Category: Uncategorized

January 30, 2022

Django and NGINX in Docker

In this post we will run Django application behind a NGINX webserver, which is a very common practice in production.

May 20, 2018

Django CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete)

One of the most common task when developing web application is to write create, read, update and delete functionality (CRUD) for each table you have.

In this post I briefly cover the step needed to create a CRUD app in Django, the steps we will need are:

January 24, 2018

Django with Docker: Add Postgres

In the last post I covered starting a new Django project with Docker, and how to build a custom container image for my project, but what I haven’t covered is how to use a Database and how persist your data since all data stored in the container ephemeral and would only exist during the life span of the container.

January 24, 2018

Django with Docker: Build an Image

Docker is an interesting technology, although still young it gained a lot of buzz and momentum.

The last couple of weeks I started playing with Docker to see how can I use it for Django project development and deployment.

October 12, 2017

CentOS New System Checklist

Here I document minimal steps to setup a CentOS 7 machine, it suppose to be a live post, so I’ll keep updating it every time I found a step worth mentioning!

December 29, 2016

Go Language Setup for Multiple Projects

Update: It turns out that this setup is not needed, you should a have single GOPATH directory with all of your projects inside it, and use the vendor feature to handle each project dependencies. More details in a new post.

When working with Go language you must setup the GOPATH environment variable, but soon you will face two problems:

Each project should have its own Go dependencies and its own Git code repo, so putting your source under GOPATH would be problematic.
When working with “Atom” with “Go Plus” plugin, it needs to install several Go packages which would pollute your own source.

To solve both problems I added the following to my “.bash_login”:

August 9, 2016

أين تذهب في استراليا

لا يرتبط اسم استراليا مع السياحة لدى الكثيرين منا، على الرغم من انها مقصد سياحي عالمي مهم خصوصا لدى الدول الآسيوية القريبة منها.

سأذكر بشكل موجز مزايا وعيوب السفر الى استراليا

المزايا

سهولة اجرآت التأشيرة الاسترالية: يتم التقديم على تأشيرة الزيارة من خلال الانترنت، ويتم الحصول عليها الكترونيا في فترة قصيرة (اقل من اسبوع).
تنوع الخيارات فكل من سيدني وملبورن وجولد كوست لها طابعها الخاص.
الاسعار متوسطة، ويمكن استرجاع بعض ضرائب المبيعات عند مغادرة البلد.
الشعب الاستراليا ودود.
قلة الزحمة في الصيف.
الرحلات الداخلية اسعارها معقولة.
صيفنا شتآهم: نظرا لكون استراليا تقع في النص الجنوبي من الكرة الارضية فان فترة الصيف عندنا تكون هي فصل الشتاء عندهم، مما يعني ان الطقس معتدل الى بارد.
احد الخيارات القليلة عالميا عند لرغبة في السفر شتاءً.

العيوب

لا توجد رحلات مباشرة من السعودية الى استراليا، واسهل الخيارات هي رحلات الاماراتية من دبي وتستغرق الرحلة ١٤ ساعة الى سيدني، من ناحية أخرى تتوفر رحلات من دبي الى جميع المدن الرئيسية في استراليا مما يعطي مرونة في خط السفر بحيث تذهب من مدينة وتعود من اخرى.
التكلفة العالية لتذاكر الطيران حيث يكلف المقعد الاقتصادي قرابة ٧ الآف ريال او اكثر.
نظرا لان الطقس بارد خلال الصيف فان الفعاليات تكون قليلة وكذلك يصعب الاستمتاع بالبحر والمنتزهات المائية، وقد يكون بارد جداً لدرجة يصعب الخروج فيها ليلاً.
خيارات التسوق محدودة.
قيادة السيارة في اليمين، مما يصعب القيادة وتحتاج بعض تعود، على الرغم من المدينة الوحيدة التي قد تحتاج فيها سيارة هي جولد كوست.

كما كتبت مقالات مفصلة عن المدن السياحية الثلاثة التي تستحق الزيارة في استراليا:

July 30, 2016

أين تذهب في ملبورن استراليا

المركزالفني وساحة فيديراشن سكوير ACMI Cultural Center and Federation Square

المركز الاسترالي للصور المتحركة ACMI هو معرض مخصص للمحافظة على كل ما يتعلق بالصور والافلام، لكن بغض النظر عن اهتماماتك المبنى يعد من ابرز المباني في ملبورن ويلتصق به ساحة فيديراشن وهي ساحة كبيرة تقام فيه العديد من الفعاليات، وكذلك على بعد خطوات من محطة فليندر ستريت اكبر محطات القطارات في ملبورن، كما انه يطل على نهر يارا وحدائق اليكساندرا، ومن الجهة الاخرى من الشارع كاتدرئية ساينت بول، لذلك انصح ان تكون اول محطة في زيارتك لمبلورن هي هذه المنطقة.

July 30, 2016

اين تذهب في سيدني استراليا

دار أوبرا سيدني Sydney Opera House

اهم معلم في مدينة سيدني، تحفة معمارية غريبة ومميزة، المبنى مكون من مبنيين على شكل ٣ اصداف متداخلة.
خذ جولة داخل المبنى، واذا حالفك الحظ سيمكنك متابعة بعض المتدربين يعزفون مقطوعة موسيقية.

July 30, 2016

اين تذهب في جولد كوست استراليا

سرفرز باردايس Surfers Paradise

سرفرز باراديس (جنة المتزلجين على الماء) هي المنطقة الترفيهية الرئيسية في جولد كوست، مجموعة كبيرة من المطاعم والفنادق والمحال بمختلف انواعها من الفخمة الى محلات التذكارات، محلات الالعاب والترفية والمأكولات الشعبية.

في الواجهة البحرية يتحول الشارع في مساء ايام السبت والجمعة والاحد الى سوق مؤقت مليئ بالاكشاك التي تبيع مختلف البضائع الغريبة، وتمتليئ بمحلات الحيوانات الغريبة التي يمكن ان تلاعبها وتصور معها.

من الاماكن التي تصلح للصغار:
– Timezone Surfers Paradise
– Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
– Infinity Attraction

May 29, 2016

Change and rebuild an RPM on CentOS

Test

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo yum install epel-release.noarch
sudo yum install yum-utils rpmdevtools

mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{SOURCES,SPECS}
wget http://example.com/lame-3.99.5.tar.gz
mv lame-3.99.5.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
rpmdev-newspec lame
mv lame.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
cat < < EOF > ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/lame.spec
# ------------------------------------------------------------
Name:           lame
Version:        3.99.5
Release:        1%{?dist}
Summary:        LAME MP3 Encoder

License:        N/A
Source0:        lame-3.99.5.tar.gz

%description
Educational tool to be used for learning about MP3 encoding. LAME aims to be the basis of a patent free audio compression codec.


%prep
%setup -q


%build
%configure
make %{?_smp_mflags}


%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
%make_install


%files
%doc
/usr/bin/lame
%dir /usr/include/lame
/usr/include/lame/*
/usr/lib64/*
/usr/share/doc/lame/html
/usr/share/man/man1/lame.1.gz

%changelog
# ------------------------------------------------------------
EOF
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/lame.spec
sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/lame-3.99.5-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm 


yumdownloader --source sox
sudo yum-builddep sox-14.4.1-6.el7.src.rpm 
rpm -i sox-14.4.1-6.el7.src.rpm 
vi ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/sox.spec
:  Add "--with-lame" to the configure line
%configure --with-lame
:
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/sox.spec 
sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/sox-14.4.1-6.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
sox | grep mp3

References: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package

February 17, 2016

Limit String Length in Printf in C

I can’t believe how many times I forget this trick! so I am writing it down so I won’t forget it!

Normally when you use printf function with “%s” formatting to print a string (char *) you rely on C convention of terminating a string with a NULL character (i.e. value 0).

So if you want to print small part of longer string, you copy the part you need to a new buffer and terminate it will NULL.

January 31, 2016

Django: How to pass an url as parameter of include

In Django web applications I usually have a single template file for navigation or bread crumb that I include from other template files, it is easy and straight forward to pass parameter to the included template file, some thing like:

{% include "nav.html" with title="title" object=my_object %}

But it would be a little tricker to send a URL as a parameter, i.e. you can’t write it:

{# WRONG DOESN'T WORK #}
{% include "nav.html" with title="title" link={% url 'book_edit'%} %}

But luckily Django have a decent and elegant solution, you can use “url” template function with “as” parameter, which will not display but will store it in a variable that you can use later in the include function:

January 25, 2016

Django CRUD Parent/Child Edition

I’ve written before about implementing CRUD operations on a single table in Django, and the post was very popular on my blog and I hope many people learned something from it.

The next logical step is to write a CRUD application with Parent/Child relationship, the application is bit more verbose but it follow the same simple logic used in the first post.

In fact I didn’t write a single application, I wrote five stand alone applications that shows different ways to implement CRUD operations:

August 30, 2015

اقتراحات لتفعيل خدمة لاسلكي الهواة

كتبت رسالة الى معالي الدكتور محمد السويل وزير الاتصالات باقتراحات لتفعيل خدمة لاسلكي الهواة او ما يعرف بـ “Amature Radio” او “Ham Radio” ردا على طلبه للعموم باقتراحات لتطوير خدمة الاتصالات في المملكة:
https://twitter.com/MIsuwaiel/status/580704446520291328
وفي ما يلي نصها، للتاريخ وكذلك كمرجع لي.

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله،

معالي الدكتور محمد السويل اكتب لكم بمقترحات لتشجيع خدمة لاسلكي الهواة في المملكة العربية السعودية.

قبل قرابة السنتين احببت ان اتعلم تقنيات اللاسلكي ولاسلكي الهواة لاكتشف عدة عوائق لاستخدام الخدمة في المملكة.

June 14, 2015

My first public Python Package “pyagentx”

I’ve just published my first public Python package “pyagentx”, the package will help you build “AgentX” agents to extend a master SNMP agent.

Let’s assume that you want to monitor your custom application from your Network Managment System (NMS), but the NMS only speak SNMP, this package allows you to extend the master SNMP agent to include your custom application metrics.

Project page on Github

Package page on Python Package Index

April 19, 2015

Django Image and File Field Caveats

Every time I work with Image or File fields in Django I forget some tiny detail that waste 10-20 minutes until I remember what was I missing, I always say I will remember it next time but I never do! so I made a list of common errors I keep doing while working with Image/File fields:

For complete working project: (https://github.com/rayed/dj-imagefield-example)

Setting MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT

Make sure you set proper values for MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT in your settings.py, e.g. I use the following structure:

January 22, 2015

Intro to Ansible Presentation

My presentation at Riyadh Linux User Group about Ansible

January 15, 2015

Git directory outside working directory

I have an old PHP website that I wanted to have its code/content versioned with Git, normally Git setup the repo directory in the “.git” directory inside the working directory, but I faced a problem, if the working directory is accessible from the web server it means “.git” is also accessible too.

Luckily git have an option to have the repo directory located somewhere else using the GIT_DIR environment variable, so here what I did:

December 31, 2014

Install psycopg2 (PostgreSQL adapter for Python) on OSX

I was playing with Django with Postgres backend, and I had little difficulty installing “psycopg2” the Python DB adapter for Postgres on my Mac OSX.

I’ve installed Postgres using Postgres.app for OSX which is straight forward and standard Mac app.

But when I tried installing “psycopg2” using “pip” (the python package manager) I got an error:

$ pip install psycopg2
:
Error: pg_config executable not found.
:

I just searched for “pg_config” in my system:

December 26, 2014

Limit SSH to Copy a Single File Only

I want to allow host-2 to copy a file securely from host-1, so the easiest way is to use “scp” command which use “ssh” as a transport to copy the file.

If you want to do it manually it is straight forward “scp” invocation:

host-2$ scp host-1:data.csv .

But if you want to automate it you have to use “ssh” keys, but this means leaving a private ssh key on host-2 that can access host-1 without any restriction, i.e.

December 11, 2014

“sar” command cheat sheet

“sar” is a Unix command that collect, report, or save system activity information, it is different from other system status command like “top” or “vmstat” that only show real time status only, “sar” in the other hand collect these data so you can find the system state at any time.

October 29, 2014

Solving Python virtualenv “DistributionNotFound: distribute”

After upgrading my Ubuntu machine from 12.04 to 14.04 I had this error on virtualenv wrapper:

October 27, 2014

Rsnapshot on OSX

Rsnapshot is a backup solution for Unix machines including Linux and OSX, it supports many great features including full backups with the size of only incremental backup, it also support backing up local and remote machines.

October 23, 2014

Monitoring Servers with Munin

This is a draft on configuring Munin to monitor services on a Linux machine, still dirty but published for my reference, if you have question let me know.

September 29, 2014

Django memory leak with gunicorn

If you have a long running job that leaks few bytes of memory it will eventually will consume all of your memory with time.

September 20, 2014

Django Themes (or where to put base.html?)

The Wrong Way

I used to create a new directory to hold common templates like “base.html”, and add it TEMPLATES_DIR in the settings.py file:

July 14, 2014

Protect your Server with Fail2Ban

Fail2ban is a program that scan your log files for any malicious behavior, and automatically block the offending IP.

June 19, 2014

كيف تنشئ موقع انترنت مجانا

هل تملك عنوان بريد الكتروني تحت gmail او hotmail؟ ماذا لو بحثت عن اسمك هل ستظهر صفحتك في تويتر او فيس بوك؟

لماذا لا تقوم بحجز اسم نطاق خاص بك مثل www.rr.sa ويكون عنوانك البريدي هو rayed@rr.sa، وبالمجان ايضاً.

May 28, 2014

Accelerating Postgres connections with PgBouncer

PgBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL, connection pooling makes Postgres connection much faster, which is important in Web applications.

May 17, 2014

Translation in Django

Preparing Django project to support multiple langauges is easier than you think!

March 26, 2014

Graph you Data and Email It

I have a new website and I want to know the number of new signup every day, so I wrote a small script new_users.sh that will print the number of new signups today.

March 9, 2014

Free Electronics Video Courses

PyroElectro have decent and recent courses on electronics that cover different fields.

February 5, 2014

Ubuntu new server checklist

These are the step I perform after installing new Ubuntu machine.

December 23, 2013

Django returning JSON for AJAX requests

In your views.py you can have a page that return JSON data for AJAX request like this:

December 12, 2013

Setting Up Python and Supervisor on CentOS

CentOS default repository is very limited, and even if you install EPEL you will get old packages, in my case I needed to install Supervisor to manage my Django application, after trying to do it manually and through EPEL I ended up with the following setup.

December 12, 2013

Django Multiple Settings with Single File

Instead of having multiple settings files one for production and one for development and so on, I prefer to use an “if” statement with environment variable:

December 6, 2013

Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

Via: https://twitter.com/flowchainsensei/status/408167162344648704

November 23, 2013

PostgreSQL Replication

Setting up a Postgres replaication

November 21, 2013

Login to PostgreSQL without typing a Password

If you to connect to PostgreSQL without typing a password, you can do it by having your password in the file “.pgpass”.

November 19, 2013

Django “render” vs “render_to_response”

Summary: Always use render and not render_to_response In Django you have more than one way to return a response, but many times I get confused between render and render_to_response, render_to_response seems shorter, so why not use it!

November 15, 2013

Install Python Image Library (PIL) on OSX

PIL or Python Imaging Library is a library that allows you to manipulate images in Python programming language, trying to install “PIL” using “pip” tool won’t work perfectly so here is how to proper installation.

October 16, 2013

My New Project: AgentX Implementation in Python

During this Eid vacation I spent many hours working on AgentX implementation in Python.

You can find the project in GitHub:

(https://github.com/rayed/pyagentx)

September 18, 2013

Backup Journey to rsnapshot

When I started producing backup worthy files (code, documents, projects, etc …), I realised the importance of backups after losing important files which happens to everybody. So I started my journey with backup solutions.

Backup generation 1: My first backup was simple directory copy operation, I copied my important directories to external floppy (then CD), and since it is manual operation I always forget about it and my backups was always old.

August 26, 2013

Python auto complete in OSX

If you run Python shell in OSX you notice the auto completion functionality isn’t working, this is caused by Apple decision not to ship GNU readline and instead they use libedit (BSD license), to fix the problem I used the following snippet:

August 24, 2013

IPython Import Error

I tried to install IPython to play with it and learn more about scientific Python packages, but I faced an error on my first step:

August 21, 2013

Implementing Login/Logout in Django

Update: add names and namespace to URLs

Implementing user authentication is fairly easy job in Django, many functionalities are already included in the standard Django installation, you can manage users using the default “admin” app the comes with Django.

Here I will show how implement Login/Logout feature by relying on Django built-in views.

August 15, 2013

اليابان: رحلتي الى طوكيو

منذ صغري وانا احمل تقدير كبير لليابان واليابانين خصوصا عندما رأيت نهضة اليابان المثيرة امام عيني خلال فترة الثمانينات، عندما كانت المنتجات اليابانية المشهورة برداءة الصنع تأخذ عقول واموال المستهلكين في العالم حتى اصبحت في القمة من ناحية الجودة، كانت المحطات التلفزيونية والجرائد والمجلات تتحفنا بعجائب الاختراعات اليابانية من روبوتات وسيارات والكترونيات والاهم البطيخ المربع

August 7, 2013

عيدكم مبارك وكل عام وانتم بخير

تقبل الله منا ومنكم صالح الاعمال

August 2, 2013

Supporting Right-to-Left (for Arabic) in WordPress: the Easy Way

This post is an update of previous old post: Supporting right to left writing (for Arabic) in WordPress

April 24, 2013

Source Code Management with GIT

I gave an introduction to Git in the last DevCamp meeting held on the 18h of April at Badir.

I hope you find it useful

April 22, 2013

أين تذهب في نيو اورلينز New Orleans

روابط ذات علاقة

تقع مدينة نيو اورلينز في ولاية لويزيانا في الولايات المتحدة الامريكية، ولسبب ما فان المدينة سحرتني منذ زمن بعيد قبل ان ازورها ولا اعرف كيف ولماذا! كل ما اعرفه انني عندما زرتها لم تخيب ظني وطابقت كل ما تخيلته عنها وزادت.

زرت نيو اورلينز خلال زيارة لي لمدينة هيوستن في ولاية تكساس، وكانت المسافة بينهما هي ٥ ساعات بالسيارة، مدينة هيوستن وولاية تكساس بشكل عام فاقتا توقعاتي خصوصا من ناحية اعتدال الجو والانشطة الثقافية فيها حيث ضمت العديد من المتاحف والحدائق والفعاليات، والتي لم يتسنى لي الاستمتاع بها كون سفرتي كانت خلال شهر رمضان.

April 8, 2013

العربية تعني جودة اقل!

لو مريت على محلين متشابهين احدهم اسمه “احنا الورق” والاخر اسمه “Paper R Us” من ايهما سوف تشتري؟!

لماذا تسعى الشركات المحلية لاستخدام اسماء انجليزية بدل العربية؟

لماذا الشركات التي اسمأها انجليزية جودتها اعلى واسعارها افضل؟!

لو طلب تاجرين فتح محلين وصُرِح لإحدهم باستخدام اسم عربي والآخر أي اسم يحلو له، هل هناك افضلية لإحدهم على الآخر!

لماذا الـ"STC" ولماذا “موبايلي”؟!

هل حافظنا على لغتنا ام ربطنها بالدونية؟!

April 4, 2013

Django Serving Static Files without a Web Server

UPDATE: Steps in this post isn’t correct, check the Django Themes post for better solution.

When deploying Django site it is always recommended to serve static files (e.g. js, css, img, static, media) using a normal web server instead of relying on Django built development server or Gunicorn.

But sometimes you want to test something quick and you don’t want to bother with installing or configuring a web server, the solution is to use the built-in django.views.static.serve view to serve the static files from Django it self:

April 3, 2013

rayed.com IPv6 Ready!

This website rayed.com is now IPv6 ready:

$ dig rayed.com AAAA 

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;rayed.com.			IN	AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
rayed.com.		21600	IN	AAAA	2a01:7e00::f03c:91ff:fe70:5c6a

You can test IPv6 readiness for any website from IPv6 Test service.

April 3, 2013

Change Default Editor in Ubuntu

Just type:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

April 2, 2013

Managing Python Environments with “virtualenvwrapper”

What is virtualenvwrapper

virtualenvwrapper is a tool that (as the name suggest) wrap “virtualenv” program, virtualenv solve the following problem:

March 20, 2013

Fixing “cannot change locale (UTF-8)” error

I am trying new way to fix the annoying “cannot change locale (UTF-8)” error, this error usually show when you login from your OSX to a Linux machine:

March 20, 2013

Update Linux without a password

So you managed to login to your Ubuntu Linux machine with a password by using the magic of ssh keys, and you installed “apticron” to email you whenever their is a system update, you login to the system and issue the update command “sudo aptitude update” and “sudo” asks you about your password! not only it is annoying, it also can’t be automated, imaging you manage 10 servers and you have to type the password to update each machine! or you want to automate using some remote execution application like Fabric or Salt (I am Python fan, so I won’t mention Chef or Puppet here).

March 9, 2013

Best GIT cheat sheet

Click on each region to find out how to change its state: http://ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html

February 19, 2013

الحذاء وطبق الكريستال

قصة للأطفال، تحكي عن حذاء جديد يتسخ من اول استخدام مما يجعله عرضة للسخرية من قبل صحن الكريستال.

بعد فترة يمل الطبق من السخرية ويبدأ الحديث مع الحذاء عن كيفية تعرضه للاتساخ، ويبدأ الحذاء بالحديث عن مغامراته اليومية خارج المنزل، وكيف انه يفيد صاحبه كل يوم.

بعد ما تشبعت مخيلة الطبق من مغامرات الحذاء اليومية بدأ يحس بمدى تفاهة حياته، وحاجته لان يكون مفيداً أكثر من الاستخدام النادر عند قدوم الضيوف.

February 10, 2013

My First Makefile

The following is a sample Makefile for simple project, here I am building a simple “Bloom Filter” library, and “main” program to use it.

The library will have the following files:

hash.h and hash.c
bloom.h and bloom.c

and we should get “libbloom.a” out of it.

The “main” program will use:

main.c
bloom.h
libbloom.a

and we should get “main” executable. So our make file should look like this:

$ cat Makefile
CFLAGS=-Wall -O3
LDFLAGS= -L.
LDLIBS=-lbloom

CFLAGS += `pkg-config --cflags libpcre`
LDFLAGS += `pkg-config --libs libpcre`

OBJS=main.o other.o libbloom.a
BLOOM_OBJS=hash.o bloom.o

all: main libbloom.a

main: $(OBJS)
        $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $^ $(LDLIBS)

libbloom.a: $(BLOOM_OBJS)
        ar rcs $@ $^

.PHONY: clean
clean:
        -rm main libbloom.a *.o

Makefile use TAB not spaces for indentation.

February 3, 2013

Minimal Django Project: Part 2 … Flat Pages

In this step we will setup the Flatpage App, Flatpage allows you to create simple static pages from the Admin interface:

**mycms$ mkdir templates**
**mycms$ vi mycms/settings.py**
:
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
:
    # Add Flatpage Middleware
    'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware',
)
:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    :
    '/Users/rayed/python/mycms/templates',
)
:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
:
    # Add Flat Pages App
    'django.contrib.flatpages',
:
)
:


**mycms$ vi mycms/urls.py**
:
# Your other patterns here
# SHOULD BE THE LAST RULE
urlpatterns += patterns('django.contrib.flatpages.views',
    (r'^(?P<url>.*)$', 'flatpage'),
)

**mycms$ ./manage.py syncdb**
**mycms$ mkdir -p templates/flatpages**
**mycms$ vi templates/flatpages/default.html**
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>{{ flatpage.title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>{{ flatpage.title }}</h1>
{{ flatpage.content }}
</body>
</html>

Now from the admin interface add a new page from “Flat pages” app, and you can view directly from the normal site.

February 3, 2013

Minimal Django Project: Part 1 … First Run

Update: Django 1.6+ don’t need any of these steps! it will work out of the box.

The following is the shortest way to create DB backed Django project, it uses SQLite as a backend, which make the setup very easy and fast.

I usually use for testing new Django modules or apps.

**$ django-admin.py startproject mycms**
**$ cd mycms**
**mycms$ chmod +x manage.py **
**mycms$ vi mycms/settings.py **
import os

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__name__))
:
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': './mycms.db',
:
    }
}
:
TIME_ZONE = 'Asia/Riyadh'
:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    PROJECT_ROOT + '/templates',
)
INSTALLED_APPS = (
:
    'django.contrib.admin',
:
)
:
**mycms$ vi mycms/urls.py **
# Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
:
    # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)
**mycms$ ./manage.py syncdb**
:
provide username, email, password for admin
:
**mycms$ ./manage.py runserver**
:
To access it from outside
:
**mycms$ ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080**

To access it: Frontpage @ localhost Admin @ localhost

January 23, 2013

PostgreSQL: New Project Setup

For each new project that need PostgreSQL you should create its own user and its own DB, the following are the steps need for that.

Installation

$ sudo aptitude install postgresql
$ sudo aptitude install python-psycopg2  # For Django access

Require a Password

$ sudo vi /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf
:
#local   all             all                      peer
local    all             all                      md5
:
$ sudo service postgresql restart

Create Postgres User

$ sudo -u postgres createuser -P my_user
Enter password for new role: 
Enter it again: 
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) n

Create DB

$ sudo -u postgres createdb my_db -O my_user

Test It

$ psql -U my_user my_db

After login you issue any SQL statement, you should also try the following commands:

January 14, 2013

My Python and Django bookmarks

This a list of Django and Python websites I found useful, I hope you find it useful as well, and may be add to it in the comments:

November 11, 2012

Japan Trip Photos

In October 2012 I visited Japan with my lovely family, overall Japan was great country to visit, and I will be writing more extensive post about my visit, mean while I hope you enjoy my photos.

Flickr Japan Set

www.flickr.com

August 19, 2012

عيدكم مبارك وكل عام وانتم بخير

تقبل الله منا ومنكم صالح الاعمال

June 15, 2012

Supporting right to left writing (for Arabic) in WordPress (Updated)

UPDATE: I found an easier way to do the same thing Check it out

This post is an update of previous old post: Supporting right to left writing (for Arabic) in WordPress

In my blog I write in both languages English and Arabic, but I have to switch text direction from the template default English direction “Left to Right” to Arabic “Right to Left”. One way do to it is to add HTML tags in each Arabic entry.

June 8, 2012

Kiva systems: innovative warehouse robotics

Kiva Systems is a company that makes order fulfillment systems that use mobile robots for warehouse automation. Its material handling systems are used by Staples, Walgreens, GAP, Crate and Barrel, Toys “R” Us and Gilt Groupe, among others.

Wikipedia Kiva Systems

Amazon bought them for $775 million, you must watch the videos!

May 10, 2012

Blast from the past: Small Piece of Saudi Arabia Internet History

Last week my friend Osama Aldosary was cleaning his emails and found this 13 years old email from me back when I was working as a system admin at ISU KACST, and I was administrating the email servers that accept and forward all internet emails for Saudi universities, Osama was working for KSU back then.

Thank you Osama

Subject:	New Link Migration Plan
Date:	Wed, 10 Feb 1999 15:34:40 +0307
From:	Rayed Al-Rashed < *****@kacst.edu.sa>
Organization:	KACST
To:	*****@kaau.edu.sa, *****@kfupm.edu.sa, *****@ksu.edu.sa, *****@ksu.edu.sa, *****@uqu.edu.sa

Salam Brothers,

As you all know KACST was connected through King Faisal Specializes
Hospital, and since KACST is now connected through ISU, we have to
replace our old IP addresses with the new ones from ISU.

Of course this will affect the leased-line link and E-Mail traffic with
all of you, and we tried to delay the migration as much as we can to
give you enough time to set up your own services through ISU link.

Our dead line to return the old IPs will end in less than a month, then
we have to return them to RIPE, we are going to start our plan to
migrate to the new IPs, and we have to stop the leased-line link and our
old mail relay that serve your domains when we return the old IPs.

I am sure that most of you are ready by now, but if you are facing any
problems we will be happy to help you with it.

NOTE:
Please send me the current state of your migration plan, and the
estimated time to finish.

-----------------------------------------------
Rayed Al-Rashed
Internet Services Unit
King abdullaziz City for Science and Technology
-----------------------------------------------

May 10, 2012

Django backend benchmark

I create small Django app and tried to benchmark it with different backends, here is the result:

Backend	Req/Sec
PostgreSQL	68.41
PostgreSQL+pgpool	116.12
MySQL	127.61

The test performed using "ab" tool, 1000 requests with 5 concurrent clients: `$ ab -c 5 -n 1000 http://localhost/test`

May 10, 2012

PostgreSQL on Ubuntu from scratch

PostgreSQL

My notes on installing and configuring PostgreSQL on Ubuntu Linux.

PostgreSQL is used by many large web sites and services, including Skype, Reddit, Instagram, “.org” registerer, check longer list here Prominent Users

Best of all it isn’t owned by anyone, not Oracle nor anyone else!

May 6, 2012

مقابلتي في اطياف

مقابلتي في اطياف اكرة صوتي المسجل، بعض الاحيان انسى انه انا 🙂

روابط ذات علاقة

Atari 800 XL

MSX

جامعة جورج واشنطن George Washington University

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_University

April 28, 2012

Deploying Django

Django is a web framework written in Python language, my favourite computer programming language.

Python a language is really great language, easy to read and understand, and very easy to learn, but for me I always found setting up Python for web development as a challenge, socially if compare it to PHP, which almost works out of the box, actually most people think PHP works only in the web server and can’t work as stand alone application, search for PHP CLI if you are interested.

I will try here to document an easy Django deployment for my future reference and hopefully it will help others:

April 19, 2012

MENOG 10 In Dubai

If you are working in Internet network operations you don’t want to miss this event, MENOG -Middle East Network Operator Group- is a conference where network operator from all over the globe and the region of course come to talk about network operation issues, trends, etc…
MENOG 10 Agenda

MENOG is also a great opportunity to get quality education, this time they have 2 workshops one about “DNS Operations & DNSSEC Deployment”, and another one about “IPv6 for ISPs”, the workshop is 5 days training.
MENOG 10 Workshops

March 26, 2012

The Big Book of Monsters

Few months ago while waiting for our flight in the airport I took out my notebook (paper one) and I start drawing with my son Dody, we started drawing different monsters trying to be funny and creative, and we decided to write a book with the name “The Big Book of Monsters” where we fill it with drawings of monsters with names and describing their powers.

So here some sample pages: The Big Book of Monsters

March 13, 2012

Where do Saudi Arabia’s Top 1000 Websites hosted?

Small report I worked on to find out the hosting location of Saudi Arabia’s top accessed websites, the aim of this report is to raise the awareness of the lack of Internet hosting in Saudi Arabia, and the slow adoption of Saudi TLD “.sa”.

