I am currently on vacation in Thailand, so far I love it. Really beautiful and clean despite being crowded in some areas.

Hopefully I’ll post more about in the coming days. Meanwhile checkout out my photos on Flickr:
rayed @ Flickr

Extremely slow but still DSL. My phone line got off line for more than a month, after that phone worked but with out DSL for another 2 weeks, during this time I only connect using 28K dial up connection, which is really really slow.

Update: I upgraded to 512K and it is awesome, it wasn’t slow Windows was downloading tons of updates 🙂

Since I upgraded my WordPress to version 2 I used Akismet to protect my from comment spam, it did a great job for a while but lately it passes a lot of spam, I am not sure what is the problem but I am suspecting some network problems.

So until I resolve this problem I’ll try using CaptCha! plug-in, it uses captcha method to prevent spamming.

Captcha works as follow, when you want to submit a comment, the website displays an image with few characters shown in wave shapes, and you requested to type the character you see to accept your comment, the idea is to prevent automatic script from submitting comment because they can not read the character in the screen, even if they used OCR it would be very hard to recognize it.

Yesterday I went to Jarir Bookstore between exist 5 and 6, and when I came back to my car I found the passenger glass smashed and all my stuff scattered on the car. Fortunately, I never leave anything in my car, so nothing got stolen, but fixing the damage would cost around 1000 SR.

My brother car got stolen 500m from my Jarir Bookstore near Saco, both accidents happened in less than 6 months period!!

Recently the 2 most popular browsers IE and Firefox released a new version.

Firefox is already a very good product so improving it is very hard 🙂 The most important new feature is the online spell checker which is really lovely. It also has a new theme, I didn’t like that much but it might take some time to get used to.

IE 7 in the other hand is really impressive (compared to IE 6 of course), it has tab browsing at last, the theme is really really good, the new font rendering engine is really smooth and clear it feels like a Mac.

Every year or so I have a project in Java I learn enough thing to finish the project then I forget it by getting busy in other proejcts.
Over the years I really loved and hated Java,

Java what to learn:

• Ant: is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make’s wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.
• Tomcat: servlet and JSP server, can work as standalone, with Apache HTTPd, or IIS.
• log4j: log4j is a Java-based logging utility. It is used primarily as a debugging tool.
• JUnit: JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language.

Installing Java on FreeBSD (my favourite operating system) wasn’t an easy task, you have to download Java files from Sun web site put them in a special directory then start a lengthy build process that never successed.

Fortunately FreeBSD Foundation has binary package for Java, all you need is to Download and install using:

# pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd5.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz

and you are done.

With Java on FreeBSD may be I will start playing with Lucene instead of Swish-e as Alriyadh search engine.

These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

• My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
• IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
• Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
• Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
• Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
• Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.
• Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:

Few months ago my brother Fouad went to SACO hardware store, unfortunately he forgot his wallet in the car, as soon as he remembered it he went back to the car to find the window broken and all his belongings stolen, including his wallet and his work briefcase, he reported the accident to his bank within few minutes to deactivate his VISA card, but it was too late they thief already purchased 17,000 SR worth of good including laptops and mobile phones, all this happened in less than an hour!!!! Until he is still talking to the bank to return it back.

Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.

Implementing Pingback feature is very easy, you need to add the following code to your template:

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.alriyadh.com/php/xmlrpc/" />


This code will make other blogging software notify your software that it is linking to it, It do this by sending “pingback.ping” XML-RPC request to the given URL, when you get the notification you can add it to the database, email it, or do what ever you want with it.