Extempore

I love SSH. SSH is the de-facto service for remote server management, especially in a CLI environment.

Being a avid Linux user, and spending quite a bit of time on OSX lately, I often SSH into several servers remotely. Being subject to “username conventions”, you don’t always share the same username across machines. And I always wondered how one could just type ssh hostname instead of providing the username.

Seems that, by creating a .ssh/config file with following contents:


Host server.example.com server
  User username


WIll make life easier, as you can in the future only do a “ssh hostname”. I didn’t know this.

Yay, Linux exists 15 years. The little rebel OS was put to public 15 years ago. It’s architecture and philosophy lead to the popularity of other operating systems (BSD, and thus also Mac OS).

Even though I work quite a significant amount of time on Mac now, i still use Linux every single day. Best OS, evar.

A small post, but so I can have it as a reference if I ever encouter it again. We’ve setup a Windows 2003 Domain, and run DNS on both the Domain Controllers. We have terrible issues with DNS always shutting down, and disabling itself, so it won’t boot up again.

While we are breaking our heads on how this happens, we made a small two-liner script to enable a Windows service over the command line. We’ve put this in the recovery tab, and scheduled it as a task to run every hour.

The code to enable the DNS service, and to restart the service is below:


sc config DNS start= auto
net start dns


I know it’s very ghetto way of keeping DNS running, but we’re figuring out why DNS always shuts down. Until then, this provides us necesarry DNS uptime

Thanks,
Michael

Yesterday evening, it was the Dubai Chapter of the Twestival. Twestival is a festival, organized by the Twitter community worldwide. Over 165 cities worldwide participated on this event to support the Charity Water foundation.

The Dubai chapter was held yesterday in Barasti, Mina Seyahi.

It was an amazing event, and had a great turnout. It’s very handy to put a person behind a “twitter username”, and met many new twitterers.

Thanks for the awesome team who organized it,
m1ke

The new .TEL TLD willbe open for public tomorrow. It starts at a premium of close to 300 USD, and is destined for telecom operators.

Though, i’d say the more expensive would be http://ho.tel and http://mo.tel, corporates are more interested in the .com TLD anyways.

Thanks, and .tel your friends,
m1ke

2 days ago, there was the 4th episode of Democamp Dubai. This event brings an opportunity for internet startups to present their product to the public – and it’s an amazing chance to do some networking and getting to know the people.

I know I blog about this event a bit late, just like I arrived too late, but hey. Better late than never

I am looking forward for the following episode, I silently promised the spinbits guys to have a demo ready for that.

Thanks,
Michael

When I joined Dubaiworld three years ago as a information architect, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) was the buzzword. All major vendors, IBM, Microsoft, SUN, had ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) solutions, and SOA’s were going to save the world, but instead it was a big failure.

While the business side of IT was too busy making definitions, and spending numerous hours (and hey, budgets) wondering if one would use REST versus it’s WS- counterpart; a open community namely the Internet, provided the world with home brewed services.

Big players such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, provided a simple new way to interact with what they were providing all along; services. You could use a certain service in another context. Without overwhelming the corporate ignorant world with buzzwords.

I believe corporates will often follow, it takes another caliber with a more innovative way of thinking to move things forward.

Dear all,

Happy new year to all, I wish 2009 will bring you good health, prosperity and success. In these times, many would hope for economical stability, so we should add that to this also.

2008 was a good year, we launched places.ae, and were approached by some very interesting companies for partnerships, and have a few possibilities to get funding. It’s rowing for sure, but I will explain this on the places blog itself in eight days from now when places.ae celebrates it’s first year of operation.

Twitter was the tool in 2008, and sub 400 dollar laptops, became normal. My sister is currently cruising in Australia with her Asus EEE PC “netbook” and it will only grow to be this way. I believe many websites will rather become web services consumed on “portals” (igoogle, yahoo, live.com), or in widgets on your favorite phone or netbook. Bigger laptops are good, but I less usable. I have a 17inch Macbook pro, which I hardly use because of it’s size. (Plus, my other laptop runs ubuntu and I like it far more than OSX).

Anyhow, As a resident of Dubai currently, I would like to see the following being built, or rather announced;
Continue reading…

This post is not necessarily about the current credit crunch, and how Dubai is affected. Although it leans onto it.

I just had a coffee with a good friend of mine, and we were speaking about the status of Dubai, and the entire region actually and it’s corporate profiles. And what is lacking is transparency. Ironically enough, a new body is being setup to provide transparency, accountability and governance.

Anyhow, I refer to corporate transparency, what’s happening in the companies itself. I refer to blogging.

Current modern copanies, such as Sun microsystems, Facebook, Google, etc all have corporate blogs, where employees; both executive management as any other layer, talk about their strategies, challenges and outcomes.

In Dubai, very few companies do this, and especially none of the top 20 companies.

In times such as the ones we are in now, many people are unsure about what is going to happen. I don’t expect any of the Dubai top companies’ CEO’s, or other key people, to have a crystal ball and foresee the future, yet any news insights would be welcome. Rather directly instead of usual channels such as news papers.

Even prior to these less than perfect times, from an economical point of view. I am not sure about any UAE based top exec, giving in their own words how he/she is going to move the company forward, or just voice an opinion about global events.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it’s sad, nevertheless. We’re 2009 already (ok, almost), we should follow the global trends and get away from communication means and marketing techniques that are so 90′s.

Share1t.com is one of those websites I wish existed more. A form to share files up to 100MB; simple, neat and fast (thank you, whoever, for fixing the broken cables).

A great, nifty tool from the guys at builtBackwards.

Love it!