After serving Alriyadh.com the past 3 years, I am replacing Swish-e with Solr search server, Solr is a search server based on Lucene text search engine.

Solr has many advance features I didn’t utilize most of them yet, but hopefully you will see them soon. I will write a post about Solr and how it works and its integrate with PHP soon.

For now please have a look at it and tell me what you think.

Without any announcement Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) released the new 1/2 Riyal, it replaces the old coin, with special technologically advanced features, like UOO (Use Only Once), and WCAC (Who Cares About Consumers)

Old 1/2 Riyal photo:

New currency photo:

Seriously SAMA I am sick of shops handing me a chewing gum instead of 1/2 Riyal, and you have to do something about it, my suggestions (some of them not related to SAMA):

This week, I started my new job at CITC, I am leaving STC, I’ve spent the last 6 years working for SAUDI NET and SAUDI DATA.

Alhamdu Lelah, the last 6 years were amazing, I learned too many thing, made friends with too many people.

Thanks to everyone participated in this great experience, and special thank to Abdullah Aldosari who add the extra spices on it 😉

http://xkcd.com/327/

If you didn’t understand it read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection

Al Mayman closed
Ba Shamakh closed
Jarir out dated books

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

If you still use tables to build your web site you really need to go back to school to learn CSS, and understand why CSS should be utilized to design your web site.
Here are some resource I found most useful to understand and start using CSS for layout, enjoy:

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

Old MySQL versions didn’t have good support for Arabic, so what I used to do is to configure MySQL tables with any character set e.g. latin-1 and configure PHP to read it and write in Windows-1256 and pass it to MySQL as is i.e. MySQL think it is “Latin-1” but in fact it is “Windows-1256”.

Needless to say cheating in the character set have many bad consensuses:

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

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

ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 BLOB;
ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 TEXT CHARACTER SET cp1256;

You can change it and test it from phpMyAdmin.

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

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

My son Abdullah is addicted to Dora the Explorer cartoons, and since I am planing to travel in the summer I am looking for ways to take his DVDs with me using my iPod.

I found this free software that convert videos to iPod ready format, so far it is doing very good job.
Koyote Free Ipod video converter

The last computer game I spent more than 1 hour playing was Crash Bandicoot on Sony play station 1, after this game I lost interest on all computer games, I even started to hate them specially football related game (e.g. Winning Eleven), for some reason I couldn’t train my self to hit the sequence square-square-triangle to do whatever it do in PS.

Few months ago I read about Nintendo Wii and it is new revolutionary controller, the Wii remote, it is basically a game controller that you wave in the space and can detect 3D motion. You can use Wii remote as a sword, baseball bat, tennis racquet, human hand, you name it.