown.

What about you? How do you keep track of comments on blogs you visit?

Little Gordon

2008-08-16T05:00:00.007+03:00

If you ever enjoyed Hell's Kitchen TV show then you'll definitely enjoy this

Beach vs. Beach

2008-08-15T23:14:00.005+03:00

Beach in Muscat, Oman

Beach in Tubli, Bahrain

Hack your Mind

2008-08-14T16:44:00.007+03:00

Boost your mind, hack it to learn better, faster, and deeper and become a pillar of progression for the society with these 77 tips and techniques related to health, balance, and focus.

Anatomy of a troubleshooting process

2008-08-13T23:54:00.002+03:00

about 2 hours ago
Internet access is extremely slow. Anybody else is having the same problem?

about 1 hour ago
BTW, I'm on Batelco's 1mb ADSL service

about 1 hour ago
Batelco's DNS is screwed. www.google.com is not resolved but www.yahoo.com is. Could it be something bigger, maybe root dns servers?

35 minutes ago
It's google's DNS. It's not responding. Try it with nslookup or dig and server ns1.google.com

30 minutes ago
Nonetheless, internet speed is damn slow

26 minutes ago
gmail is also not accessible. What's going on?

22 minutes ago
got a google IP address, 64.233.167.104, from a web based nslookup service. Still not accessible. Could it be Batelco's proxy?

10 minutes ago
just used www.anon.me web proxy to successfully access google.com. it's definitely Batelco's problem.

5 minutes ago
google.com is back, gmail.com is back. Speed is a little bit better. Batelco, what the heck happened?

Short Story: Domino Effect

2008-08-12T22:20:00.008+03:00

Playing dominos with my friends the other day reminded me of the summer I spent with my cousin Ebrahim in my grandfather’s house when I was 7. The extremely hot mid-days denied us the pleasure of playing outside. We had to come up with games that would keep us busy after lunch.

The game that took the most of our time was not even a game. It all started when Ebrahim sneaked into my uncle’s room one day and took a dominos box that interested us. My uncle’s room was a forbidden area for the two of us. We were not supposed to enter it while he was not around. Ebrahim was a couple of years older than me. These two years gave him an adventurous spirit that I never had. He would do things that I couldn’t do.

We didn’t understand the dominos game so we started arranging the pieces in a straight line making them stand like a group of soldiers standing in front of their commander waiting for marching orders. We would drop the first piece and watch how each piece pushes the next one creating a wave that drops all of them in few seconds. The sensations kept going with each new arrangement but the 28 pieces were very little to keep us excited so we started adding other objects.

One day, right after lunch, following a scheme that we worked on for days, we brought out all the VHS tapes that my uncle kept in his room. My grandfather saw us getting into my uncle’s room but like always he didn’t say anything. He was a sweet and a kind man and never stopped us from doing things that we wanted to do. We considered him as our friend who was so close to us that we entrusted him with our secrets. The idea was to construct a building using the VHS tapes and use the dominos to knock it down.

I carefully built a meter long shaky building with the VHS tapes while Ebrahim arranged the domino pieces close to it with the last domino having a tape set beside it to gather the momentum of the dropping little pieces and hit the building with it. My grandfather was having his lunch time nap in a nearby room. The excitement was growing with every piece of domino Ebrahim set.

The scene was set for a formation we planned for days. It was a show with no audience except the dominos themselves witnessing a sensation of achievement of two little boys merging their love for building and destruction in a single scene. We put our fingers together and pushed the first domino and cheerfully watched the pieces dropping one after another until they knocked down the shaky building with a roaring noise. We were ecstatic with our triumph.

The beautiful feeling stayed for as long as the few seconds the 28 pieces of dominos usually take to drop each other. Our biggest achievement of that summer woke up our grandfather from his nap abruptly. He furiously run into the room and screamed at us so badly that we both burst into hysteric crying that would have gone for days if it was not for our grandmother’s intervention.

My grandfather continued the sweet and kind man he was but stopped being a friend that day. My 7 years old mind was too young to understand the extent the domino effect may reach.

Written as an assignment in a creative writing workshop with Deonna Kelli Sayed

Boot into a physical windows partition, virtually

2008-08-11T20:38:00.005+03:00

While we were discussing virtualization in Bahrain LUG's meeting a couple of days ago, I promised the attendees to show them how I relieved myself from the hassles of dual booting into Windows XP and Linux by using the free vmware server on Linux to boot virtually into my physical Windows XP partition. I encourage you to make proper backups of both systems before you embark into the following procedure just to be on the safe side.

