Makl Ndrix

A few days ago, I read a post where the founder of the video and photo sharing application Color gives feedback on the much talked about 1 Billion dollar Instagram buyout.

Color came little over a year ago, creating great promises towards sharing pictures with your fellow nearby smartphone users; rather than facebook’s lame and weird single perspective on life.

Fast forward a year, and unlike color, Instagram became a hot entrepreneurial topic; how can a iOS-only photo sharing application be acquired for 10 digits. It seems the latter remained humble and focused on the product, refrained from passing to many negative comments and so on, and it created a nice product, rather than creating a hype.

Another hype phenomenon can be seen in the indian tamilian movie 3, the movie of the internet meme “Kolaveri D”. Although the tamil song created a large hype, the movie seemed to be less successful. Much different to color, there was no arrogance or anything; the movie simply didn’t live up to the hype.

The iPhone 4S was a bit of a let down, not because it is a bad device, yet the world was expecting an iPhone 5. It (the world) created a hype.

Although I’m not really in any position to say how to run your business, but ease down on the hype. Create a kick-ass product, the hype will just be substituted by word of mouth. And that’s what you want.

A fake, android powered iPad in Dragon Mart.

The 7 days newspaper was subject to a “meta refresh” hack earlier today, yet it seems to be fixed already. When going to any link, it would point to the following page:

It seems to be hacked by a particular W0LF Gh4m3d, a person who does several defacements without any political agenda. One of his/her hcks was “www.wijnabonnement.nl “, which actually translates into wine subscription, not a good thing putting a Saudi Arabian flag on there, is it?

After three years of series of using BlackBerries (work and personal), I went to the dark side and got myself an Android phone.

It was a bit getting used to (and necesarry nagging from my end), but here are some of the reasons why I love it, and some reasons why I miss my Blackberry:
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Copied from the old code.ae archives..

Differences between 1987 and 2007:

Ctrl-Z:

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On places.ae, we got notified of some issues with Facebook signups and logins. All of the sudden, when the Facebook OAuth service pushed us back to our redirect-page, the HyperGraph Gem threw the following error:

FacebookError: OAuthException – Invalid OAuth access token

This is often thrown because the Access Token could contain a | (pipe) character, which gets encoded to %7C, and this makes HyperGraph choke a bit. So a simple gsub(‘%7C’,'|’) will solve it, such as the code below:

at = HyperGraph.get_access_token(FB_ID, FB_SECRET, FB_RET, code)
at = at.gsub(‘%7C’,'|’)
g = HyperGraph.new(at)
me = g.get(‘me’)

Thanks,
Michael

When installing MongoDB under Ubuntu, one could stumble upon the following problem:

mongo: error while loading shared libraries:
libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is caused because MongoDB uses XulRunner for it’s operations. (This is also why you see a bunch of X11 programs that are to be installed when using apt-get). XulRunner, however, contains this file, but is not loaded.

Solving the problem:
Make sure you have xulrunner installed (sudo apt-get install xulrunner-1.9.2) and add its path to ldconfig’s configuration files, which are in/etc/ld.so.conf.d. You could create a file, say, /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xulrunner.conf, containing the following line:

/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.10/

After this, you chould run ldconfig (as root) and that should do the trick. Let me know if you have any problems with this.

Recently, the UAE appeared in the news with some security/privacy related issue; the fact that using encrypted services on the Internet could be a danger to the nation’s security. “The UAE threatened to discontinue some BlackBerry services because of RIM’s refusal to offer a surveillance back door to its customers’ encrypted communications.” [1]

Now, 2 days ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group defending
your rights in the digital world, requested Verizon in an open letter to revoke the CA (certificate authority) certificate from Etisalat, the nation’s CA. How does all of this work?
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Gulfnews reported that the TRA, the UAE’s authority that regulates all telecommunication things, will be shutting down Blackberry services.

Reason being, It can’t be wiretapped is not in line with UAE telecommunications regulations. Which was figured out after it was active for 3.5 years. Maybe providers will come out with a “patch” again to enable these services?

I guess they’ll come to a agreement whereby BBM Messenger will be blocked, emails will be enabled again (since all HTTPS enabled webmail solutions are encrypted anyway) and web traffic will be forced through the country’s proxy servers.

Ages ago, I installed Reason and have been playing a bit with it. Few days ago was actually the first time I created something relatively complete. It contains a sample of Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona”.

You can download it here

Feel free to leave any comments for it.