Check all IMAP folders:
By default Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new messages, but since we use server side filter emails don’t have to go to inbox and sometimes go directly to destionation folder.
Fortunaltely Tunderbird can be configured to check all folders, but it has to be done manually, put the follwoing lines in “user.js”:

// Download mail from all accounts on startup
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

The file doesn’t exists by default so you need to create it in your “profile” filder, this link will help you to locate your “profile” folder:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#profile

Today I installed the new Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop, and I wanted to share my experince.

I took me a while to find out how to install it, after I rebooted from CD, and selected Start/Install a live Ubuntu system showed up, I thought I downloaded the live CD version of Ubuntu, but I remember that I raed “Install” during booting, so I rebooted again to try to install the system, same thing happen, I gave up and tried to play with the live CD version, then I found the “Install Ubuntu” icon on the desktop!!

Yesterday I visited one of my favourite fast food resturants, Herfy, and I order my usual meal “Super Herfy”. It usually cost 15 SR, but when I ordered it he asked me for 17 SR!! then I remembered that some resturants super size your meal without asking, I usually expect this kind of practice from “Hardee’s” and “KFC” not from Herfy.

I hate super sizing in general, because they super size the french fries and the drink, and I am not a big fan of both, and the medium serving is more than enough for me. But if you are offering super sizing my burgers this is a different story 🙂

Cricket

Cricket is trend monitoring software, it allows you to monitor trend for any device you want.

I wrote 2 extensions for Cricket to monitor Lighttpd web server, and Memecached caching server.

Lighttpd web server

“lighttpd (also called “Lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license.” Wikipedia

For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.

The Bad

• Mouse movement: Mac OS has very strange mouse movement, if you move the mouse slowly it moves “very” slow, and if you move it faster it move “very” fast. I couldn’t get used to it until now and it drives me crazy.
  I tried different software to fix this weired behavior, but it is still awkward.
• Arabic support is really bad:
  • Keyboard layout is different than PC layout, which is frustrating for PC converts.
  • Most soft wares don’t provide good support for Arabic, Front page doesn’t connect Arabic characters. Apple iWork Pages doesn’t even support right to left writing.
  • Writing in “bold” in Arabic font is the same as non bold.
• Software updates are huge, I guess they don’t have incremental update, you need to download the complete software whenever a new version exists. e.g. I am downloading 51M update for QuickTime, and you have to restart the machines afterward!! So far I downloaded more than 1 GB for software update!!

The Good

• It is UNIX 🙂
• In Mac OS an application is a complete folder when you click the folder the application runs. So software installation is very easy, you just move the folder to where you want to your application folder. To uninstall move the folder to the trash.
• The graphics are awesome, wallpapers, screen savers, application everything is cool!
• The machines is really great looking, and the 20″ monitor is really amazing and bright.
• Super quite you don’t hear any noise.
• Mac OS sleep feature is really fast, one click and the machine is running in less than a second!!

Python, my favorite computer language (althought I don’t use it that often) released 2.5 beta version.

What amazed me that their website is now changed with new look, and Python has a new logo too.

The last 3 days we were facing many problems with Alriyadh.com web server, the server suddenly get very slow, and all requests times out. It took me very long time to identify the problem, I tried many things and every time I think it will solve the problem completely, but after few hours the problem appear again and he server start to crawl.
Until this moment I am not 100% sure the problem is solved, but during the process I learned many things, so I’ll share it with you and hopefully everything will go smoothly, if it doesn’t I have to learn new thing to figure out the problem.

A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.

But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).

SAUDI NET is hiring and we are looking for fresh graduates in CS/IS, we have very large expansions that will give you many great chances to work with different technologies.

SAUDI NET is part of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) so you will get all the STC employees benefits.

If you are intersted send me your resume at (rayed at saudi.net.sa)