Subzero Blue

China goes to space

Yep, China goes to space, not all of it of course, just one man.
There’s not enough space in the earth’s orbit to take the whole Chinese population along.

So, China joins the space nations, becoming only the 3rd country to put a man into space.
The Shenzhou V spacecraft was successfully launched today with China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei aboard. He will orbit the earth 14 times and then land somewhere in Inner Mongolia.

Before take-off the astronaut was quoted saying he would gain honor for the People’s Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation and that he would not dissapoint the motherland …etc., but i bet that deep inside of him he just wished the whole thing would pass quickly without his ass being blown up into a billion pieces.

Oh well, congratulations for China. I truly respect and admire the Chinese people.

New Inspector Clouseau: Steve Martin?

It appears that MGM favor Steve Martin for the role of Inspector Clouseau in a remake of the 1964 movie “Pink Panther”.

In the original, Peter Sellers was the star French detective, and man was he awesome !
I totally loved the movie and the sequels that followed.
Peter Sellers was a comedy genius, and just seeing his face makes you laugh your butt off.

I quite like Steve Martin too and i think he could do a good job in the role, if he takes it that is, but in my opinion i don’t think he’d be able to totally fill the big shoes Peter Sellers left behind.

Gad El Maleh : “La Vie Normale”

Just watched the one-man-show stand-up comedy “La Vie Normale” by Gad El Maleh yesterday night, and it was hilarous.
I really enjoyed it a lot.

Gad is a Jewish Morrocan French guy, and in his sketches he makes fun of everything around us, touching everyday issues from our lives and passing some really nice messages.

I’ll be on the lookout for any other stuff by him, i really liked his style.

Talking of one-man-shows and stand-up comedies, i truly wish Lamine El-Nahdi and Raouf Ben Yaghlane do some shows in Ramadan this year too. My wife and I went to their shows last year, and we laughed our heads off.
They’re amazing, truly the best arab comedians in my point of view. I don’t even think the Egyption superstar Adel Imam could pull off such a great show on his own.

Oracle 10g

So, the new version of Oracle Database is ready, and guess what, they’re calling it Oracle 10g.

Now, after Oracle 7, we got Oracle 8i and then Oracle 9i, and we figured out the “i” was for internet, and that they were marketing their database as the best database for the internet and e-business, but now the “i” is gone, and we have a “g”, so what does that stand for ?

Well, it actually stands for “Grid”, and it mirrors the direction in which Oracle are taking their flagship database product, Grid Computing.
Oracle are selling this database as the scaling self-managing self-fixing self-everything grid-computing resource-optimizing database.

I guess a lot of people will be happy with this new release, as for me i’m not that much into Oracle, last time i used it in a project it was at the Oracle 7 stage, and i just played around with Oracle 9i for a while.

I’m personally looking forward to another database release, the long awaited SQL Server 2004 code-named Yukon.

Flash Baine

A flash-mob is to target David Blaine, an american illusionist who planned to spend 44 days and nights suspended in a clear plastic box with nothing but water to sustain him, tonight as he enters his final week in at Tower Bridge.

The organisers of the Flashblaine event (as they called it, and which is due to run for just three minutes) say they hope it will be the biggest flash-mob in the world.

They want people to sound their mobile phone ringtones together at exactly 7:44pm and then chant “what goes up, must come down” at Blaine, then laugh manically and hold an item of food in the air.

For more details about the Flashbaine event, click here.

Flash-mobbing is a US-born phenomena in which hundreds of people spontaneously arrive at a designated area and carry out short, random acts.

I think it’s really cool and fun 🙂

Lunar Embassy

Today i re-found this website i stumbled upon a year or so ago, which is a quite interesting online business, it’s a startup that sells real estate on the moon.

Actually, the website offers land on Mars & Venus too, as well as an option to have your name added to their registry which they claim will be sent and hosted on the moon this year.

Want more ? well you can actually even get a Lunar Passport, and become a true alien after buying some real estate through them.

I think it’s a cool and fun idea, even though it’s bogus.

For more info, click here.

Dial-up Internet Problems

For the last couple of days, there’s been a problem with dial-up internet access in Tunisia, rendering home users and small businesses unable to access a big number of websites.

There still is no known reason of why this has happened and when the problem will be solved. It’s still at the stage of blame throwing between the ISPs and the ATI.

It’s so weird how the internet has become so important to us and our everyday lives, one problem comes up, and we feel like we’re crippled.
Oh and when it happens to an internet junkie lke me, oh God, life just seems to stop, lol…

UPDATE: The problem has finally been solved. In the end, it turns out Tunisie Telecom were behind the problem.

Hugo The Hippo

I just finished re-watching this old animated movie I recorded off Zimbabwe TV when I was a kid, it?s called “Hugo The Hippo” and I used to love it.
So yesterday when we were visiting my parents, I picked up this video tape and a number of others I remember loving in my childhood, and brought them with me, so my wife and I could watch them together.

This animated movie of course is nowhere close to today’s animated features in terms of quality and all, but the story is beautiful and the soundtrack is amazing.
After all these years, I still remember every scene and every lyric to every song, it’s incredible.

It?s the story of a little hippo with all it’s ups and downs, with all it’s sad and happy moments, and the message behind it all is how people can be so selfish and how they should pay more attention to animals and treat them fairly and not just use them for their own benefit and then throw them.

It’s a beautiful movie with a wonderful message, and I wish someone like Pixar would remake it and give more people the chance to see it and be touched by it, just like I was by this old version.

Ennahli Park

Yesterday, we went out with some friends of ours, and we chose to go to the Ennahli Park. It was our first time there, and it’s quite a nice place.
It’s situated in a nice green hilly area in the beginning of the Bizerte highway, with places for people to sit, have picnics, or just have something to drink/eat in this nice little caf

Responding to IE Changes

I know this must have been blogged like crazy everywhere, and that there’s no one on earth who doesn’t know this already, but i thought i’d just piss you off and tell you again anyway 😛

Because of a lawsuit Microsoft lost, there will be some changes in the next version of IE.
In the future version of Internet Explorer, currently due out early next year, the browser will prompt visitors to confirm that they want to execute each active content item on a page (Flash, ActiveX, …etc. anything using the object/embed tags) which is a big pain in the neck (and a bunch of other places too, believe me).

However, there are several straightforward ways to update web pages so that the prompt no longer appears.

For more info: click here.