Archive for December, 2005

Blinklist

Friday, December 30th, 2005

I have a desktop machine as well as a laptop! one of the problems I often face is not haveing my bookmarks availble on both machines!

The perfect solution as I see it, would be to find a firefox extention that automagicly intergrates with the firefox bookmarks… if you bookmark something it gets added to the online list… setting up thesame setting on an other PC will resault in the import of your bookmarks. From that point on your bookmarks are synced between the two machines!

I am now looking for such a solution! My first trial will be with blinklist witch has a firefox extention

I hope blinklist will solve my problems. Otherwise I will need to search for another solution!

Amr Khalid in Alexandria

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

Yesterday was the last day Amr Khalid spent in Alexandria, in a 3 day workshop with the lifemaker teams! They mainly evaluated their efforts in the last year (SWAT analysis) and they talked about concentrating on 3 projects for the next 3 months. (more about this later)

It was pretty cool to be able to take pictures with my phonecam. I know that I was not excited about it and was looking for a phone without a camera (it would have been cheeper) but I am glad that I got one in the end.

And here is the resault of all that!!

guess which one is me :)
Getting my photo taken with Amr Khalid

I love rain

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

It is winter now in Egypt and that means rain!! Some people in other parts of the world get rain all the time so they may not get the importance of rain here in Egypt. We only get rain in winter… imagine that you had to wait year round just to see the wonderous view of small water drops falling from the sky :)

As Muslims rain has exrta meanings. Prayers are answered at the time of rainfall, so here is a prayer that the Muslim Ummah regains its lost glory and peace settles upon the earth! Aaameen

so now it is time for everyone to settle down with something hot to drink and watch that rain…..

DTracing Linux Userspace using BrandZ

Monday, December 19th, 2005

Adam Leventhal (one of the DTrace developers) was in volved in making DTrace work for BrandZ. He’s written a blog entry on using this combination to have a look at the “top issue” (why is it that whenever you run top, the top process is top?). The blog entry shows how using DTrace and OpenSolaris (the only way that you can currently use BrandZ), can be of benefit to Linux.

I am thinking of setting up a solaris box at work so I may post a tutorial someday :)

At last, I convert my rm files with vsound

Friday, December 16th, 2005

vsound allows you to record the output of any standard OSS program (one that uses /dev/dsp for sound) without having to modify or recompile the program. It uses the same idea as the esddsp wrapper from the Enlightened Sound Daemon (in fact, vsound is based on esddsp). That is, it preloads a library that intercepts calls to open /dev/dsp, and instead returns a handle to a normal file. It also intercepts ioctl’s on that file handle and logs them, to help convert the audio data from its raw form. Vsound then uses sox to convert the raw data to the desired file format.

The above text is from the manpage. I converted an rm file to wav using the following command:

vsound -f output.wav realplay realaudiofile.rm

Realplayer goes ahead and plays the file and you don’t hear anything! The audio stream is been redirected to the output.wav file. The vsound program ends when you stop realplayer.

Job done!!

Button Maker

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

There is a really cool web site that creates those lovely web buttons Check it out….
I am off to make lots of buttons :)

Ubuntu

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

I am have been reading a lot about other peoples ideas as to why Ubuntu is so successfully! I would like to add my two cents :)
I think the only thing in which Ubuntu differs from debian is the availability of certain packages that are basically “cool” or useful! I have been using Debian for more than 2 years now and I have had a look at Ubuntu so I think I know what I am talking about!!

As the Linux community is rapidly closing the gap between it and other (read M$) communities in terms of user friendly GUI apps. a time frame of 3 months can mean a lot of changes to the users desktop experience.

Some distributions like fedora have the latest packages, so you might ask what Ununtu has over Fedora or SUSE. The answer lies in APT!! Nothing is like APT.

so lets summarize it all up in a little table

ease of package management up to date cool packages
Fedora no yes
Debian yes no
Ubuntu yes yes

What people will do for a bit of profit

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

Yesterday was the last day of the underwriting of Egypt Telecom stock for people here in Alexandria. In fact most Stock Brokerage Companies stoped accepting requests Monday.

Needless to say that it was crowded, but just how crowded it was may supprise some. Luckily I had my new CX75 phone with me, so I got some videos and pictures of the crowd.

The videos ar still in the 3pg format as I didn’t have the time to convert them. When (and if) I do I will repost them.
Crowd infront Of Yasmeen Brokerage (video)

It was crowded

Siemens CX75

Monday, December 5th, 2005

I finaly got myself a new phone! After alot of research I ended up choseing the CX75.
It has a nice display, RsMMC slot, bluethooth, mp3 support and a blogging client (havent tried it yet).
I must admit that I am very happy with the phone and recomend anyone looking for a mid-range phone to get it!

azein.com

Sunday, December 4th, 2005

I finaly got back azein.com, After about 6 weeks of lying in wait. So I will start actually doing something with my site :)