Prerequisites:

Dual boot system with Windows XP and Linux
vmware server 1.0.6 or above on Linux. Here is how to install it on Ubuntu Hardy
Unmount the Windows XP partition under Linux if it is mounted

Steps:

Hardware Profile

Boot normally into the Windows XP partition and create a new hardware profile by going to Control Panel-->System-->Hardware-->Hardware Profiles, and clicking on Copy to copy the current profile. Name the new profile "vmware"
Log out of windowx XP and boot into Linux.

Vmware on Linux

Run vmware server's wizard for a new virtual machine
Choose Windows XP and follow the steps in the wizard until you reach the hard disk allocation step then un-check the options of allocating space and splitting and finish the wizard
Go to the Edit Settings screen of the new virtual machine and delete the current virtual hard disk
Press Add to add a new hard disk and choose "use a physical disk" and choose "use entire disk"
power up the virtual machine and boot into windows XP in Grub, then choose the "vmware" hardware profile
Cancel the new hardware detection pop-ups then install vmware tools then restart the virtual machine.

Warnings:

The virtual machine will boot into GRUB, so make sure you don't start your Linux partition into the virtual machine. Doing so will FUBAR your Linux partition.
I've done this sometime back and there might be some little tweaks that I can't recall right now so give it a try and update me.
SCSI drives may not be supported. I've done this with IDE
DirectX is not an option in the virtual Windows XP so forget about playing games in the virtual machine
The overall performance is slower compared to a physical partition boot, but with enough RAM, you won't feel handicapped.

Mountain vs. Mountain

2008-08-10T23:34:00.004+03:00

Mountain in Edinburgh, Scotland

Mountain in Muscat, Oman

Linux User Group Gathering

2008-08-09T22:48:00.010+03:00

Marwan, the co-founder of Bahrain Linux User Group (LUG) presented VirtualBox virtualization technologies in our monthly meeting held earlier today.

He started by explaining the nature of virtualization technologies and their common uses. In a nutshell, virtualization allows computer users to run an operating system, like windows XP, as a guest OS on another operating system, like Linux, which functions as a host OS.

Then he walked us through the VirtualBox installation process on Ubuntu Linux which was straight forward using a HowTo article on Ubuntu's website. The fun started when he booted a WindowsXP guest OS in Ubuntu working as a window, or a full screen, with full functionality including sharing files between the two OSes.

Then he detailed down several configuration setups in VirtualBox with heated discussion by the audience, me included, comparing it to vmware, which is another virtualization product, but proprietary.

The obvious uses of virtual machines go beyond having windows XP booted in Linux. I for one use vmware to boot a guest WinXP on a host WinXP, and sometimes Linux, to access my work network through VPN. VPN clients connect a PC virtually to another network which most of the time shields the PC from internet access so when you are on the VPN, you can't access the net except through the VPN connection which may be slower compared to you local PC's internet access. Using a Guest OS VPNed in another network doesn't affect your host's internet connectivity.

Another use is for testing application that you may not want to run on your PC. A lot of security researchers use virtual machines to test security vulnerabilities and malware without affecting their PCs and local networks.

Developers also use virtualization to experiment with code on different platforms without the need to have multiple PCs or servers each running a different OS.

There are also tons of corporate uses of virtualization that I'll hopefully detail down in a separate post.

Code of Ethics asks for your artistic talent

2008-08-08T21:40:00.004+03:00

You have artistic talents, you use Photoshop or illustrator to put your talent into visual masterpieces, and you enjoy being rewarded for your efforts. So why don't you participate in the competition for designing a logo for the Code of Ethics initiative? Check Mahmood.tv for more details.

Flower vs. Flower

2008-08-07T23:53:00.005+03:00

Flower in Saar, Bahrain

Flower in Glasgow, Scotland

Death Glorifiers

2008-08-06T21:21:00.008+03:00

While others celebrate life, we celebrate death. We die to die. What else justifies sending an sms message to promote a Ramadan booklet by a society in Muharraq like this:

***** صفحة لصور مرحومي المنطقة في الكتيب الرمضاني لجمعية

A page of the recently deceased in the Ramadan Booklet of ****** Society

Graffiti vs. Graffiti

2008-08-05T23:58:00.001+03:00

Graffiti in Barcelona, Spain

Graffiti in Saar, Bahrain

Casual Games: Gateway

2008-08-04T23:35:00.010+03:00

Casual Games are the hottest commodities in video gaming industry nowadays and for a very simple reason that they appeal to everyone, especially non-hardcore gamers who enjoy passing time with a quick but challenging game on their mobile phones, PDAs, or iPods. Casual Games are easy to learn but hard to master which sounds like the holy grail of video gaming if you ask for my opinion. You actually find them even on gaming consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3 or the Microsoft XBox 360 which shows how appealing these kind of games are.

