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.

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?

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:

• Hardware: Maybe unfair, but initially I had the Curve 8320. That was a solid, throw-me-around-and-I-won’t-break phone. Since then, my later Curve (8900) seemed to have inferior hardware, and the trackball always got stuck. I tried several cleaning techniques, and it always stayed bad. To an extend that I could only scroll in one direction, then it was time to switch.
• Browser: RIM, we’re not the 90′s anymore.
• Developing: writing apps for the Android OS is more fun, and there are more examples available.
• Privacy: although BlackBerry is said to be “fort knox security”, recently there were some concerns about RIM allowing local providers to snoop on BBM and Email messages. Now, it seems they gave in. I have nothing to hide from the government, but this is misleading. Now I am well happy in my SSH and SSL environment.
• Apps: Not as strong as the Apple Appstore, Android has a lot more apps than blackberry. I am not a multimedia person and couldn’t care less in having the lastest 3D shooters on my phone. There’s just a few apps that make life easier on the Android, compared to the ‘Berry.

On another side, things I do miss about my blackberry:

• The Keyboard: hands.down.the.best.ever. I never really liked touchscreen keyboards
• BBM: I do miss chatting with my friends over BBM
• Unlimited Data: although for Etisalat and Du that means “fair usage of 2 GB”
• Email experience: perhaps a combination of both the keyboard and the app, but emails are easy with BB, although being an avid Gmail user, I like the native Google Contact/Email, … iintegration.

As said, i don’t care much about 3D games or camera quality, so that’s all good. I mainly use my phone for making and receiving phone calls, SMS’s, Emails and occasional web surfing.

Thanks,
Michael

Differences between 1987 and 2007:

Ctrl-Z:

Interview:

iNoticed

Backups:

Microcode:

Arabic support:

uSleep();

Firewalls:

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

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.

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?

Etisalat offers SSL certificates. This can be used to authenticate “SSL” websites, such as https://ebanking.com. An SSl certificate is basically checked for 3 things:

• Is the certificate still valid or expired?
• Is the certificate for the correct server? (ebanking.com, can only have a certificate for ebanking.com, not for any other domain)
• Is it a real certificate (signed by a CA)

The last step is to avoid that one would make a fake certificate, claiming it to be ebanking.com. A certificate authority is a trusted body that verifies the authenticity of the requester. If you can issue “trusted” certificates, you can hijack connections to every SSL page. These include Gmail, hotmail, facebook and every e-banking website out there.

The EFF is concerned that with actions such as the BlackBerry spyware last year, or the recent BlackBerry issues, it questions the trust one can put into Etisalat.

[1] New York Times (2010): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/technology/14encrypt.html?_r=1

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.

You can download it here

Feel free to leave any comments for it.