Short summary only 8.9% of sites are hosted locally, and only 4.9% have “.sa” domain.

The Report

February 6, 2012

My new Arduino kit

I ordered The Ultimate Microcontroller Pack with Arduino UNO, in fact I ordered 2 packs one for me and my 6 years old son, and one for my 13 years old nephew Abdullah.

I am very excited to try all the components, so far I am still with LED and buttons, looking for moving my first servo and of course my first robot 🙂

January 25, 2012

Arduino and other embedded boards

My list of embedded boards, I hope to keep it updated as I learn more about embedded systems options:

Arduino: $15, Atmel AVR, microcontroller.
Pinguino: $24, PIC, microcontroller.
Netduino: $35, ARM, Microsoft .Net!, Atmel 32-bit microcontroller.
Raspberry Pi: $25, ARM, Microprocessor, SoC, Good Video (HDMI), Linux.
Teensy: $16, Amel AVR, Microcontroller, Tiny.
BeagleBoard: $89, ARM, Ethernet, 2GB MicroSD, Linux.
mbed: $45, ARM.

December 21, 2011

Very interesting interview with Monty, MySQL inventor, in FLOSS weekly

Don’t miss the latest episode of FLOSS weekly podcast with Monty the original author of MySQL, to learn why you should consider Maria DB instead of MySQL in your next project, some highlights from the interview:

He is Finnish not Swedish!! yet another Finnish changing the world!!
He has 2 daughters My, and Maria, and one son Max … this where “My”SQL, “Maria”DB, “Max”DB names come from.
Even after selling MySQL for 1 Billion dollar to Sun, he still lives in the same neighborhood.
Why he created MariaDB, how he feel about MySQL under Oracle
Still coding, at least 4 hours a day!!

Thanks Randal and Simon for great interview, and thank you Monty for great product.

December 8, 2011

Bash auto completion heaven

bash completion extends bash’s standard completion behavior to achieve complex command lines with just a few keystrokes. This project was conceived to produce programmable completion routines for the most common Linux/UNIX commands, reducing the amount of typing sysadmins and programmers need to do on a daily basis.

Just install:
sudo aptitude install bash-completion

September 19, 2011

Great Arduino Tutorial Videos

Great Arduino Tutorials videos from Jeremy Blum, the good ting about Arduino it simplify many aspect of Electrical Engineering and make it easier to play with.

Tutorial Series for Arduino

Thanks Jeremy

August 30, 2011

عيد سعيد وكل عام وانتم بخير

July 11, 2011

My new “.sa” domain name

I registered new domain name under “.sa” ccTLD, try it out rr.sa, the registerion was smooth and took less than one hour, registers your now, SaudiNIC. (You have to be Saudi resident)

June 4, 2011

Loop Unwinding Experiment

Few months ago I read an interesting post by Mike Haertel the original author of GNU grep titled “why GNU grep is fast“, one of the reason given is loop unrolling.
Few weeks ago I came a cross the same post which made me more interested on Loop Unrolling, so I decided to experiment with it, I implemented simple function to search for an item inside a list of items, and return as soon as it finds it, soo here is my result:

May 20, 2011

Tips for a Faster Website

Last week I presented at Gitex Riyadh in Alriyadh.com booth about ways to improve website speed.

جناح الرياض في جيتكس " اليوم الأول "

May 10, 2011

My presentation at IPv6 workshop

Download the presentation in PDF format:

IPv6 Technical Introduction

April 3, 2011

Faster file syncing with Redis

The problem
In alriyadh.com most of the site administration take place inside the premises of Alriyadh Newspaper offices, and as you can image the bandwidth dedicated to the website team isn’t that big. This why we designed our system to have two parts, one inside Alriyadh Newspaper internal data center where the local access is very fast, and another part accessible to the public hosted in MeduNet, and we would have a database replication for the website data, and file system replication for the web site images and media.

December 25, 2010

Configuring IPv6 in your server

Getting IPv6 connectivity to your server isn’t very hard in fact if you have a decent provier you might already have it configured.

Do you have IPv6 already configured?

First try this command

$ ifconfig -a

You will have result like this:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1e:0b:d6:7b:b8 inet addr:88.85.245.43 Bcast:88.85.245.47 Mask:255.255.255.248 inet6 addr: fe80::21e:bff:fed6:7bb8/64 Scope:Link :

he-ipv6 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
inet6 addr: 2001:470:1f08:1160::2/64 Scope:Global inet6 addr: fe80::5855:f52b/64 Scope:Link :

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host :

November 4, 2010

مينوج ٧ ورحلة اسطنبول

زرت اسطنبول في رحلة عمل قصيرة لحضور مؤتمر “مينوج” مشغلي شبكات الشرق الاوسط

للأسف لم تسنح لي الفرصة لزيارة المدينة بشكل جيد، لكني خرجت بانطباع ايجابي ورغبة في زيارتها سائحاً مرة اخرى، هذه بعض الصور التي التقطتها خلال الزيارة، اضغط على اي منها لرؤية باقي الصور:

October 31, 2010

My first Git Session

This guide for my own reference please don’t rely on it, for a better introduction check out Git Reference website.

Basic concept and terminologies, Git have 3 logical places:

Working Area: normal directory where you edit your project.
Staging Area: Think of the staging as your project state before you start your coding session, after each coding session you add your changes to staging area using git add filename or git add .
Snapshot Area: After multiple coding sessions you would finish a logical change, e.g. adding commenting system in web site, next you need to store a snapshot of your project after these changes, you would do that with git commit

Setting the environment:

August 9, 2010

أين تذهب في لندن

روابط ذات علاقة

مقالة مقتسبة من رسالة بريدية ارسلتها لصديق سألني عن لندن، على الرغم من خبرتي المتواضعة جداً عن المدينة الا اني كتبت عن الاماكن التي اعجبتني واستعنت باحد اصدقائي ساكني لندن لاكمالها، علها تكون مفيدة وتلغي صورة ادجوار رواد التي تظهر لدى الكثيرين عند ذكر لندن.

رحلات الباص

اول نشاط اقوم به عند زيارة اي مدينة هي رحلات الباصات السياحية، فهي تعطي تصور عام للمدينة وعن الاماكن التي تستحق الزيارة في الايام القادمة من الرحلة، كما انها مثالية لالتقاط الصور. غالباً تتوفر تذاكر الرحلات السياحية لمدة 24 ساعة مع امكانية الصعود والنزول من الباص في اي وقت.

March 31, 2010

Geneva Motor Show March 2010 Photos

March 31, 2010

Apricot Malaysia Photos

March 28, 2010

وظيفة شاغرة: مشرف محتوى الكتروني

نبحث عن مشرف محتوى الكتروني بالمواصفات التالية:

شهادة دبلوم ذات علاقة
سنتين خبرة في اعمال مشابهة
اجادة اللغة الانجليزية
اجادة النشر على الانترنت بالتقنيات المختلفة (www,email,PDF,twitter,facebook)
خبرة في برمجة بتقنيات الانترنت (HTML,PHP,ASP,AJAX,CSS,Javascript)

March 23, 2010

The Story of Bottled Water

March 3, 2010

The joy of bookstores

Whenever I visit a bookstore abroad I get really high from all the books and magazine I see, all types of books with shiny colorful covers, covering all subject serious and silly for all range of ages from childhood to 100, all types of people browsing or even sitting on the floor reading their book flavor of the day. Really get my heart exploding from joy, all I need is more time and money to browse through all of these books and share all the knowledge from reading with all people i love, what a feeling!!
Unfortunately this joy soon disappear with the realization that I came with my family for a few days vacation that soon will end, in fact my return back trip is tomorrow.
What change this joy to sadness is the fact that these experiences can not be felt again for the next year if I am lucky.
Bookstore in Riyadh are merely stationary and electronics stores, and although books cover large portion of the store, they are mostly outdated with no relevance to anyone with interest on reading.
Why do our bookstore are in this state? Is it because most of Saudis can not read English? Or because we have the tendency to hate anything cultural.

February 13, 2010

The Internet Revealed & What is Internet Exchange?

A short film about about how the Internet work, and what is an Internet Exchange, and why it is very important.

Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a functioning Internet Exchange yet!!

Thank you Nasser for the video.

February 8, 2010

MENOG 6 in Riyadh

The Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG) announced that 6th version of the meeting will take place in Riyadh from 10 to 14 of April 2010.

MENOG is a regional forum offering network engineers and other technical staff the opportunity to share knowledge and experiences, and identify areas for regional cooperation.

MENOG 6 will be include:

Workshop 10-12 April
Tutorials 13 April (morning)
Conference 13 April (afternoon) and 14 April

If you are in the business of Internet operation, or have any interest in Internet at all, don’t miss the opportunity to attend.

February 8, 2010

Google best Ad ever

This the first time Google seems human, it can be really romantic movie to 🙂

Youtube Page

January 15, 2010

Error when updating Ubuntu

Lately I migrated all of my server to Ubuntu server, what I really loved about it the easy of updating the system, all I need to is:
$ sudo aptitude update # to update packages meta data $ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade # to perform the actual upgrade

But sometimes on of the package information meta data files get corrupted, and I will get this error:
$ sudo aptitude update : W: A error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used.GPG error: http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <ftpmaster@ubuntu.com>


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        January 6, 2010
      
    
    
      
        اخيراً مقاييس لافياش الكهرب في المملكة
      
    
    
      واخيراً وبعد 25 عام من اصدار المواصفات لافياش الكهرب، اعلنت الجمارك انها ستطبق القرار وستمنع الافياش غير المطابقة.
قوابس كهرب 110 فولت:


قوابس كهرب 220 فولت:


تأكد من تركيب القوابس الصحيحة في منزلك، واطلبها في الاجهزة التي تشتريها.
    
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        December 16, 2009
      
    
    
      
        أين تذهب في واشنطن
      
    
    
      مواضيع اخرى قد تعجبك:

اليابان: رحلتي الى طوكيو
أين تذهب في لندن
خواطر عن لندن
أين تذهب في نيو اورلينز New Orleans

تحديث: ٨ / ٢٠١٤ قمت بزيارة المدينة واضفت بعض الاماكن الجديدة وحذفت بعض الاماكن التي اغلقت، ولا تبخل بملاحظاتك واماكنك ومطاعمك المفضلة.
احد الاصدقاء سيسافر الى الولايات المتحدة الامريكية وسيقف في واشنطن العاصمة لبضعة ايام فسألني عن المدينة بحكم اني درست فيها في مرحلة الماجستير، اول كلمة قلتها له هي لا تقف فيها، لاعتقادي انه لن يجد الكثير ليراه.
    
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        December 2, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Malaysia trip photos
      
    
    
      
    
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        November 14, 2009
      
    
    
      
        أسهل طريقة لإزالة صرير الباب
      
    
    
      
    
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        November 5, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Short Podcasts, how to listen to them?
      
    
    
      I own an iPod for more than three years now, and since I am not a music fan it was setting in my drawer doing nothing, the only useful thing I used it for was putting some kids shows for my son to keep him busy during long journeys.
But recently I discovered the wonderful world of Podcasts, and to be honest I got addicted to it, these days you will often see me with my earbuds walking like a zombie.
    
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        October 29, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students
      
    
    
      
It’s an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. But a new paper … contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply of native-born talent in the United States. In fact, the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack of incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive. Cranking out even more science graduates, according to the researchers, does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students.
    
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        October 27, 2009
      
    
    
      
        10% هي ما بقي من الانترنت
      
    
    
      لم يتبق من عناوين الانترنت سوى 10% وبعدها لن يتمكن اي مستخدم جديد من الاتصال بعنوان حقيقي.

http://www.inetcore.com/project/ipv4ec/index_en.html
الحل طبعاً هو التحول الى النسخة السادسة من عناوين الانترنت (IPv6).
عدد من مقدمي خدمة الانترنت اعلنوا بدأهم تقديم الخدمة تجارياً، مثل “بيانات” و"نسمة" وآخرون في الطريق، لكن يبقى السؤال هل لدينا وقت!!!
فريق العمل السعودي لـIPv6 هي مجموعة عمل من مقدمي الخدمة وشركات تقنية المعلومات والقطاعين الحكومي والخاص، دور الفريق هو التأكد من جاهزية جميع الاطراف لنهاية عناوين النسخة القديمة وضمان تحول سلس الى النسخة الجديدة.
Saudi Arabia IPv6 Task force
    
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        October 27, 2009
      
    
    
      
        البيت الابيض يحول الى دروبال Drupal
      
    
    
      البيت الابيض الموقع الرئيسي للحكومة الامريكية يحول الى دروبال، نظام ادارة المحتوى المفتوح المصدر.

للمزيد من التفاصيل:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal
    
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        October 17, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Firefox block Microsoft plugins
      
    
    
      Today when I started Firefox on Windows XP, it gave me the following warning:

These plug-ins are installed without user permission, and virtually impossible to disable or uninstall, and it turned out that these plug-ins left the browser open to attack.
More info:
Sneaky Microsoft Add-On Put Firefox Users At Risk
    
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        October 8, 2009
      
    
    
      
        صور جديدة لدودي وتالا
      
    
    
      
صور عند مصورة محترفة، عيالي طالعين هادين ومؤدبين وحلوين وبدون مخوش على غير العادة (قولوا ما شاء الله بس تراهم مهوب كذا في الطبيعة)
المزيد من الصور
    
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        October 4, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Smart phones and netbooks operating system
      
    
    
      I compiled a quick and dirty list of smart phone and netbook OS, the list included the OS that I think are relevant.
I merged both smart phone and netbooks OSes in the same category, because it seems they can be used on both platforms.
Please let me know if you want to include any data worth adding.
Open
Chrome OS
Started: 2009
Company: Google
OS Base: Linux
Browser: Webkit based (it is Chrome!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_OS
    
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        September 30, 2009
      
    
    
      
        FLOSS weekly Linus interview
      
    
    
      FLOSS weekly (FLOSS = Free Libre Open Source Software) interview with Linus Torvalds, straight questions and honest and simple answers, I love it.
http://twit.tv/floss88 (56 minutes)

    
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        September 13, 2009
      
    
    
      
        How to feel miserable as an artist
      
    
    
      






    
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        September 9, 2009
      
    
    
      
        خواطر عن لندن
      
    
    
      خواطر سريعة عن زيارتي الاخيرة للندن.
الحبر النظيف

خلال المساء وفي وسط لندن تلاحظ العديد من مراكز توزيع الجرائد المجانية مثل جريدة London Lite، ما اعجبني في هذه الجرائد ليس النموذج المجاني، لاني اعتقد انه يستهلك العديد من المصادر الطبيعية دون تقديم قيمة حقيقية، لكن ما اعجبني هما شيئن، الاول مقاس الجرائد، فالمقاس الصغير او ما يسمى بالتبلويد سهل جداً في التصفح ولا تحتاج الى طاولة 4 في 6 لقرأته، الشئ الثاني وهو الاهم هو نوع الحبر المستخدم، فهو حسب زعمهم وحسب تجربتي لا يلوث الايدي بالحبر، وحقيقة هذه الخاصيتين هي من اكثر الاشياء التي اكرهها في مطبوعاتنا.
    
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        August 20, 2009
      
    
    
      
        بيانات برنامج القرآن
      
    
    
      وضعت كل البيانات التي استخدمتها في برنامج القرآن للتحميل، مع معلومات عن كيفية استخدامها.
صفحة بيانات القرآن
برنامج القرآن
    
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        August 18, 2009
      
    
    
      
        برنامج القرآن على الويب
      
    
    
      منذ ان كنت صغيراً ولدي رغبة بانتاج مجموعة برامج اساسية لكل مستخدم حاسب عربي ومسلم، القائمة كانت تشمل البرامج التالية:

برنامج للقرآن الكريم مع التفاسير المشهورة.
برنامج للتقويم الهجري، مع مواقيت الصلاة.
برنامج قاموس عربي انجليزي، انجليزي عربي.

قمت بعمل برنامج للأذن عام 1997 باستخدام لغة ديلفي، لكن للأسف لم احتفظ بالمصدر ولم ارفعة على نفس الخادم الذي رفعت فيه البرنامج، عموماً كونه المعادلة غير متطابقة مع معادلة مدينة الملك عبدالعزيز والعلوم والتقنية، فان البرنامج ليس له قيمة فعليه كبيرة.
صفحة البرنامج القديمة
    
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        August 9, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Presenting at Riyadh Geeks Today
      
    
    
      
Today at 7:15 pm Riyadh time, I am going to give a presentation titled “Tips for faster websites” in front of  Riyadh Geeks group at Bader.
Alriyadh Newspaper covered the meeting and the presentation:
http://www.alriyadh.com/2009/08/08/article450749.html
I got many calls and emails from to attend the presentation, which made me bit nervous and worried, thank you all, and see you their.
Update:
We’ve just finished Riyadh Geeks meeting, big audience, thank you all for coming, and special thank to “Riyadh Geeks” for inventing me, and arranging this event.
    
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        August 6, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Why I can’t trust Microsoft
      
    
    
      When Microsoft released Bing search engine, I was really impressed, it looks good and the search is good.
But unfortunately Microsoft have a very bad habits of ruining really good products.
When you try to search for Why is Windows so expensive?, the first result you will get is: “Why are Mac’s So Expensive?”

    
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        July 8, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Google Chrome OS
      
    
    
      Every time I visit a family I spend considerable time fixing Windows desktop and laptop, I don’t mind helping, but I mind not getting paid by Microsoft!
Windows machines are really hard to maintain, and you will rarely find someone happy with, unless he do the periodic re-installations, plus Windows is really pricey software, Windows 7 pro will cost $199 (home is $80 cheaper), it was acceptable 10 years ago when the computers prices were around $3000, but nowadays it i
    
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        June 13, 2009
      
    
    
      
        TED: Success is a continuous journey
      
    
    
      3 minutes presentation:
Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street, but a constant journey. He uses the story of his business’ rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson — when we stop trying, we fail.


Link
    
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        June 7, 2009
      
    
    
      
        TED: Schools kill creativity
      
    
    
      I saw this video last year by Sir Ken Robinson, as the title say “schools kill creativity”, watch and tell me what you think.

Very funny and insightful video (20 minutes)

    
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        June 2, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Google Wave: Is What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today
      
    
    
      Lengthy but a must see presentation.


    
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        May 23, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Arabic Projects Ideas 3: Open Arabic Stemmer
      
    
    
      Nowadays we have many great options to build your own search engines, either for your website, or for you own custom applications. to mention a few:

Lucene

Solr (uses Lucene)
Sphinx

All of these search engine option works great for English language, and they have decent support for Arabic language thanks  to Unicode and UTF-8, but unfortunately they still lack a the power of stemming that you will find in English language.
    
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        May 23, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Arabic Projects Ideas 2: Open Arabic Fonts
      
    
    
      If you build Arabic website you must be hit by the hard reality, Arabic web font options are really narrow, the only realistic choices are:

Tahoma: only good for small sizes.
Arabic Transparent
Traditional Arabic

My idea is to buy other quality Arabic fonts and ask browser/OS vendors to include them, we really need more choice to improve the quality of website productions, and add more creativity to our Arabic Internet.
    
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        May 23, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Arabic Projects Ideas 1: Open Um Alqura Calendar
      
    
    
      In Saudi Arabia the official calendar is Um Alqura calendar, which is a Hejeri based calendar.

The idea is to buy the royalties of the calculation function (KACST owns it), and open it, and force all software vendors to include it.

Just imagine that your mobile date, match your outlook date, match your favourite website date. Stakeholders:

Government: KACST, CITC, Yesser, MCIT
Software vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Apple
Open Source: Linux, MySQL, Postgresql etc..
Mobile phones vendors: Nokia, SonyEriccson, Apple, HTC, etc…
Other electronics vendors: Humax receiver manufacturer.
Content Providers: Google, Maktoob, Yahoo, MSN, Newspapers, etc..
Development Languages: Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Perl, etc…

If you have an ideas to improve the initial idea please comment.
    
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        May 15, 2009
      
    
    
      
        MySQL Founder Starts Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring
      
    
    
      Monty Widenius, the ‘father’ of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

Via: Slashdot
    
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        May 13, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Linux.com relaunched
      
    
    
      The new Linux.com relaunched under the management of Linux Foundation.
    
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        May 11, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Riyadh Geeks meeting
      
    
    
      I just came from my first meeting, one word awesome 🙂
Thank you guys for arranging such nice event, as usual you meet with
many interesting people with great ideas, and a lot of energy.
One thing for sure, it won’t be the last meeting for me.
    
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        May 1, 2009
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com ver 6 released
      
    
    
      Finally after 2 years of delays alriyadh.com new version is released.

No matter how many test you perform, something will go wrong when you launch the website.

Special thanks to Turki Aljaber, and Malik Alghasab for a really great job building the website.

If you find any problem please let me know.
    
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        April 16, 2009
      
    
    
      
        شعب مُصاب بالشيزوفرينيا!
      
    
    
       هي، أو هو: يدخل الشات ليتحاور مع الجنس الآخر

بكل شيء وحول أي شيء. يذهب إلى موقع الأفلام

ليشاهد أحدث الأفلام السينمائية. يدخل إلى منتــداه المفضل ليناقش في كل القضايا السياسية والاجتماعية

بكل جرأة. وعبر اسمه (أو: اسمها) المستعار يبتسم

بمرح ويوزع النكات على الآخرين. وما أن يضغط

على زر إغلاق الكمبيوتر، ويخرج من عالم الانترنت

الافتراضي، إلا وتعود إليه بطريقة آلية: تكشيرته، وخوفه، وشكله التقليدي المحافظ!

كل شعوب الأرض: شكلها الواقعي لا يختلف كثيراً

عن شكلها “الافتراضي” على الإنترنت.. إلا نحن ..

في الواقع شيء، وعلى الإنترنت: شعب افتراضي!! 
    
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        April 15, 2009
      
    
    
      
        What does it mean to be free?
      
    
    
      
    
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        April 2, 2009
      
    
    
      
        More information about Google Servers
      
    
    
      Have you ever asked your self where does Google buy its servers, Dell, HP, IBM, or Sun?
Unlike everyone in the world, Google don’t buy servers from different vendor they build them!
It doesn’t make sense if you have 100 or 1000 servers, but if what about if you have hundreds of thousands of servers, which is the case for Google.
Actually Google have long time ago stated that they their own server, but the company revealed many new details about its servers, and operation.
    
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        March 23, 2009
      
    
    
      
        The World’s Worst Places to Work: #3 Riyadh
      
    
    
      Overall Grade: Very High Risk Location

Severe Problems: Political Violence & Repression, Political & Social Environment

Major Problem: Culture & Recreation Facilities

Other Problems: Housing, Climate, Disease & Sanitation, Education Facilities, Physical Remoteness, Communications
No surprise here. Life in the Saudi capital is not easy. “The possibility of a terrorist attack is an ongoing threat,” according to ORC, “while wide-ranging restrictions on dress, movement, conduct, food, alcohol, travel, and communications limit expatriate life.” The city is especially hard for foreign women. Finally, adds ORC, “violating the country’s strict moral religious codes is a particular danger in this conservative city.”

    
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        March 19, 2009
      
    
    
      
        jQuery tutorial video
      
    
    
      jQuery is a lightweight Javascript library, it is very easy to learn, I found this amazing video from Google TechTalk channel on Youtube, don’t be fooled by the presenter age (he is 12 years old) he knows what is he talking about, enjoy!


    
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        March 18, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Ericsson 500Mbps DSL
      
    
    
      Ericsson has successfully demonstrated data-transfer speeds of more than 500 megabits per second over copper, the communications company said Monday.
The data-transfer rates were achieved using a version of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology called “vectorized” VDSL2, Ericsson said in a statement. The technology, also called “crosstalk cancellation,” provides the high transmission rates through a twisted pair of copper cables by reducing the noise coming from other pairs in the same cable bundle. VDSL2 has traditionally offered speeds of around 100Mbps. 
    
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        March 17, 2009
      
    
    
      
        موقع قيم النسخة الثانية
      
    
    
      يوم امس دعاني جهاد العمار الى مؤتمر صحفي نظمة حول اطلاق النسخة الجديدة من موقع قيم، 50% من المؤتمر كان حول التطويرات الجديدة في الموقع والتي من اهمها اضافة خاصية الخرائط، فعلا رائعة!!! وكذلك اعلى مستخدمين (ترتيبي كان قليل 🙁 )
ما اثار اهتمامي اكثر هو الحضور، كان كثير ورائع، كمية الحماس والطاقة الموجودة كانت رائعة. لازم ابداء احضر مثل هذه الاجتماعات.
    
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        March 11, 2009
      
    
    
      
        15 Inspiring Bruce Lee Quotes
      
    
    
      My favorite:

Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory
Simplicity is the key to brilliance
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done

Complete 15 @

http://www.junauza.com/2009/03/15-inspiring-bruce-lee-quotes-that.html
    
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        March 10, 2009
      
    
    
      
        يا حبي للرياض
      
    
    
      

    
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        February 22, 2009
      
    
    
      
        بنتي تالا
      
    
    
      الحمد لله رزقني الله بصبية اسميتها تالا



تالا انضمت لاخيها عبدالله
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayed/tags/dody
    
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        February 16, 2009
      
    
    
      
        The most efficient way of getting around
      
    
    
      

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/web/trans0209gettingaround.html

    
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        February 14, 2009
      
    
    
      
        PHP development enviroument, what do you use?
      
    
    
      I must confess, I still use HTML-kit for PHP development, the only reason I use it for direct FTP editing, I know I should be ashamed of my self 🙁
The last couple of months I started to look at Subversion version control system, as a secure and professional way to edit your code, so I started shopping for new PHP IDE.
My requirements are:

Support Arabic
Support UTF-8
Support Subversion

So what do you use for PHP development? and what feature is a must?
    
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        February 8, 2009
      
    
    
      
        IPv6 workshop photos
      
    
    
      Unfortunately, I was very busy organizing I didn’t have a chance to take a lot of pictures.

    
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        February 7, 2009
      
    
    
      
        تذكير ورشة عمل IPv6 غداً الأحد
      
    
    
      اذا كان لك اهتمام بالانترنت، والشبكات فيجب ان تحضر. هناك أكثر من عرض يجب على الجميع حضورها.

المكان فندق الشيراتون الرياض، نلقاكم هناك.
    
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        February 2, 2009
      
    
    
      
        12% to the end of the Internet
      
    
    
      
Mr. Latif Ladid, the president of IPv6 Forum, left a comment on a previous post on my blog with the latest update on IPv4 exhaustion, only 12% of IPv4 address are left, that is 2% in less than 3 months, the new estimate is 769 days.
This this insightful comment:

The IP address space is down to just 12% with 534 M IP addresses or 32 blocks left. see http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html
One of the most obvious and easily quantifiable incentives of the move to IPv6 is the growth and the continuity of the Internet and then the run to the bank for the remaining address space as it will be needed to have a secure dual stack transition which is the most secure transition and will be unfortunately the rich man’s transition. All others will tunnel which is not secure making it the poor man’s transition. Even the transition will aggravate the digital divide between the haves and have-nots in terms of security. The IPv6 Forum knew this problem 10 years ago and pushed ISPs to move earlier to manage a secure transition, but it takes patience and passion to make this happen.
    
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        February 1, 2009
      
    
    
      
        IPV6 دعوة لحضور ورشة عمل الإصدار السادس لبروتوكول الانترنت
      
    
    
      الدعوة الالكترونية الرجاء ارسالها لكل من تعرف وقد يهمة الامر:


    
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        January 29, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Kudu’s kids meal toy … after 20 minutes
      
    
    
      
No my son didn’t even try to break, it just break in 4 places in 20 minutes, the worst toy I ever saw. Of course Kudu isn’t the only restaurant with crabby kids toys, Herfy and almost all restaurant in Saudi Arabic.
The only exception is McDonald’s, where kids ask for it just for the toys.
Local restaurants, please improve your toys.
    
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        January 28, 2009
      
    
    
      
        KDE 4.2 Released
      
    
    
      
For more info:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/index.php
Don’t know what is KDE? check Wikipedia KDE page
    
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        January 26, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Back to School
      
    
    
      
    
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        January 24, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Saudi Arabia IPv6 workshop and website
      
    
    
      I am currently preparing for Saudi Arabia IPv6 workshop, that we at CITC arranging at 8th of February 2009.
The workshop will have many high profile speakers in the IPv6 field.
You can find more information about the workshop at IPv6 website:
www.ipv6.org.sa
Don’t forget to register for the workshop.
P.S. the website is built using Drupal
    
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        January 24, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Network Solutions Under Large-Scale DDoS Attack
      
    
    
      I got a DNS failure when I tried to access my website yesterday, I didn’t suspect my ISP because I am using OpenDNS as my name server, so I switched back to SAUDI NET name servers and it worked fine. So I thought it was OpenDNS problem, until I read the news about large-scale DDoS attack on Network Solutions my DNS registrar, where I also host my DNS for rayed.com.
Slashdot Article
    
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        January 17, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Nothing is original …
      
    
    
      Nothing is original ....
    
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        January 15, 2009
      
    
    
      
        ورشة عمل المحتوى العربي المفتوح
      
    
    
      
تنظم مدينة الملك عبدالعزيز للعلوم والتقنية في يومي السبت والأحد القادمين ورشة عمل بعنوان “المحتوى العربي المفتوح” وتأتي هذه الورشة لتعزيز مبادرة الملك عبدالله للمحتوى العربي.
شخصياً اعتقد ان انطلاقة اي تطوير للأنترنت يجب ان تبدأ من المحتوى.
نقلاً عن: سوالفي
    
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        January 14, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Qt becomes LGPL
      
    
    
      
Slashdot:

Qt, the highly polished, well documented, modern GUI toolkit owned by Nokia will be available under the LGPL starting with version 4.5! … [Nokia] want to encourage and stimulate the use of Qt Everywhere. This is fantastic news for all commercial developers looking to create cross-platform applications …

Wikipedia:

Qt is most notably used in KDE, Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia, Adobe Photoshop Album, VirtualBox and OPIE.

Really good news for KDE project and fans.
    
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        January 7, 2009
      
    
    
      
        Drupal best modules
      
    
    
      One of Drupal’s best features is the modular design, the core of Drupal is very small but flexible, and it only implements basic functionality.
The good news is that Drupal already has hundreds of modules to implement any missing feature, you can even build your own module if you didn’t find a module to fulfill your needs.
But having all these choices make finding the appropriate module a really hard job, to help you select the best Drupal modules I found a good list of module at Acquia (a commercial company founded by Drupal inventor Dries Buytaert to provide different services around Drupal).
    
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        December 29, 2008
      
    
    
      
        nginx [Engine X] enters webserver top 5
      
    
    
      

nginx [Engine X] became the world 4th most popular web server, according to the latest Netcraft survey.

It is an event based web server, which makes really scalable especially for static files, so if you are serving many images, audio files, video, you might consider it.

