January 31, 2008
Internet goes down, everything goes down... Life came to a standstill in Dubai, home of the renowned "Media City" and modern "electronic government," after an extensive Internet failure affected much of the United Arab Emirates... [...] Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE's public and private sectors. [...] The outage heavily crippled Dubai's business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars' worth of transactions daily. [Source: CNN] And all around the Middle East and beyond as well: Internet services and usage have been disrupted...
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January 30, 2008
Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said in a speech: "The American media is much, much more geared to understanding that there is an unwritten contract between them and us..." What is this "unwritten contract"? I'll tell you what it is: it's an agreement to censor anything and everything that offends the Lobby and its glorified, sanitized view of Israel. Here, after all, is a country that practices apartheid, imprisons children, and was founded on ethnic cleansing and bigoted religious obscurantism – and yet they present themselves to the world...
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...And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. -- Isaac Asimov This goes to a friend I had a little chat with today; and to everyone who ever found themselves in a moment they started to doubt themselves in....
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January 29, 2008
Posted on January 29, 2008 09:27 PM under:
Link Dump
Soft as a Rock Cool, soft and comfortable cushions shaped like stones. (tags: design house furniture ideas rock soft) Issuu - You Publish Easy online publication. Upload documents, create magazines, share and embed anywhere. (tags: design publishing ebook community books magazine tools) How glasses affect your image A cool advertising comic about how the glasses you wear affect your image. (tags: funny glasses humor advertising comics illustration fun)...
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ArabianBusiness.com have just released a list of the world's 50 richest Arabs. Most of them are from the gulf region, mainly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates; with the rest divided among Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and one person from Jordan. No one from the Arab Maghreb is anywhere to be seen on the list. Here are the Top 10 sorted by net worth: 1. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud (Saudi Arabia): US$ 29.5 Billion 2. The Al Rajhi Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 24 Billion 3. The Hariri Family (Lebanon): US$ 17.8 Billion 4. Nasser Al...
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January 28, 2008
Remember those bionic eyes some of our favorite sci-fi characters had to zoom in on far-away things, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs? Well those could become an attainable reality for everyone soon enough. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside; opening many doors for useful applications of these contact...
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January 25, 2008
Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when GPS would finally make it to Tunisia, and to my great surprise today, by accident, I came across a new website launched by Tunisia's first private mobile operator Tunisiana publicizing a new product they're launching called GPS Weenee. (Weenee in Arabic means: Where am I? or Where is it?) The product should be currently available at Tunisiana's service centers in the Grand Tunis area: Les Jardins du Lac, La Marsa (Zephyr), Ariana, Medina, Tunis-Carthage Airport. The details of the service are as follows: - Coverage: The Grand Tunis area and...
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The results of the Innovate or Die competition, which challenged inventors to evaluate environmental issues and develop ingenious solutions surrounding climate change using pedal based machines, have recently been announced. Team Aquaduct was declared the winner out of 102 entries by utilizing the human ability to pedal to bring an easy and effective solution and lots of hope to people in the developing world who struggle daily to gather, transport, filter, and store clean drinking and cooking water. A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean...
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Posted on January 25, 2008 09:43 AM under:
Books
Lawrence Lessig and his publisher Random House have released another one of his books "The Future of Ideas" under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect and argues that as the Internet faces the challenges of intellectual property laws, it should not become so controlled that it discourages innovation and creativity in the digital world. He explains the historical context of the Internet and its relationship to the "commons" and argues that, for the Internet to evolve and be an open...
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Posted on January 25, 2008 09:18 AM under:
Link Dump
How to Start a Startup An essay about how to launch a startup by Paul Graham. (tags: startup business entrepreneurship howto entrepreneur article toread) Why to Not Not Start a Startup Another essay by Paul Graham on why to not not launch a startup. (tags: startup business entrepreneurship paulgraham entrepreneur toread)...
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January 24, 2008
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders who recently called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands, will soon be releasing a film on the internet which insults the Koran, and which is reported to show the Koran being torn up and otherwise desecrated. The extreme right wing politician has made the ten minute film promoting his belief that the Koran inspires people 'to do the worst things'. His views have inspired him to talk about a 'Tsunami of Islamisation' in Europe, for the Koran to be banned, and for Dutch Muslims to either give up their religion or leave...
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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama launched an online viral counteroffensive Tuesday against persistent e-mail chain letters that lie about his religious and political background. [...] There are various versions of the e-mails, but they generally insinuate that Obama is secretly a Muslim who attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia. One of the e-mails charges that he's a radical Muslim who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Another e-mail claims that he was sworn into the Senate using a copy of the Quran. All of the allegations are false. [Source: Wired] I don't even know what to say...
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January 23, 2008
Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousands masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that is second nature with me, but don't be fooled. For God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression that I'm secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game; that the water's calm and I'm in command, and that I need no one. But don't believe...
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January 22, 2008
Finally... Saudi Arabia is to lift the ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the kingdom. Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year. The move is designed to forestall protests for greater freedom by women, which have recently included campaigners driving cars through the kingdom in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods. "There has been a decision to move on this by the Royal Court because it is recognised that if girls have been in schools since...