I found my 7 years old daughter Zain playing the old-but-gold game Snake on our Dreambox satellite receiver the other day! Casual games are played by everyone, everywhere, and for a good reason. They mean big bucks for the gaming industry, but more importantly for independent game developers who were crashed in recent years with the big gaming studios that spend millions of dollars in creating and marketing multi-platform games.

I would like to present to you an interesting game which is simple to learn and control, but extremely challenging. Gateway is a puzzle game in which you use your mouse to control a little robot through the gateways. The game starts with a simple interactive tutorial explaining how to move the robot and collect things and combine them to help you move forward. I love puzzle games. They are a great exercise for my rusty brain, and apparently a great money generator for Nintendo with their series of brain train games on the DS platform. Give it a shot and share your thoughts.

Happy gaming :)

Inventor of Smiley :)

2008-08-03T23:25:00.001+03:00

I found the smiley :) inventor

Spam on Facebook

2008-08-02T23:58:00.001+03:00

From:	Too Care
To:	BuZain
Subject:	Hello
Message:	Hello, Nice to meet you, how is everything, hope all is well with you. My name is Mrs.Susana Nuhan, I found your contact after reading your profile I picked interest to contact you. I've something very important which I would love to share with you privately, therefore, would advise you to kindly write me back on:(susnuh01@yahoo.com) so that I'll give you details. Waiting anxiously for your anticipated corporation, Yours, Sussy.

micro-blog

2008-08-01T23:49:00.004+03:00

If you can't make time to blog, then micro-blog

Anniversary of Bahrain LUG

2008-06-13T03:03:00.006+03:00

Come celebrate with us the anniversary of Bahrain Linux User Group @ 4:00pm on Saturday 14th of June 2008 in Belle View Apartments.

There will also be a presentation by fellow super LUGer Marwan about his latest visit to Germany for the Linux Tag 2008 conference.

Set a world record, download Firefox

2008-06-12T22:15:00.006+03:00

Help your beloved Firefox web browser to set the Guinness world record of most downloaded software in 24 hours. Download Firefox 3 on June 17th

Linux User Group Gathering

2008-04-07T22:12:00.006+03:00

Mark your calendars

The Bahrain Linux User Group is gathering on 4:00PM Saturday, April 12th at the Belle View Apartments (for directions see LUG Location)

The topic will be as follows:

Linux Help Session

All participants are encouraged to submit questions, problems, and desires related to Linux. We will then try and find resolutions and possible ways to get what you want out of Linux. Below are some examples of the types of questions would love to hear about:

Some examples

How can I do this in Linux? (e.g. Copy a DVD, connect an ipod, edit videos)
How can I fix this problem I had? (e.g. Wireless Network, Suspend)
What is this thing? (e.g. the Linux Kernel, GNOME)

Hackers go beyond damaging computers and networks

2008-03-30T03:01:00.004+03:00

This is just sick !!

Hackers use flashing animated images posted on an online forum to assault epileptic patients.

Off to Barcelona

2007-11-03T03:16:00.000+03:00

Barcelona, here I come

How sweetly shocking!

2007-09-22T04:20:00.000+03:00

what's with Chelsea and letting go of their most successful manager ever! It is getting better and better for Liverpool to clinch the very-much-missed premiership title.

I can't be any happier. Viva la Scousers.

I vividly hear Kopites chanting:

London Bridge is falling down
Falling down, falling down
London Bridge is falling down
Poor old Chelsea
Build it up with Red and White
Red and White
Red and White
Build it up with Red and White
Poor old Chelsea

Latest trend in malicious hacking

2007-08-28T02:09:00.000+03:00

THEME: Security

Riding on top of the worldwide appeal of youtube videos, the "Storm Botnet" hacking group bombarded the net with spam email promising funny videos. But when you click on the link, it takes you to their web server that tries to infest your PC with their viruses converting it into a zombie machine that can do whatever the hackers want.