It can also configured to work as HTTP and mail proxy.

Of course you should look also at Lighttpd [Lighty] which work with the same principle, and I have been using it for around 2 years for alriyadh.com
    
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        December 27, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Not dead yet!
      
    
    
      More update will come 🙂
    
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        December 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Selling the Iraq War ! Canadian and Australian Prime Ministers give Exact SAME SPEECH
      
    
    
      
via: reddit
    
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        November 29, 2008
      
    
    
      
        شعار جديد لمدينة الملك عبدالعزيز للعلوم والتقنية
      
    
    
      
للمزيد
    
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        November 22, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Al Madina newspaper uses drupal
      
    
    
      

It seems that Al Madina daily newspaper is using drupal fro their newspaper website, really nice.
al-madina.com 
    
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        November 16, 2008
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD has an offical forum
      
    
    
      
FreeBSD my favorite OS, has an official web based discussion forum:
http://forums.freebsd.org/
Congratulations, an good job.
It seems to me FreeBSD is getting easier everyday.
    
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        November 11, 2008
      
    
    
      
        في وطني كن مهايطيا ولا تكن مبدعا
      
    
    
      مقال يلخص احد اهم مشاكلنا في هذا الوطن:

في وطني كن مهايطيا ولا تكن مبدعا
احمد، جزاك الله خير، دائماً ما يثلج صدري بمقالتك.
    
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        November 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        How many IPs do we have left?
      
    
    
      Only 14% of IP addresses are left, which is estimated to be used in 811 days which is around 2 years!!
IPv4 Exhaustion counter
Does that mean the Internet as we know it will stop growing? yes exactly, if we ran out of IP addresses you can not connect your new game console, phone, notebook, etc... to the Internet.
Scientists has found many solutions to delay this problem, including “classless network”, and NAT, which allowed us to use the IP address space more efficiently.
    
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        November 4, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Drupal wins 2008 Best Open Source CMS
      
    
    
      Drupal wins 2008 Best Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing

More from

http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-open-source-cms-award-winner-announced
More from Wikipedia:

Drupal
Content Management System (CMS)

    
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        November 3, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Wikipedia switch its infrastructure from RedHat to Ubuntu
      
    
    
      It is a bit of old news but thought I would share in case you missed it.

Basically Wikipedia is switching 400 server from Redhat and Fedora mix to Ubuntu server.

Check the details in ComputerWorld article 
    
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        October 22, 2008
      
    
    
      
        I am Free
      
    
    
      
    
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        October 21, 2008
      
    
    
      
        أفضل رسام كاريكاتير سعودي
      
    
    
      الكاريكاتير … قد يكون هو الشئ الوحيد الذي يقرأه السعوديين من اوله الى اخره 🙂
اعترف اني شخصياً احرص على الاطلاع على الكاريكاتيرات اليومية ونادرا ما اقرأ مقالات الكتاب، باستثناء فهد الاحمدي لكون مقالاته ظريفة وخفيفة ولا تجيب النكد.
فنانين الكاريكاتير السعوديون رسامين مبدعين (مثال) وغالباً خفيفين الدم (طبعاً هناك استثنآت)
في ما يلي قائمة بالرسامين المفضلين عندي.

    
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        October 6, 2008
      
    
    
      
        غبار الهجير افضل مسلسل سعودي؟
      
    
    
      اعتماداً على تصويت جريدة الرياض فان 92% من المشاركين يرون ان مسلسل “غبار الهجير” هو افضل مسلسل سعودي!!
وكان التنافس محموماً بشكل واضح بين “غبار الهجير” و”غلطة نوف” و”كلنا عيال قرية” على صدارة فئة المسلسلات إلا أن اللحظات الأخيرة وسعت الفارق الكبير بين الأول وبقية منافسيه.
انا في الحقيقة لم اعرف بهذا المسلسل الا من هذا الخبر و لم اسمع احد يتكلم عنه اطلاقاً، لا بمدح ولا بذم، وزالت حيرتي عندما عرفت انه يعرض في قناة المجد.
    
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        September 30, 2008
      
    
    
      
        كل عام وانتم بخير وعيد سعيد
      
    
    
      
    
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        September 10, 2008
      
    
    
      
        STC’s new logo?
      
    
    
      It seems that Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is going to change its logo, the new logo is all over Riyadh, without any reference to STC, with only the slogan “What good is technology if doesn’t make your life easier (poorly translated)”.

This time STC is using the logo one of the companies STC bought, STC bought 51% of Indonesian GSM operator Natrindo, and AXIS is the brand name used by Natrindo.
    
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        September 6, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Django 1.0 released!
      
    
    
      Django team released version 1.0 of the their web application framework, Django is written in Python.
I only tried Django for a week more than one year ago, and it was really amazing, and easy to create web application.
Even if you don’t write in Python I recommend you spend sometime to know it, may be walk through the tutorial. It has many inspiring and brilliant features you definitely need to know before select your next web framework.
    
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        September 6, 2008
      
    
    
      
        The Adventures of Johnny Bunko
      
    
    
      

A friend recommended that I read “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko”, I read it and I loved it, thought I should share it with others too.
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is America’s first business book in manga and the last career guide you’ll ever need.
The book, which you can read in an hour, tells the story of Johnny Bunko, a beleaguered Everyman toiling away at the Boggs Corp.
    
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        September 2, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Chrome: Google new web browser
      
    
    
      Google is building their own new browser, very interesting features, it has so many advance features that makes you wonder is the next OS GUI going to be a browser.
A post about the “chrome”:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html
Nice comic describing chrome features:

http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/
    
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        July 26, 2008
      
    
    
      
        حملة الجمعية السعودية الخيرية لمكافحة السرطان
      
    
    
      الجمعية السعودية الخيرية لمكافحة السرطان تقوم بحملة على الانترنت لجمع التبرعات وزيادة الوعي بالجمعية ونشاطاتها.
شاركنا بالتبرع ووضع اعلان الجمعيى في موقعك:

صفحة الاعلان
    
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        July 13, 2008
      
    
    
      
        TED: Ideas worth spreading
      
    
    
      
TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference […] It defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading”, and selected talks given at TED are available free on its website. Its lectures cover a broad set of topics: science, arts, design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology, and entertainment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)
So many inspiring talks (in Video and Audio format), you will find it really hard to keep listening because the inspiration effect is almost instant.
    
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        July 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Erlang, or Utility-computing vs. Appliance-computing
      
    
    
      Very good read about cloud computing, trust me it worth it.
I strongly believe that cloud computing (or computing as a utility) is the way computing is going to evolve over the next few years/decades.
[t]he two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon as well as Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems. Not only because they want to, but because they need to. If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as efficiently as possible. You need your technology to be able to scale in a similar way as other, comparable utilities or large real-time systems are scaling — utilities like telephony and electricity.

    
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        July 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        تتبع: خدمة تتبع سيارتك من الاتصالات
      
    
    
      تتبع خدمة جديدة من شركة الاتصالات تمكنك من متابعة موقع سيارتك في اي لحظة باستخدم برنامج خاص او جوجل ايرث، يمكنك متابعة مسارها، سرعتها، التحذير عند تجاوز سرعة معينة، او منطقة معينة، او حتى وقت معين.
طبعاً، هذه الخدمة مصيبة على المراهقين اللي بادين يسوقون او يسرقون سيارات اهلهم 🙂 حتى السووايق ما راح يسلمون.
ويبدو ان الخدمة ستكون موجهة للافراد والشركات، واعتقد ان توجيهها للافراد حركة اعلامية من شركة الاتصالات، اما للشركات فاعتقد انها ستكون خدمة ممتازة، خصوصاً شركات تأجير السيارات، وشركات النقل.
    
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        July 5, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Network Timeout!!
      
    
    
      Lately I am getting a lot of “Network Timeout” errors, is it my machine or does everybody get this error.
    
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        June 23, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Misfer has a blog
      
    
    
      My dear friend Misfer Almaymouni finally got a time to start a blog, and as you expect deep posts, that type of posts you have to read 5 times to understand (and sometimes you don’t 🙂 )
http://misfer.fqaqee3.net/
    
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        June 18, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Download Firefox 3 now
      
    
    
      In Saudi Arabia download Firefox before 10 pm on Wednesday to help Firefox to set new world record.
Make sure you scan the file before installation, just in case.
    
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        June 12, 2008
      
    
    
      
        شارك فاير فوكس لتسجيل رقم قياسي جديد
      
    
    
      يسعى متصفح فاير فوكس Firefox  لتسجيل رقم قياسي في موسوعة جينيس لأكثر برنامج تحميل خلال 24 ساعة، واليوم المنتظر هو يوم إصدار النسخة الثالثة، وسوف يكون يوم الثلاثاء القادم 17 يونيو.

يمكنك التسجيل في موقع فاير فوكس لتذكيرك بيوم الإصدار (رجاء لا تستخدم عنوان بريد العمل الرسمي)

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/
شرح فيديو لاهم مزايا النسخة Firefox 3
Field Guide to Firefox 3
    
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        June 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Being poor is …
      
    
    
      Being poor is …

Short but heart breaking essay on what is it like to be poor.
    
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        May 29, 2008
      
    
    
      
        فضيحة شواطئنا!
      
    
    
      فالدراسات والبحوث التي نفذتها جهات حكومية منها وزارة الصحة ومراكز بحثية أثبتت بداية أن الشواطئ السعودية غير مهيأة للسباحة أو الصيد كونها شديدة التلوث، وأن 4% فقط من الواجهات البحرية للبحر الأحمر متاحة للجميع مقابل 96% مملوكة لأشخاص
رابط الخبر
قرأتها في موقع نبيل المعجل
    
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        May 24, 2008
      
    
    
      
        لينكس: تبي تحيرة خيرة
      
    
    
      تحديث فبراير ٢٠٢٢ :
بعد تغيير سياسة Centos في التحديث، قررت التحويل الى ديبيان
توزيعة ديبيان خفيفة ورشيقة مقارنة باوبنتو، ومجانية وتحديثاتها آمنة
تحديث ١٢ اكتوبر ٢٠١٨:
حولت بالكامل لسينوتس CentOS متوافق مع رد هات لكن مجاني.
تحديث ٢٩ اغسطس ٢٠١٣:
حاليا الخيار بالنسبة لي اوضح كثيرا، فهو ينحصر في اوبنتو Ubuntu خصوصا نسخة الخادمات، او سينتوس CentOS اذا احتجت توافقية مع RedHat.
الموضوع الاصلي
من اهم نقاط الضعف في نظام لينكس هي تعدد التوزيعات، مما يخلق حيرة في اختيار التوزيعة المناسبة حتى لدى خبرء يونكس، فعلى الرغم من اني مدمن انظمة يونكس منذ اكثر من عشر سنوات الا اني لا ازال احتار عند العمل مع لينكس، وهذه احد اهم الاسباب التي تجعلني افضل نظام فري بي اس دي (FreeBSD)، حيث لا يوجد سوى نظام تشغيل واحد فقط لا غير، واذا بحثت عن حل مشكلة في فري بي اس دي ستعرف انها سوف تعمل لانه لا يوجد سوى نظام واحد اسمه قري بي اس دي. طبعاً اذا اخترت توزيعة لينكس وبقيت عليها فانك تحصل على نفس الفائدة، لكن يبقى التشتيت مستمراً من قبل التوزيعات الثانية التي يظهر فيها مزايا جديدة من هنا وهناك.
    
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        May 17, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Engineers endangered species?
      
    
    
      High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers
After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.
Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.
    
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        May 10, 2008
      
    
    
      
        تدريب واختبارات “رد هات” لينكس في المملكة
      
    
    
      أكاديمية الفيصل العالمية تتحالف مع “رد هات” لتقديم دورات واختبارت “رد هات” لينكس، خبر جداً مفرح لسببين:

سهولة التدريب على لينكس
ارتفاع الطلب على انظمة لينكس في السوق السعودي

الرجاء التعليق على الخبر اذا كان يهمك 🙂



http://www.alriyadh.com/2008/05/10/article341420.html
تحديث: موقع الاكاديمية على الانترنت:

اكاديمية الفيصل: رد هات
    
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        May 8, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com image quality improvements
      
    
    
      PHP default resampling method vs “resampling and sharping”;
Move your mouse over the image to see sharp version

Influenced by:
Smart Image Resizer
Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret
    
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        May 7, 2008
      
    
    
      
        موقع الرياض وجائزة جديدة
      
    
    
       في احتفالية كبرى احتضنتها قاعة الفلك في فندق برج العرب بمدينة دبي، حقق موقع “الرياض الإلكتروني” جائزة جديدة ضمن سلسلة الجوائز التي نجح الموقع في كسبها خلال السنوات الماضية، حيث فاز بجائزة أفضل المواقع الإستراتيجية الإعلامية Best Strategic Media and Press Portal على مستوى المواقع العربية متصدرا بذلك ترتيب قائمة أفضل المواقع الإلكترونية لوسائل الإعلام العرب

“الرياض” الإلكتروني ينجح في تحقيق جائزة أفضل موقع عربياً 
“الصحفي الإلكتروني” نموذج حديث لمفهوم التحقيقات الإلكترونية
موقع “الرياض ” الإلكتروني الأفضل.. محلياً وخليجياً وعربياً
الرياض الإلكتروني بتقنيات 2.0 web قريباً!
المستقبل برؤية الشباب الطموح

التعليقات صوت القارئ الأول

    
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        May 5, 2008
      
    
    
      
        CSS tutorial site
      
    
    
      One of the best CSS tutorial I ever seen:

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/
Step by step explanation of many of CSS concepts.
    
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        April 26, 2008
      
    
    
      
        TIOBE Programming Community Index
      
    
    
      TIOBE Programming Community Index
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
    
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        April 26, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Putty Tray: The best SSH client?
      
    
    
      PuTTY Tray is an improved version of PuTTY. It features some cosmetic changes, and a number of addons to make it more useful and much more fun to use.
The features that I really like:

Minimizing to the system tray
Portability: optionally stores session configuration in files (for example: on a USB drive) like portaPuTTY
Reconnects when your PC wakes up from stand-by / Attempts to reconnect when the connection fails

http://www.xs4all.nl/~whaa/putty/
    
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        April 23, 2008
      
    
    
      
        The geekiest pants… ever?
      
    
    
      
More pictures: (http://www.vouspensez.com/2008/04/22/the-geekiest-pants-ever/)
    
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        April 20, 2008
      
    
    
      
        My vacation in Mauritius
      
    
    
      



www.flickr.com
    
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        January 5, 2008
      
    
    
      
        script.aculo.us auto completion made easy
      
    
    
      I was not a big fan of JavaScript, until new cool technologies emerged that utilize JavaScript in really useful ways, the most impressive of course would be AJAX related functionality.
AJAX is really easy to use, put some features are hard to implement which lead to JavaScript libraries emerging every where, the most popular are:

Yahoo! UI
Prototype and script.aculo.us
jQuery
Dojo
MochiKit

I’ve played with Yahoo! UI it was really powerful and have many features, but it was getting complicated by time, the last time I tried to implement auto complete feature it took me a whole day 🙁
    
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        November 12, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Saudi NIC new website
      
    
    
      Saudi NIC the organization responsible for registering “.sa” domains updated their website, the new design very clean and fresh. Congratulation.
Registering under “.sa” is free, and you can get good names too, so if you have a company please go and register (it is easy).
They also register Arabic domain names.
    
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        July 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Google toolbar now for Firefox
      
    
    
      I never liked Google toolbar anyway, but for those who can’t live without it here it is:

Google Firefox toolbar
    
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        June 29, 2005
      
    
    
      
        My new Nokia 6230i
      
    
    
      
I bought a new Nokia 6230i mobile phone after I my old Nokia 6610 was stolen (actually  dropped in a cap while he drove me home).
The new phone comes with 1.3 Megapixel camera see a sample picture
Luckily STC started providing MMS service, which allows me to send emails from mobile phone, so now I can take a picture from mobile phone and email it direclty my flickr account, or I can blog by sending an email to my Blogger email address.
    
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        June 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET new DSL prices
      
    
    
      Unfortunately I don’t have DSL in my area 🙁



64K
128K
256K

Old Price
160
250
400

New Price
100
180
270









    
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        May 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Firefox essential extensions
      
    
    
      
Here is my list of essential Firefox extensions:

Tabbrowser Preferences
Session Saver
miniT
SwitchProxy Tool

    
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        May 12, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Online Arabic to English dictionary
      
    
    
      
Thanks to ArabEyes project WordList which is an Arabic to English wordlist, I created small web based dictionary application.
It is very simple but yet useful application, all you need to do is drag-n-drop the following link into you bookmark toolbar Qamoos
To use it you mark any word in your browser, and after clicking the Qamoos Bookmarklet then a popup like this will show with the Arabic meaning for the word.
    
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        May 12, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Web based Quran Application
      
    
    
      Last week I rediscovered ArabEyes which is a web site dedicated for Arabic UNIX software, they host many Arabic projects.

One of the hosted projects is Quran project, they produced many XML files of Quran text, and they needed help with collecting data, both textual data, and audio data.

So I talked with Abdullah Aldosari about it, and it happened that he have MySQL table with this kind of data, so I processed the table and convert it UTF-8 to be complatible with ArabEyes and UNIX, my plan is to cleanup this data and contibue it back to ArabEyes.

Meanwhile I started playing with this data and created a web based Quran software, please try it out.

Quran

It uses AJAX to make fast and user friendly interface.


    
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        May 4, 2005
      
    
    
      
        I like the new Avalon
      
    
    
      
I really like the new Toyota Avalon 2005, and I am really thinking of buying one.
     

    
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        May 4, 2005
      
    
    
      
        ISU opened flickr but with restrictions
      
    
    
      
After closing the great photo site Flickr for couple of weeks, ISU opened the site again but with some restrictions, searching for photos are now blocked.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags 🙁

    
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        April 24, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Saudi Radio stuck in the 80s
      
    
    
      
Today I woke up at 5:30am after 12 hours of sleep (I just came from a long 6 hour journey to Bahrain) I took a shower prayed then I went to work around 6:30, I turned on the radio and it was set on one of the Saudi Radio channels, the same music, the same programs, the same songs, it was like the last time I listened to Saudi radio back in 80s when every body stopped listening to radio and start watching satellite channels from other countries.
When I think about it, not only Saudi radio, all Saudi media stuck on the 80s, despite some cosmatic changes, all news paper, all TV channels are still the same.
Thinking: is it only the media or does the whole country stuck in the 80s!!!
    
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        April 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Moved rayed.com email hosting to SAUDI NET
      
    
    
      
Finally I moved my domain rayed.com email hosting to SAUDI NET, the main reason is that old server was very unreliable and was down for 5 days, the old server was very old Compaq PC Pentium III with all disk almost full, it was shared with the great site Fqaqee3.net, Misfer the owner of fqaqee3.net is little busy these days, I hope he could rearrange the server and move it better server.
    
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        April 4, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Hummer vs Toyota
      
    
    
      
This clip for you Rakan:
Hummer pulled by Toyota

    
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        March 30, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Add Alriyadh newspaper headlines to your website
      
    
    
      
Alriyadh newspaper UNOFFICALY releasing new service that allow you to add alriyadh.com headlines into yuor website, it very simple to include, for example if you are interstead in putting “Internet & Communication” into your website put this code into your website:
<iframe style="width:400px; height:30px; border:0px;" src="http://www.alriyadh.com/section.net_marque.html">
It will show into your website like this:

Of course you can change the section by replacing the file name:

Local News:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.local_marque.html
International News:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.inter_marque.html
Columns:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.columns_marque.html
Clinic:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.clinic_marque.html
Art & Culture:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.art_marque.html
Light News:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.misc_marque.html
Economy:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.econ_marque.html
Sport:
http://www.alriyadh.com/section.net_marque.html

    
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        March 20, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Playing with Flickr API
      
    
    
      
Flickr has really amazing web service API, they support many transports REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC. I had some idea about SOAP, and XML-RPC, and never worked with REST, it turned out as the best and the simplest one of them.
All you need is API KEY which is a key you use every time you call a function, it is used by Flickr for statistics, you can get it from here Get a key, it is only one form, and you will get the key instantly.
    
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        March 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PHP Accelerator is awesome
      
    
    
      
I have a server with PHPAdsNew installed serving around 20 requests per second serving a really busy web site.
Few days ago the admins for that website doubled the number of ads per page, and the server stopped responding most of the day 🙁
I installed PHP Accelerator to make it faster to serve the those ads, but it didn’t help that much, I tried every trick I know to maximize MySQL performance (although it didn’t have any load in the first place) nothing worked.
    
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        March 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Building a search engine
      
    
    
      
Currently I am working on a search engine for a large website, the search engine is based on PHP+MySQL.
You may wonder why not use LIKE in SQL for searching! Of course LIKE will work with few documents, but how about tens of thousand of documents it would be very slow, since the DBMS would have top scan all reconrds one by one in your database to find the word you are looking for.
    
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        February 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Car accident update
      
    
    
      
I got my money back!!
The guy who crashed my car came to the traffic department and paid the money 🙂
It has been 8 month since the accident I never thought I’ll get anything from it.
Alhamdou Lelah
Original Posting

    
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        February 16, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET is now the laregest ISP in Saudi Arabia
      
    
    
      

    
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        February 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        I got my Canon digital camera back
      
    
    
      
Finally after two months with the Quershi service center I got my Canon digital camera back.
I tried to call them for the past couple of weeks and no one answers, so I had to go to the shop my self, and surprise! Surprise! the shop is closed they moved to another location, so I went to the new location and took my camera, I wonder why they didn’t call me to tell me that the camera is ready.
BTW, they took 235 to fix the dark LCD screen for the camera, they said there were an oil on the LCD which ruined it!!! and it isn’t covered by the warranty.
I hope I’ll live until I see real warranty in Saudi Arabia, they always says it isn’t covered by the warranty !
    
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        February 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Weve just implemented transparent proxy
      
    
    
      
Now you can use SAUDI NET EasyNet without any proxy settings, we knew that transparent HTTP works fine for a long time, unfortunately we didn’t know that transparent HTTPS could work too, this is why we waited until this time when we saw one of the ISP implemented it 🙁
Any way it is working fine now, so if you want to use SAUDI NET EasyNet just:

 Call 3 66 00 77 

    
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        February 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET EasyNet Ad
      
    
    
      


    
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        January 31, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Eezee Net phone numbers working now
      
    
    
      
SAUDI NET EezeeNet number ( 3 66 00 77 ) is now working and you can start testing now.
Remeber to setup the proxy:
Host: proxy.saudi.net.sa
Port: 8080
Remeber it isn’t free as some ISPs prompote, it cost you 3 Riyals per hour, it is free in the sense it doesn’t need any Internet account to to use it.
Enjoy it, and tell every body.

    
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        January 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL 8 released
      
    
    
      
Many new improvements but the most important to me is the native support for Windows platform, not that people will start using it in production in Windows, but it will allow more people to use and play with it.
I wonder about the status of the replication system.
What’s new in 8.0

    
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        January 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL new website
      
    
    
      
PostgreSQL launched a new good looking website, it look more professional 🙂
PostgreSQL if you don’t know it, is the open source Oracle database server. It has many  advance features not currently found on MySQL.

    
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        December 29, 2004
      
    
    
      
        3660077
      
    
    
      
3 66 00 77
EezeeNet from SAUDI NET

    
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        December 29, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Eezee Net phone numbers
      
    
    
      
Today EezeeNet phone numbers will be announced for all ISPs, the phone numbers start with 366 instead of 368 announced earlier.
EezeeNet is dialup service provided by STC to allow customers to connect to the Internet without having ISP account, of course ISP will share the profit with STC for the connection, it costs 3 Riyals per hour, and I guess the ISP share is .65
any way I’ll post the given numbers earlier this day insha Allah.
    
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        December 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        My annoying neighbor
      
    
    
      
Yesterday, at 12:00 am while me and my wife watch TV, the  guy living in the apartment above mine start drilling, I start complaining to my wife saying what insensitive neighbor he is. At first I said it won’t take long, few minutes and he will be over, but the noise didn’t stop and it became very annoying.
At 1:00 am I decided to go to bed and ignore that noise, the strangest thing happened, I didn’t hear any noise, I went back to the living room to find out that all this noise was coming from an electric tooth brush connected their, which I drop (and apparently broke) few days ago, and it start working and stopping by it self.
Sorry neighbor.
    
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        December 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD new website
      
    
    
      
FreeBSD new website, check it out, but not today it due in 1/1/2005.
Just a reminder.

    
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        December 12, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Riyadh newspaper new web site
      
    
    
      
Check it out! Riyadh newspaper has a new domain name www.alriyadh.com, not just this it has new simplified, and cleaner design.
The new design dramatically improved the browsing speed, and daily bandwidth usage for the site dropped 40%
Thanks to the hard work of Abw Nawaf, Waleed, Mohammed, Faisal, Majed, and abdullaziz, good job guys 🙂

    
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        December 7, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Thunderbird 1 released
      
    
    
      
The Internet is safe again 🙂
Thuderbird is an email,news,rss client developed by Mozilla foundation, it is really fast and light weight, the only problem is with compose Arabic Emails, I couldn’t figure out away to toggle the input direction.

    
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        December 4, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Finally I sent my camera to maintenance
      
    
    
      
My digital Canon camera LCD display got very dark, It was very hard to see even in the night, so I decide I should send it before the warranty expires, I went to three stores to find the right store for maintenance, they will sent it to Jeddah, and it will take from 2 to 3 weeks.
I hope they fix it.

    
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        December 4, 2004
      
    
    
      
        My Sister
      
    
    
      
Check this great song about the sisters … in Arabic
Akhyaty

    
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        November 23, 2004
      
    
    
      
        my.saudi.net.sa tip
      
    
    
      
SAUDI NET portal site has a little anoying box called “New @ MY” this box is mandatory and you can’t remove it or change its location.
But there is a little trick to remove it completely, instead of accessing the portal using the address:
http://my.saudi.net.sa/
You can use:
http://my.saudi.net.sa/?nofixed=1

    
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        November 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Dumping Mozilla for Firefox,Thuderbird combo
      
    
    
      
I decide to stop using Mozilla in favour of Firefox, Thuderbird combo.
Firefox is a stand alone browser, and Thuderbird is stand alone email client, both made by Mozilla foundation.
I make this decision since Mozilla package isn’t as current as neither Firefox, or Thuderbird, and I think I raed that Mozilla foundation will favour Firefox/Thuderbird.
Another advantage of two seperate programs for browsing and email, is the ability to upgrade one component without affecting the other, althought all Mozilla upgrade were very smooth.
    
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        November 21, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Working after Eid misery
      
    
    
      
Today is the second day of work after Eid vacation, I hardly got up from my bed today, as you know sleeping hours in Ramdan and Eid is dramatically fliped, I usually sleep after 6 am!! and wake up around 2pm.
I went to bed at 12 am but couldn’t sleep until 5:30 am.
Today I’ll try to stay awake all day, so I can fall sleep early in night.
    
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        November 13, 2004
      
    
    
      
        
      
    
    
      
    
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        November 9, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 1.0 released
      
    
    
      
Dump Internet Expolrer, and use.

 

    
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        November 9, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Eid vacation starting today
      
    
    
      
What are my plans? Going to my uncles farm near O’sheger.

    
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        November 8, 2004
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 5.3 Released
      
    
    
      
and it is now considered STABLE branch of FreeBSD, i.e. it is now ready for prodution.

    
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        November 1, 2004
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD port for PHP supports dynamic extensions (update)
      
    
    
      
Few months ago I wrote about php4-extensions as the way to install other PHP modules, php4-extensions is a meta port which mean it isn’t a real port, it is a port used to install other ports.
So when you try to install php4-extensions, and selected MySQL, and XML extensions, it will install the following ports:
 /usr/ports/databases/php4-mysql
 /usr/ports/textproc/php4-xml
and you can uninstall them separately.
This solve alot of issue for me, previously when I want to upgrade MySQL I have to uninstall PHP completly, and reinstall it again of course this mean upgrading all port used by PHP, which create a miss.
Now, I can reinstall only PHP MySQL extension only.
    
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        October 11, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Came back from Gitex in Dubai
      
    
    
      
More details to come, I have tons of work to catch on.

    
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        September 21, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Mozilla Arabic support improvments
      
    
    
      
Today I filled a Mozilla bug report about an old bug on handling Arabic paragraph, in the same day I received a feedback about this bug saying they couldn’t regenerate it on current versions. So I downloaded Firefox Preview Release and it really solved, I love Mozilla 🙂
Update: The bug still exists in Mozilla 1.7.3 🙁
Update: But it works with Mozilla 1.8 a 🙂

    
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        September 13, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Back from vacation
      
    
    
      
… so tired, I found out that I don’t relax on my vacations, from now on I need to include a relaxation period in all of my vacations.
One more thing, when I go back to work I really hate it, but we will see if the relaxation period will solve this.
About my vacation, I spent two days in Ras Tanura in Aramco compound, in my wife’s uncle home, Fahad, it was great the place is very nice with a sea view, they have very small but fun city.
Then I spent two days in Bahrain, nothing new their same place, same activities, we saw 5 movies and came back again … and that’s it.
    
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        September 7, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Going to Bahrain for the weekend
      
    
    
      
A short vacation 🙂

    
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        August 31, 2004
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET pool cup
      
    
    
      The place:



Our guest of honor Misfer Almaymouni who left SAUDI NET recently:


And the winner is: (this is my photo in case you don’t know me)


Panoramic view of the place
Some of the guys

All Photos
    
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        August 30, 2004
      
    
    
      
        FreeRADIUS version 1 released
      
    
    
      
RADIUS is the protocol used for authenticating users, it is used mainly by routers and NASes.
FreeRADIUS is the best open source RADIUS server available, it support many external databases, LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle.

    
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        August 21, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Cost of living in Riyadh
      
    
    
      
According to this link from CNN the cost of living in Riyadh is ranked #77 out of 144 cities.
I wonder with the current oil price where are we heading and the worst part that we aren’t getting a dime from it!

    
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        August 14, 2004
      
    
    
      
        More spam prevention using Spamhaus
      
    
    
      
Today I started using Spamhaus to help prevent spam, I use it now in addition to Spamcop.
It was triggered by many spam emails coming from the same range of IPs, so I tested it with Spamhaus and it blocked it.
Here is the code to add in Postfix main.cf file:
smtpd_client_restrictions =
        permit_mynetworks
        check_client_access hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/client_access
        reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org
        reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net
        permit


    
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        August 4, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Serious Security Hole In PuTTY
      
    
    
      
Putty is my favorite SSH client for windows.
Upgrade to 0.55, for more info check Slashdot

    
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        August 3, 2004
      
    
    
      
        SMPP client rewritten in PHP
      
    
    
      Today I ported my Python SMPP client library to PHP, I had to redesign the whole library because the old design was very bad, and with the new design it became very small, and trivial library.
Most of my work was on a library to convert between window-1256 charset used by most Arabic computers, to UTF-16 (big endian) used by GSM phones.
The new SMPP library supports long and flash messages, you can try it from SAUDI NET Portal.
    
