One of the best cheat sheet / reference on UNIX and Linux:

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

http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml

باقي 5 ايام فقط على معرض الرياض الدولي للكتاب، اذا لم تذهب حتى الآن اذهب.

المعرض يقام سنوياً ولكن للأسف لم احضره خلال العشر السنوات اللتي مضت (ان لم يكن اكثر)، خلال هذه الفترة لم اكن اقرأ سوى كتب الحاسب الانجليزية، والانترنت طبعاً 🙂 لكن هذه السنة قمت بزيارة المعرض مرتين، مرشحة للزيادة.

كان لدي العديد من الاعتقادات عن المعرض وهي ما منعتني من الحضور كل هذه السنين:

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

بالطبع كل هذه الانطباعات تغيرت بشكل او بآخر، فالكتب العربية ليست مملة، او على الاقل ليس كلها، لكن عليك ان تجد ما ينساب ذوقك، فانا وجدت الكتب الاجتماعية الساخرة، وادب الرحلات مسلية ومفيدة للغاية، حتى انني بدأت اقرأ الروايات الاجنبية المترجمة (الحديثة) مع انها كانت ابعد ما يخطر على بالي.

FreeBSD 7 is available, many new improvements performance and feature wise, check the announcement.

One of the most impressive improvements is SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing):

Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better

Mozilla Foundation the people behind Firefox are launching a new Foundation Mozilla Messaging, their objective is to improve how people communicate on the Internet. Of course they will start with my favorite email client Thunderbird :

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

If Thunderbird improve its collaboration features it will be great contender in the Enterprise Collaboration arena, watch out “Lotus Notes” and “Outlook”.

After spending couple of years with Siemens, and 6 years with Nokia, I decided to convert my mobile to SonyEricsson, I switched to SonyEricsson T650i.

So far I like it, the OS is fast and so far reliable, the screen is very colorful and smooth, the camera is descent with auto focus feature which I love, and I really loved the design. Need sometime to get used to the back button.

This is really funny 🙂

Drupal the open source content management system has a new fresh release Drupal 6.

Update: It seems CCK and VIEWS aren’t compatible with Drupal 6 yet, does anyone use Drupal without CCK and VIEW?

• Fix mod_rewrite to have clean URLs, and get rid of “index.php” part.
• Edit “config/config.php” and change the following:
  
// Setup your base URL
$config['base_url']="http://rayed.com/ci/";
// No need for index.php
$config['index_page'] = "";
// Remove AUTO and Put PATH_INFO
// this will allows you to pass variables as URL
// segments or Query string "?id=1"
$config['uri_protocol'] = "PATH_INFO";

• Setup your database configuration “config/database.php”
• Auto connect to database, edit “config/autoload.php”:
  $autoload['libraries'] = array('database');
• Edit “config/routes.php” to change default controller:
  $route['default_controller'] = "users";

For the last year I spent a lot of my PHP time playing with CakePHP I like it at first, but when I tried to build large applications with it I noticed it have major issues with performance, plus I really had difficult time dealing with it is strict naming convention and it object-relational-mapping (ORM).

Few days ago I read about CodeIgniter framework and its similarities to CakePHP and its amazing performance, so I went and visited their website again, I heard about CodeIgniter before from Abdullah Aldosari (I miss our technical discussions) but when I visited the website I wasn’t really impressed, but the new website looks much better, so judging by the look improvement alone I decided to give it a try 🙂

Two separate friends are visiting Hong Kong soon, they asked for tips about Hong Kong this it what I remembered, hope others find it useful.

Overall Hong Kong is very beautiful and modern city, hotel prices are bit high (with the weak dollar everything is), transportation is very good and efficient, the food is good and you can find Halal food in many places but you have to ask for.