First impressions: WOW, WOW, huh, why, where!!! I guess I need sometime to get used to it. At least I have a terminal program with ssh, after all it is UNIX machine 🙂

Yesterday, Alriyadh.com awarded the Middle East ICT Excellence Award in the “Print and Electronic Media of the Year (Print)” category from the Middle East Excellence Awards Institute.

Alriyadh Newspaper covered the story, and we received a great response from many people, thanks everyone:

• «الرياض»تحصل على جائزةالشرق الأوسط في تقنية المعلومات والاتصالات لأفضل موقع الكتروني
• «الرياض» تحصل على جائزة أفضل موقع إلكتروني في الشرق الأوسط
• موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني.. عمل دؤوب وتطوير دائم(screen shots for alriyadh.com since opening)
• السحيباني: انتظروا المزيد من التطوير في موقع «الرياض» الإلكتروني
• شباب سعودي يتوج «الرياض» الإلكتروني باللقب
• تقنيون سعوديون: فخورون بفوز «الرياض» .. والجائزة ذهبت لمن يستحقها
• قراء «الرياض» يتفاعلون مع الفوز

Special thanks to Ahmad Alsuwailm for the great coverage.

Today I contacted ADAM -the Apple distributer in Jeddah- by email and they replied after 20 minutes, which is a good thing, here is the reply:

Our branch in Riyadh is for whole sale only, but we can send you what ever you need from Jeddah.
The intel iMac 20″ is for 7500SR not including shipping.

In another front Apple announced the new MacBook which replaced the iBook, it cost $1099 which is really attractive, but with only 13″ screen, it can be a good gift though.

Today I went to Apple Store in Riyadh looking for a Mac, I was interested in the 17″ iMac, but after seeing the 20″ iMac the 17″ won’t satisfy me, it was really amazing and looks much prettier in real life.

The bad side is the price, the 17″ cost 6500SR ($1730), and the 20″ cost 8400SR ($2240), keep in mind that in the US the 17″ cost $1299 ($430 difference), and the 20″ cost $1699 ($541 difference).

Every few years I think of buying a Mac machine, usually it happens after Apple annonce new cool thing, first the PowerPC CPU which was really amazing back in the 90s, then with Mac OS X being built on top of UNIX, then lately with the introduction of Intel based Macs.

Also 6 months ago my friend Misfer bough a PowerBook, and he loves s much.

So is it time to convert to Mac, Mac machines are generally more expensive than Windows machines, especially here in Saudi Arabia, and I only know one store that sells Macs.

FreeBSD my favorite operating system released version 6.1, they finally put the new logo.

For more information about FreeBSD checkout FreeBSD@WikiPedia

I noticed that Firefox takes more than 100MB from my memory, I thought it would cache something and I didn’t get that much thought, specially when it very clever to adjust the cache based on my memory. But yesterday it took 170MB from my notebook 256MB, this huge!!

Today I chatted with Abdullah about Firefox memory consumption, and he said it is normal on his machine, Strange! I restarted Firefox on Safemode to see if anything in my settings or extension are wrong. Yeppy! Firefox back to normal in 20MB range.

CakePHP version 1.0 is released, CakePHP in thier word is:

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I have tried it few times and it is really intersting peace of software, many say CakePHP is Ruby on Rails clone.

Check it out:
404 Page

and give me you feedback, what to you think it should contain.

A while ago I bought an “Orange” mouse for my parents home, I bought it based on a recommendation from a sales man at “echo” electronic store. I thought optical mouses reached apoint where all mouses are the same, I was wrong. “orange” mouse was very stupid, jumping all the time and it drove my crazy.

So when I went to computer complex at Olaya to buy my DSL modem, I decided to buy a mouse for my parents computer, and since I have a good Genius mouse I bought another Genuis mouse for 20SR (Ibought mine for 30SR 3 years ago), and what a difference between the two. Genuis mouse was very wasy moving and no jumping all over the screen, I loved it.