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        August 2, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Supporting long, and flash SMS
      
    
    
      
Today Abdullah Aldosari my coworker insisted on working on long SMSs, he kept dreaming of them the last couple of days, so we sat together today, and we figured out how to do it.
It was fairly simple, in fact I found an old code that I wrote for sending operator logos which use this feature! Abdullah also searched for the way to send flash SMS, it was even simpler, all you need is to set a flag when sending the SMS and that’s it.
These new features will be introduced to SAUDI NET portal after proper testing (i.e. tomorrow 🙂
We are using a protocol called SMPP it is used to communicate with the SMS Center, the SMPP client library we are using is currently written in Python language, I am thinking of rewriting it in PHP  as soon as I find a good way to convert between character sets.
    
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        July 29, 2004
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD port for PHP supports dynamic extensions
      
    
    
      
In the past when you forget to add a PHP extension in FreeBSD you have to recompile the whole thing, but now PHP port support dynamic extensions, in fact PHP port doesn’t allow you to add any extensions, you have to add these extensions using a separate port.
There is one wrapper port called /usr/ports/lang/php4-extensions/ which will allow you to select modules to install.
Very nice indeed, even when I spent long time to figure out how to add extensions.
    
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        July 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Change PHPMyAdmin to view Arabic on English interface
      
    
    
      I love phpmyadmin, it is a web interface for MySQL DB server, I usually use the English interface, but the problem with English interface that it doesn’t show Arabic string, of course you can change the whole interface to Arabic, but I don’t understand anything from that interface.
So I played with PHPMyAdmin code so I can use English interface but using Arabic character set, here is how to do it:



# vi lang/english-iso-8859-1.inc.php

... change: $charset = 'iso-8859-1';

... to: $charset = 'windows-1256';


    
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        July 24, 2004
      
    
    
      
        MySQL replication is so simple
      
    
    
      
I just configured my first MySQL replication, it is very simple to configure, few configuration steps and it is done.
 The hardest thing is to figure the location of MySQL configuration file my.cnf under my FreeBSD, it doesn’t exists by default so you have to create it your self, it can be many place, I choosed /var/db/mysql/my.cnf to make reside with the datafiles.
 You can find a sample chapter from Jeremy Zawodny book, High Performance MySQL.
    
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        July 24, 2004
      
    
    
      
        My wife had a lasik surgery
      
    
    
      
It took around 15 minutes, it was little painfull in the first day, her vision is somehow blurry, the doctor says the blur will go away in the next 10 days.
 Lasik if you don’t know it is a surgery to correct the vision.
 http://lasik.bab.com/ 

    
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        July 18, 2004
      
    
    
      
        More about my car accident
      
    
    
      
Today the traffic department called me to telling that they found the car with the description I gave, but the color wasn’t silver it was gray! So they called me to change the paper I signed earlier. 
 Silver and gray is there really any difference between the two!?  
 The name of the guy who hit me and ran away was Abdullah Mohammed Alsalem. 
  
    
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        July 14, 2004
      
    
    
      
        PHP5 relaeased
      
    
    
      
With many amazing new features, is it going to be the defacto scripting language!
OnLamp article about PHP5 new features
 

    
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        July 12, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Amavisd + Spamassassin + ClamAV
      
    
    
      
Installing amavisd+Spamassassin+clamav

# cd /usr/ports/security/amavisd-new/
# make install
# cd /usr/ports/security/clamav/
# make install

Updating ClamAV virus defintation, every hour!:

# vi /usr/local/etc/freshclam.conf
... HTTPProxyServer proxy.saudi.net.sa
... HTTPProxyPort 8080
# freshclam
# crontab -e
... 43 * * * * /usr/local/bin/freshclam --quiet

Changing clamav setting to work as vscan user, same as amavisd:

# vi /usr/local/etc/clamav.conf
... # Change User to match amavid user
... User vscan
# chown -R vscan:vscan /var/run/clamav

    
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        July 10, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Just came from Beirut
      
    
    
      
Going to sleep now 🙂

    
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        June 30, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Free RHCE practice test
      
    
    
      
This is a practice exam for RedHat RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer Program)
My results so far: 50%, 70%, 80%, 70%, …

    
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        June 30, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Blogger Bookmarklet
      
    
    
      
A nice feature from Blogger called bookmaklet, it is a simple link that you drag-and-drop it on your browser link bar, to allow you write a new blog entry related to the current web site you are browsing. Cool!
Blogger Bookmarklet

    
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        June 28, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Clam AntiVirus and amavisd
      
    
    
      
After installing amavisd you need to edit the confiuration file to change some of the settings:
# vi /usr/local/etc/amavisd.conf
:
$mydomain = 'yourdomain.com';
:
$final_spam_destiny = D_PASS;
You also need to enable clamav section, then restart:
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/amavisd.sh restart
To allow amavisd-new to work with clamav you need to run clamav using the same user:
# vi /usr/local/etc/clamav.conf
... change user to:
 User vscan
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/clamav-clamd.sh restart

    
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        June 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Spamassassin is easy
      
    
    
      
I was planning to install spamassassin+amavisd+clamav on our mail server for a long time, but every time I try to do it, I quit after few tries.
But finally I got it, and it isn’t that hard at all, although I don’t understand everything yet, but it seems easy. Hopefully I’ll add some configuration hints for FreeBSD of course.

Spamassassin is SPAM mail detection software, it became the de facto standard in SPAM fighting.
ClamAV is an opensource antivirus program.
amavisd-new is a high-performance interface between mailer (MTA) and content checkers: virus scanners, and/or SpamAssassin.

    
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        June 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        BBCArabic RSS newsfeed
      
    
    
      
Finnaly I can remove my old BBC parsing script and replace it with RSS feed.
Arabic BBC RSS
I also found (from BBC links) a nice software for reading RSS called SharpReader, I didn’t try it but it looks cool!

    
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        June 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Al Arabiya news channel web site
      
    
    
      
Nice! Very clean and works well with Mozilla browser.

    
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        June 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Remove Spyware from your Window machine
      
    
    
      
If you use MS Internet Explorer and you have one of the following:
Many toolbars that you didn’t install, and you couldn’t remove.
Pop-up windows from nowhere, coming from all Internet web sites, even the ones you know they didn’t have any.
Slow machine.
Slow connection.
Then you diffently need to install Lavasoft AD-Aware, and remove all the ad, and spywares.
Just try it.

    
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        June 16, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Car accident update
      
    
    
      
I went to the traffic department to follow-up on my car accident report, I was told that the guy who hit me came and gave them his insurance -which won’t help since he escaped-, and they told me to go Car dealer (Al Hamza, Sheikh Almared) to get an estimate for the car repair.
After search for 20 minutes for the car dealer shop -the shop didn’t have a banner!!- I found it and they ask for 30 Riyals for the car estimate, they send me back to the Traffic department with a sealed envelope with the repair estimate, which was 1700 riyals.
The traffic department now will contact the guy to get the money from him, it could take months as they said!
Any way I’ll wait and see how our judicial system work.
    
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        June 4, 2004
      
    
    
      
        My car crashed by drunk driver
      
    
    
      
On my way to my parents home to help my sister with her math exam a drunk driver (I think) hit my car and escaped! I stopped him, and called the cups, they told me to get his car plate and leave him.
My friends told me that I am not going to get any money to repair my car from him, but I’ll try my best with the traffic department to catch him.
    
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        May 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET increase customers emails to 100MB
      
    
    
      
SAUDI NET got jealous from gmail for providing 1GB of free email service, so SAUDI NET will increase email quota to 100MB, to get SAUDI NET email you need to subscribe to one of SAUDI NET service, either Dialup, or DSL.

    
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        May 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Installing Fedora Linux on my machine
      
    
    
      What is Fedora?

Fedora is basically a hat, see image in Google

In the computer world Fedora is a new Linux distrbution sponsored by RedHat, and supported by open source community, it existed to replace RedHat free version Linux.
Dual booting howto

Using PartitionMagic I resized Windows XP partition, and added two new partitions, 9 GB for Linux, and 1 GB as FAT32 partition, to be shared between Windows XP and Linux.
I installed Linux, with GRUB (boot loader) installed in the partition (and not on MBR).
I rebooted the machine, then from Windows I used bootpart to add Linux to Windows boot option.

    
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        May 19, 2004
      
    
    
      
        ISU block blogspot.com
      
    
    
      
ISU (Internet Service Unit) is blocking all domains under blogspot.com, blogspot is used by Blogger.com to host its customers blogs.
ISU always block the whole domain when they find bad subdomains!!
I already filled unblocking request.

    
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        May 18, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Anyone interested on afkary.net
      
    
    
      
afkary.net domain will expire soon any one interested I can transfer the domain starting now.

    
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        May 17, 2004
      
    
    
      
        ssh tunneling = fast browsing
      
    
    
      
A while ago I tried tunneling proxy conection though ssh, you asked why … because ssh have a neat compression feature, it will compress all ssh communication between your client and the ssh server, and by tunneling HTTP proxy trafic through ssh you can speed up HTML page loading time, you can really see the difference.
Any way I had a problem of having to run ssh client every time I want to use the Internet, even when you want to check one small thing, it was kind of anoying to change the proxy from the localhost (thought tunneling) and connecting directly to the SAUDI NET proxy server.
Today I invested sometime to build small proxy auto configuration script, that will try to use the local proxy (compressed & tunneled) and if it fails it will try to connect directly to the proxy, here is the script, give it a try it really makes thing FAST.
    
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        May 16, 2004
      
    
    
      
        myweb under construction page
      
    
    
      
Misfer our talented designer designed new Under Construction page, this page will be the default page when the customer create new myweb account.

    
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        May 12, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Fouad playing with Blogger
      
    
    
      
Two days ago I talked with my brother Fouad about Blogger and it features, he couldn’t grasp the concept at first, but he subscribed to it, and played with it, and he created his first weblog.
Fouad isn’t computer savy, and he found Blogger useful may be you should try it your self if you didn’t yet.
I didn’t get the URL of Fouad Blogger yet, I’ll publish as soon as I get it.
    
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        May 12, 2004
      
    
    
      
        rayed.com points to rayed@myweb
      
    
    
      I forwarded request to www.rayed.com to http://myweb.saudi.net.sa/rayed, for the following reasons:

To promote using myweb service provided by SAUDI NET.
To replace my own blogging software with Blogger, I know I can make Blogger publish to rayed.com directly, but I didn’t want to publish in two locations.

I also migrated all entries from the my own software to Blogger, so nothing lost. (as if there anything worth saving!)
The most important one, is because myweb.saudi.net.sa is much faster than my own server, which is a very old machine, with very limited bandwidth.

    
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        May 12, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Another Blog from email
      
    
    
      
and this time from GMail.com

    
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        May 10, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Blogger.com new interface
      
    
    
      
Although I liked the old one, but the new is really cool, the colors are great, the interface seems more logical, and they got rid of the HTML frames.

    
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        May 9, 2004
      
    
    
      
        I got my GMail.com email account
      
    
    
      
I forgot to mention this earlier, but one week ago when I logged in to Blogger.com I got an invetation to try Gmail.com service, if you never heared of Gmail before, it is a webmail service provided by google.com and they give 1GB of space.

    
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        May 9, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Blogging from Email
      
    
    
      
Blogger is really very nice service 🙂
I entred this entry by sending an email message to special email e.g xxxx@blogger.com, and it just posted it to my web site, I start to love these guys.

    
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        May 9, 2004
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET website really sucks
      
    
    
      
SAUDI NET web site is really bad, we are trying to replace it since … well forever actually but we couldn’t, the marketing people signed a contract (!!!) with external company to deveploe the website.
and we are still waiting, it is really bad, and every time I see it I get very angry 🙁

    
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        May 5, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Dinner at STC executive club
      
    
    
      
The weather was nice and we witnesed a lonar eclipse too … unfortunately I forgot to take a picture for the eclipse 🙁

Check out other pictures

    
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        May 2, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Developing news paper site
      
    
    
      
It would be very interesting project to do, many ideas in my head but we will see what will comes from it.
I’ll definitely use CSS to support many printer friendly, light, handheld version of the web site, and will have RSS syndication.
and of course it will be compressed for faster download, what else … I’ll keep thinking
The worst part that it should be very simple to use, this would be hard to do, but I’ll try my best.
    
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        May 2, 2004
      
    
    
      
        I bought new Canon digital camera
      
    
    
      
I like it a lot, although my pictures (most of them) look blury.

This is not my home, but I liked it

    
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        May 2, 2004
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET myweb rocks
      
    
    
      
I really like it free web space, no ads, my own name, and fast, yummy!!

    
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        April 30, 2004
      
    
    
      
        My first log
      
    
    
      
Hello every one, I will write here about my interests, I’ll mainly write about college life, homes, resturants, coffee shops, malls, etc…

    
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        April 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        I got gmail email account
      
    
    
      
I got an invetation to join beta testing of Google Mail (GMail), when you think that email can’t get better Google surprise you with many inovations.

    
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        April 17, 2004
      
    
    
      
        I can’t sleep
      
    
    
      
Nothing to say … I am very borde so I thought I would update my website.
Sorry!

    
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        July 9, 2003
      
    
    
      
        afkary.net
      
    
    
      
I know it has been long time since the last update to the website, I was very lasy lately.
The part were I wasn’t lazy I work in a new site called afkary.net, Afkary means “My Ideas”, no it doesn’t talk about my own ideas, it will be service to allow users to create their own eMagazine, without the need to install any software, just take the sample site, and customize it to your taste.
Still working on it to make it really easy, and useful.
    
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        April 7, 2003
      
    
    
      
        New Design
      
    
    
      
I got sick from the green design … I don’t like this one a lot, but at least not green!

    
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        February 2, 2003
      
    
    
      
        I became HP OpenView Certified Consultant in Network Management
      
    
    
      
I passed “HP OpenView Certified Consultant in Network Management exam” today, very long exam, but very useful!

    
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        January 9, 2003
      
    
    
      
        I just passed SCDME exam
      
    
    
      
I just passed SCDME exam (Sun Certified Data Management Engineer), it was very tough exam.
The exam has two flavours one emphasis on Veritas Volume Manager, and the one I took emphais on Solstice DiskSuite.
Certificate Page

    
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        December 23, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Denmark > Copenhagen > DigiQuant
      
    
    
      
I spent a week in Copenhagen, Denemark.
I went for training on , it was very good.
The weather was very cold in the first day, but I think I got used to it. Unfortunately I didn’t have time for sight seeing.
Picture of me and some colleges

    
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        October 20, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Updated resume online
      
    
    
      
Not hunting for a job, but for the sake of updating it.
Resume

    
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        September 2, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Back to Riyadh
      
    
    
      
Salam again, I am back in Riyadh, I was in vacation for the past month I visited my family in Washington DC, I also visited Naiagra Falls and Montreal in Canada, Anapolis, Baltimore, San Deigo, Las Vegas.
I spent around 5 days for travelling, I really need very long sleep now.

    
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        July 27, 2002
      
    
    
      
        I became Sun Certified Network Administrator
      
    
    
      
Finally, after long delays -due to voucher purchase problems- I passed a Sun Certified Network Administrator exam.
Next plan?! I don’t know!! I am thinking of taking Java certifecations, but who knows.

    
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        July 6, 2002
      
    
    
      
        My Chat System
      
    
    
      
Recently I was developing a Chat system software that can be used from regular browser window, the requirement for the client can be found on almost all browsers, it needs to run JavaScript1 .5+, Java1 .0+, as far I know there are some versions of WindowsXP that don’t have Java at all, of course you can download WindowsXP Java plugin from http://www.sun.com/.
Give a test drive Chat!

    
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        July 1, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Web Server upgrade
      
    
    
      
Today I upgraded the server I am using to Apache1 .3. 26it should fix security hole found on versions older than1 .3.26.
I also upgraded PHP to the version4 .2.1

    
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        April 23, 2002
      
    
    
      
        SCNA book arrived
      
    
    
      
Last week I orderer “Solaris 8 Network Adminstrator Certification training guide” to help me preparing for Sun Certified Network Admin (SCNA) exam, It just arrived 🙂 I am planing to take the exam in the 2nd May.
The books isn’t very good, but it is the only one I found about the subject.

    
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        April 6, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Sun Certified System Admin on Solaris8
      
    
    
      
I finished the SCSA second exam, and I passed it 🙂
Now I became “Sun Certified System Admin on Solaris8 “, I am also planing to take “Sun Certified Network Admin on Solaris8 “, SCNA as soon as I get its material.

    
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        April 2, 2002
      
    
    
      
        I passed Sun Certified System Admin (SCSA) first exam
      
    
    
      
Last thursday I passed SCSA first exam, and I’ll take the second exam this thursday, if I pass it (Inshallah) I’ll be SCSA 🙂
If I got SCSA, I am planing to take SCNA (Sun certified Network Admin)
Wish me luck 😉

    
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        February 13, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Me and my lovely wife in Maldives
      
    
    
      
Hay ,, we are in Maldives, very long journey but it worth it, we traveled from Riyadh at8 , 30to Dubi, we arrived at11 :30, and waited theier till3 :30, then we took another plain to Maldives, but the journey wasn’t over, when we reached Male maldives capital we took small sea plane to Sun Island were we will stay,we have to wait for about1 : 30hour to rise the plane,the sea plane wasn’t bad but we were very tired and we slept on the journey, when we reached Sun Island we had to take a small boat to reach it.
But once we reached it, we forgot all the bad things, very lovely island, very magical beach, crystal clear water, real green palm trees, oh I am very excited to wake up again and see it again, we took Water Bungalow, it is small room inside the sea, yes inside the sea, we actually hear the waves beneth us, we have small stairs that reach the water, an we have our own sun dick were no on can see you 🙂
what else … the food is good, prices are good, and you didn’t have to carry money at all every thing will be billed to your room, and we have Internet in our room also 🙂
More to come in ten years 😉
    
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        October 13, 2001
      
    
    
      
        Mozilla9 .5
      
    
    
      
Today I converted my browser from Opera to Mozilla9 .5, I was running Opera and Mozilla9 .X for the past couple of weeks, Opera is very fast but sometimes it gives poor view for some web sites, Mozilla is better in viewing web sites, but it is kind of slow, another thing I like with Opera is the tabbed view, all web sites are in the same window, and you tab to switch between them, but now Mozilla9 . 5have this feature, so I converted directly 🙂
I also moved my emails from Netscpe4 .X to the new Mozilla, a good thing about it, that you can use multiple email accounts 🙂
UPDATE: the email serach is very slow, and it doesn’t have spell-checking 🙁
    
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        October 13, 2001
      
    
    
      
        No news!!
      
    
    
      
Is a good news 🙂
No really my life is getting very boring, long cycle of routines 🙁
Is that what I want to do for the rest of my life?!
Okay, let us take a moment to think what is wrong in the picture, first my private life (yes I do have one 🙂 I am engaged for abount three months now (this is a news isn’t it) … any way I didn’t want to tell you, don’t ask why, may be because it private, any way I already did.
Every thing is going ok on my private life, every thing is getting very clear, all the dates are known now, nothing in the near future yet, so I am starting to get used to the situation (Is this good or bad!!)
Work is another story, I don’t know what to say about it, but I really start to hate it, things take forever to finish, every aspect is improving but nothing finishes, I’ll taslk about it in the near future.
    
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        September 4, 2001
      
    
    
      
        Redesign!!
      
    
    
      
I didn’t get any design ideas, so I went back to something similar to what I built, the news section is built from pre downloaded files, which will make the page runs much faster.
I wish I have more time to play with my site again …

    
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        June 23, 2001
      
    
    
      
        10 days without any change
      
    
    
      
The last few weeks were very busy, My mothere had to return back to Washington DC, and we have to finish many issues here in Riyadh, my brother Hussam went with my mother too, it is his first time in non Arabic country, he was kind of nervous, but I am sure he will enjoy it.

    
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        June 13, 2001
      
    
    
      
        New Website, new weblog :)
      
    
    
      
Hi there welcome back to rayed.com, still nothing here, I don’t have many plans yet, the only thing I am planing to do is to make it worth visiting.
Keep coming 🙂

    
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            Category: Life
          
        
        
            
    
      
        April 6, 2008
      
    
    
      
        قيم: موقع تقييم المطاعم
      
    
    
      

“قيّـم هو موقع تفاعلي لتقييم المطاعم. يعطي قيّـم اعضاءه كامل الحرية في اضافة وتحرير محتوياته, مثلاً كأضافة اي مطعم في اي مدينة في العالم, التصويت على مستواه, كتابة تقييمات مفصلة عن تجاربهم و ملاحظاتهم, النقاش عن تفاصيل المطعم, وغير ذلك.”

qaym.com
اعتقد اننا في حاجة الى المزيد من المواقع التي تزيد من وعي المستهلكين، وتزيد من الضغط على المنتجين (المطاعم في هذه الحالة) لتحسين مستواها.
شكراً جهاد العمار على تطوير الموقع 🙂
    
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        March 10, 2008
      
    
    
      
        معرض الرياض للكتاب باقي 5 ايام
      
    
    
      باقي 5 ايام فقط على معرض الرياض الدولي للكتاب، اذا لم تذهب حتى الآن اذهب.
المعرض يقام سنوياً ولكن للأسف لم احضره خلال العشر السنوات اللتي مضت (ان لم يكن اكثر)، خلال هذه الفترة لم اكن اقرأ سوى كتب الحاسب الانجليزية، والانترنت طبعاً 🙂 لكن هذه السنة قمت بزيارة المعرض مرتين، مرشحة للزيادة.
كان لدي العديد من الاعتقادات عن المعرض وهي ما منعتني من الحضور كل هذه السنين:

الكتب العربية مملة
المعرض مزدحم
عدم وجود مواقف للسيارات
لا يوجد كتب جديدة تستحق الذهاب

بالطبع كل هذه الانطباعات تغيرت بشكل او بآخر، فالكتب العربية ليست مملة، او على الاقل ليس كلها، لكن عليك ان تجد ما ينساب ذوقك، فانا وجدت الكتب الاجتماعية الساخرة، وادب الرحلات مسلية ومفيدة للغاية، حتى انني بدأت اقرأ الروايات الاجنبية المترجمة (الحديثة) مع انها كانت ابعد ما يخطر على بالي.
    
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        February 24, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Mozilla Messaging: conquering the enterprise?
      
    
    
      
Mozilla Foundation the people behind Firefox are launching a new Foundation Mozilla Messaging, their objective is to improve how people communicate on the Internet. Of course they will start with my favorite email client Thunderbird :

The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience.

If Thunderbird improve its collaboration features it will be great contender in the Enterprise Collaboration arena, watch out “Lotus Notes” and “Outlook”.
    
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        February 20, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Moving from Nokia to Sony Ericsson
      
    
    
      
After spending couple of years with Siemens, and 6 years with Nokia, I decided to convert my mobile to SonyEricsson, I switched to SonyEricsson T650i.
So far I like it, the OS is fast and so far reliable, the screen is very colorful and smooth, the camera is descent with auto focus feature which I love, and I really loved the design. Need sometime to get used to the back button.
    
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        February 17, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Valentine in Riyadh
      
    
    
      This is really funny 🙂



    
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        January 29, 2008
      
    
    
      
        My Hong Kong tips
      
    
    
      Two separate friends are visiting Hong Kong soon, they asked for tips about Hong Kong this it what I remembered, hope others find it useful.
Overall Hong Kong is very beautiful and modern city, hotel prices are bit high (with the weak dollar everything is), transportation is very good and efficient, the food is good and you can find Halal food in many places but you have to ask for.
    
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        January 27, 2008
      
    
    
      
        This post left empty on purpose
      
    
    
      
    
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        January 20, 2008
      
    
    
      
        وداعاً امي منيرة
      
    
    
      انتقلت إلى رحمة الله جدتي الغالية “منيرة بنت عبد العزيز الزامل”، توفيت يوم أمس قرابة الساعة العاشرة والنصف صباحاً عن عمر يناهز 87 لتلحق بجدي “عبد الرحمن بن عبد العزيز الراشد” رحمة الله عليه بعد 58 سنة، قضت معظمها رحمة الله عليها في تربية أطفالها الستة ثم العناية بأمها رحمة الله عليهما.

جزاك الله ألف خير، وغفر لك، وأنزلك الفردوس الأعلى يا رب.

لا تنسوها بدعائكم
    
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        January 15, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
      
    
    
      

Great quote from Leonardo da Vinci.
More Leonardo da Vinci  quotes
    
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        January 3, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Moving rayed.com email to GMail
      
    
    
      I am moving all my emails (except work email) to one single email using my own domain (myname at mydomain), and I am going to use Google Apps service, basically I am getting GMail for my own domain, I even have my own start page and tons of applications.
The provided storage is unbeatable, and after Google provided IMAP service, it is really tempting.
So guys if you want to contact me please do at myname at mydomain.
    
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        January 2, 2008
      
    
    
      
        ماهو ارخص سوبر ماركت في الرياض؟
      
    
    
      أمانة مدينة الرياض طورت برنامج لقياس تنافسية محلات بيع السلع الاستهلاكية، البرنامج يقارن اسعار مجموعة من السلع الاستهلاكية بين مجموعة محلات.
صفحة المؤشر
نشر المؤشر وزيارته الدورية يساعد على زيادة المنافسة بين المحلات مما يفيد المستهلك، اللي يبدو انها صاير ملطشة هذي الايام 🙁
    
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        December 8, 2007
      
    
    
      
        The Story of Stuff
      
    
    
      
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.
    
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        November 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Pictures of the new 1/2 Riyal
      
    
    
      Without any announcement Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) released the new 1/2 Riyal, it replaces the old coin, with special technologically advanced features, like UOO (Use Only Once), and WCAC (Who Cares About Consumers)
Old 1/2 Riyal photo:

New currency photo:

Seriously SAMA I am sick of shops handing me a chewing gum instead of 1/2 Riyal, and you have to do something about it, my suggestions (some of them not related to SAMA):
    
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        October 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Leaving SAUDI NET
      
    
    
      This week, I started my new job at CITC, I am leaving STC, I’ve spent the last 6 years working for SAUDI NET and SAUDI DATA.
Alhamdu Lelah, the last 6 years were amazing, I learned too many thing, made friends with too many people.
Thanks to everyone participated in this great experience, and special thank to Abdullah Aldosari who add the extra spices on it 😉
    
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        October 3, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Where to buy computer books in Riyadh?
      
    
    
      Al Mayman closed

Ba Shamakh closed

Jarir out dated books
Where can I find computer books in Riyadh? any suggestions.
    
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        August 26, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Back to Riyadh
      
    
    
      Guess which countries I have been to during my vacation, my Flickr photos could help:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayed/
    
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        July 20, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Convert videos for iPod
      
    
    
      My son Abdullah is addicted to Dora the Explorer cartoons, and since I am planing to travel in the summer I am looking for ways to take his DVDs with me using my iPod.
I found this free software that convert videos to iPod ready format, so far it is doing very good job.

Koyote Free Ipod video converter
    
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        July 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        My brother Khalid got a Wii
      
    
    
      
The last computer game I spent more than 1 hour playing was Crash Bandicoot on Sony play station 1, after this game I lost interest on all computer games, I even started to hate them specially football related game (e.g. Winning Eleven), for some reason I couldn’t train my self to hit the sequence square-square-triangle to do whatever it do in PS.
Few months ago I read about Nintendo Wii and it is new revolutionary controller, the Wii remote, it is basically a game controller that you wave in the space and can detect 3D motion. You can use Wii remote as a sword, baseball bat, tennis racquet, human hand, you name it.
    
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        June 29, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Wanted!! Cholula hot sauce
      
    
    
      
Few months ago I went to Fuddruckers restaurant, and I ordered grilled chicken salad, I am not a salad guy and the salad tasted bit plane, so I went to the sauce bar and took the most exotic looking sauce, I grabber Cholula hot sauce with its distinct large round wooden cap and tried it with my salad, the flavor was amazing. I even took a picture of the sauce trying to find it in local stores.
    
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        June 2, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Fly Sama
      
    
    
      
Two weeks ago I visited Jeddah city for the first time since 1990, yes 17 years since my last visit!
I made my flight reservation on Saudi Airlines, and the only return flight I found was on Friday 7am, and since the flight is so early it will ruin my Thursday too, I decided to try the new economical air lines, Sama or Nas.
I visited the two sites, and I made my decision on how good the website was.
    
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        May 27, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Abdullah Aldosari left SAUDI NET
      
    
    
      After spending 6 years at SAUDI NET, Abdullah Aldosari has left us and joined Mobily.
Abdullah was our system architect, with large arsenal of skills talents, we have working very tightly all these years. SAUDI NET sure lost a very valuable team member.
Abdullah it has been a pleasure and honor to work with you.
    
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        May 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Muntaqa the best of Arabic email groups
      
    
    
      

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.
Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.
In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere 🙂
Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.
    
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        April 23, 2007
      
    
    
      
        IE6 in Ubuntu
      
    
    
      Ubuntu Linux is really easy OS with many interesting features, one of the best sites to help you with your Ubuntu experince is Ubuntu Guide, the site has many useful tips on how to do thing in Ubuntu.
One of the tips is how to install Internet Explorer under Ubuntu, I saw Fahad AlShenaifi do it, he is our Ubuntu expert since he is using it exclusively for the past year or so.
    
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        April 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        العربية.نت منبر من لايستحقون منبر
      
    
    
      استغرب على العربية.نت تركيزهم على بعض الاخبار التي لاتستحق ذكر، لكنها تثير الجماهير.

وعلى عكس القناة المرئية فهي لاتبدو بمظهر متزن، بل هي اشبه بصحف التابلويد.

هل سنظل نتابع اخبار المرتدين، والشاذين، والعاهرات، لفترة طويلة على هذا الموقع ام سيؤدي دورة المفترض كموقع اخباري متزن. 
    
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        March 9, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Best times to enjoy ٌRiyadh
      
    
    
      Riyadh is a very big city, with 5.5 Million person sharing it streets, driving in Riyadh can be one of the worst experiences you may ever have.

Many people nowadays avoid the pressure of commuting and prefer to stay at home, I am a big example 🙁

The secret to enjoy the city is to use taxi to go wherever you want, and preferably stay in the back seat, and void the habit of looking at the road and try to enjoy the ride, you will be surprised of how many new things changed without you noticing it.

The other option to enjoy the city is Weekend mornings, Thursday morning is the best, business are open and the traffic is lighter that other days, Friday morning is nice with no one in the roads, but there is no places to go 🙁 may be you will find small fool restaurants, it can be ideal if you want to explore new places in Riyadh.
    