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Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ...
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January 21, 2008
Posted on January 21, 2008 12:59 PM under:
Books
Yesterday I finished reading "Blue Ocean Strategy (How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant)" by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The book explores the authors' vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth. Using dozens of examples, from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks, they present the approaches these companies took to open new doors for their businesses and reach out to...
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January 19, 2008
Posted on January 19, 2008 01:01 PM under:
Music
American singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is another artist attempting to break away from the recording industry machine; her approach is by turning to her fans to fund her next album. She has launched a website called Jill's Next Record through which she's collecting donations from her fans in an attempt to come up with $75,000 for recording the album and other related costs. In return for her fan's donations, she will be giving them prizes according to the size of the donation. Donations can go from $25 up to $10,000; while her prizes go from sending out an advanced copy of...
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January 18, 2008
Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research has launched an eight-month contest to lure software engineers and researchers to develop the next generation of search engines, offering them a cash prize of $100,000. The aim is build a search engine that works across multiple media platforms, that not only searches for text in websites but also for terms within music and video files. The top five teams will be flown to Singapore for the finals at Fusionopolis, a science and technology research centre set to open in October. An international advisory panel will oversee the competition. Applicants have a registration...
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Weird bit of news from Lebanon... Four Lebanese university students have been jailed for a week for making crude remarks on the Facebook social networking site about the singing talents of a woman they met at a party, media reports said on Thursday. Local newspapers reported that the students, all male, were ordered to be detained on January 10 after the young woman's father objected to the authorities in the western town of Zahle. The four were charged with slander and “violating public morality” and were ordered to be held in preventive detention despite objections by human-rights groups. [Source: Now...
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Blogger is finally available in Arabic, and two other Middle Eastern right-to-left languages: Hebrew and Persian. Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, they have added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor. I think it's great that they've done this, it will make a lot of people's lives easier. I know many people who've been using Blogger to publish their blogs in several languages like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew for some time now. Some of these people who have a little technical know-how were able to play around with...
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January 17, 2008
Another stupid act by some school over a Muslim girl's choice of clothes... ... Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia's Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet. Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue...
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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain...
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January 16, 2008
". . . as Bush basks in the glow of his own fantasy, the suffering in Gaza, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, along with the savage occupation of Iraq, continues to fuel widespread anger and rage. . . . he has, with Israeli encouragement, isolated governments, even friendly governments, in the Middle East that raised feeble protests. But his day is past. There is open revolt. Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Palestinians, and three-fourths of Israelis, do not believe Bush can affect events in the Palestinian territories. . . . The agenda of the Bush White...
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January 15, 2008
Apple just introduced the world's thinnest laptop in this year's MacWorld. The MacBook Air turned out to be a reality, and what a beautiful, amazing reality it is. Features - .16 to .76-inch thickness on top - Weighs only 3 pounds - 5 hours of battery life with everything running - Intel Core 2 Duo Processor at 1.6 or 1.8GHz - Motherboard the length of a pencil - 13.3-inch screen, LED backlit - 2GB RAM standard - 1.8-inch 80GB HD or 64GB Solid State Drive - Multitouch trackpad with gestures. Pans, zooms, rotates, etc. - 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 -...
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January 14, 2008
I just came across a really interesting post in which the writer puts himself in the others shoes, looking at the situation from another perspective, imagining how it would be if it happened to him and his country... Some highlights: It’s been eight years now. Eight long years. Sure, initially I was glad when China toppled the Bush regime and executed the “retarded tyrant” as I love to call him. It wasn’t that bad at the start, but as time wore on and I realized they weren’t leaving, it started to gnaw at me. [...] Initially, people seemed to accept...
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The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do. -- Joseph Stalin Couldn't be more true......
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January 13, 2008
While checking out the news today, I came across what has to be one of the dumbest articles in the history of news and media; it's so stupid I thought the guy who wrote it was actually just being sarcastic, but no it turns out he's seriously deranged as he believes what he wrote. The article's title is: "Middle East indebted to Bush"; I couldn't believe my eyes when I read it; Do I even need to go any further to show how crazy this person is? In the article he talks of the malignancy of the Middle East, how...
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January 12, 2008
In my daily readings I recently came across this entry, that I thought I'd share here, about how you should always try to hire people that are better than you, something I totally agree with, and breaks down the reasons into the following points (I'm resuming in my own words): 1. Trust: You're more likely to trust someone with something if you know they'll be doing it ever better than you could. 2. Quality: You're sure there won't be a drop in quality whether you'r ethere or not. 3. Fresh Perspectives: These people will bring different experiences, skills, viewpoints and...
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January 11, 2008
Posted on January 11, 2008 11:22 PM under:
Tunisia
Canadian Redline Communications Group Inc., a leading provider of standards-based WiMAX and broadband wireless infrastructure products, announced that Divona Telecom, the one and only satellite and WiMAX telecom operator in Tunisia, has chosen Redline's WiMAX Forum Certified RedMAX products for its five-city WiMAX network. The US$1 million network buildout will take place in several phases over the next two years, and will connect five major cities in Tunisia, including Tunis, Nabeul, Souse, Monastir and Sfax. Divona Telecom is serving corporate clients in Tunisia, with several hundred corporations on its WiMAX network and plans to double their subscriber base every quarter...
