Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “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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