WordPress is a personal blogging software, works with PHP and MySQL.
The first page of WordPress administration page is called dash board it usually takes forever to load, this due the fact that WordPress display some RSS feed from its development blog.
The loading problem caused by trying to access the RSS feed with a proxy server, which won’t work inside Saudi Arabia, so here is the fix, in the file wp-includes/class-snoopy.php modify the proxy lines to be something like:

var $proxy_host = "proxy.saudi.net.sa"; // proxy host to use
var $proxy_port = "8080"; // proxy port to use


Unfortunately I don’t have DSL in my area 🙁

Today alriyadh.com broke the world record for the largest number of ads in a single page, today they added yet another banner to become 7 banners in thier frontpage.

Swish-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans – Enhanced) is really nice small program that index almost anything, I am playing with it at the moment and I am thinking of dumping my own search engine and replace it with Swish-e.

Swish has many features but the one feature that stroke me is the speed:
66,548 files indexed. 164,076,410 total bytes. 26,496,024 total words.
Elapsed time: 00:02:44 CPU time: 00:02:31
Indexing done!

Here is my list of essential Firefox extensions:

• Tabbrowser Preferences
• Session Saver
• miniT
• SwitchProxy Tool

Thanks to ArabEyes project WordList which is an Arabic to English wordlist, I created small web based dictionary application.

It is very simple but yet useful application, all you need to do is drag-n-drop the following link into you bookmark toolbar Qamoos

To use it you mark any word in your browser, and after clicking the Qamoos Bookmarklet then a popup like this will show with the Arabic meaning for the word.

Last week I rediscovered ArabEyes which is a web site dedicated for Arabic UNIX software, they host many Arabic projects.
One of the hosted projects is Quran project, they produced many XML files of Quran text, and they needed help with collecting data, both textual data, and audio data.
So I talked with Abdullah Aldosari about it, and it happened that he have MySQL table with this kind of data, so I processed the table and convert it UTF-8 to be complatible with ArabEyes and UNIX, my plan is to cleanup this data and contibue it back to ArabEyes.
Meanwhile I started playing with this data and created a web based Quran software, please try it out.
Quran
It uses AJAX to make fast and user friendly interface.

I really like the new Toyota Avalon 2005, and I am really thinking of buying one.

After closing the great photo site Flickr for couple of weeks, ISU opened the site again but with some restrictions, searching for photos are now blocked.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags 🙁

Today I woke up at 5:30am after 12 hours of sleep (I just came from a long 6 hour journey to Bahrain) I took a shower prayed then I went to work around 6:30, I turned on the radio and it was set on one of the Saudi Radio channels, the same music, the same programs, the same songs, it was like the last time I listened to Saudi radio back in 80s when every body stopped listening to radio and start watching satellite channels from other countries.
When I think about it, not only Saudi radio, all Saudi media stuck on the 80s, despite some cosmatic changes, all news paper, all TV channels are still the same.
Thinking: is it only the media or does the whole country stuck in the 80s!!!