Saudi NIC the organization responsible for registering “.sa” domains updated their website, the new design very clean and fresh. Congratulation.

Registering under “.sa” is free, and you can get good names too, so if you have a company please go and register (it is easy).

They also register Arabic domain names.

ISU blocked Flickr for the third time in less than a year, I HATE YOU ISU.

Please help me to unblock Flickr by filing URL unblocking request.

The importance of flickr is that thousands of weblogs and personal websites host their image at flickr, so by blocking flickr they blocked all images from all of these weblogs.

I am not a “speeling bee champion” -the previous sentence proves it 🙂 -, and I usually don’t care about spelling mistakes of others, but some spelling mistakes drive me crazy.

One of the most common in Arabic is:
لاكن
This is wrong, if you write it like this please stop, it is written:
لكن

I hope Google would support Arabic in their toolbar spell checker.

P.S: If you noticed any spelling mistakes in any of my post please let me know.
P.S: I used to write “great” as “grate” for many many years, but thanks to my friend “Fayez Alazmi” who corrected me one day I don’t write “grate” that often any more 🙂 .

PostgreSQL (Wikipedia) 8.1 released, check What’s new in 8.1 document.

For some reason I love PostgreSQL althought I never really used it before, I am very happy with MySQL but I really would love to use PostgreSQL, for me MySQL excel in 3 areas:

• PHPMyAdmin: I can’t live without it, I know PostgreSQL have phppgadmin, but I don’t think it would match PHPMyAdmin.
• Windows port: I remember they ported PostgreSQL to Windows, a while ago but I never tried it either, I guess I am lazy.
• Replication: I am not sure about the status of replication in PostgreSQL, am I lazy or what.

Alriyadh.com introduced new style to display comments, see the Sample Article

The new style uses CSS instead of tables, which make it much smaller and cleaner.

A link to each comment is also added -the time of the post- to allow bookmarking and sending URLs to specific comment.

The posting form is now viewed in the same page, it is hidden by default but after clicking “Post Comment” it will appear thank to the power of Javascript.

Nice Dilbert strip (click to enlarge):

This is an experimental page that shows the articles with most comments:
http://www.alriyadh.com/php/comments/comments_top.php

Hopefully it will find it self in the front page shortly, I don’t where should we put it, the front page is little crowded as is.

My web server is running FreeBSD 5.3 for the past 100 days without any problems. But 5.X isn’t as and fast as 4.X series, hope this will change with the new 6.0 release.

Some major improvment over 5.4:

• Significant performance improvements to the filesystem and direct disk access layers of the OS. The filesystem is now multithreaded and can take full advantage of multiple CPU systems.
• Expanded support for wireless networking adapters and new support for the WPA wireless security protocol.
• Experimental support for the PowerPC platform.

Slashdot covered the story, and most of the feedback from FreeBSD 6.0 beta users was positive:

Today Alriyadh.com opened comments on all articles, instead of articles in the “columns” section only.

In the first day of opening comments the amount of comments posted today tripled the average daily volume.

This means the work on the Internet team will need to work three times harder than they used to be, since all of user comments need to be moderated!

This is a huge step from being just an electronic copy of the printed newspaper, to becoming a real Internet website.

FreeBSD the amazing Operating System running this site got a new logo: More Pictures