Freedom of Speech at its finest

Stephen Colbert mocks President Bush.

I got myself an iMate K-Jam :(

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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