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

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 🙂

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.

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.

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

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

عيد سعيد وكل عام وانتم بخير

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)

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:

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

جناح الرياض في جيتكس " اليوم الأول "