Entropy is not what it used to be.

  • Starting a UAE business now 40.000 USD cheaper

    Gulfnews tells us that those who are willing to start a business (LLC, Limited liability company), do not have to cough op the 150.000 AED (40.000 USD). With the current economic situation, this is not a bad step at all. More than 80 % of businesses in the UAE are LLC’s, so it’s a good…

  • Etisalat’s spyware patch – funny video

    Catboy, a radio DJ at Dubai 92, released a funny video on Etisalat’s spyware patch for Blackberries. (more here, here and here) Simply awesome.

  • Are web frameworks really worth it?

    As places.ae is maturing to it’s 500 days being online and growing… It’s also awfully painstaking how cumbersome a framework (it’s written in Ruby on Rails) can be. Agreed, I am not the most seasoned rails programmer, and my ruby code sometimes makes people cry, but still. Note that this rant is about web based…

  • Tar based incremental backups

    A small bash script I wrote to have incremental backups done on a unix server, and then pushed to a Windows File system. On the fileserver, we add this directory to the normal backup. This is on a mail server, where emails are stored in MailDir format. We create weekly full backups on sunday, and…

  • Archiving outlook emails, gmail style

    In Nakheel we have a maximum email quota which gets filled up pretty quickly if you receive large attachements, such as presentations, manuals and silly movies. I wanted to build a macro that imitates Gmail awesome archiving method. Based on the lifehackers’s article, my version had to move the my selected mails to a PST…

  • When health warnings and math don’t go together

    I got an email today from a colleague, warning about a poisonous gas called gasoline. Odd in a oil-rich country though. If you read it, you’ll notice that 15 degrees Fahrenheit is 6 degrees Celcius or 60 degrees Celcius. In reality, 15 degrees Fahrenheit is -9 degrees Celcius. I guess this memo wasn’t really talking…

  • Offline, sorry

    I’m very sorry I haven’t updated my blog for a while. I went on a holiday, and fell sick when I got back in Dubai. Give me a few days, and I will update this again! Thanks, Michael

  • Yahoo overhauls its image search

    Yahoo overhauled it’s image search, and some say it’s a better search than Google now. I wouldn’t hurt for Yahoo, as they have to re-gain some market share in the world of search engines. For the UAE, the bad part though, is that most of the images are feeded from Flickr, which is blocked here.

  • Logging into SSH with a different username

    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…

  • Happy Birthday Linux

    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…

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