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        March 3, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Fahad weblog
      
    
    
      My dear Friend Fahad AlShenaifi finally found a time to launch his blog, http://fahadblog.com/wordpress/
The blog in English, and talk about Ubuntu, computer security, and him self.
Don’t miss his photo gallery.
    
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        January 21, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Unleash the power of RSS, use Google Reader
      
    
    
      Few weeks ago I started using Google Reader, and so far it is amazing. Basically you subscribe all your RSS feeds you are interested in Google Reader, and instead of visiting 10 or 20 website, you visit Reader page to get the latest updates.
The integration with Firefox is amazing, just click on RSS icon and you can add it directly to Google Reader, very easy.
I used to use Thunderbird for a while for RSS, but after I set it up I forgot to use it. The subscription method is bit more complex than Google reader, and lack of a single folder for all of my RSS feeds make it useless.
    
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        January 7, 2007
      
    
    
      
        SAMA sending us to the 80s
      
    
    
      Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) lately is doing a horrible job with SPAN network, SPAN is Saudi Arabia system for paying using your bank card.
In the last 4 months, most transactions from local store fails, which force many business and customer to fall back to an older technology, Cash!!
I am not used to carrying a lot of cash with me, and rely on my bank card to buy goods.
    
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        January 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Saudi Arabia is the 8th fattest country on Earth
      
    
    
      According to this website:

http://linkdonkey.blogspot.com/2007/01/fattest-countries-on-earth.html

Saudi Arabia is the 8th fattest country on Earth. Other Arab countries are also included!
Does the government know about this?

What do you suggest to do about it.
10) Emirates – 25.9 men/39.9 women

9) Palestine – 23.9 men/42 women

8) Saudi Arabia – 26.4 men/44 women

7) French Polynesia – 36.3 men/ 44.3 women

6) Qatar – 34.6 men/45.3 women

5) Nieue – 15 men/46 women

4) Jordan – 32.7 men/59.8 women

3) Samoa – 32.9 men/63 women

2) Tonga – 46.6% men / 70.3% women

1) Nauru – 80.2% men / 78.6% women
    
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        December 5, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Back in Riyadh
      
    
    
      since Saturday 3 am, but I just got recovered from the jet lag.

Hopefully I’ll post my trip highlight and photos soon.
    
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        November 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        On vacation :)
      
    
    
      I am currently on vacation in Thailand, so far I love it. Really beautiful and clean despite being crowded in some areas.
Hopefully I’ll post more about in the coming days. Meanwhile checkout out my photos on Flickr:

rayed @ Flickr
    
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        November 2, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My DSL is back :)
      
    
    
      Extremely slow but still DSL. My phone line got off line for more than a month, after that phone worked but with out DSL for another 2 weeks, during this time I only connect using 28K dial up connection, which is really really slow. 
Update: I upgraded to 512K and it is awesome, it wasn’t slow Windows was downloading tons of updates 🙂
    
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        October 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Car stolen this time mine!
      
    
    
      Yesterday I went to Jarir Bookstore between exist 5 and 6, and when I came back to my car I found the passenger glass smashed and all my stuff scattered on the car. Fortunately, I never leave anything in my car, so nothing got stolen, but fixing the damage would cost around 1000 SR.
My brother car got stolen 500m from my Jarir Bookstore near Saco, both accidents happened in less than 6 months period!!
    
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        October 24, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 2 and IE 7
      
    
    
      Recently the 2 most popular browsers IE and Firefox released a new version.
Firefox is already a very good product so improving it is very hard 🙂 The most important new feature is the online spell checker which is really lovely. It also has a new theme, I didn’t like that much but it might take some time to get used to.
IE 7 in the other hand is really impressive (compared to IE 6 of course), it has tab browsing at last, the theme is really really good, the new font rendering engine is really smooth and clear it feels like a Mac.
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        September 16, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My brother car got stolen again!! this time the whole car!!!
      
    
    
      Few months ago my brother Fouad went to SACO hardware store, unfortunately he forgot his wallet in the car, as soon as he remembered it he went back to the car to find the window broken and all his belongings stolen, including his wallet and his work briefcase, he reported the accident to his bank within few minutes to deactivate his VISA card, but it was too late they thief already purchased 17,000 SR worth of good including laptops and mobile phones, all this happened in less than an hour!!!! Until he is still talking to the bank to return it back.
    
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        August 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        New Thunderbird checklist
      
    
    
      Check all IMAP folders:

By default Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new messages, but since we use server side filter emails don’t have to go to inbox and sometimes go directly to destionation folder.

Fortunaltely Tunderbird can be configured to check all folders, but it has to be done manually, put the follwoing lines in “user.js”:



// Download mail from all accounts on startup

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);



The file doesn’t exists by default so you need to create it in your “profile” filder, this link will help you to locate your “profile” folder:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#profile
    
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        August 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Installing Ubuntu Linux 6.06
      
    
    
      
Today I installed the new Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop, and I wanted to share my experince.
I took me a while to find out how to install it, after I rebooted from CD, and selected Start/Install a live Ubuntu system showed up, I thought I downloaded the live CD version of Ubuntu, but I remember that I raed “Install” during booting, so I rebooted again to try to install the system, same thing happen, I gave up and tried to play with the live CD version, then I found the “Install Ubuntu” icon on the desktop!!
    
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        August 12, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Don’t super size me!
      
    
    
      
Yesterday I visited one of my favourite fast food resturants, Herfy, and I order my usual meal “Super Herfy”. It usually cost 15 SR, but when I ordered it he asked me for 17 SR!! then I remembered that some resturants super size your meal without asking, I usually expect this kind of practice from “Hardee’s” and “KFC” not from Herfy.
I hate super sizing in general, because they super size the french fries and the drink, and I am not a big fan of both, and the medium serving is more than enough for me. But if you are offering super sizing my burgers this is a different story 🙂
    
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        June 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Testing Google AdSense Images
      
    
    
      It has been 4 months since I put Google ads on my site, and so far the result are rediclousy funny, I only earned $4 🙂 , I didn’t expect to get anything at all, and even if I did I doubt that they will send to Saudi Arabia.
Today, I noticed an ad that I didn’t like and it appeared very frequently, so I decided to block it, fortunately Google have a mechanisim for that but it will take some time, so I decided to switch from text ads to image ads, and change the location of the banner to better place, and I will wait to see how it will affect my earnings.
    
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        June 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Thunderbird extension for Arabic
      
    
    
      Thunderbird is a great email client, it has very good support for international languages, and it displays Arabic emails without any problems, the only problem that I face with it is when writing Arabic emails, unfortunately Thunderbird doesn’t have shortcut or button to change the writing direction from left-to-right used by most western languages, to right-to-left used for Arabic.
But through the power of extensions you can install this small extension (37K) that will add 2 new buttons in Compose window, one for changing the direction from LTR->RTL, and vice versa.
    
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        June 8, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh Newspaper world cup vote and win
      
    
    
      Alriyadh Newspaper is giving away 25 one year subscription, one subscription for each game day in FIFA world cup 2006, all you need to do is to guess the result of each match, of course the more matches you get correct the more chance for you to win, to vote go to alriyadh world cup site http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup/, and it is absolutely free, no need for 5 SR SMS to subscribe, and if you get the result right you really have good chance to win.

Update:

“All” correct guesses will get 50% discount on Arliyadh Newspaper subscription, so it will become 300SR instead of 600SR.
    
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        June 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Finally I upgraded WordPress
      
    
    
      Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session
Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.
    
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        May 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com Worldcup 2006 website
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com launched a new website for covering the FIFA world cup 2006, the website can be found here http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup.
The new site isn’t a regular news website, it is a new web application specifically designed for the world cup, it would be also updated in real time, i.e. you can follow any match events while it is still in play, of course you will still find regular coverage like news, and photos.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Greylisting: New weapon to fight Spam
      
    
    
      Last Tuesday, I enabled Geylisting on SAUDI NET mail servers, and you can see the decrease of spam we are getting (the blue line):

The first day of enabling greylisting we got many complaints about delayed emails, but after that all emails flow with delays.
To learn more check Greylist @ Wikipedia
    
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        May 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com wins ICT Excellence Awards
      
    
    
      Yesterday, Alriyadh.com awarded the Middle East ICT Excellence Award in the “Print and Electronic Media of the Year (Print)” category from the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute.
Alriyadh Newspaper covered the story, and we received a great response from many people, thanks everyone:

«الرياض»تحصل على جائزةالشرق الأوسط في تقنية المعلومات والاتصالات لأفضل موقع الكتروني
«الرياض» تحصل على جائزة أفضل موقع إلكتروني في الشرق الأوسط
موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني.. عمل دؤوب وتطوير دائم(screen shots for alriyadh.com since opening)
السحيباني: انتظروا المزيد من التطوير في موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني
شباب سعودي يتوج «الرياض» الإلكتروني باللقب
تقنيون سعوديون: فخورون بفوز «الرياض» .. والجائزة ذهبت لمن يستحقها
قراء «الرياض» يتفاعلون مع الفوز

Special thanks to Ahmad Alsuwailm for the great coverage.
    
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        May 16, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Mac buying update
      
    
    
      Today I contacted ADAM -the Apple distributer in Jeddah- by email and they replied after 20 minutes, which is a good thing, here is the reply:

Our branch in Riyadh is for whole sale only, but we can send you what ever you need from Jeddah.

The intel iMac 20″ is for 7500SR not including shipping.

In another front Apple announced the new MacBook which replaced the iBook, it cost $1099 which is really attractive, but with only 13″ screen, it can be a good gift though.
    
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        May 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Apple store in Riyadh?
      
    
    
      Today I went to Apple Store in Riyadh looking for a Mac, I was interested in the 17″ iMac, but after seeing the 20″ iMac the 17″ won’t satisfy me, it was really amazing and looks much prettier in real life.
The bad side is the price, the 17″ cost 6500SR ($1730), and the 20″ cost 8400SR ($2240), keep in mind that in the US the 17″ cost $1299 ($430 difference), and the 20″ cost $1699 ($541 difference).
    
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        May 12, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Convert to Mac! Is it time?
      
    
    
      Every few years I think of buying a Mac machine, usually it happens after Apple annonce new cool thing, first the PowerPC CPU which was really amazing back in the 90s, then with Mac OS X being built on top of UNIX, then lately with the introduction of Intel based Macs.
Also 6 months ago my friend Misfer bough a PowerBook, and he loves s much.
So is it time to convert to Mac, Mac machines are generally more expensive than Windows machines, especially here in Saudi Arabia, and I only know one store that sells Macs.
    
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        May 6, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Firefox Google toolbar : uninstall now
      
    
    
      I noticed that Firefox takes more than 100MB from my memory, I thought it would cache something and I didn’t get that much thought, specially when it very clever to adjust the cache based on my memory. But yesterday it took 170MB from my notebook 256MB, this huge!!
Today I chatted with Abdullah about Firefox memory consumption, and he said it is normal on his machine, Strange! I restarted Firefox on Safemode to see if anything in my settings or extension are wrong. Yeppy! Firefox back to normal in 20MB range.
    
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        April 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Genius, my favorite mouse
      
    
    
      A while ago I bought an “Orange” mouse for my parents home, I bought it based on a recommendation from a sales man at “echo” electronic store. I thought optical mouses reached apoint where all mouses are the same, I was wrong. “orange” mouse was very stupid, jumping all the time and it drove my crazy.
So when I went to computer complex at Olaya to buy my DSL modem, I decided to buy a mouse for my parents computer, and since I have a good Genius mouse I bought another Genuis mouse for 20SR (Ibought mine for 30SR 3 years ago), and what a difference between the two. Genuis mouse was very wasy moving and no jumping all over the screen, I loved it.
    
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        April 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        DSL access at last :)
      
    
    
      After three months delay from the inital plan I finally got DSL access.
My friend Abdulaziz Alqudhibi offered me NetGear DSL Modem/Router/Access point for really great price but it will take two days to install, but I couldn’t wait so I went to the market and bought a SpeedTouch 585, I hope I won’t regret it

    
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        April 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        الحليفة، مزرعة في وادي
      
    
    
      
الحليفة هي مزرعة صغيرة اشتراها عمي عبدالعزيز قبل قرابة السنة، وعلى الرغم من صغر المزرعة التي لا يتجاوز مساحتها 5000 متر فانها معروفة لدى الكثير من سكان الوشم.

تقع المزرعة بالقرب من مدينتي “اثيثية” و “مرات”، والمزرعة موجودة داخل احد الاودية، ويحدها من الغرب سد الحليفة.

ارجوا ان تستمع بالصور مثلما استمعت انا بزيارتها.

   
    
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        March 19, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Saudi credit cards are useless
      
    
    
      It cost 150SR per year and I never use it in the Kingdom, even abroad I use for reservation only, because the last time I used it to pay for my hotel stay I couldn’t get approval for a rented car because the hotel held more money than the cost of my room, and my credit card limit was reached, so I had to pay double in cash 🙁
To make thing worse, I tried to purchase a product from the Internet using my credit card and they refused to process my credit card most likely because it is Saudi card.
    
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        March 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        1000 Mabrook Eyad
      
    
    
      My brother Eyad graduated from Aman University.
1000 Mabrook Eyad


Sorry for the photo bad quality, I took it using my phone from the TV.
    
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        March 2, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My new 80GB USB hard disk
      
    
    
      
I love it, I backed up everything Pictures, Movies, PDF books, ISO images, everything you can image, I wounder why I didn’t buy one earlier.
My brother in law Turki Almuamer suggests that I should buy one, after his laptop go stolen from Dubai airport with all of his data :(, sorry for your loss Turki, and thank you for the suggestion, and another thanks to Abdullah Aldosari for suggestion on where to buy it.
    
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        February 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        rayed.com the first result in Google
      
    
    
      Finally my website http://rayed.com/ became the first result in Google when searching for “Rayed”:

http://www.google.com/search?q=rayed
For years and years when you search for my name you will get X-Ray related sites, because the past of the verb “ray” is “rayed”.
    
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        February 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        BBS News script no longer work
      
    
    
      Long time ago I built a PHP script that fetch and parse Arabic BBC news and format them in Javscript format, this can be used by adding few HTML code in your website.
The script located at: http://rayed.com/bbcjs.php3
I stopped the script more than 5 years ago, but until now I found many entries in my log asking for that file, so I decide to take an action, I put the file back but I put a warning message to notify the user that the script is no longer working.
    
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        February 4, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 1.5.0.1 upgrade
      
    
    
      Few days ago while browsing my favourite websites, a pop-up showed asking me to install Firefox 1.5.0.1 … WOW, I didn’t have to re-download 4.5MB for Firefox again, this really nice feature.
It also appears to me that the new version 1.5.0.1 much better than the old one, at least in memory consumption, I like it.
    
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        February 3, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Cheese Steak @ Subway
      
    
    
      







Everyone who know me knows that I love Subway subs, but recently I switched to Quiznos mainly because they toast the sandwiches, yummy my mouth start watering 🙂
But two days ago I got tired from Quiznos so I went back to Subway and I tried the “Cheese Steak”, oh my god, it is really delicious!
The worst thing about Subway that you need to know which topping and sauce is good with what, and of course if you get something wrong it could ruin your sandwich.
    
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        January 16, 2006
      
    
    
      
        After 8 months of waiting, the Avalon arrived
      
    
    
      Finally after 8 months of waiting, and many calls and visits to Abdul Latif Jameel my new Avalon arrived.

    
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        January 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Back to Riyadh :)
      
    
    
      
    
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        January 8, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Photos from Konstanz, Germany
      
    
    
      Here are two photos I took today when visiting Konstanz, I forgot my Canon camera so I took these photos with my Nokia phone, surprisingly they look good. Click to enlarge.


    
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        January 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        In Germany now
      
    
    
      So no real updates for a while, it is freezing in here, a lot of pictures in the near future.
    
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        December 29, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Finally DSL access :)
      
    
    
      but after two months 🙁

STC is under going a massive deployment in DSL lines in 2006, they announced that they will increase the number of DSL lines kingdom wide from 50,000 line to 500,000 line by the end of 2006!

So I decided to call the STC service number 907, and order DSL, they gave me an appointment today to tell me if the line is ready or not, no called me, so I called and they told the “Moather” exchange -which my area belongs to- will get DSL access in 26/1/1427 Hejjri which corresponds to 25/2/2006 according to IslamicFinder

I’ll be waiting.
    
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        December 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Refresh firefox, and make it faster
      
    
    
      Today I tried to install LiveHTTPHeaders extension and I had to kill FireFox in the middle of installation process, so I ended up with half installed extension,  I tried to install it again to find out two copies of the same extension one working the other just showing in the list without being able to do anything with it.
Then I decided to remove manually, to find out 340M temporary files in the profile directory, so I decided to replace the complete profile, and create new one again.
    
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        December 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Writing Arabic emails under Thunderbird
      
    
    
      Thunderbird is my favourite email client, I really love it.

The only problem I face is when writing an Arabic email, the problem is with changed the direction of text from “Left to Right” (ltr) to “Right to Left” (rtl).


The trick works like this:

From the toolbar change the text alignment to the right.
Double click on the line.
The “Advanced Property Editor” will popup, it will allow you to add any custom attribute to the current section.
In “Attribute” add “dir”, and in the “Value” add “rtl”.

I am sure we will have some short cut in the future, I know there is an extension for supporting “Right to Left” but I guess it is old, and I personally prefer built in support.
    
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        December 3, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Exposé for Firefox
      
    
    
      
Exposé is a feature in Mac OS X that enables you to see all your open windows with only one click.
foXpose is a Firefox extension that give you similar effect, it will show you all your open tabs at once, give it a try it is only 6kb extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/...
    
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        November 30, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 1.5 released
      
    
    
      with auto update, i.e. you don’t have to reinstall it every time a new version released, it will update it self with small download.

Plus it means the browser will be always secure.

P.S. Firefox 1.5 is 5 Mb download.
    
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        November 24, 2005
      
    
    
      
        I love Thursday mornings
      
    
    
      The best time of the week by far is Thursday morning, I usually wake up around 8 am, even when I stay late the night before it, I go out for breakfast at any place quite.
Today I went to MyPie restaurant in Olaya, it is a small restaurant that serve Pies of course and sandwiches. I usually take Labna with Tomato, and Meat pies, but today I tried the lever sandwich (very popular in Saudi), and Shakshokah (Scrambled eggs with tomato and onion).
    
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        November 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Cat in a microwave
      
    
    
      This a very disturbing story, I don’t recommend reading it at all, or at least don’t try to visualize the story.
A family left their 3 kids, oldest is 8, at home with the family maid, they were playing in the garden with a small kitten they have, while playing it rained and the kitten got wet, so the kids thought they need to dry her, so they put her in the microwave and they clicked random numbers and started cooking the poor kitten, after few minutes the microwave exploded and the kitten internal part shattered all over the kitchen.
    
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        November 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        My JVC Everio camcorder
      
    
    
      
I wrote a while back about JVC camcorder with hard disk, I bought this camera to shoot my baby life 🙂
I thought I would write small review about it, so here is the good and the bad.
The good:

Easy to use.
No tapes to buy, to take on trips, to exchange, just take the shoot.
No over writing other clips by mistake.

The bad:

Less than average video quality.
I have an old notebook with USB1, moving clips from the camcorder to notebook takes very very long time.

    
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        November 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        digg.com vs Slashdot
      
    
    
      If you like SlashDot the technical news site, you will love Digg.
My first impression of digg is that Digg has more links, and less discussion.
The major advantage about Digg is that stories are picked by users not by ad editor, which makes it self maintained site! check Digg FAQ.
There is even a dedicated website to compare Digg to Slashdot, and give score to based on how fast they post a news, so far the result Digg 24, Slashdot 14:

http://diggvsdot.com/
    
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        November 14, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Abdullah Alrashed
      
    
    
      

My friends at Alriyadh Newspaper published my son news on todays issue:

Abdullah Alrashed

Thank you guys 🙂



    
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        November 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        ISU block flickr AGAIN
      
    
    
      ISU blocked Flickr for the third time in less than a year, I HATE YOU ISU.
Please help me to unblock Flickr by filing URL unblocking request.
The importance of flickr is that thousands of weblogs and personal websites host their image at flickr, so by blocking flickr they blocked all images from all of these weblogs.
    
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        November 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Spelling mistakes drive me crazy
      
    
    
      I am not a “speeling bee champion” -the previous sentence proves it 🙂  -, and I usually don’t care about spelling mistakes of others, but some spelling mistakes drive me crazy.
One of the most common in Arabic is:

لاكن

This is wrong, if you write it like this please stop, it is written:

لكن
I hope Google would support Arabic in their toolbar spell checker.
P.S: If you noticed any spelling mistakes in any of my post please let me know.

P.S: I used to write “great” as “grate” for many many years, but thanks to my friend “Fayez Alazmi” who corrected me one day I don’t write “grate” that often any more 🙂 .
    
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        November 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Crazy or Executive
      
    
    
      Nice Dilbert strip (click to enlarge):

    
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        October 31, 2005
      
    
    
      
        I became a dad
      
    
    
      For a very beautiful boy.
Say Mashallah
UPDATE: I named him Abdullah 🙂

    
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        October 21, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Homer Becomes Omar
      
    
    
      Slashdot covers the Simpsons in Arabic.

Link
    
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        October 20, 2005
      
    
    
      
        JVC camcorders with hard disk
      
    
    
      No tapes or discs any more! It stores 5 hours of DVD quality movies.
http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio_g/
    
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        October 4, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Happy Ramdan
      
    
    
      🙂
    
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        September 10, 2005
      
    
    
      
        The Simpsons in Arabic
      
    
    
      MBC will broadcast an Arabic version of the Simpons, Mohammed Heaindi will play Homer Simpson, it will broadcast in Ramadan Month.

Couldn’t wait for it 🙂
    
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        August 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Riyadh City Webcam
      
    
    
      http://my.saudi.net.sa/webcam




    
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        August 16, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New start page
      
    
    
      Whenever I install new machine or a new browser I download one HTML file and make it my home page.
This start page contains:

Search form for many of my favourite search engines.
Links to my favourite links.

The start page save me a lot of time typing, since it have links of frequently used websites.
Give it a try, My Start Page.
    
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        July 12, 2005
      
    
    
      
        What Does the Fungus Know That You Don’t?
      
    
    
      Even fungus couldn’t eat McDonald’s Food

    
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        July 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        My wife’s painting
      
    
    
      My wife bought this lovely painting:


The painting is by an Iraqi artist -I couldn’t get the name- check other paitings from  www.iraqifineart.com
    
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        November 22, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Indian food killing me
      
    
    
      Couple of weeks ago a new Indian restaurant open in Raka Plaza near my home, it is called “Spice”, it looked nice, and the logo was really cool.

Last week me and my wife tried it, the food was good, the problem was the day after that, I had the worst stomach ache, and it didn’t stop until today. Everytime I eat anything the same pain comes again.



They stole the logo from Cafe Spice.
    
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        November 15, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Social bookmarks
      
    
    
      Bookmarks … store them, categorize them, share them, plus much more…

Register and find out how great is it.

http://del.icio.us/
    
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            Category: UNIX
          
        
        
            
    
      
        April 2, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It
      
    
    
      Nice article about Linux kernel development, the most interesting to me is the section “Why Companies Support Kernel Development”:
The list of companies participating in Linux kernel development includes many of the most successful technology firms in existence. None of these companies are supporting Linux development as an act of charity; in each case, these companies find that improving the kernel helps them to be more competitive in their markets.
    
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        March 23, 2008
      
    
    
      
        UNIX Toolbox
      
    
    
      
One of the best cheat sheet / reference on UNIX and Linux:

UNIX Toolbox is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing.

http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
    
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        February 28, 2008
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 7
      
    
    
      
FreeBSD 7 is available, many new improvements performance and feature wise, check the announcement.
One of the most impressive improvements is SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing):

Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better
    
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        February 24, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Mozilla Messaging: conquering the enterprise?
      
    
    
      
Mozilla Foundation the people behind Firefox are launching a new Foundation Mozilla Messaging, their objective is to improve how people communicate on the Internet. Of course they will start with my favorite email client Thunderbird :

The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience.

If Thunderbird improve its collaboration features it will be great contender in the Enterprise Collaboration arena, watch out “Lotus Notes” and “Outlook”.
    
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        February 14, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Drupal 6 released
      
    
    
      
Drupal the open source content management system has a new fresh release Drupal 6.
Update: It seems CCK and VIEWS aren’t compatible with Drupal 6 yet, does anyone use Drupal without CCK and VIEW?
    
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        January 16, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Sun Buys MySQL
      
    
    
      Sun Buys MySQL, good or bad? we will see.
    
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        December 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Learning Drupal
      
    
    
      
Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.
Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.
    
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        June 25, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Moved to a new server
      
    
    
      rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:

FreeBSD 6.2

Apache 2

PHP 5

MySQL 5
    
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        June 10, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Linux vs FreeBSD kernel rebuild
      
    
    
      For the past couple of week, I am trying to refresh my Linux skills, I abandoned Linux as the server platform of choice in favor of FreeBSD, but recently unfortunately FreeBSD isn’t supported as Linux, and sometimes Linux have this weired feature that isn’t available in FreeBSD, e.g. DRDB.
I am big FreeBSD fan, and I loved it even more when I worked with Linux, Ubuntu, the Linux distribution I use, is really impressive as a desktop OS, but if you want to hack the system, and play with its internal it doesn’t give much room, and this the exact reason I switched from Windows to Linux 10 years ago.
    
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        May 28, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Shrinking Vista Partion (to install Ubuntu :))
      
    
    
      Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
Chose Storage. Then chose Disk Management. And now you can play with the partition sizes.
    
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        April 23, 2007
      
    
    
      
        IE6 in Ubuntu
      
    
    
      Ubuntu Linux is really easy OS with many interesting features, one of the best sites to help you with your Ubuntu experince is Ubuntu Guide, the site has many useful tips on how to do thing in Ubuntu.
One of the tips is how to install Internet Explorer under Ubuntu, I saw Fahad AlShenaifi do it, he is our Ubuntu expert since he is using it exclusively for the past year or so.
    
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        April 13, 2007
      
    
    
      
        CentOS the free RedHat, Version 5.0 released
      
    
    
      CentOS is a freely available Linux distribution which is based on Red Hat’s commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product. This rebuild project strives to be 100% binary compatible with the upstream product, and within its mainline and updates, to not vary from that goal. Additional software archives hold later versions of such packages, along with other Free and Open Source Software RPM based packagings. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System.
    
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        April 13, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Dovecot 1.0.0 released (Mail Server)
      
    
    
      Dovecot version 1.0.0 finally released, after almost 5 years of development.
Dovecot is IMAP and POP3 server, it is one of the best and easiest servers I ever worked with, easy enough for home environment, and flexible and powerful enough for service providers.
I’ve tested it earlier before and hopefully we will migrate to it later this year.
Dovecot integrate very well with Postfix mail server (Postfix handle SMTP, Dovecot handle POP3+IMAP), and can easily support virtual hosting.
    
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        April 3, 2007
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd enters the Top 5
      
    
    
      Lighttpd web server is becoming major player in the web server space, according to Netcraft Lighttpd is the 4th most popular web server on the net, and it is moving fast!


    
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        February 9, 2007
      
    
    
      
        CakePHP under Lighttpd
      
    
    
      After moving alriyadh.com to Lighttpd I had some problem making a CakePHP application I wrote to work properly.
I searched the net for a solution and I found this post, but unfortunately the solution they proposed didn’t work, I spent several hours trying to make it work until I gave up, I decide to do it from scratch and luckily it worked. 
The mod_rewrite rules I used in lighttpd.conf file:



url.rewrite-once = (

        "^/cake/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/$1/$2",

        "^/cake/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/index.php?url=$1"

)



Where cake is you cakePHP application.
    
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        February 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com moved to lighttpd
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com website is now served by Lighttpd (aka Lighty).
I moved all static content from Apache to Lighty, Lighty “select” based design makes it ideal for I/O bound operation, i.e. disk and network operations. For this reason Lighty move all CPU bound operations to external process and communicate with them using FastCGI protocol.
This is what delayed my migration to Lighty, because I used to compile PHP with mod_php only and with FastCGI support, so I have to recompile PHP to enable it. Of course I spent few days testing, and I am still having some areas not covered completely.
    
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        January 16, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Lighttpd powers Saudi Arabia most <del>popular</del> unpopular website
      
    
    
      Since we migrated Saudi Arabia international lines from ISU to us, we started to host the most unpopular web page in the kingdom, Internet Block Page.

We started hosting it on Apache web server, but we noticed timeout problems with the server, to discover that slow clients reserve many Apache process which lead to consuming all of Apache processes.

Lighttpd came to the rescue, I replaced Apache with Lighttpd and so far it is doing a great job. Lighttpd is a prefect fit since the website only serve one static page, and this where Lighttpd shines.

This doesn’t mean Lighttpd is better than Apache, each one has its own uses, this small comparison table for both:
    
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        January 15, 2007
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 6.2 released
      
    
    
      FreeBSD my favorite operating system has new version 6.2. The new version has many features, the most intersting (for me at least):

freebsd-update provides officially supported binary updates for security fixes and errata patches (I always thought applying the patches manually isn’t friendly enough for most people).
csup, an integrated cvsup client  (Now I don’t have to install it manually in new machines).

If you never used FreeBSD invest sometime on it, and I guarantee that you will fall in love with it 🙂
    
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        January 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        XCache new PHP optimizer
      
    
    
      XCache is relatively new PHP code optimizer, written by “Jan Kneschke” the same guy who wrote Lighttpd web server.
After migrating Alriyadh.com to the new dual CPU servers, I had problems with APC PHP optimizer and locking, so I disabled the optimizer altogether, after all the CPU was very fast and it handled the load without any problems.
But lately with my increasing interest on Lighttpd I noticed XCache, I never heard of it before but after reading the web site, and the problem APC have with multi processors I decided to give XCache a try, and the best of all it was ready in FreeBSD ports, so I installed it and so far it doing a good job.
    
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        October 24, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 2 and IE 7
      
    
    
      Recently the 2 most popular browsers IE and Firefox released a new version.
Firefox is already a very good product so improving it is very hard 🙂 The most important new feature is the online spell checker which is really lovely. It also has a new theme, I didn’t like that much but it might take some time to get used to.
IE 7 in the other hand is really impressive (compared to IE 6 of course), it has tab browsing at last, the theme is really really good, the new font rendering engine is really smooth and clear it feels like a Mac.
    
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        October 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Java what to learn
      
    
    
      Every year or so I have a project in Java I learn enough thing to finish the project then I forget it by getting busy in other proejcts.

Over the years I really loved and hated Java, 
Java what to learn:

Ant: is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make’s wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.
Tomcat: servlet and JSP server, can work as standalone, with Apache HTTPd, or IIS.
log4j: log4j is a Java-based logging utility. It is used primarily as a debugging tool.
JUnit: JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language.