Watch out people. Avoid clicking on links that promise funny videos from people you don't know. The good news is that gmail, and possibly other web based email servers catch these emails as spam. The bad news is, they slip through to batelco's mailboxes.

Here are more details.

Ripped off by Batelco

2007-08-27T22:20:00.000+03:00

THEME: Technology

I always knew that I'm not getting from batelco what I pay for. But seeing the bandwidth test results on this interesting website, speedtest.net, is excruciatingly painful.

I get 85 % of what I pay for. What about you?

Damn you terrorists!

2007-07-01T03:20:00.000+03:00

I flew out of Glasgow Airport few hours before the burning car attack. I can't believe it!! I was standing inside the terminal in close proximity to the place the car burst into flames. I was looking at the monitors and waiting for my airline gate to open while Zain was playing beside me with her doll. The thought that my precious Zain and UmZain could have been there at the moment of the crash keeps haunting me since I heard the news earlier today.

Damn you terrorists! Killing me, my family, and loads of innocent people would have given you a free ticket to heaven, you say. I say to HELL all of you Islamic fanatics.

Help Google help you

2007-06-14T02:33:00.000+03:00

I found this neat feature/game while I was searching on Google and the best way to describe it is to encourage you to use it.

What do you think?

Legends of the colliding universes

2007-06-02T01:04:00.001+03:00

Here is a rare joint appearance of legendary Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the D5 conference few days ago

My First Flickr Photo

2007-05-19T00:41:00.000+03:00

I just uploaded my first flickr photo taken with my new Nikon D80 digital SLR camera. This getting-into-photography thing is a long story and it is too late to tell it all so I'll let the juice for a separate post.

I took like 400 pictures since I bought the D80 few days ago but this picture is the one I like most and I thought I'll share it with you all.

Finally, VISTAfied

2007-03-31T00:56:00.000+03:00

I resisted Microsoft's flagship operating system, Vista, for so long. I avoided every single bit of it from the moment it was announced years ago. Not that I intentionally decided to do so; on the contrary, I basically lost faith in products coming out of Redmond. It is not the technological advancements that I dislike, but the rotten business practices of the proprietary software corporates in comparison to what is happening in the Open Source Movement. That's a story for a future book, if you allow me to dream :) , not a short blog post so I'll cut it short and jump to the point. Ok, Ok, you don't need to say it, yes I gave in, ohh yeah, whatever !!!

It was in a moment of weakness, when Ubuntu Linux was really misbehaving, that I decided to give Vista a try. I got a DVD ISO image from a friend some time ago and I thought no-big-deal; I'll install it, (fore)play with it for a couple of minutes then get back to my lovely Linux. My dual boot system at home, WinXP and Ubuntu, wouldn't mind triple-booting it.

I'll not go through the drill of installing an extra bootable OS on my PC but I'll share you some of my latest findings in this matter. The first thing is, throw away all of your partitioning software and make room for the new/old KING on the block gParted. It is an open source partitioning software than can be run from a LIVE or bootable CD. It smoothly shrank my NTFS partition to make room for Vista. I also found out that I already have 4 primary partitions on my harddisk and gParted wouldn't allow me to create one more. And Vista needed a primary partition for it to install on. After some mingling, I deleted the UTILITY partition that comes by default with most DELL computers, and maybe other ones also, then created what Vista needed.

The installation was smooth, but took a lot of restarts, and it detected my nVidia geForce video card but failed to detect my Creative Audigy Z2 surround sound card. It took a few minutes to download the latest drivers from Creative's website and Vista was no-more mute.

The first thing I installed was my beloved Firefox browser and its add-ons I can't live without like the gmail notifier, answers.com search, and several others. Then of course I needed an Anti-Virus so I opted for a 1 month trial from Trend Micro.

Vista's user interface is different and appealing to an extent. The sidebar with its gadgets is a cool idea but not very much revolutionary since the idea was long available on WinXP using Google Desktop. The Aero effects are interestingly nice but I've been doing Xgl/Compiz on Ubuntu for sometime with cool 3D rotating desktops and window transparency and movement effects so nothing super here. That's all without comparing it to eye candy effects on Mac OS X which is a different universe by itself.

One thing I noticed is the need to elevate account privileges when you do installations since by default the Vista users don't run as an administrator. This is a good step forward for Microsoft but barely comparable to the well-established practice on Linux and other OSes.

