… so tired, I found out that I don’t relax on my vacations, from now on I need to include a relaxation period in all of my vacations. One more thing, when I go back to work I really hate it, but we will see if the relaxation period will solve this. About my vacation, I spent two days in Ras Tanura in Aramco compound, in my wife’s uncle home, Fahad, it was great the place is very nice with a sea view, they have very small but fun city.

A short vacation 🙂

The place: Our guest of honor Misfer Almaymouni who left SAUDI NET recently: And the winner is: (this is my photo in case you don’t know me) Panoramic view of the place Some of the guys All Photos

RADIUS is the protocol used for authenticating users, it is used mainly by routers and NASes. FreeRADIUS is the best open source RADIUS server available, it support many external databases, LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle.

According to this link from CNN the cost of living in Riyadh is ranked #77 out of 144 cities. I wonder with the current oil price where are we heading and the worst part that we aren’t getting a dime from it!

Today I started using Spamhaus to help prevent spam, I use it now in addition to Spamcop. It was triggered by many spam emails coming from the same range of IPs, so I tested it with Spamhaus and it blocked it. Here is the code to add in Postfix main.cf file: smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks check_client_access hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/client_access reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net permit

Putty is my favorite SSH client for windows. Upgrade to 0.55, for more info check Slashdot

Today I ported my Python SMPP client library to PHP, I had to redesign the whole library because the old design was very bad, and with the new design it became very small, and trivial library. Most of my work was on a library to convert between window-1256 charset used by most Arabic computers, to UTF-16 (big endian) used by GSM phones. The new SMPP library supports long and flash messages, you can try it from SAUDI NET Portal.

Today Abdullah Aldosari my coworker insisted on working on long SMSs, he kept dreaming of them the last couple of days, so we sat together today, and we figured out how to do it. It was fairly simple, in fact I found an old code that I wrote for sending operator logos which use this feature! Abdullah also searched for the way to send flash SMS, it was even simpler, all you need is to set a flag when sending the SMS and that’s it.

In the past when you forget to add a PHP extension in FreeBSD you have to recompile the whole thing, but now PHP port support dynamic extensions, in fact PHP port doesn’t allow you to add any extensions, you have to add these extensions using a separate port. There is one wrapper port called /usr/ports/lang/php4-extensions/ which will allow you to select modules to install. Very nice indeed, even when I spent long time to figure out how to add extensions.