    
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        October 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Java Package for FreeBSD
      
    
    
      Installing Java on FreeBSD (my favourite operating system) wasn’t an easy task, you have to download Java files from Sun web site put them in a special directory then start a lengthy build process that never successed.
Fortunately FreeBSD Foundation has binary package for Java, all you need is to Download and install using:
# pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd5.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz

and you are done.
With Java on FreeBSD may be I will start playing with Lucene instead of Swish-e as Alriyadh search engine.
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        August 19, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Virtual FTP accounts with Pure-FTPd  and MySQL
      
    
    
      Pure-FTPd is a FTP server with many features that enable you to host virtual accounts, these are the features that I loved and tested:

You can put the user information in MySQL database, without having to create a real UNIX account for each user.
It also have the feature of creating the user home directory when the user logging, so all you need to create a new user is to add it to the database.
CallUploadScript this feature will make the server run a script whenever a new file is uploaded, I used this feature to scan the file for viruses as soon as the user upload the file. (I use ClamAV as my virus scanner)

Installation (FreeBSD)



# cd /usr/ports/ftp/pure-ftpd/

# make install

# vi /etc/rc.conf

:

pureftpd_enable="YES"

pureftpd_upload_enable="YES"

pureftpd_uploadscript="/path/to/pureftpd_uploadscript.sh"

:


    
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        August 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        New Thunderbird checklist
      
    
    
      Check all IMAP folders:

By default Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new messages, but since we use server side filter emails don’t have to go to inbox and sometimes go directly to destionation folder.

Fortunaltely Tunderbird can be configured to check all folders, but it has to be done manually, put the follwoing lines in “user.js”:



// Download mail from all accounts on startup

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);



The file doesn’t exists by default so you need to create it in your “profile” filder, this link will help you to locate your “profile” folder:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#profile
    
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        August 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Installing Ubuntu Linux 6.06
      
    
    
      
Today I installed the new Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop, and I wanted to share my experince.
I took me a while to find out how to install it, after I rebooted from CD, and selected Start/Install a live Ubuntu system showed up, I thought I downloaded the live CD version of Ubuntu, but I remember that I raed “Install” during booting, so I rebooted again to try to install the system, same thing happen, I gave up and tried to play with the live CD version, then I found the “Install Ubuntu” icon on the desktop!!
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Cricket extensions
      
    
    
      Cricket
Cricket is trend monitoring software, it allows you to monitor trend for any device you want.
I wrote 2 extensions for Cricket to monitor Lighttpd web server, and Memecached caching server.
Lighttpd web server
“lighttpd (also called “Lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license.”  Wikipedia
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd the new webserver in town
      
    
    
      For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.
    
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        July 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Mac experience so far
      
    
    
      The Bad

Mouse movement: Mac OS has very strange mouse movement, if you move the mouse slowly it moves “very” slow, and if you move it faster it move “very” fast. I couldn’t get used to it until now and it drives me crazy.

I tried different software to fix this weired behavior, but it is still awkward.
Arabic support is really bad:

Keyboard layout is different than PC layout, which is frustrating for PC converts.
Most soft wares don’t provide good support for Arabic, Front page doesn’t connect Arabic characters. Apple iWork Pages doesn’t even support right to left writing.
Writing in “bold” in Arabic font is the same as non bold.


Software updates are huge, I guess they don’t have incremental update, you need to download the complete software whenever a new version exists. e.g. I am downloading 51M update for QuickTime, and you have to restart the machines afterward!! So far I downloaded more than 1 GB for software update!!

The Good

It is UNIX 🙂
In Mac OS an application is a complete folder when you click the folder the application runs. So software installation is very easy, you just move the folder to where you want to your application folder. To uninstall move the folder to the trash.
The graphics are awesome, wallpapers, screen savers, application everything is cool!
The machines is really great looking, and the 20″ monitor is really amazing and bright.
Super quite you don’t hear any noise.
Mac OS sleep feature is really fast, one click and the machine is running in less than a second!!






    
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        June 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Python 2.5 Beta, and new Python website
      
    
    
      Python, my favorite computer language (althought I don’t use it that often) released 2.5 beta version.
What amazed me that their website is now changed with new look, and Python has a new logo too.

    
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        June 20, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Optimizing MySQL
      
    
    
      The last 3 days we were facing many problems with Alriyadh.com web server, the server suddenly get very slow, and all requests times out. It took me very long time to identify the problem, I tried many things and every time I think it will solve the problem completely, but after few hours the problem appear again and he server start to crawl.

Until this moment I am not 100% sure the problem is solved, but during the process I learned many things, so I’ll share it with you and hopefully everything will go smoothly, if it doesn’t I have to learn new thing to figure out the problem.
    
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        June 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        JEdit the ultimate editor!
      
    
    
      
A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.
But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP  (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).
    
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        June 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET needs fresh graduates
      
    
    
      SAUDI NET is hiring and we are looking for fresh graduates in CS/IS, we have very large expansions that will give you many great chances to work with different technologies. 
SAUDI NET is part of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) so you will get all the STC employees benefits.
If you are intersted send me your resume at (rayed at saudi.net.sa)
    
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        June 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Thunderbird extension for Arabic
      
    
    
      Thunderbird is a great email client, it has very good support for international languages, and it displays Arabic emails without any problems, the only problem that I face with it is when writing Arabic emails, unfortunately Thunderbird doesn’t have shortcut or button to change the writing direction from left-to-right used by most western languages, to right-to-left used for Arabic.
But through the power of extensions you can install this small extension (37K) that will add 2 new buttons in Compose window, one for changing the direction from LTR->RTL, and vice versa.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My MAC OS downloads
      
    
    
      Until now my downloads are basically similar to Windows counter part:

Firefox
Thunderbird
Real Player
Windows Mediaplayer
Windows Messenger

any thing else I should look at.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Greylisting: New weapon to fight Spam
      
    
    
      Last Tuesday, I enabled Geylisting on SAUDI NET mail servers, and you can see the decrease of spam we are getting (the blue line):

The first day of enabling greylisting we got many complaints about delayed emails, but after that all emails flow with delays.
To learn more check Greylist @ Wikipedia
    
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        May 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com wins ICT Excellence Awards
      
    
    
      Yesterday, Alriyadh.com awarded the Middle East ICT Excellence Award in the “Print and Electronic Media of the Year (Print)” category from the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute.
Alriyadh Newspaper covered the story, and we received a great response from many people, thanks everyone:

«الرياض»تحصل على جائزةالشرق الأوسط في تقنية المعلومات والاتصالات لأفضل موقع الكتروني
«الرياض» تحصل على جائزة أفضل موقع إلكتروني في الشرق الأوسط
موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني.. عمل دؤوب وتطوير دائم(screen shots for alriyadh.com since opening)
السحيباني: انتظروا المزيد من التطوير في موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني
شباب سعودي يتوج «الرياض» الإلكتروني باللقب
تقنيون سعوديون: فخورون بفوز «الرياض» .. والجائزة ذهبت لمن يستحقها
قراء «الرياض» يتفاعلون مع الفوز

Special thanks to Ahmad Alsuwailm for the great coverage.
    
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        May 12, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Convert to Mac! Is it time?
      
    
    
      Every few years I think of buying a Mac machine, usually it happens after Apple annonce new cool thing, first the PowerPC CPU which was really amazing back in the 90s, then with Mac OS X being built on top of UNIX, then lately with the introduction of Intel based Macs.
Also 6 months ago my friend Misfer bough a PowerBook, and he loves s much.
So is it time to convert to Mac, Mac machines are generally more expensive than Windows machines, especially here in Saudi Arabia, and I only know one store that sells Macs.
    
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        May 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 6.1 released
      
    
    
      FreeBSD my favorite operating system released version 6.1, they finally put the new logo.
For more information about FreeBSD checkout FreeBSD@WikiPedia
    
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        March 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        PHP output compression
      
    
    
      PHP 4.0.5 and above added new feature to compress your PHP pages on the fly, all you need is the zlib extension, this how I configured it.

# vi /usr/local/etc/php.ini

:

zlib.output_compression = On

:

# apachectl graceful


Alriyadh.com front page size dropped from 20.5 K to 5.6 K, according to my tests almost 50% of browser don’t support compression, IE for instance turn off gzip compression support if you have bad firewalls (Zone Alarm), and even some IE extensions (specially ad wares) turn off the compression.
    
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        March 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Caching: memcached vs MySQL
      
    
    
      Several month ago I researched caching methods to use with Alriyadh.com, it was essential because we used old and slow hardware.
The result of my test showed that MySQL based caching was superior to memcached caching.
I did a new benchmark comparing MySQL, PHP memcache extension, and PHP memcache class.
The text is done by fetching the result of a complex query 1000 times, and calculated the time it took using my bechmark library (link dead!), times in seconds:
    
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        March 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com migration finished
      
    
    
      Today alriyadh.com main website migrated to FreeBSD, now the complete website runs on FreeBSD on HP servers.
    
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        March 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com ads server migrated to FreeBSD
      
    
    
      The ads appear now as if they are local images, awesome 🙂

You will notice that the maximum CPU utlization is 29% at around 7:30 am, at this time the old server would hit 100% CPU utlization.
The 29% is before enabling APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which replaced PHPAccelerator I used with the old server, you can see a major drop in CPU utilization after enabling it.
    
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        February 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My tiny contribution to ClamAV
      
    
    
      ClamAV is an open source Anti Virus software for UNIX systems, we use it here in SAUDI NET to stop Virus in email message it stops thousands of viruses  everyday, I also use it in our personal hosting service that we provide for our customers, unfortunately some customers upload virus intentionally and unintentionally, so I installed ClamAV to scan and delete viruses.
Last week I noticed one of our trouble making customers uploading sospious files, I ran “clamscan” on the user directory but it didn’t detect it, when I tried to download it my PC anti-virus software “MicroTrend” stopped the download warning me about the Virus. So I went home and downloaded it again and scanned it using Norton AV, it didn’t detect it either! 
    
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        February 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        “The Complete FreeBSD” book in PDF format
      
    
    
      FreeBSD is my operating system of choice, for many reasons, one of them is the great documentation, all you need to know about FreeBSD you can find in FreeBSD handbook.

But to make thing better Mr. Greg Lehey decided to release it for download under the Creative Commons license.  Go pick your copy at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/
Thank you Mr. Greg
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        “Unfair” Apache performance comparison
      
    
    
      To find out how fast our new servers are I run a small test using ab Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.
I’ll send 10,000 requests using 10 simultaneous processes, I run the same test on both old and new server:
Old Server
$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   78.172 seconds

:

New Server
$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 new-www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   3.851 seconds

:

This mean that the new server is 20 times faster than the old server, the test is really unfair because the old server is running on production and serving other requests. I’ll repeat the same test after migration to see the real numbers.
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com migration status
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com is hosted at MeduNet, they unpacked the servers on the lab for now, and hopefully they will prepare the racks and install the servers next week.

Mean while I went to MeduNet and installed FreeBSD 6 on the 3 servers, fortunately I brought 2 installation CD with me which allowed me to work on 2 servers concurrently. The whole installation process took 1 hour for the 3 servers, of course this a basic setup to allow me to connect remotely to continue installing required software.

I went back home and continued working on the servers, it took more than 7 hours to update the system and install the required software, specially Cricket which required a lot of time and configuration.

I also started migrating some of the data from the old servers to the new ones, and to tell you the truth the link between those servers are extremely slow, I left rsync running for overnight and it only copied 1.7G out of 10G.
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        rsync tips
      
    
    
      rsync is a really smart file transfer tool, when you want to move a large directory from machine to machine it is the best tool you can use.
The tool utilise ssh protocol (among others) to transfer files, this is a sample command:
host_1# rsync /some/dir host_2:/other
The above command will copy the directory /some/dir  from host_1 to host_2, the smart thing about rsync that it check what files are already copied so it won’t copy them again.
    
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        February 22, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com migrating from Solaris to FreeBSD
      
    
    
      alriyadh.com new servers arrived, we are upgrading from 4 Sun Solaris machines to 3 HP machines with FreeBSD, the machines specification as follow:

Dual Xeon 3.40GHz
1GB RAM
4 x 36GB Hard disk

The servers should be in production next week, you should notice significant performance improvements Insha Allah.

Other website enhancements will follow that wasn’t possible with the old hardware.
    
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        January 21, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Fastest CVS UP server
      
    
    
      FreeBSD use a protocol called CVS to update its source code, it is also use it to upgrade FreeBSD ports.

But before you start update you must specify the mirror you want sychronize your code with, of  course you should use the server near you to speed up the process.

I always had trouble finding the best mirror, I used pickup server in France, then I switched to servers in the US, but I never satisfied with the speed.

Until I discovered fastest_cvsup which is a tool that test all mirror of given country(eis) and give the fastest one of them, neat!

It turned out that the fastest mirror are indeede in france, here is the result:



# fastest_cvsup -q -c sa,fr,us,ca

 -=(ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo)=(cvsup2.ca.freebsd.org)=-

cvsup4.fr.freebsd.org



The command check server in Saudi Arabia (nothing in Saudi Arabia but to make sure), France, US, and Canada.

You milage may vary, in fact teh result could change from day to day, so it might be a good idea to use a script like the one given with the tool:



#!/bin/sh

if SERVER=`fastest_cvsup -q -c fr,us,ca`; then

 cvsup -g -L 2 -h $SERVER /usr/local/etc/cvsup/ports-supfile

fi


    
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        December 27, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com first DDoS
      
    
    
      We had today a major DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service), we get thousands of concurrent connection from all over the globe. It took us a while to figure out the problem, the attack still active but hopefully we managed to take the site online again for Saudi Arabia users.
    
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        December 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Refresh firefox, and make it faster
      
    
    
      Today I tried to install LiveHTTPHeaders extension and I had to kill FireFox in the middle of installation process, so I ended up with half installed extension,  I tried to install it again to find out two copies of the same extension one working the other just showing in the list without being able to do anything with it.
Then I decided to remove manually, to find out 340M temporary files in the profile directory, so I decided to replace the complete profile, and create new one again.
    
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        November 18, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL included in Solaris 10
      
    
    
      Sun microsystem will include PostgreSQL open source database with every copy of Solaris 10, with 24/7 support also 🙂
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/news/111705.jsp
    
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        November 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL and PHP (on Windows)
      
    
    
      After installing PostgreSQL (15 minutes job), and playing with pgAdminIII, I decided to try it with PHP.

    
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        November 12, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL on windows
      
    
    
      Last weekend I decided to try PostgreSQL on Windows, I download PostgreSQL 8.1 installation file from PostgreSQL website, it was 22Mg zip file.
I also downloaded the 12 Mg manual, which contains everything about Postgres.
The installation is straight forward, simple wizard with some clicks and everything is installed and Postgres is running.

Postgres comes with two clients:

psql: CLI (command line) client.
pgAdminIII: graphical client.

pgAdmin (see the screen shot) looks amazing and gives you access to all parts of the database, and you can connect to multiple databases. I got intimidated at first when I saw all the options in pgAdminIII but after looking carefully at them it isn’t that scary 🙂
    
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        November 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL 8.1 released
      
    
    
      PostgreSQL (Wikipedia) 8.1 released, check What’s new in 8.1 document.
For some reason I love PostgreSQL althought I never really used it before, I am very happy with MySQL but I really would love to use PostgreSQL, for me MySQL excel in 3 areas:

PHPMyAdmin: I can’t live without it, I know PostgreSQL have phppgadmin, but I don’t think it would match PHPMyAdmin.
Windows port: I remember they ported PostgreSQL to Windows, a while ago but I never tried it either, I guess I am lazy.
Replication: I am not sure about the status of replication in PostgreSQL, am I lazy or what.

    
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        November 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 6.0 released
      
    
    
      My web server is running FreeBSD 5.3 for the past 100 days without any problems. But 5.X isn’t as and fast as 4.X series, hope this will change with the new 6.0 release.
Some major improvment over 5.4:

Significant performance improvements to the filesystem and direct disk access layers of the OS.  The filesystem is now multithreaded and can take full advantage of multiple CPU systems.
Expanded support for wireless networking adapters and new support for the WPA wireless security protocol.
Experimental support for the PowerPC platform.

Slashdot covered the story, and most of the feedback from FreeBSD 6.0 beta users was positive:
    
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        November 2, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New FreeBSD logo
      
    
    
      FreeBSD the amazing Operating System running this site got a new logo:

More Pictures
    
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        October 6, 2005
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD new website
      
    
    
      FreeBSD finally updated the website. I wrote about the new website 10 months ago, I guess it took more than they expected 😉

The new website look modern, but the logo still old.
    
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        August 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Tip on installing graphic support for PHP in FreeBSD
      
    
    
      GD is a graphic library that enable PHP to manipulate images, to install it from FreeBSD port us:
# cd /usr/ports/graphics/php4-gd
# make -DWITHOUT_X11 install

The tip is to use WITHOUT_X11 option this will save you from compiling X Windows which is needed for some of GD supported formats.
    
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        August 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Caching method compared
      
    
    
      I tested different types of caching, here is my times:


Method
Hit Time
Improvments over Miss


File
0.00029
19337.93%


MySQL
0.00064
8762.50%


memcached
0.00103
5444.66%


Altought File caching is much faster that the other two methods, it can suffer from file locking problems, and can’t be shared between more than one server.
memcached client used is written in PHP which will slow it down a little bit.
So MySQL seems the ideal choice 😉
    
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        July 17, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Saudi Ubuntu Yahoo Group
      
    
    
      Osama Aldosary started a Saudi Ubuntu email group at Yahoo Groups, join us!



Click to join subuntu
    
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        July 11, 2005
      
    
    
      
        My Sun Certified System Admin notes
      
    
    
      It is little old but I found it useful from time to time.
My Notes
    
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        July 11, 2005
      
    
    
      
        no-www
      
    
    
      I removed www from my site name, so from now on it is only http://rayed.com/, www.rayed.com will be still acceptable but will be redirect to rayed.com.

Here is how it is done in Apache:
<VirtualHost *>
        ServerName www.rayed.com
         Redirect permanent / http://rayed.com/
</VirtualHost>

    
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        July 11, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Figlet
      
    
    
      FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text, it mainly for UNIX but you can find other versions for other OSes.

http://www.figlet.org/
                          _
 _ __ __ _ _   _  ___  __| |  ___ ___  _ __ ___
| '__/ _` | | | |/ _ \/ _` | / __/ _ \| '_ ` _ \
| | | (_| | |_| |  __/ (_| || (_| (_) | | | | | |
|_|  \__,_|\__, |\___|\__,_(_)___\___/|_| |_| |_|
           |___/

    
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        July 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Ubuntu Linux?
      
    
    
      Lately I raed (and heared) a lot of good things about Ubuntu Linux, my understanding is that Ubuntu is a user friendly Debian (I am sure it is more than that).
My friend Osama Aldosari gave me a copy of Ubuntu CD, and made think of installing it on my laptop, more to come one the experince.
Read more about Ubuntu at Wikipedia
    
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        May 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Interanet searching with Swish-e
      
    
    
      Swish-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans – Enhanced) is really nice small program that index almost anything, I am playing with it at the moment and I am thinking of dumping my own search engine and replace it with Swish-e.
Swish has many features but the one feature that stroke me is the speed:

66,548 files indexed.  164,076,410 total bytes.  26,496,024 total words.

Elapsed time: 00:02:44 CPU time: 00:02:31

Indexing done!
    
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        November 28, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Enabling FreeBSD firewall
      
    
    
      Now with the new FreeBSD releases you don’t have to recompile the kernel to add firewall support (which is easy but take sometime), now firewall module can be loaded as a kernel module, with a simple command like:



# kldload ipfw        # (WARNING read on first)


But be careful the default behaviour is to block everything, you need to open the connection you need manually using a command like:



# ipfw -q add allow all from any to any


    
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        June 17, 2002
      
    
    
      
        Sun Certified System Admin Notes
      
    
    
      While preparing for SCSA exams I wrote some notes, not very useful for study, but might be useful for quick reference.
Sun Certified System Admin Notes
    
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            Category: Blog
          
        
        
            
    
      
        March 31, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Upgraded to WordPress 2.5
      
    
    
      I’ve just upgraded my Blogging software to WordPress latest version 2.5
Since I skipped a version I noticed huge improvements, tags, widgets, new dashboard, new interfaces, more info in this post WordPress 2.5
    
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        December 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Learning Drupal
      
    
    
      
Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.
Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.
    
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        June 25, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Moved to a new server
      
    
    
      rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:

FreeBSD 6.2

Apache 2

PHP 5

MySQL 5
    
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        May 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Muntaqa the best of Arabic email groups
      
    
    
      

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.
Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.
In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere 🙂
Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.
    
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        April 6, 2007
      
    
    
      
        WordPress 2.1 as CMS
      
    
    
      On of the cool new features of WordPress 2.1 is “Front Page” options it allows you to make WordPress front page a static page instead of showing latest post.

This make WordPress suitable as CMS for small websites, without any heavy customizations.
    
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        April 6, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Supporting right to left writing (for Arabic) in WordPress
      
    
    
      UPDATE: I found an easier way to do the same thing Check it out
In my blog I write in both languages English and Arabic, but I have to switch text direction from the template default English direction “Left to Right” to Arabic “Right to Left”.
One way do to it is to add HTML tags in each Arabic entry.
Another way to do it is to utilize WordPress “Custom Fields” feature, WordPress allows you to add custom fields to any entry, so I add a new custom field to my Arabic entries, the key will be “wp_direction” and the value will be “rtl”.
    
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        March 3, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Fahad weblog
      
    
    
      My dear Friend Fahad AlShenaifi finally found a time to launch his blog, http://fahadblog.com/wordpress/
The blog in English, and talk about Ubuntu, computer security, and him self.
Don’t miss his photo gallery.
    
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        February 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Improving thumbnails quality
      
    
    
      Inpired by Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret post, about how Flickr thumbnails make the photo prettier than the original photo.
The article suggest that Flick sharpen the image before it resize it.
So I did my own test, this the result and you are the judge:
 
Image 1, normal resize.
Image 2, sharpen before resize.


Sharpened and saturated +100:

All I need to know is how to do it from inside PHP.
    
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        January 21, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Unleash the power of RSS, use Google Reader
      
    
    
      Few weeks ago I started using Google Reader, and so far it is amazing. Basically you subscribe all your RSS feeds you are interested in Google Reader, and instead of visiting 10 or 20 website, you visit Reader page to get the latest updates.
The integration with Firefox is amazing, just click on RSS icon and you can add it directly to Google Reader, very easy.
I used to use Thunderbird for a while for RSS, but after I set it up I forgot to use it. The subscription method is bit more complex than Google reader, and lack of a single folder for all of my RSS feeds make it useless.
    
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        October 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        WordPress spam proctection: Akismet Out, CaptCha! In
      
    
    
      Since I upgraded my WordPress to version 2 I used Akismet to protect my from comment spam, it did a great job for a while but lately it passes a lot of spam, I am not sure what is the problem but I am suspecting some network problems.
So until I resolve this problem I’ll try using CaptCha! plug-in, it uses captcha method to prevent spamming.

Captcha works as follow, when you want to submit a comment, the website displays an image with few characters shown in wave shapes, and you requested to type the character you see to accept your comment, the idea is to prevent automatic script from submitting comment because they can not read the character in the screen, even if they used OCR it would be very hard to recognize it.
    
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        August 25, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Implementing Pingback in alriyadh.com
      
    
    
      Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.
Implementing Pingback feature is very easy, you need to add the following code to your template:



<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.alriyadh.com/php/xmlrpc/" />


This code will make other blogging software notify your software that it is linking to it, It do this by sending “pingback.ping” XML-RPC request to the given URL, when you get the notification you can add it to the database, email it, or do what ever you want with it.
    
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        June 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Testing Google AdSense Images
      
    
    
      It has been 4 months since I put Google ads on my site, and so far the result are rediclousy funny, I only earned $4 🙂 , I didn’t expect to get anything at all, and even if I did I doubt that they will send to Saudi Arabia.
Today, I noticed an ad that I didn’t like and it appeared very frequently, so I decided to block it, fortunately Google have a mechanisim for that but it will take some time, so I decided to switch from text ads to image ads, and change the location of the banner to better place, and I will wait to see how it will affect my earnings.
    
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        June 8, 2006
      
    
    
      
        WP1 & WP2 spam filtering
      
    
    
      While upgrading WordPress to version 2, I backed up my database and I noticed that the comments table size is around 1.7MB which is huge, I don’t have that many comments. I find out that WordPress don’t delete comments even if they were marked spam, so I deleted them manually, so go check your comments table and save some space.
WP1 Spam detection:

WordPress 1.x has a feature that mark comments as spam if they match certin keywords, it was doing very good job, except for that last few weeks I start getting new spam comments so I had to update my spam keywods.
    
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        June 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Finally I upgraded WordPress
      
    
    
      Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session
Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.
    
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        April 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        New theme PaintedDesert
      
    
    
      Today my friend Feras Al-Jumah sent me a link to a WordPress theme called PaintedDesert. I liked it so much that I installed it on my blog, hope everybody like it.

Thanks Feras for the link.
Here is a screenshot of my old theme:


    
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        April 4, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alexa experiment end
      
    
    
      Today I’ll end my Alexa experiment. During the last 60 days I tried to improve my Alexa ranking, my ranking jumped from 1,603,040 to 133,430.
Today I removed Alexa ranking banner in my website footer, and I’ll remove all A9 toolbar extension from Firefox, it is occupying 20,000 pixels from my screen and I rarely use it.
    
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        March 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        I got Google Analytics Invitation
      
    
    
      WikiPedia definition:
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.
I’ve just received my Google Analytics Invitation, so I subscribed to the free service. Of course no interesting reports until now, but I’ll keep you updated when I got anything interesting.
    
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        February 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        rayed.com the first result in Google
      
    
    
      Finally my website http://rayed.com/ became the first result in Google when searching for “Rayed”:

http://www.google.com/search?q=rayed
For years and years when you search for my name you will get X-Ray related sites, because the past of the verb “ray” is “rayed”.
    
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        February 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Google AdSense on my blog
      
    
    
      I signed up with Google AdSense, and you can find Google Ads in sidebar, I am still learning about the AdDense program.

But basically it allow content providers (i.e. owner of Internet websites) to earn money by displaying google ads, and each time a person click on an add it add more credit to him.

To learn more here are some links from Wikipedia links:

AdSense

AdWords

Mediabot
    
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        February 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        BBS News script no longer work
      
    
    
      Long time ago I built a PHP script that fetch and parse Arabic BBC news and format them in Javscript format, this can be used by adding few HTML code in your website.
The script located at: http://rayed.com/bbcjs.php3
I stopped the script more than 5 years ago, but until now I found many entries in my log asking for that file, so I decide to take an action, I put the file back but I put a warning message to notify the user that the script is no longer working.
    
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        February 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        New look
      
    
    
      I chaned the default image that comes with the default WordPress theme, what do you think about it.
    
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        February 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alexa Ranking imporvment
      
    
    
      My ranking from:

1,603,040

To:

1,052,170

In less than 10 days.
UPDATE: My ranking jumped to 629,132, I am starting to enjoy this 😉

UPDATE: Day 17 my ranking is now 473,585.

UPDATE: Day 20 my ranking is now 388,412.

UPDATE: Day 23 my ranking is now 360,154, I guess it starting to slow down.

UPDATE: Day 28 my ranking is now 322,116.
    
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        January 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Trying to improving my Alexa ranking
      
    
    
      I really hate Alexa, and I never trust their ranking method, you must install their toolbar to get counted but I never saw any one using their toolbar, but unfortunately it is the only was to measure website popularity.
Any way I am going to use A9 toolbar (which is part of Amazon, who in turn own Alexa), and I added Alexa Badge in the bottom of my page to see how this will affect my website ranking.
    
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        January 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Flickr open again, but is it for good!
      
    
    
      Today a friend of mine opened my old web site http://myweb.saudi.net.sa/rayed/ and I noticed that my flickr badge is working again! I thought he used an external proxy, but he wasn’t 🙂

Flickr is open again but is it for good or it is just a mistake from ISU.

I enabled my Flickr badge again, I miss Flickr!

UPDATE: ISU blocked flickr again 🙁

UPDATE: It is open now, I am confused!

UPDATE: It seems that Flickr is open in Riyadh proxies, and not on Jeddah proxies, I hope it is closed by mistake.
    
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        December 27, 2005
      
    
    
      
        WordPress 2
      
    
    
      WordPress the blogging software that runs my site released version 2.

A lot of new features, the admin interface is complete changed with many new enhancements, they also added WYSIWYG editor, and easier file upload.
    
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        November 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Cat in a microwave
      
    
    
      This a very disturbing story, I don’t recommend reading it at all, or at least don’t try to visualize the story.
A family left their 3 kids, oldest is 8, at home with the family maid, they were playing in the garden with a small kitten they have, while playing it rained and the kitten got wet, so the kids thought they need to dry her, so they put her in the microwave and they clicked random numbers and started cooking the poor kitten, after few minutes the microwave exploded and the kitten internal part shattered all over the kitchen.
    
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        November 23, 2005
      
    
    
      
        digg.com vs Slashdot
      
    
    
      If you like SlashDot the technical news site, you will love Digg.
My first impression of digg is that Digg has more links, and less discussion.
The major advantage about Digg is that stories are picked by users not by ad editor, which makes it self maintained site! check Digg FAQ.
There is even a dedicated website to compare Digg to Slashdot, and give score to based on how fast they post a news, so far the result Digg 24, Slashdot 14:

http://diggvsdot.com/
    
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        November 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        ISU block flickr AGAIN
      
    
    
      ISU blocked Flickr for the third time in less than a year, I HATE YOU ISU.
Please help me to unblock Flickr by filing URL unblocking request.
The importance of flickr is that thousands of weblogs and personal websites host their image at flickr, so by blocking flickr they blocked all images from all of these weblogs.
    
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        July 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Archive link fixed
      
    
    
      I added small Javascript to the list:



<select onchange=" location.href= this.options[this.selectedIndex].value; ">


    
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        June 30, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Moved to WordPress
      
    
    
      I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress the process was very easy, but I am still having difficulties with slow parts of WordPress!
    
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        June 29, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress
      
    
    
      I am thinking seriously about moving from Blogger to WordPress, Blogger is really great service, I mainly choose it because it doesn’t need any server side scripting at all, i.e. it will work with SAUDI NET myweb service.