When I wanted to get back to my Ubuntu, I found out that the stupid Vista installation screwed up my Master Boot Record and I lost my GRUB boot loader, I thought. But to the rescue came the Super Grub Disk, which is a bootable floppy application that amazingly helped me restore my GRUB based MBR and made me boot back into my Ubuntu.

It's been several hours since I installed Vista and I must admit it, it is not bad; not bad at all. So here I am ending my first blog post written completely on Vista after months of blogging hibernation.

Unblock Mahmood.tv

2006-10-31T21:07:00.000+03:00

UPDATE [02 nov 2006]: Mahmood.tv is unblocked. Congrats to all bloggers

I never thought this day will ever come. Mahmood is a great inspiration to every single Bahraini blogger. We were homeless; reading foreign blogs, and commenting on topics that are not related to us; until Mahmood.tv came out. Shame on you Min. of Info

Great Open Source Weekend

2006-10-28T00:57:00.001+03:00

What is it with me, open source, and weekends these days. Both Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy are released and I downloaded them immediately. I have 2 Ubuntu desktops so I scraped the not-very-much-used one and installed fedora 6 on it. I haven't spent enough time on Fedora 5 as I had it as a virtual machine running in Ubuntu and I rarely logged into it. As for the Edgy upgrade, the Ubuntu partition is my main desktop now so I'll keep the upgrade for next weekend.

The first thing about Fedora 6 is the new and spectacular DNA driven theme and the logo change. It seems I was away of the fedora community for so long that the initiative had changed gears and had a major restructuring without me noticing much. I read sometime ago about some changes in the way the fedora project is managed by Redhat and I noticed the logo change in version 5 but never paid enough attention. Anyways, it seems what happened is definitely for the betterment of the community. Fedora 6 is very promising and the Gnome based user interface with the DNA background image is very neat.

I haven't installed much of tools on it yet due the very noticeable issue of network access slowness. I suspect it has to do with IPv6 because I remember lots of posts online complaining about it on some old versions of fedora and its bad effects on the network access speed so this could be related. Ubuntu apt-get installation tool is extremely fast and the Ubuntu repositories are fast too. Fedora's yum is no where as fast and it is very irritating in comparison to apt-get. I'll keep you posted with my fedora endeavors so keep tuned

Since I have both of the Ubuntu and fedora desktop screens in front of me, I thought it is a good chance to share one keyboard and one mouse to work on both of them. I tried Synergy sometime ago but couldn't make it work on windows and I thought I'll give it another try. It is a software based KVM tool that makes sharing a single mouse and a keyboard between multiple computers very easy. I sudo apt-get install it on Ubuntu and su -c 'yum install' it on fedora. It took me a couple of seconds to create the config file on my Ubuntu to make it as a server and run the synergy command to run it. Another second to run it on fedora as a client linking to the Ubuntu IP address and viola the keyboard and mouse are shared between the two. Very neat and smooth and works like a charm. Now I can move between the two screens easily with a single mouse and I can even copy+paste between them. me happy :)

Here is a good Howto for setting up synergy on Ubuntu.

Crypto Book

2006-10-23T20:11:00.000+03:00

Thanks to iCon, I'm back reading again. I always had a thing for cryptography. If not for the tons of books I have about the topic. And the tons of print-outs from the mid 90s that are still on my bookshelves. I printed them off the net when I was a part time web site developer then. We had a slow dial up connection that was shared by 6 PCs. I never complained. Most of the crypto articles were in plain text and would download in no time. I read all of them and I'm still hungry for more.

Is it that almost all of the modern cryptography systems are totally dependent on Math? But I never got interested in Math's real life implementations. I was a purist in college and still is. I do Math for Math's sake. Nothing less; nothing more.

How come then I got so interested in cryptography?

I think it is the notion that a person can have the freedom of expression and the choice to maintain his privacy in front of the peeping eyes of corrupt governments. I never really analyzed it before but I can see that it is neither the science of cipher nor its art that made me a crypto geek.

I'm more inclined to see it driven by the agony implanted in my mind of a 6 years old child deprived of his right to be a son of a devoted and loving father. Is this really what drives me to dig deep into the complicated crypro algorithms and the detailed biographies of the crypto icons? Is it because of a father that was lost for 21 years; kicked out of Bahrain and separated from his beloved wife and 3 children?! That's something for TIME to answer!