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January 10, 2008
Questler is a new online service that was launched into public beta a couple of months ago and which has an interesting social networking approach to learning online, finding answers to questions, and acquiring/sharing knowledge. The idea of the website stems from the belief that everyone is a learner, seeking more knowledge on certain topics, and that learning best occurs when individuals interact with each other in free spaces, informally, to share knowledge and collaboratively create ideas. So in other words, the goal is to try to tap into the collective knowledge of the crowd to acquire and share knowledge....
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January 09, 2008
Interesting news from NewsGator... NewsGator announced today the general availability of NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also began today. [...] NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all of NewsGator’s Web, desktop and mobile readers for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange), all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter when or...
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Ever wondered about where IKEA gets their product names from? What they mean? What language they're in? Well most of the names are usually either Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Norwegian in origin, and there's a whole naming system that they're using for their product ranges, and it goes as follows: Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish place names Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names Bookcase ranges: Occupations Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names Chairs, desks: men's names Materials, curtains:...
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I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Hijri Year 1429. Today is the first day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. May it be a blessed, happy and joyful new year for you all bringing you prosperity, success and great health. Most households in Tunisia cook either Mloukhia or Couscous on this day; Mloukhia, because it's green as a way of hoping it will be a green and fruitful new year ahead, or Couscous, Tunisia's national dish using meat that was specially dried and salted for the occasion from the previous Eid Al-Adha (Kaddeedit Ras...
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Work/Life balance is a very important subject and really big challenge for a lot of people nowadays; I just came across an interesting post on Slacker Manager where David Zinger shares his 8 simple rules to solve work/life balance. Here's a quick overview of his ideas in my own words: 1. Make sure you really want to and can change to achieve this balance 2. Put life before work. 3. Create a dynamic balance not a static one. 4. Set your limits; Know when to say no to work and yes to family. 5. Don’t lie to yourself about who...
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January 08, 2008
Posted on January 8, 2008 06:34 PM under:
Cinema
Production begins today in London on Bond 22, with Daniel Craig reprising the role of Agent 007. Ukrainian bombshell Olga Kurylenko will be the Bond girl in this movie, according to a press release issued today by the film studios. Early reports had actress Gemma Arterton as the new Bond girl, but even though Arterton has a role in the new film it is not as large as Kurylenko's. A former model, Kurylenko was most recently seen alongside Timothy Olyphant in last November's "Hitman." The film, which is the 22nd in the series, is due in theaters in November. French...
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I just came across a really interesting study by Saras D. Sarasvathy from University of Washington's School of Business on "What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?". She examined the reasoning of 30 founders of companies, ranging in size from $200 Million to $6.5 Billion. What Sarasvathy found was that these founders shared a distinct form of rationality that we have all long recognized intuitively as "Entrepreneurial". She termed this type of rationality "Effectual Reasoning". Here is a bit from her study that basically explains this "Effectual Reasoning": "Effectual reasoning […] does not begin with a specific goal. Instead, it begins with a...
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January 07, 2008
Posted on January 7, 2008 10:17 PM under:
Tunisia
People who know me personally or who have followed this blog for a while know that I love my good tasty fast food, and that I don't miss a chance whenever I'm abroad to head to the nearest Burger King, McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut...etc. I know a lot of it is unhealthy and that it's fattening, etc etc etc, but I just love it, despite all the lectures I've gotten about it. Unfortunately, here in Tunisia we don't have any of my favorite fast food chains, so I can only enjoy their meals when I travel abroad. Still, I do...
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January 05, 2008
Apparently, the world's first Air Cars, vehicles using the power of compressed air technology (CAT) are currently under production, with the possibility of being on sale in Europe and India later this year. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre, will be built by India's largest automaker, Tata Motors. The Air Car uses compressed air to push its engine's pistons. It is anticipated that approximately 6000 Air Cars will be cruising the streets of India by 2008. If the manufacturers have no surprises up their exhaust pipes the car will be practical and reasonably priced. The CityCat...
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January 03, 2008
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning. -- Mahatma Gandhi...
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Well after a period of watching, testing & playing around: I'm officially hooked and using Twitter. For those not familiar with Twitter, it can be best described, I think, as a micro-blogging / social networking platform that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets") to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application. Updates are then displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them via instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. I'm personally using Twitter to post my quick thoughts, ideas,...
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January 02, 2008
I just came across a great article on TechRepublic listing the ten signs that show if you're not cut out to be an IT manager. The list goes as follows, I'll keep the writer's phrasing because it's straight to the point and effective: 1. You have a real desire to be liked 2. You prefer to avoid the spotlight and just be a part of the gang 3. Every time you are called on to comment about the topic being discussed, you experience short-term memory loss 4. Having a tough conversation with an employee causes you a great deal of...
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