But lately I moved some parts of my site to a new server, and I now have a more reliable Apache+PHP+MySQL installation, and start playing with wordpress and it was really cool feature, I even built a plugin 🙂

any way here is my test wordpress page: (http://rayed.rayed.com/wordpress/)
    
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        June 27, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Fixing WordPress dashboard
      
    
    
      
WordPress is a personal blogging software, works with PHP and MySQL.
The first page of WordPress administration page is called dash board it usually takes forever to load, this due the fact that WordPress display some RSS feed from its development blog.
The loading problem caused by trying to access the RSS feed with a proxy server, which won’t work inside Saudi Arabia, so here is the fix, in the file wp-includes/class-snoopy.php modify the proxy lines to be something like:

var $proxy_host = "proxy.saudi.net.sa"; // proxy host to use
var $proxy_port = "8080";  // proxy port to use

    
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        November 15, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Social bookmarks
      
    
    
      Bookmarks … store them, categorize them, share them, plus much more…

Register and find out how great is it.

http://del.icio.us/
    
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            Category: Alriyadh.com
          
        
        
            
    
      
        February 28, 2008
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 7
      
    
    
      
FreeBSD 7 is available, many new improvements performance and feature wise, check the announcement.
One of the most impressive improvements is SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing):

Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better
    
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        November 22, 2007
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com new search engine
      
    
    
      
After serving Alriyadh.com the past 3 years, I am replacing Swish-e with Solr search server, Solr is a search server based on Lucene text search engine.

Solr has many advance features I didn’t utilize most of them yet, but hopefully you will see them soon. I will write a post about Solr and how it works and its integrate with PHP soon.
For now please have a look at it and tell me what you think.
    
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        September 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        MySQL: fixing errors of the past
      
    
    
      Old MySQL versions didn’t have good support for Arabic, so what I used to do is to configure MySQL tables with any character set e.g. latin-1 and configure PHP to read it and write in Windows-1256 and pass it to MySQL as is i.e. MySQL think it is “Latin-1” but in fact it is “Windows-1256”.
Needless to say cheating in the character set have many bad consensuses:

Sorting will not work as expected
Other applications will assume you are using the correct character set and you won’t be able to read or write your data. e.g. PHPMyAdmin could display something like this:

“ÈÓã Çááå ÇáÑÍãä ÇáÑÍíã”

How to fix it

I found this trick in MySQL documentation, what you need to do is convert any character field to “blob” then convert it back to the desired field type with the desired character set:



ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 BLOB;

ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 TEXT CHARACTER SET cp1256;



You can change it and test it from phpMyAdmin.
    
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        May 18, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com converted to CSS based design
      
    
    
      Warning: It is the same design converted to CSS.
After 5 weeks of development and testing, Alriyadh.com is now converted to CSS based design, it still not 100% complete.
You can view the design by using this URL:

www2.alriyadh.com
Some benefits of moving to CSS:

Fonts look the same a cross browsers: I am using Yahoo! User Interface Library fonts file to guarantee that font have the same size a cross browsers.
Page are bit smaller: because many presentation tags are now removed from the HMTL and put in the CSS.
Printer friendly by default: we now have have separate CSS file for printing, so no need for printer friendly page since all page are automatically are.
PDA friendly by default: same as printer CSS, not implemented yet.
Rendering is faster.
It will simplify future redesign. (since we are talking about redesign, suggestion are welcomed 🙂 )

    
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        February 9, 2007
      
    
    
      
        CakePHP under Lighttpd
      
    
    
      After moving alriyadh.com to Lighttpd I had some problem making a CakePHP application I wrote to work properly.
I searched the net for a solution and I found this post, but unfortunately the solution they proposed didn’t work, I spent several hours trying to make it work until I gave up, I decide to do it from scratch and luckily it worked. 
The mod_rewrite rules I used in lighttpd.conf file:



url.rewrite-once = (

        "^/cake/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/$1/$2",

        "^/cake/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/index.php?url=$1"

)



Where cake is you cakePHP application.
    
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        February 7, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Submitting Forms using Ajax
      
    
    
      When you build AJAX based form, you need to provide visual feedback to tell the user that something is really happening.
I created small template for this purpose:


Ajax Form
Hopefully you will see it in the next alriyadh.com CSS based theme 🙂
    
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        February 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Improving thumbnails quality
      
    
    
      Inpired by Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret post, about how Flickr thumbnails make the photo prettier than the original photo.
The article suggest that Flick sharpen the image before it resize it.
So I did my own test, this the result and you are the judge:
 
Image 1, normal resize.
Image 2, sharpen before resize.


Sharpened and saturated +100:

All I need to know is how to do it from inside PHP.
    
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        February 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com moved to lighttpd
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com website is now served by Lighttpd (aka Lighty).
I moved all static content from Apache to Lighty, Lighty “select” based design makes it ideal for I/O bound operation, i.e. disk and network operations. For this reason Lighty move all CPU bound operations to external process and communicate with them using FastCGI protocol.
This is what delayed my migration to Lighty, because I used to compile PHP with mod_php only and with FastCGI support, so I have to recompile PHP to enable it. Of course I spent few days testing, and I am still having some areas not covered completely.
    
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        January 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com previous polls
      
    
    
      Recently I have improved alriyadh.com voting system, many of them are in administration area, some of these changes will be visible in the near future.
One of the new additions is the previous votes page:

http://www.alriyadh.com/php/vote/
Check it out, and keep in mind the design is still under work.
Memo to self: replace the word “vote” with “poll”
UPDATE: If you see weird colors in IE (7?) it is fixed now.
    
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        January 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        XCache new PHP optimizer
      
    
    
      XCache is relatively new PHP code optimizer, written by “Jan Kneschke” the same guy who wrote Lighttpd web server.
After migrating Alriyadh.com to the new dual CPU servers, I had problems with APC PHP optimizer and locking, so I disabled the optimizer altogether, after all the CPU was very fast and it handled the load without any problems.
But lately with my increasing interest on Lighttpd I noticed XCache, I never heard of it before but after reading the web site, and the problem APC have with multi processors I decided to give XCache a try, and the best of all it was ready in FreeBSD ports, so I installed it and so far it doing a good job.
    
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        October 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Java Package for FreeBSD
      
    
    
      Installing Java on FreeBSD (my favourite operating system) wasn’t an easy task, you have to download Java files from Sun web site put them in a special directory then start a lengthy build process that never successed.
Fortunately FreeBSD Foundation has binary package for Java, all you need is to Download and install using:
# pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd5.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz

and you are done.
With Java on FreeBSD may be I will start playing with Lucene instead of Swish-e as Alriyadh search engine.
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        August 25, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Implementing Pingback in alriyadh.com
      
    
    
      Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.
Implementing Pingback feature is very easy, you need to add the following code to your template:



<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.alriyadh.com/php/xmlrpc/" />


This code will make other blogging software notify your software that it is linking to it, It do this by sending “pingback.ping” XML-RPC request to the given URL, when you get the notification you can add it to the database, email it, or do what ever you want with it.
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Cricket extensions
      
    
    
      Cricket
Cricket is trend monitoring software, it allows you to monitor trend for any device you want.
I wrote 2 extensions for Cricket to monitor Lighttpd web server, and Memecached caching server.
Lighttpd web server
“lighttpd (also called “Lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license.”  Wikipedia
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd the new webserver in town
      
    
    
      For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.
    
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        June 20, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Optimizing MySQL
      
    
    
      The last 3 days we were facing many problems with Alriyadh.com web server, the server suddenly get very slow, and all requests times out. It took me very long time to identify the problem, I tried many things and every time I think it will solve the problem completely, but after few hours the problem appear again and he server start to crawl.

Until this moment I am not 100% sure the problem is solved, but during the process I learned many things, so I’ll share it with you and hopefully everything will go smoothly, if it doesn’t I have to learn new thing to figure out the problem.
    
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        June 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        JEdit the ultimate editor!
      
    
    
      
A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.
But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP  (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).
    
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        June 8, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh Newspaper world cup vote and win
      
    
    
      Alriyadh Newspaper is giving away 25 one year subscription, one subscription for each game day in FIFA world cup 2006, all you need to do is to guess the result of each match, of course the more matches you get correct the more chance for you to win, to vote go to alriyadh world cup site http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup/, and it is absolutely free, no need for 5 SR SMS to subscribe, and if you get the result right you really have good chance to win.

Update:

“All” correct guesses will get 50% discount on Arliyadh Newspaper subscription, so it will become 300SR instead of 600SR.
    
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        June 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Finally I upgraded WordPress
      
    
    
      Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session
Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.
    
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        May 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com Worldcup 2006 website
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com launched a new website for covering the FIFA world cup 2006, the website can be found here http://www.alriyadh.com/worldcup.
The new site isn’t a regular news website, it is a new web application specifically designed for the world cup, it would be also updated in real time, i.e. you can follow any match events while it is still in play, of course you will still find regular coverage like news, and photos.
    
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        May 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com wins ICT Excellence Awards
      
    
    
      Yesterday, Alriyadh.com awarded the Middle East ICT Excellence Award in the “Print and Electronic Media of the Year (Print)” category from the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute.
Alriyadh Newspaper covered the story, and we received a great response from many people, thanks everyone:

«الرياض»تحصل على جائزةالشرق الأوسط في تقنية المعلومات والاتصالات لأفضل موقع الكتروني
«الرياض» تحصل على جائزة أفضل موقع إلكتروني في الشرق الأوسط
موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني.. عمل دؤوب وتطوير دائم(screen shots for alriyadh.com since opening)
السحيباني: انتظروا المزيد من التطوير في موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني
شباب سعودي يتوج «الرياض» الإلكتروني باللقب
تقنيون سعوديون: فخورون بفوز «الرياض» .. والجائزة ذهبت لمن يستحقها
قراء «الرياض» يتفاعلون مع الفوز

Special thanks to Ahmad Alsuwailm for the great coverage.
    
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        May 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 6.1 released
      
    
    
      FreeBSD my favorite operating system released version 6.1, they finally put the new logo.
For more information about FreeBSD checkout FreeBSD@WikiPedia
    
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        May 2, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com new 404 page
      
    
    
      Check it out:

404 Page
and give me you feedback, what to you think it should contain.
    
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        March 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        PHP output compression
      
    
    
      PHP 4.0.5 and above added new feature to compress your PHP pages on the fly, all you need is the zlib extension, this how I configured it.

# vi /usr/local/etc/php.ini

:

zlib.output_compression = On

:

# apachectl graceful


Alriyadh.com front page size dropped from 20.5 K to 5.6 K, according to my tests almost 50% of browser don’t support compression, IE for instance turn off gzip compression support if you have bad firewalls (Zone Alarm), and even some IE extensions (specially ad wares) turn off the compression.
    
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        March 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Caching: memcached vs MySQL
      
    
    
      Several month ago I researched caching methods to use with Alriyadh.com, it was essential because we used old and slow hardware.
The result of my test showed that MySQL based caching was superior to memcached caching.
I did a new benchmark comparing MySQL, PHP memcache extension, and PHP memcache class.
The text is done by fetching the result of a complex query 1000 times, and calculated the time it took using my bechmark library (link dead!), times in seconds:
    
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        March 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com migration finished
      
    
    
      Today alriyadh.com main website migrated to FreeBSD, now the complete website runs on FreeBSD on HP servers.
    
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        March 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com ads server migrated to FreeBSD
      
    
    
      The ads appear now as if they are local images, awesome 🙂

You will notice that the maximum CPU utlization is 29% at around 7:30 am, at this time the old server would hit 100% CPU utlization.
The 29% is before enabling APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which replaced PHPAccelerator I used with the old server, you can see a major drop in CPU utilization after enabling it.
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        “Unfair” Apache performance comparison
      
    
    
      To find out how fast our new servers are I run a small test using ab Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.
I’ll send 10,000 requests using 10 simultaneous processes, I run the same test on both old and new server:
Old Server
$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   78.172 seconds

:

New Server
$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 new-www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   3.851 seconds

:

This mean that the new server is 20 times faster than the old server, the test is really unfair because the old server is running on production and serving other requests. I’ll repeat the same test after migration to see the real numbers.
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com migration status
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com is hosted at MeduNet, they unpacked the servers on the lab for now, and hopefully they will prepare the racks and install the servers next week.

Mean while I went to MeduNet and installed FreeBSD 6 on the 3 servers, fortunately I brought 2 installation CD with me which allowed me to work on 2 servers concurrently. The whole installation process took 1 hour for the 3 servers, of course this a basic setup to allow me to connect remotely to continue installing required software.

I went back home and continued working on the servers, it took more than 7 hours to update the system and install the required software, specially Cricket which required a lot of time and configuration.

I also started migrating some of the data from the old servers to the new ones, and to tell you the truth the link between those servers are extremely slow, I left rsync running for overnight and it only copied 1.7G out of 10G.
    
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        February 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        rsync tips
      
    
    
      rsync is a really smart file transfer tool, when you want to move a large directory from machine to machine it is the best tool you can use.
The tool utilise ssh protocol (among others) to transfer files, this is a sample command:
host_1# rsync /some/dir host_2:/other
The above command will copy the directory /some/dir  from host_1 to host_2, the smart thing about rsync that it check what files are already copied so it won’t copy them again.
    
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        February 22, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com migrating from Solaris to FreeBSD
      
    
    
      alriyadh.com new servers arrived, we are upgrading from 4 Sun Solaris machines to 3 HP machines with FreeBSD, the machines specification as follow:

Dual Xeon 3.40GHz
1GB RAM
4 x 36GB Hard disk

The servers should be in production next week, you should notice significant performance improvements Insha Allah.

Other website enhancements will follow that wasn’t possible with the old hardware.
    
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        January 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh a record number of comments
      
    
    
      It is still 10:54 pm and until now we have around 1200 comments:

923 Viewed.
65 Pending.
207 Rejected.

and I complain when I get 3 spam messages.
الله يعينكم والله
    
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        January 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com eBooks
      
    
    
      alriyadh.com introduced new service called “Alriyadh eBook”, basically they collected articles of selected writers and group them in one downloadable PDF file.

We used to get hundreds of request for some writers, specaially “فهد عامر الأحمد” who write very informative and in the same time amusing articles.

http://www.alriyadh.com/static/ebooks/
    
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        January 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Trying to improving my Alexa ranking
      
    
    
      I really hate Alexa, and I never trust their ranking method, you must install their toolbar to get counted but I never saw any one using their toolbar, but unfortunately it is the only was to measure website popularity.
Any way I am going to use A9 toolbar (which is part of Amazon, who in turn own Alexa), and I added Alexa Badge in the bottom of my page to see how this will affect my website ranking.
    
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        January 25, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com news in your website, cut and paste
      
    
    
      I developed a new Javascript based feed for alriyadh.com that can be included easily in any website, all you need is cut-n-paste some HTML code (mostly Javascript) into your web page and you will get all the news you need.

The script is customizable you can select the following:

What section you want to view.
How many links in each section.
How do you want to view the links.

Give it a try and tell me what do you think, remember it is still under development, so please don’t complain about the design 🙂

http://www.alriyadh.com/static/feedjs/
    
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        December 27, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com first DDoS
      
    
    
      We had today a major DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service), we get thousands of concurrent connection from all over the globe. It took us a while to figure out the problem, the attack still active but hopefully we managed to take the site online again for Saudi Arabia users.
    
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        December 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Yet another Ad :(
      
    
    
      www.alriyadh.com added a new advertising banner to all pages, they now show 6 ads in a single page, I am not sure what they are thinking why don’t they increase the prices, and put fewer ads. I hate it.
    
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        December 1, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Cleaning up readers comments
      
    
    
      When reading alriyadh.com readers comments, I found many readers using bad practices when posting comments for example:

Repeating one character many times, e.g. “……”, “!!!!!”, “?????”, etc..
Using empty lines
Using Kasheda to format Arabic strings.
Using more than one space between words.
Misspelling “لكن”

So I wrote a filter to remove all these practices.
What do you think? good or bad idea, please tell me what do you think.
    
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        November 20, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com usability improvements
      
    
    
      alriyadh.com added multiple usability improvements to comment posting form:

To prevent duplicate posting, the submit button is disabled after the first click.
The user name and email is now remembered, so next time it will be auto filled.
Focus is set to the first empty field in the form.
Client IP is now recorded to detect fake posting, some users sends multiple posts with different, this will help to detect them.

    
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        November 15, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com one man show!
      
    
    
      Everyday at 11pm, alriyadh.com team start working on the next day issue, the job involve copying all contents from the printed version to the alriyadh.com content management system, the process involve 2 to 3 team members, and takes about 4-5 hours to complete.
But last Thursday was a special case, due to a planned vacation for one team member, and family issues for another member, Faisal Alenzi was the only guy working that night and he carried the whole show and published the whole issue on time by him self.
    
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        November 14, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Abdullah Alrashed
      
    
    
      

My friends at Alriyadh Newspaper published my son news on todays issue:

Abdullah Alrashed

Thank you guys 🙂



    
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        November 9, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Spelling mistakes drive me crazy
      
    
    
      I am not a “speeling bee champion” -the previous sentence proves it 🙂  -, and I usually don’t care about spelling mistakes of others, but some spelling mistakes drive me crazy.
One of the most common in Arabic is:

لاكن

This is wrong, if you write it like this please stop, it is written:

لكن
I hope Google would support Arabic in their toolbar spell checker.
P.S: If you noticed any spelling mistakes in any of my post please let me know.

P.S: I used to write “great” as “grate” for many many years, but thanks to my friend “Fayez Alazmi” who corrected me one day I don’t write “grate” that often any more 🙂 .
    
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        November 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com new comments style
      
    
    
      
Alriyadh.com introduced new style to display comments, see the Sample Article
The new style uses CSS instead of tables, which make it much smaller and cleaner.
A link to each comment is also added -the time of the post- to allow bookmarking and sending URLs to specific comment.
The posting form is now viewed in the same page, it is hidden by default but after clicking “Post Comment” it will appear thank to the power of Javascript.
    
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        November 6, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com most commented articles
      
    
    
      This is an experimental page that shows the articles with most comments:

http://www.alriyadh.com/php/comments/comments_top.php
Hopefully it will find it self in the front page shortly, I don’t where should we put it, the front page is little crowded as is.
    
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        November 3, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com: tell us what do you think!
      
    
    
      Today Alriyadh.com opened comments on all articles, instead of articles in the “columns” section only.
In the first day of opening comments the amount of comments posted today tripled the average daily volume.
This means the work on the Internet team will need to work three times harder than they used to be, since all of user comments need to be moderated!
This is a huge step from being just an electronic copy of the printed newspaper, to becoming a real Internet website.
    
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        August 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Caching method compared
      
    
    
      I tested different types of caching, here is my times:


Method
Hit Time
Improvments over Miss


File
0.00029
19337.93%


MySQL
0.00064
8762.50%


memcached
0.00103
5444.66%


Altought File caching is much faster that the other two methods, it can suffer from file locking problems, and can’t be shared between more than one server.
memcached client used is written in PHP which will slow it down a little bit.
So MySQL seems the ideal choice 😉
    
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        August 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New plans for alriyadh.com
      
    
    
      When I started building alriyadh.com website I decided to generate all pages as static HTML files, I relied heavily on Server Side Includes (SSI) to build complex pages.
The main reason for this decision was the fact that the server was very slow on processing PHP files, espcially with a site with high load.
Generating static HTML files has its advantages but it also had many problems:

Regenerate everytime you want to test a change
Changing the design will cause regenrating the whole website, which could take forever.
Generating complex pages is very hard, I had to rely on SSI.
What to do with pages that change frequently, e.g. pages with comments.
When importing old data, you need to generate them as well.
Static HTML files performance advantage for frequently used data, like todays issue, but for old issues it just take a lot of disk space.

Soon I’ll start testing dynamicly generated of pages with these points in mind:
    
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        June 18, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New world record number of ads in a single page
      
    
    
      
Today alriyadh.com broke the world record for the largest number of ads in a single page, today they added yet another banner to become 7 banners in thier frontpage.

    
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        May 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Interanet searching with Swish-e
      
    
    
      Swish-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans – Enhanced) is really nice small program that index almost anything, I am playing with it at the moment and I am thinking of dumping my own search engine and replace it with Swish-e.
Swish has many features but the one feature that stroke me is the speed:

66,548 files indexed.  164,076,410 total bytes.  26,496,024 total words.

Elapsed time: 00:02:44 CPU time: 00:02:31

Indexing done!
    
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            Category: MySQL
          
        
        
            
    
      
        February 28, 2008
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 7
      
    
    
      
FreeBSD 7 is available, many new improvements performance and feature wise, check the announcement.
One of the most impressive improvements is SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing):

Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better
    
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        February 14, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Drupal 6 released
      
    
    
      
Drupal the open source content management system has a new fresh release Drupal 6.
Update: It seems CCK and VIEWS aren’t compatible with Drupal 6 yet, does anyone use Drupal without CCK and VIEW?
    
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        February 11, 2008
      
    
    
      
        CodeIgniter setup tips
      
    
    
      
Fix mod_rewrite to have clean URLs, and get rid of “index.php” part.
Edit “config/config.php” and change the following:



// Setup your base URL

$config['base_url']="http://rayed.com/ci/";

// No need for index.php

$config['index_page'] = "";

// Remove AUTO and Put PATH_INFO

// this will allows you to pass variables as URL

// segments or Query string "?id=1"

$config['uri_protocol'] = "PATH_INFO";



Setup your database configuration “config/database.php”
Auto connect to database, edit “config/autoload.php”: 

$autoload['libraries'] = array('database');

Edit “config/routes.php” to change default controller:

$route['default_controller'] = "users";


    
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        February 10, 2008
      
    
    
      
        CodeIgniter yet another PHP framework
      
    
    
      
For the last year I spent a lot of my PHP time playing with CakePHP I like it at first, but when I tried to build large applications with it I noticed it have major issues with performance, plus I really had difficult time dealing with it is strict naming convention and it object-relational-mapping (ORM).
Few days ago I read about CodeIgniter framework and its similarities to CakePHP and its amazing performance, so I went and visited their website again, I heard about CodeIgniter before from Abdullah Aldosari (I miss our technical discussions) but when I visited the website I wasn’t really impressed, but the new website looks much better, so judging by the look improvement alone I decided to give it a try 🙂
    
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        January 16, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Sun Buys MySQL
      
    
    
      Sun Buys MySQL, good or bad? we will see.
    
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        December 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Learning Drupal
      
    
    
      
Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.
Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.
    
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        October 10, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Exploit of Moms
      
    
    
      

http://xkcd.com/327/
If you didn’t understand it read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection
    
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        September 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        MySQL: fixing errors of the past
      
    
    
      Old MySQL versions didn’t have good support for Arabic, so what I used to do is to configure MySQL tables with any character set e.g. latin-1 and configure PHP to read it and write in Windows-1256 and pass it to MySQL as is i.e. MySQL think it is “Latin-1” but in fact it is “Windows-1256”.
Needless to say cheating in the character set have many bad consensuses:

Sorting will not work as expected
Other applications will assume you are using the correct character set and you won’t be able to read or write your data. e.g. PHPMyAdmin could display something like this:

“ÈÓã Çááå ÇáÑÍãä ÇáÑÍíã”

How to fix it

I found this trick in MySQL documentation, what you need to do is convert any character field to “blob” then convert it back to the desired field type with the desired character set:



ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 BLOB;

ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 TEXT CHARACTER SET cp1256;



You can change it and test it from phpMyAdmin.
    
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        June 25, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Moved to a new server
      
    
    
      rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:

FreeBSD 6.2

Apache 2

PHP 5

MySQL 5
    
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        April 13, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Dovecot 1.0.0 released (Mail Server)
      
    
    
      Dovecot version 1.0.0 finally released, after almost 5 years of development.
Dovecot is IMAP and POP3 server, it is one of the best and easiest servers I ever worked with, easy enough for home environment, and flexible and powerful enough for service providers.
I’ve tested it earlier before and hopefully we will migrate to it later this year.
Dovecot integrate very well with Postfix mail server (Postfix handle SMTP, Dovecot handle POP3+IMAP), and can easily support virtual hosting.
    
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        January 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com previous polls
      
    
    
      Recently I have improved alriyadh.com voting system, many of them are in administration area, some of these changes will be visible in the near future.
One of the new additions is the previous votes page:

http://www.alriyadh.com/php/vote/
Check it out, and keep in mind the design is still under work.
Memo to self: replace the word “vote” with “poll”
UPDATE: If you see weird colors in IE (7?) it is fixed now.
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        August 19, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Virtual FTP accounts with Pure-FTPd  and MySQL
      
    
    
      Pure-FTPd is a FTP server with many features that enable you to host virtual accounts, these are the features that I loved and tested:

You can put the user information in MySQL database, without having to create a real UNIX account for each user.
It also have the feature of creating the user home directory when the user logging, so all you need to create a new user is to add it to the database.
CallUploadScript this feature will make the server run a script whenever a new file is uploaded, I used this feature to scan the file for viruses as soon as the user upload the file. (I use ClamAV as my virus scanner)

Installation (FreeBSD)



# cd /usr/ports/ftp/pure-ftpd/

# make install

# vi /etc/rc.conf

:

pureftpd_enable="YES"

pureftpd_upload_enable="YES"

pureftpd_uploadscript="/path/to/pureftpd_uploadscript.sh"

:


    
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        June 20, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Optimizing MySQL
      
    
    
      The last 3 days we were facing many problems with Alriyadh.com web server, the server suddenly get very slow, and all requests times out. It took me very long time to identify the problem, I tried many things and every time I think it will solve the problem completely, but after few hours the problem appear again and he server start to crawl.

Until this moment I am not 100% sure the problem is solved, but during the process I learned many things, so I’ll share it with you and hopefully everything will go smoothly, if it doesn’t I have to learn new thing to figure out the problem.
    
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        March 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Caching: memcached vs MySQL
      
    
    
      Several month ago I researched caching methods to use with Alriyadh.com, it was essential because we used old and slow hardware.
The result of my test showed that MySQL based caching was superior to memcached caching.
I did a new benchmark comparing MySQL, PHP memcache extension, and PHP memcache class.
The text is done by fetching the result of a complex query 1000 times, and calculated the time it took using my bechmark library (link dead!), times in seconds:
    
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        November 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL and PHP (on Windows)
      
    
    
      After installing PostgreSQL (15 minutes job), and playing with pgAdminIII, I decided to try it with PHP.

    
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        November 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL 8.1 released
      
    
    
      PostgreSQL (Wikipedia) 8.1 released, check What’s new in 8.1 document.
For some reason I love PostgreSQL althought I never really used it before, I am very happy with MySQL but I really would love to use PostgreSQL, for me MySQL excel in 3 areas:

PHPMyAdmin: I can’t live without it, I know PostgreSQL have phppgadmin, but I don’t think it would match PHPMyAdmin.
Windows port: I remember they ported PostgreSQL to Windows, a while ago but I never tried it either, I guess I am lazy.
Replication: I am not sure about the status of replication in PostgreSQL, am I lazy or what.

    
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        August 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Caching method compared
      
    
    
      I tested different types of caching, here is my times:


Method
Hit Time
Improvments over Miss


File
0.00029
19337.93%


MySQL
0.00064
8762.50%


memcached
0.00103
5444.66%


Altought File caching is much faster that the other two methods, it can suffer from file locking problems, and can’t be shared between more than one server.
memcached client used is written in PHP which will slow it down a little bit.
So MySQL seems the ideal choice 😉
    
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        March 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PHP Accelerator is awesome
      
    
    
      
I have a server with PHPAdsNew installed serving around 20 requests per second serving a really busy web site.
Few days ago the admins for that website doubled the number of ads per page, and the server stopped responding most of the day 🙁
I installed PHP Accelerator to make it faster to serve the those ads, but it didn’t help that much, I tried every trick I know to maximize MySQL performance (although it didn’t have any load in the first place) nothing worked.
    
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        July 27, 2004
      
    
    
      
        Change PHPMyAdmin to view Arabic on English interface
      
    
    
      I love phpmyadmin, it is a web interface for MySQL DB server, I usually use the English interface, but the problem with English interface that it doesn’t show Arabic string, of course you can change the whole interface to Arabic, but I don’t understand anything from that interface.
So I played with PHPMyAdmin code so I can use English interface but using Arabic character set, here is how to do it:



# vi lang/english-iso-8859-1.inc.php

... change: $charset = 'iso-8859-1';

... to: $charset = 'windows-1256';


    
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        July 24, 2004
      
    
    
      
        MySQL replication is so simple
      
    
    
      
I just configured my first MySQL replication, it is very simple to configure, few configuration steps and it is done.
 The hardest thing is to figure the location of MySQL configuration file my.cnf under my FreeBSD, it doesn’t exists by default so you have to create it your self, it can be many place, I choosed /var/db/mysql/my.cnf to make reside with the datafiles.
 You can find a sample chapter from Jeremy Zawodny book, High Performance MySQL.
    
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            Category: PHP
          
        
        
            
    
      
        February 14, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Drupal 6 released
      
    
    
      
Drupal the open source content management system has a new fresh release Drupal 6.
Update: It seems CCK and VIEWS aren’t compatible with Drupal 6 yet, does anyone use Drupal without CCK and VIEW?
    
  read more
  

        
            
    
      
        February 11, 2008
      
    
    
      
        CodeIgniter setup tips
      
    
    
      
Fix mod_rewrite to have clean URLs, and get rid of “index.php” part.
Edit “config/config.php” and change the following:



// Setup your base URL

$config['base_url']="http://rayed.com/ci/";

// No need for index.php

$config['index_page'] = "";

// Remove AUTO and Put PATH_INFO

// this will allows you to pass variables as URL

// segments or Query string "?id=1"

$config['uri_protocol'] = "PATH_INFO";



Setup your database configuration “config/database.php”
Auto connect to database, edit “config/autoload.php”: 

$autoload['libraries'] = array('database');

Edit “config/routes.php” to change default controller:

$route['default_controller'] = "users";


    
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        February 10, 2008
      
    
    
      
        CodeIgniter yet another PHP framework
      
    
    
      
For the last year I spent a lot of my PHP time playing with CakePHP I like it at first, but when I tried to build large applications with it I noticed it have major issues with performance, plus I really had difficult time dealing with it is strict naming convention and it object-relational-mapping (ORM).
Few days ago I read about CodeIgniter framework and its similarities to CakePHP and its amazing performance, so I went and visited their website again, I heard about CodeIgniter before from Abdullah Aldosari (I miss our technical discussions) but when I visited the website I wasn’t really impressed, but the new website looks much better, so judging by the look improvement alone I decided to give it a try 🙂
    
  read more
  

        
            
    
      
        January 16, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Sun Buys MySQL
      
    
    
      Sun Buys MySQL, good or bad? we will see.
    
  read more
  

        
            
    
      
        December 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Learning Drupal
      
    
    
      
Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.
Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.
    
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        November 22, 2007
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com new search engine
      
    
    
      
After serving Alriyadh.com the past 3 years, I am replacing Swish-e with Solr search server, Solr is a search server based on Lucene text search engine.

Solr has many advance features I didn’t utilize most of them yet, but hopefully you will see them soon. I will write a post about Solr and how it works and its integrate with PHP soon.
For now please have a look at it and tell me what you think.
    