Back to the book which I got years ago and never managed to complete. I picked it because it was simply a cryptography book. I however ended up having one of the best portrayal of the legendary Whitfield Diffie.

This is not a technical book. It is about the politics of secrecy. It is a story of a free spirit; a man who envisioned a society that has the power to maintain its privacy. It is about the people who picked upon his ideas and charged ahead towards the future. Towards our presence. Towards times that have Diffie's public-key crypto as a cornerstone of every single online purchase. Every single stock trade. Every single Internet transaction.

I finished the book this time and enjoyed every single bit of it. If you love to know the history of the people who brought to you secure and safe Internet shopping, this book is for you.

Eid Mubarak

2006-10-23T10:18:00.000+03:00

Eid Mubarak to all.

Let's make it a celebration of love, sacrifice, and unity.

Just Bahraini

2006-10-12T04:37:00.000+03:00

Ubuntu Linux

2006-08-25T14:01:00.000+03:00

There are few weekends in somebody's life that are unforgettable. Today is one of them for me. No, no, this is not sex related :). But maybe it is close. Well, I spent the whole day with Ubuntu Linux. And let me tell you it was a hell of an experience. I'm not a Linux newbie, but the surge of adrenaline pumping my heart, definitely qualified me as one.

I'm a redhatter for years now. I experiment a lot with Fedora and never bothered looking at any other distro. Until recently. Ok I stayed with Monopix for sometime but for the mere reason of testing mono development. mono is a port of Microsoft.net platform for Linux. The guy behind it,Miguel de Icaza, worth his own series of articles on my blog so I'll keep the details for then.

Confession here, I'm not anti-Microsoft and I make a living playing with their technologies.

It was not planned for me to use Ubuntu at all. Fridays are sacred days for me. I release all my tension, stress, and frustration through being a vegetable. A dead meat. I'm no Mahmood :) I don't do anything, unless the wife's beastie side comes out, then it is something else and let's avoid it for now :)

The best thing about Ubuntu is that you can boot from the CD and explore the system without any installations. It detected almost everything in my DELL PC and the system was functional in minutes after I put in the boot CD.

Partitioning a hard driver is always a difficult thing. Partition Magic, the universally used partitioning tool gave me lots of nightmares with Windows NTFS partitions throughout the years. Not with Ubuntu; the partitioning software is very good and you don't feel intimidated at all playing around with it. I shrunk my main NTFS partition and made room for Ubuntu.

The community behind Ubuntu is amazing. Was it luck that I stumbled by ubuntuguide.org website in the first google search looking for ubuntu guidelines? Maybe that's why I felt good about the community.

I just finished reading an article through digg.com that compared 3 Desktop ditros and Ubuntu came number one. Hurray

TAGS: Ubuntu, Linux, Desktop, Fedora, Community, ubuntuguide.org

Interview with Eric Schmidt - Google CEO

2006-07-10T03:06:00.000+03:00

I just watched an interesting video interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It's a short one and absolutely worth it. He highlights the way they manage creativity throughout their organization. And they have this 20% rule whereby they encourage all engineers to spend 20% of their times on their own ideas. It seems lots of their recent successful projects were built accordingly. Would it be possible to have a local/regional company that has a similar attitude? If you know of one then drop me a line. I'll apply for a job immediately :)

Freedom of Speech at its finest

2006-05-06T22:41:00.000+03:00

Stephen Colbert mocks President Bush.

I got myself an iMate K-Jam :(

2006-05-05T20:14:00.000+03:00

It was a weird decision. I went with my wife to GOSI complex to buy a Nokia 9500 mobile. I went into a shop and picked it. I was about to show it to her and explain why I think its a good mobile. She mocked the hell out of me saying that it's a Tabooka, a brick, and went on and on saying this and that about it. I hated it. I just picked the most obvious alternative; iMate K-Jam. I hate windows based mobiles, and out of the blue I ended up buying one. God has his ways I believe.

iCon

2006-05-05T20:10:00.000+03:00

My friend Ayman lent me an interesting book. iCon. It's a biography of Steve Jobs, the Apple Computers co-founder and the legendary IT industry leader. Being in IT, you always hear and read about Steve and continuously admire him. But this book takes you beyond all this. You become closer to his day-to-day life, his peculiar business practices, and his decision making rituals. You loose yourself in the wavy corridors of Steve's mind and his business adventures. It's not an autobiography though, so you don't have the truth from the horse's mouth, but it is still entertaining and stimulating. You'll get as close as possible to Steve's Reality Distortion Field.

