“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 🙂

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.

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”.

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.

This is really funny 🙂

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.

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

Great quote from Leonardo da Vinci.

More Leonardo da Vinci quotes

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.

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 🙁

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.

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):

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 😉

Al Mayman closed
Ba Shamakh closed
Jarir out dated books

Where can I find computer books in Riyadh? any suggestions.

Guess which countries I have been to during my vacation, my Flickr photos could help:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayed/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

since Saturday 3 am, but I just got recovered from the jet lag.
Hopefully I’ll post my trip highlight and photos soon.

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

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 🙂

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!!

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.

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:

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.

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

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!!

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 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Finally after 8 months of waiting, and many calls and visits to Abdul Latif Jameel my new Avalon arrived.

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.

So no real updates for a while, it is freezing in here, a lot of pictures in the near future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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/

My friends at Alriyadh Newspaper published my son news on todays issue:
Abdullah Alrashed
Thank you guys 🙂

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.

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 🙂 .

Nice Dilbert strip (click to enlarge):

For a very beautiful boy.

Say Mashallah

UPDATE: I named him Abdullah 🙂

Slashdot covers the Simpsons in Arabic.
Link

No tapes or discs any more! It stores 5 hours of DVD quality movies.

http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio_g/

🙂

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 🙂

http://my.saudi.net.sa/webcam

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.

Even fungus couldn’t eat McDonald’s Food

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

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.

Bookmarks … store them, categorize them, share them, plus much more…
Register and find out how great is it.
http://del.icio.us/