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

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

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

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

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

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

Few months ago I went to Fuddruckers restaurant, and I ordered grilled chicken salad, I am not a salad guy and the salad tasted bit plane, so I went to the sauce bar and took the most exotic looking sauce, I grabber Cholula hot sauce with its distinct large round wooden cap and tried it with my salad, the flavor was amazing. I even took a picture of the sauce trying to find it in local stores.

rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:
FreeBSD 6.2
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

For the past couple of week, I am trying to refresh my Linux skills, I abandoned Linux as the server platform of choice in favor of FreeBSD, but recently unfortunately FreeBSD isn’t supported as Linux, and sometimes Linux have this weired feature that isn’t available in FreeBSD, e.g. DRDB.

I am big FreeBSD fan, and I loved it even more when I worked with Linux, Ubuntu, the Linux distribution I use, is really impressive as a desktop OS, but if you want to hack the system, and play with its internal it doesn’t give much room, and this the exact reason I switched from Windows to Linux 10 years ago.

Two weeks ago I visited Jeddah city for the first time since 1990, yes 17 years since my last visit!

I made my flight reservation on Saudi Airlines, and the only return flight I found was on Friday 7am, and since the flight is so early it will ruin my Thursday too, I decided to try the new economical air lines, Sama or Nas.

I visited the two sites, and I made my decision on how good the website was.

Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management

Chose Storage. Then chose Disk Management. And now you can play with the partition sizes.

After spending 6 years at SAUDI NET, Abdullah Aldosari has left us and joined Mobily.

Abdullah was our system architect, with large arsenal of skills talents, we have working very tightly all these years. SAUDI NET sure lost a very valuable team member.

Abdullah it has been a pleasure and honor to work with you.

Warning: It is the same design converted to CSS.

After 5 weeks of development and testing, Alriyadh.com is now converted to CSS based design, it still not 100% complete.

You can view the design by using this URL:
www2.alriyadh.com

Some benefits of moving to CSS:

• Fonts look the same a cross browsers: I am using Yahoo! User Interface Library fonts file to guarantee that font have the same size a cross browsers.
• Page are bit smaller: because many presentation tags are now removed from the HMTL and put in the CSS.
• Printer friendly by default: we now have have separate CSS file for printing, so no need for printer friendly page since all page are automatically are.
• PDA friendly by default: same as printer CSS, not implemented yet.
• Rendering is faster.
• It will simplify future redesign. (since we are talking about redesign, suggestion are welcomed 🙂 )