Reading books is one habit that was heavily hurt since I changed my job a couple of years ago. Although I was reading articles daily, books were a far reach. Not anymore I believe. This book brought the book-reading passion back. I made time to enjoy this book and I'm sure I'll make even more time for the dozens of books I recently bought and couldn't read.

If you don't know enough of Steve's life, his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 sums it up in a neat and mind-boggling statement.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

This book is highly recommended. Enjoy it.

Batelco ADSL pricing scam

2006-05-05T20:09:00.000+03:00

Batelco is emailing its ADSL customers about the changes in their ADSL Packages. They claim it's for the better. Unless I don't understand English, or Arabic as well, nothing is better in these new crappy packages.

There are lots of observations I have on Batelco's conduct when it comes to the Internet and the Web. Things I avoided to publish but critically addressed to concerned managers in Batelco. But this scam is beyond any rational sanity I would ever maintain.

And this stupid mailing list setup that allows others to reply back to their announcements. We are pissed-off Batelco so you better be ready for the mail bombardment

This makes me boiling to research into how to battle threshold measures that would be definitely the norm in the coming few years. I'm sure others with better political sense would rage a good campaign against batelco but there must be some technical loopholes that can be compromised.

Be Positive, Be Positive. Damn Batelco. One thing else I'll definitely look at is QoS and packet shaping technologies.

Microsoft Unlimited Potential

2006-05-05T20:05:00.000+03:00

Microsoft is doing an amazing job in supporting communities all over the world through their Unlimited Potential initiative. In a joint effort with Bahrain Internet Society, they've localized it for Bahrain, as Career Connection, with a focus on training unemployed Bahrainis on basics of computers.

The project started March 2006 with a batch of +100 students and I had the pleasure of being an instructor in the 10 weeks course. The curriculum is well designed and helped me and my students to navigate through the material with great enthusiasm. It included material on basics of computers, internet, web design, and of course the Microsoft Office suite of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc.

I had a mixture of skill sets in my students. Some were university grads with good basic skills. The course went on smoothly and I was quite content with the student feedback. I had a couple of set-backs though with people in the mid 20s who can't distinguish a right mouse click from a left mouse click but in general the attendance and the commitment were both high. High praises to well-committed young Bahrainis.

It's a pity though that there was NO media coverage of the program. I recall there was a press release which I can't find on the net, but nothing else. I already told Microsoft and BIS gentlemen about this and I believe they'll handle it better with the upcoming batches. I know BIS was very busy preparing for the Future IT event, but it is over now and they need to get their act on.

I'd like to thank Microsoft and BIS for their distinguished efforts and for giving me the opportunity to remember my old days of teaching Math and to reassure myself that I'm still a very good teacher :) And special thanks to Ghassan from Microsoft, Ahmed from BIS, and the team in AIT institute for organizing the program.

The Joel Test

2004-12-15T00:43:00.000+03:00

This is one of those articles that every IT specialist, developers in particular, has to read and understand. The Joel Test is a method created by Joel Spolsky to measure how good a software team is. I'm not a big fan of Joel, but this jewel is precious.

Fedora Core 3: The digging continues

2004-12-10T00:34:00.000+03:00

I spent some more time with FC3 and there is nothing fancy to report except that I installed apt-get command line tool. It smoothly updated my system and allowed me to install all the software I wanted.

Being a BSDi administrator for few years, apt-get is definitely one tool that would've saved me tons of trial-and-errors for installing updates and software on BSDi. Sendmail mail server was one of those beasts that you couldn't cage easily. It was the most famous mail server back in mid nineties, maybe still is, and it had lots of security vulnerabilities that required constant patching. You would get source code then that needed to be compiled with the required modules manually added. Apt-get is a relief that only few in this world would highly appreciate.

due to copyright issues, Fedora doesn't have an mp3 codecs or DVD players installed by default. Using apt-get, of course :I installed Xine, a cool tool for playing DVDs. I watched Garfield with my baby girl and it was a smooth and entertaining ride

One thing I couldn't make work was the Checkpoint VPN client which would allow me to link to our work network. Not a high priority though.

i-mate ROM update, Agony of e740

2004-12-10T00:32:00.000+03:00

It was a moment of mixed-feelings few days ago when I had a little chat with a workmate. He told me an interesting thing about his i-mate mobile phone. He downloaded a ROM update, from www.ce4arab.com, that brings the latest i-mate OS to his old one. It gives him few interesting features only available in the latest version of i-mate, PDA2K. He showed me the on-the-fly screen orientation change from portrait to landscape which is very interesting.