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        June 25, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Moved to a new server
      
    
    
      rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:

FreeBSD 6.2

Apache 2

PHP 5

MySQL 5
    
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        May 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Muntaqa the best of Arabic email groups
      
    
    
      

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.
Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.
In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere 🙂
Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.
    
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        April 6, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Supporting right to left writing (for Arabic) in WordPress
      
    
    
      UPDATE: I found an easier way to do the same thing Check it out
In my blog I write in both languages English and Arabic, but I have to switch text direction from the template default English direction “Left to Right” to Arabic “Right to Left”.
One way do to it is to add HTML tags in each Arabic entry.
Another way to do it is to utilize WordPress “Custom Fields” feature, WordPress allows you to add custom fields to any entry, so I add a new custom field to my Arabic entries, the key will be “wp_direction” and the value will be “rtl”.
    
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        April 3, 2007
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd enters the Top 5
      
    
    
      Lighttpd web server is becoming major player in the web server space, according to Netcraft Lighttpd is the 4th most popular web server on the net, and it is moving fast!


    
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        February 9, 2007
      
    
    
      
        CakePHP under Lighttpd
      
    
    
      After moving alriyadh.com to Lighttpd I had some problem making a CakePHP application I wrote to work properly.
I searched the net for a solution and I found this post, but unfortunately the solution they proposed didn’t work, I spent several hours trying to make it work until I gave up, I decide to do it from scratch and luckily it worked. 
The mod_rewrite rules I used in lighttpd.conf file:



url.rewrite-once = (

        "^/cake/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/$1/$2",

        "^/cake/(.*)$" => "/cake/app/webroot/index.php?url=$1"

)



Where cake is you cakePHP application.
    
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        February 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Improving thumbnails quality
      
    
    
      Inpired by Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret post, about how Flickr thumbnails make the photo prettier than the original photo.
The article suggest that Flick sharpen the image before it resize it.
So I did my own test, this the result and you are the judge:
 
Image 1, normal resize.
Image 2, sharpen before resize.


Sharpened and saturated +100:

All I need to know is how to do it from inside PHP.
    
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        February 4, 2007
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com moved to lighttpd
      
    
    
      Alriyadh.com website is now served by Lighttpd (aka Lighty).
I moved all static content from Apache to Lighty, Lighty “select” based design makes it ideal for I/O bound operation, i.e. disk and network operations. For this reason Lighty move all CPU bound operations to external process and communicate with them using FastCGI protocol.
This is what delayed my migration to Lighty, because I used to compile PHP with mod_php only and with FastCGI support, so I have to recompile PHP to enable it. Of course I spent few days testing, and I am still having some areas not covered completely.
    
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        January 5, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com previous polls
      
    
    
      Recently I have improved alriyadh.com voting system, many of them are in administration area, some of these changes will be visible in the near future.
One of the new additions is the previous votes page:

http://www.alriyadh.com/php/vote/
Check it out, and keep in mind the design is still under work.
Memo to self: replace the word “vote” with “poll”
UPDATE: If you see weird colors in IE (7?) it is fixed now.
    
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        January 1, 2007
      
    
    
      
        XCache new PHP optimizer
      
    
    
      XCache is relatively new PHP code optimizer, written by “Jan Kneschke” the same guy who wrote Lighttpd web server.
After migrating Alriyadh.com to the new dual CPU servers, I had problems with APC PHP optimizer and locking, so I disabled the optimizer altogether, after all the CPU was very fast and it handled the load without any problems.
But lately with my increasing interest on Lighttpd I noticed XCache, I never heard of it before but after reading the web site, and the problem APC have with multi processors I decided to give XCache a try, and the best of all it was ready in FreeBSD ports, so I installed it and so far it doing a good job.
    
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        October 13, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Java Package for FreeBSD
      
    
    
      Installing Java on FreeBSD (my favourite operating system) wasn’t an easy task, you have to download Java files from Sun web site put them in a special directory then start a lengthy build process that never successed.
Fortunately FreeBSD Foundation has binary package for Java, all you need is to Download and install using:
# pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd5.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz

and you are done.
With Java on FreeBSD may be I will start playing with Lucene instead of Swish-e as Alriyadh search engine.
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        August 25, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Implementing Pingback in alriyadh.com
      
    
    
      Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.
Implementing Pingback feature is very easy, you need to add the following code to your template:



<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.alriyadh.com/php/xmlrpc/" />


This code will make other blogging software notify your software that it is linking to it, It do this by sending “pingback.ping” XML-RPC request to the given URL, when you get the notification you can add it to the database, email it, or do what ever you want with it.
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd the new webserver in town
      
    
    
      For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.
    
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        June 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Python 2.5 Beta, and new Python website
      
    
    
      Python, my favorite computer language (althought I don’t use it that often) released 2.5 beta version.
What amazed me that their website is now changed with new look, and Python has a new logo too.

    
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        June 20, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Optimizing MySQL
      
    
    
      The last 3 days we were facing many problems with Alriyadh.com web server, the server suddenly get very slow, and all requests times out. It took me very long time to identify the problem, I tried many things and every time I think it will solve the problem completely, but after few hours the problem appear again and he server start to crawl.

Until this moment I am not 100% sure the problem is solved, but during the process I learned many things, so I’ll share it with you and hopefully everything will go smoothly, if it doesn’t I have to learn new thing to figure out the problem.
    
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        June 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        JEdit the ultimate editor!
      
    
    
      
A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.
But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP  (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).
    
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        June 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET needs fresh graduates
      
    
    
      SAUDI NET is hiring and we are looking for fresh graduates in CS/IS, we have very large expansions that will give you many great chances to work with different technologies. 
SAUDI NET is part of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) so you will get all the STC employees benefits.
If you are intersted send me your resume at (rayed at saudi.net.sa)
    
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        June 11, 2006
      
    
    
      
        FireFTP: FTP client inside Firefox
      
    
    
      I always have trouble finding and recommending FTP clients to friends, I used to use WS_FTP but it isn’t free, same thing for Cute FTP.
Lately I didn’t use FTP client any more, because I start using HTMLKit it isn’t an FTP client per se, it is an editor with the ability to open remote files using FTP, so I do most of my file editing using it.
HTMLKit is great but it doesn’t support moving files or directories, or transfaering a complete directory. In these cases I usually log to the machine using SSH and do the need operations using the command line, but this not an option for most people.
    
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        June 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Finally I upgraded WordPress
      
    
    
      Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session
Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.
    
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        May 23, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com wins ICT Excellence Awards
      
    
    
      Yesterday, Alriyadh.com awarded the Middle East ICT Excellence Award in the “Print and Electronic Media of the Year (Print)” category from the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute.
Alriyadh Newspaper covered the story, and we received a great response from many people, thanks everyone:

«الرياض»تحصل على جائزةالشرق الأوسط في تقنية المعلومات والاتصالات لأفضل موقع الكتروني
«الرياض» تحصل على جائزة أفضل موقع إلكتروني في الشرق الأوسط
موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني.. عمل دؤوب وتطوير دائم(screen shots for alriyadh.com since opening)
السحيباني: انتظروا المزيد من التطوير في موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني
شباب سعودي يتوج «الرياض» الإلكتروني باللقب
تقنيون سعوديون: فخورون بفوز «الرياض» .. والجائزة ذهبت لمن يستحقها
قراء «الرياض» يتفاعلون مع الفوز

Special thanks to Ahmad Alsuwailm for the great coverage.
    
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        May 3, 2006
      
    
    
      
        CakePHP 1.0 released!
      
    
    
      CakePHP version 1.0 is released, CakePHP in thier word is:
Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.
I have tried it few times and it is really intersting peace of software, many say CakePHP is Ruby on Rails clone.
    
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        May 2, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com new 404 page
      
    
    
      Check it out:

404 Page
and give me you feedback, what to you think it should contain.
    
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        March 31, 2006
      
    
    
      
        PHP output compression
      
    
    
      PHP 4.0.5 and above added new feature to compress your PHP pages on the fly, all you need is the zlib extension, this how I configured it.

# vi /usr/local/etc/php.ini

:

zlib.output_compression = On

:

# apachectl graceful


Alriyadh.com front page size dropped from 20.5 K to 5.6 K, according to my tests almost 50% of browser don’t support compression, IE for instance turn off gzip compression support if you have bad firewalls (Zone Alarm), and even some IE extensions (specially ad wares) turn off the compression.
    
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        March 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Caching: memcached vs MySQL
      
    
    
      Several month ago I researched caching methods to use with Alriyadh.com, it was essential because we used old and slow hardware.
The result of my test showed that MySQL based caching was superior to memcached caching.
I did a new benchmark comparing MySQL, PHP memcache extension, and PHP memcache class.
The text is done by fetching the result of a complex query 1000 times, and calculated the time it took using my bechmark library (link dead!), times in seconds:
    
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        January 25, 2006
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com news in your website, cut and paste
      
    
    
      I developed a new Javascript based feed for alriyadh.com that can be included easily in any website, all you need is cut-n-paste some HTML code (mostly Javascript) into your web page and you will get all the news you need.

The script is customizable you can select the following:

What section you want to view.
How many links in each section.
How do you want to view the links.

Give it a try and tell me what do you think, remember it is still under development, so please don’t complain about the design 🙂

http://www.alriyadh.com/static/feedjs/
    
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        November 15, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com one man show!
      
    
    
      Everyday at 11pm, alriyadh.com team start working on the next day issue, the job involve copying all contents from the printed version to the alriyadh.com content management system, the process involve 2 to 3 team members, and takes about 4-5 hours to complete.
But last Thursday was a special case, due to a planned vacation for one team member, and family issues for another member, Faisal Alenzi was the only guy working that night and he carried the whole show and published the whole issue on time by him self.
    
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        November 13, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PostgreSQL and PHP (on Windows)
      
    
    
      After installing PostgreSQL (15 minutes job), and playing with pgAdminIII, I decided to try it with PHP.

    
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        August 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        PHP & regular experssion named groups
      
    
    
      This is a nice regular expression feature, sometime when you have complex regular expression, you could forget what each refer to:



$str = '2005-08-01';

preg_match('/(\d{4})-(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})/', $str, $m);



Now you don’t know which group is which part in the regular experssion.
Instead you can name all groups by using the format (?P<name>pattern) instead of just (pattern), then you can access this group by name you assigned it, so the previous regular experssion could be written like:



preg_match('/(?P<year>\d{4})-(?P<month>\d{1,2})-(?P<day>\d{1,2})/', $str, $m);


    
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        August 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Tip on installing graphic support for PHP in FreeBSD
      
    
    
      GD is a graphic library that enable PHP to manipulate images, to install it from FreeBSD port us:
# cd /usr/ports/graphics/php4-gd
# make -DWITHOUT_X11 install

The tip is to use WITHOUT_X11 option this will save you from compiling X Windows which is needed for some of GD supported formats.
    
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        August 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Caching method compared
      
    
    
      I tested different types of caching, here is my times:


Method
Hit Time
Improvments over Miss


File
0.00029
19337.93%


MySQL
0.00064
8762.50%


memcached
0.00103
5444.66%


Altought File caching is much faster that the other two methods, it can suffer from file locking problems, and can’t be shared between more than one server.
memcached client used is written in PHP which will slow it down a little bit.
So MySQL seems the ideal choice 😉
    
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        August 5, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New plans for alriyadh.com
      
    
    
      When I started building alriyadh.com website I decided to generate all pages as static HTML files, I relied heavily on Server Side Includes (SSI) to build complex pages.
The main reason for this decision was the fact that the server was very slow on processing PHP files, espcially with a site with high load.
Generating static HTML files has its advantages but it also had many problems:

Regenerate everytime you want to test a change
Changing the design will cause regenrating the whole website, which could take forever.
Generating complex pages is very hard, I had to rely on SSI.
What to do with pages that change frequently, e.g. pages with comments.
When importing old data, you need to generate them as well.
Static HTML files performance advantage for frequently used data, like todays issue, but for old issues it just take a lot of disk space.

Soon I’ll start testing dynamicly generated of pages with these points in mind:
    
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        August 3, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Ruby on Rails
      
    
    
      Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby computer language.

It is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture.

Smarty does a good job in the areas of View-Controller in PHP language, but I always had a feeling that the model part can be improved, but no idea how. I raed a little about Object-Relational mapping but it seems very complicated and very restircting.

Ruby on Rails on the other hand does a good job in the these 3 areas, specially the Model part, they have something called ActiveRecord which maps database tables.

There are also PHP clone for Ruby on Rails, Cake PHP, it is still in its early phases, but could give a feeling of what Ruby on Rails can offer.
    
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        May 26, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Interanet searching with Swish-e
      
    
    
      Swish-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans – Enhanced) is really nice small program that index almost anything, I am playing with it at the moment and I am thinking of dumping my own search engine and replace it with Swish-e.
Swish has many features but the one feature that stroke me is the speed:

66,548 files indexed.  164,076,410 total bytes.  26,496,024 total words.

Elapsed time: 00:02:44 CPU time: 00:02:31

Indexing done!
    
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            Category: SAUDI NET
          
        
        
            
    
      
        January 3, 2008
      
    
    
      
        Moving rayed.com email to GMail
      
    
    
      I am moving all my emails (except work email) to one single email using my own domain (myname at mydomain), and I am going to use Google Apps service, basically I am getting GMail for my own domain, I even have my own start page and tons of applications.
The provided storage is unbeatable, and after Google provided IMAP service, it is really tempting.
So guys if you want to contact me please do at myname at mydomain.
    
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        October 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Leaving SAUDI NET
      
    
    
      This week, I started my new job at CITC, I am leaving STC, I’ve spent the last 6 years working for SAUDI NET and SAUDI DATA.
Alhamdu Lelah, the last 6 years were amazing, I learned too many thing, made friends with too many people.
Thanks to everyone participated in this great experience, and special thank to Abdullah Aldosari who add the extra spices on it 😉
    
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        June 25, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Moved to a new server
      
    
    
      rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:

FreeBSD 6.2

Apache 2

PHP 5

MySQL 5
    
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        May 27, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Abdullah Aldosari left SAUDI NET
      
    
    
      After spending 6 years at SAUDI NET, Abdullah Aldosari has left us and joined Mobily.
Abdullah was our system architect, with large arsenal of skills talents, we have working very tightly all these years. SAUDI NET sure lost a very valuable team member.
Abdullah it has been a pleasure and honor to work with you.
    
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        April 23, 2007
      
    
    
      
        IE6 in Ubuntu
      
    
    
      Ubuntu Linux is really easy OS with many interesting features, one of the best sites to help you with your Ubuntu experince is Ubuntu Guide, the site has many useful tips on how to do thing in Ubuntu.
One of the tips is how to install Internet Explorer under Ubuntu, I saw Fahad AlShenaifi do it, he is our Ubuntu expert since he is using it exclusively for the past year or so.
    
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        April 13, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Dovecot 1.0.0 released (Mail Server)
      
    
    
      Dovecot version 1.0.0 finally released, after almost 5 years of development.
Dovecot is IMAP and POP3 server, it is one of the best and easiest servers I ever worked with, easy enough for home environment, and flexible and powerful enough for service providers.
I’ve tested it earlier before and hopefully we will migrate to it later this year.
Dovecot integrate very well with Postfix mail server (Postfix handle SMTP, Dovecot handle POP3+IMAP), and can easily support virtual hosting.
    
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        January 16, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Lighttpd powers Saudi Arabia most <del>popular</del> unpopular website
      
    
    
      Since we migrated Saudi Arabia international lines from ISU to us, we started to host the most unpopular web page in the kingdom, Internet Block Page.

We started hosting it on Apache web server, but we noticed timeout problems with the server, to discover that slow clients reserve many Apache process which lead to consuming all of Apache processes.

Lighttpd came to the rescue, I replaced Apache with Lighttpd and so far it is doing a great job. Lighttpd is a prefect fit since the website only serve one static page, and this where Lighttpd shines.

This doesn’t mean Lighttpd is better than Apache, each one has its own uses, this small comparison table for both:
    
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        November 2, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My DSL is back :)
      
    
    
      Extremely slow but still DSL. My phone line got off line for more than a month, after that phone worked but with out DSL for another 2 weeks, during this time I only connect using 28K dial up connection, which is really really slow. 
Update: I upgraded to 512K and it is awesome, it wasn’t slow Windows was downloading tons of updates 🙂
    
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        October 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Things I want to write about but don’t have time
      
    
    
      These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.

Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:






    
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        August 19, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Virtual FTP accounts with Pure-FTPd  and MySQL
      
    
    
      Pure-FTPd is a FTP server with many features that enable you to host virtual accounts, these are the features that I loved and tested:

You can put the user information in MySQL database, without having to create a real UNIX account for each user.
It also have the feature of creating the user home directory when the user logging, so all you need to create a new user is to add it to the database.
CallUploadScript this feature will make the server run a script whenever a new file is uploaded, I used this feature to scan the file for viruses as soon as the user upload the file. (I use ClamAV as my virus scanner)

Installation (FreeBSD)



# cd /usr/ports/ftp/pure-ftpd/

# make install

# vi /etc/rc.conf

:

pureftpd_enable="YES"

pureftpd_upload_enable="YES"

pureftpd_uploadscript="/path/to/pureftpd_uploadscript.sh"

:


    
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        August 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        New Thunderbird checklist
      
    
    
      Check all IMAP folders:

By default Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new messages, but since we use server side filter emails don’t have to go to inbox and sometimes go directly to destionation folder.

Fortunaltely Tunderbird can be configured to check all folders, but it has to be done manually, put the follwoing lines in “user.js”:



// Download mail from all accounts on startup

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);



The file doesn’t exists by default so you need to create it in your “profile” filder, this link will help you to locate your “profile” folder:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#profile
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Cricket extensions
      
    
    
      Cricket
Cricket is trend monitoring software, it allows you to monitor trend for any device you want.
I wrote 2 extensions for Cricket to monitor Lighttpd web server, and Memecached caching server.
Lighttpd web server
“lighttpd (also called “Lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license.”  Wikipedia
    
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        August 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        lighttpd the new webserver in town
      
    
    
      For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.
    
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        June 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Python 2.5 Beta, and new Python website
      
    
    
      Python, my favorite computer language (althought I don’t use it that often) released 2.5 beta version.
What amazed me that their website is now changed with new look, and Python has a new logo too.

    
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        June 14, 2006
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET needs fresh graduates
      
    
    
      SAUDI NET is hiring and we are looking for fresh graduates in CS/IS, we have very large expansions that will give you many great chances to work with different technologies. 
SAUDI NET is part of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) so you will get all the STC employees benefits.
If you are intersted send me your resume at (rayed at saudi.net.sa)
    
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        June 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Internet traffic slowness in Saudi Arabia
      
    
    
      These days Internet backbone in Saudi Arabia is having many problems affecting mainly DSL customers in some areas. I guess it must be related to the boom in new DSL connections.
To make things worst the school vacation just started and the Internet browsing became very very slow.
Thank god that I host my website at SAUDI NET so no speed prolem with it.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Greylisting: New weapon to fight Spam
      
    
    
      Last Tuesday, I enabled Geylisting on SAUDI NET mail servers, and you can see the decrease of spam we are getting (the blue line):

The first day of enabling greylisting we got many complaints about delayed emails, but after that all emails flow with delays.
To learn more check Greylist @ Wikipedia
    
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        May 9, 2006
      
    
    
      
        FreeBSD 6.1 released
      
    
    
      FreeBSD my favorite operating system released version 6.1, they finally put the new logo.
For more information about FreeBSD checkout FreeBSD@WikiPedia
    
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        April 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        DSL access at last :)
      
    
    
      After three months delay from the inital plan I finally got DSL access.
My friend Abdulaziz Alqudhibi offered me NetGear DSL Modem/Router/Access point for really great price but it will take two days to install, but I couldn’t wait so I went to the market and bought a SpeedTouch 585, I hope I won’t regret it

    
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        February 26, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My tiny contribution to ClamAV
      
    
    
      ClamAV is an open source Anti Virus software for UNIX systems, we use it here in SAUDI NET to stop Virus in email message it stops thousands of viruses  everyday, I also use it in our personal hosting service that we provide for our customers, unfortunately some customers upload virus intentionally and unintentionally, so I installed ClamAV to scan and delete viruses.
Last week I noticed one of our trouble making customers uploading sospious files, I ran “clamscan” on the user directory but it didn’t detect it, when I tried to download it my PC anti-virus software “MicroTrend” stopped the download warning me about the Virus. So I went home and downloaded it again and scanned it using Norton AV, it didn’t detect it either! 
    
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        January 27, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Faster Dialup Service
      
    
    
      SAUDI NET is testing new dialup service, the new service uses PPP compression to give faster links, the difference is noticeable espically with HTML pages. Of course images and binary files get less compression which mean you won’t notice a big difference with them.
The service is tested with SAUDI NET prepaid service only (Phone: 3604567), if tests went ok we deploy it on SAUDI NET EasyNet (Phone: 3660077).
Improvemnt of performance depeneds on your browsing behaviour, but 25% is the average increase. So if you connect using 45K you will really get 56K, and if you connect with 52K speed you will get 65K.
    
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        January 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET DSL without proxy: Fixed
      
    
    
      We found a small configuration error that broke the transparent proxy from working on some DSL connections, it should work now with every one, Enjoy!
    
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        January 15, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Flickr open again, but is it for good!
      
    
    
      Today a friend of mine opened my old web site http://myweb.saudi.net.sa/rayed/ and I noticed that my flickr badge is working again! I thought he used an external proxy, but he wasn’t 🙂

Flickr is open again but is it for good or it is just a mistake from ISU.

I enabled my Flickr badge again, I miss Flickr!

UPDATE: ISU blocked flickr again 🙁

UPDATE: It is open now, I am confused!

UPDATE: It seems that Flickr is open in Riyadh proxies, and not on Jeddah proxies, I hope it is closed by mistake.
    
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        December 29, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Finally DSL access :)
      
    
    
      but after two months 🙁

STC is under going a massive deployment in DSL lines in 2006, they announced that they will increase the number of DSL lines kingdom wide from 50,000 line to 500,000 line by the end of 2006!

So I decided to call the STC service number 907, and order DSL, they gave me an appointment today to tell me if the line is ready or not, no called me, so I called and they told the “Moather” exchange -which my area belongs to- will get DSL access in 26/1/1427 Hejjri which corresponds to 25/2/2006 according to IslamicFinder

I’ll be waiting.
    
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        December 25, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET DSL without proxy
      
    
    
      We’ve just launched transparent proxy solution on our DSL service, since I don’t have DSL at home I can’t test it yet 🙁

But if you do and have problems please let me know.
    
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        December 18, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET photo shoot
      
    
    
      

Very busy shooting studio 🙂



    
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        November 16, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET DSL feedback
      
    
    
      It is thrilling to see these words:

http://www.adslgate.com/dsl/showthread.php?t=10976

http://www.adslgate.com/dsl/showthread.php?p=85995
    
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        November 7, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Crazy or Executive
      
    
    
      Nice Dilbert strip (click to enlarge):

    
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        October 25, 2005
      
    
    
      
        New services at my.saudi.net.sa
      
    
    
      We’ve just added new services and features to SAUDI NET portal my.saudi.net.sa:

New prayer times service, with alerts 🙂 , just click setting and add it to your page.
Two newsfeed: alriyadh.com, and alarabiya.net through RSS.
New option in the setting for external link target, either to open them in the same page or new one.


    
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        August 31, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET logo back in Tadawul website
      
    
    
      Tadawul returned powered by SAUDI NET logo once again.

    
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        August 25, 2005
      
    
    
      
        SAUDI NET customer care close their door
      
    
    
      This week SAUDI NET customer care team left NCCI building and moved to one of the STC (out parent company) headquarter buildings.
The customer care works in shifts 24 hours a day, and today it is the first time since I came to SAUDI NET 5 years ago I come to my office and no one else in our floor except me.
I rarely chat with the guys in customer care, I am not very social person after all, but today I really missed them a lot, I really feel a huge void in my life, very sad moment indeed.
    
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        August 19, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Riyadh City Webcam
      
    
    
      http://my.saudi.net.sa/webcam




    
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        July 17, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Saudi Ubuntu Yahoo Group
      
    
    
      Osama Aldosary started a Saudi Ubuntu email group at Yahoo Groups, join us!



Click to join subuntu
    
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        July 17, 2005
      
    
    
      
        Upgrading SAUDI NET mail server
      
    
    
      We’ve just upgrade SAUDI NET main mail server 350GB, RAID-5, simply awesome.
    
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            Category: Css
          
        
        
            
    
      
        December 30, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Learning Drupal
      
    
    
      
Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.
Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.
    
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        September 18, 2007
      
    
    
      
        CSS Layout and design articles and resources
      
    
    
      If you still use tables to build your web site you really need to go back to school to learn CSS, and understand why CSS should be utilized to design your web site.

Here are some resource I found most useful to understand and start using CSS for layout, enjoy:

Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps: Teach you about CSS “position”, “float”, “clear”, very important in CSS based design.
No More Tables CSS Layout Techniques: layout using table is old and bad practice, learn why and how to move to CSS based layout.
Listamatic: create horizontal and vertical menus using simple <li> elements. 
Yahoo UI Library Fonts and Reset: Library to make your design and fonts look the same in all browsers.

    
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        May 18, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Alriyadh.com converted to CSS based design
      
    
    
      Warning: It is the same design converted to CSS.
After 5 weeks of development and testing, Alriyadh.com is now converted to CSS based design, it still not 100% complete.
You can view the design by using this URL:

www2.alriyadh.com
Some benefits of moving to CSS:

Fonts look the same a cross browsers: I am using Yahoo! User Interface Library fonts file to guarantee that font have the same size a cross browsers.
Page are bit smaller: because many presentation tags are now removed from the HMTL and put in the CSS.
Printer friendly by default: we now have have separate CSS file for printing, so no need for printer friendly page since all page are automatically are.
PDA friendly by default: same as printer CSS, not implemented yet.
Rendering is faster.
It will simplify future redesign. (since we are talking about redesign, suggestion are welcomed 🙂 )

    
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        February 7, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Submitting Forms using Ajax
      
    
    
      When you build AJAX based form, you need to provide visual feedback to tell the user that something is really happening.
I created small template for this purpose:


Ajax Form
Hopefully you will see it in the next alriyadh.com CSS based theme 🙂
    
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        May 30, 2006
      
    
    
      
        CSS designed websites
      
    
    
      These sites collect links to CSS designed websites, great if you want to get some inspiration, it also give some idea on the capabilities of CSS:

css thesis: sites, that’s all
CSS Import
CSS Beauty
Unmatched style

    
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        November 8, 2005
      
    
    
      
        alriyadh.com new comments style
      
    
    
      
Alriyadh.com introduced new style to display comments, see the Sample Article
The new style uses CSS instead of tables, which make it much smaller and cleaner.
A link to each comment is also added -the time of the post- to allow bookmarking and sending URLs to specific comment.
The posting form is now viewed in the same page, it is hidden by default but after clicking “Post Comment” it will appear thank to the power of Javascript.
    
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            Category: Mac
          
        
        
            
    
      
        July 20, 2007
      
    
    
      
        Convert videos for iPod
      
    
    
      My son Abdullah is addicted to Dora the Explorer cartoons, and since I am planing to travel in the summer I am looking for ways to take his DVDs with me using my iPod.
I found this free software that convert videos to iPod ready format, so far it is doing very good job.

Koyote Free Ipod video converter
    
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        October 24, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Firefox 2 and IE 7
      
    
    
      Recently the 2 most popular browsers IE and Firefox released a new version.
Firefox is already a very good product so improving it is very hard 🙂 The most important new feature is the online spell checker which is really lovely. It also has a new theme, I didn’t like that much but it might take some time to get used to.
IE 7 in the other hand is really impressive (compared to IE 6 of course), it has tab browsing at last, the theme is really really good, the new font rendering engine is really smooth and clear it feels like a Mac.
    
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        July 7, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Mac experience so far
      
    
    
      The Bad

Mouse movement: Mac OS has very strange mouse movement, if you move the mouse slowly it moves “very” slow, and if you move it faster it move “very” fast. I couldn’t get used to it until now and it drives me crazy.

I tried different software to fix this weired behavior, but it is still awkward.
Arabic support is really bad:

Keyboard layout is different than PC layout, which is frustrating for PC converts.
Most soft wares don’t provide good support for Arabic, Front page doesn’t connect Arabic characters. Apple iWork Pages doesn’t even support right to left writing.
Writing in “bold” in Arabic font is the same as non bold.


Software updates are huge, I guess they don’t have incremental update, you need to download the complete software whenever a new version exists. e.g. I am downloading 51M update for QuickTime, and you have to restart the machines afterward!! So far I downloaded more than 1 GB for software update!!

The Good

It is UNIX 🙂
In Mac OS an application is a complete folder when you click the folder the application runs. So software installation is very easy, you just move the folder to where you want to your application folder. To uninstall move the folder to the trash.
The graphics are awesome, wallpapers, screen savers, application everything is cool!
The machines is really great looking, and the 20″ monitor is really amazing and bright.
Super quite you don’t hear any noise.
Mac OS sleep feature is really fast, one click and the machine is running in less than a second!!






    
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        June 17, 2006
      
    
    
      
        JEdit the ultimate editor!
      
    
    
      
A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.
But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP  (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).
    
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        June 11, 2006
      
    
    
      
        FireFTP: FTP client inside Firefox
      
    
    
      I always have trouble finding and recommending FTP clients to friends, I used to use WS_FTP but it isn’t free, same thing for Cute FTP.
Lately I didn’t use FTP client any more, because I start using HTMLKit it isn’t an FTP client per se, it is an editor with the ability to open remote files using FTP, so I do most of my file editing using it.
HTMLKit is great but it doesn’t support moving files or directories, or transfaering a complete directory. In these cases I usually log to the machine using SSH and do the need operations using the command line, but this not an option for most people.
    
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        June 10, 2006
      
    
    
      
        Thunderbird extension for Arabic
      
    
    
      Thunderbird is a great email client, it has very good support for international languages, and it displays Arabic emails without any problems, the only problem that I face with it is when writing Arabic emails, unfortunately Thunderbird doesn’t have shortcut or button to change the writing direction from left-to-right used by most western languages, to right-to-left used for Arabic.
But through the power of extensions you can install this small extension (37K) that will add 2 new buttons in Compose window, one for changing the direction from LTR->RTL, and vice versa.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        My MAC OS downloads
      
    
    
      Until now my downloads are basically similar to Windows counter part:

Firefox
Thunderbird
Real Player
Windows Mediaplayer
Windows Messenger

any thing else I should look at.
    
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        May 28, 2006
      
    
    
      
        I bought a 20″ iMac
      
    
    
      First impressions: WOW, WOW, huh, why, where!!! I guess I need sometime to get used to it. At least I have a terminal program with ssh, after all it is UNIX machine 🙂
    
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