I felt happy for him, but also felt sad for myself as this incident reminded me of the agony of owning a piece of crap called Toshiba e740 PDA. I bought the e740 in Gitex 2002 and it was trouble from day one. I kept my hopes up and sent it to Toshiba repair centers in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi several times and kept updating the ROM whenever Toshiba released one. However, I lost complete interest when Toshiba refused to release a ROM upgrade for it to run Pocket PC 2003. The online community users of e740, me included, wrote a petition with no avail. Look at this site for a brief.

I honestly don't trust any pocket pc based mobile phone or PDA. I had my Palm V for years and it was like a rock. I think I still have it somewhere. I remember reading two full eBooks on it; The Monk and the Riddle, and The New New Thing. FYI, Palm V display is monochrome. Imagine !!

I'm quite happy with my Symbian based Nokia 6600. Nonetheless, the new i-mate JAM worth a look.

Fedora Core 3 : Let the Digging Begin

2004-12-07T21:31:00.000+03:00

I spared an hour today to make my Fedora C3 work with dual monitors. Couldn't do it :(
The configuration app asks for X windows restart but nothing happens after the restart. The external monitor shows the stuff but the laptop LCD is dead black

I keep encountering an annoying bug that doesn't allow me to log out of GNOME. The X windows halts and I have to go to a command shell, ctrl+alt+Fn where n is 1-12, and kill X.

Back to Linux

2004-12-05T17:11:00.000+03:00

It's been months since I last worked on Linux. My new job, eBanking software architect, had eaten me alive since March 2004. I managed to squeeze few hours last night to install Fedora Core 3 on my HP comapq nx9010 laptop, my work laptop. I had a bad start;thankfully ended well. Details below

I started repartitioning my 30GB hard disk using Partition Magic 8. I remember how frustrated I was last year when I used it on an NTFS disk. I failed to do it due to the infamous error 983 . The most proposed solution of running chkdsk /f failed then. Not this time thank god. I got the error and it put me off. I was about to give up. Anyways, the command worked and the hard disk got repartitioned. I have now 10 GB free. It's time to install Fedora Core 3.

I tested the DVD copy of FC2 few weeks ago and my laptop failed to boot from it. This time I downloaded the CD iso images. The installation progressed very smoothly. It detected all the hardware including my Linksys WiFi PC card. I selected the desktop edition and added few more packages. Then I run the up2date tool which took till morning to install all the required updates. The system is neat and runs with a moderate speed. I won't judge it now. Let me finish installing all my stuff first then we'll see.

Today I checked in the office and it booted up fine. I checked my email using FireFox accessing Outlook Web Access of our Exchange 2003 server. I also hooked my portable 60 GB USB2 hard drive and it got detected. Mounting the NTFS partition, my winxp drive, didn't work. It seems the code required to access NTFS is not in the kernel. I found this http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html and I'll check it out later.

I use dual monitor in the office for wider desktop space. If you do a lot of VS.net web development, you definitely need a lot of real estate on your computer desktop. Fedora has a configuration application to configure Dual Head. I tried it and it didn’t work. I’ll try to spend more time to make this work, if it works :)

I tried editing some conf files and I couldn't find my beloved editor PICO. I used it heavily in my previous job setting up and maintaining our Linux based DNS, Mail, and web servers. I'll share those experiences one day. Anyways I got the PINE RPM and pico is up and running.

I have tons of stuff to experiment on my newly configured Linux Laptop. First of all would be installing and using Eclipse IDE and Mono to do some .Net development on Linux.

I also want to do some work on Virtual Machines. I use VMware on my WinXP heavily. Time to try it on Linux and maybe try some other Open source VMs.

I have an asp.net project to tweak and deliver for beta testing this weekend. That’s a week of VS.Net work and no Linux stuff. My annual vacation starts next week so I’ll have all the time in the world to work on Fedora, it’s 3 weeks actually :(

Seattle Public Library

2004-11-02T02:41:00.000+03:00

http://www.spl.org/

i wish i can visit this library, in flesh of course :)
I read about the cutting-edge technologies used to operate it and got really energized