So You Think You Can Drive?

No you can't you dumb retard!

Driving in Oman sucks! People drive crazy and the police don't even care, it's like they're dolls paid to drive around in cars giving fines to those with broken lights and tints that are too dark!

Why do we even have police if they don't punish those that are not following the traffic rules?

Here are just a few examples of what I've seen the police do, or, rather, not do!

One time I was driving when I reached a traffic light and I saw the cars are still in the intersection area so I didn't go because I didn't want to stop the traffic 'cause the traffic might turn red and I'll be in the intersection. The cars that are before me went ahead and just stopped in the intersection. Next to me stopped a police car, THEY DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO THE PEOPLE THAT ARE IN THE INTERSECTION EVEN AFTER THE LIGHT TURNED RED AND THEY WERE STILL STUCK THERE, AND EVEN WITH THE BIG SIGN THAT SAYS "DON'T GO UNTIL EXIT IS CLEAR"!

And just today, I was driving and a police car was behind me, all of a sudden a car that was on my left just shifted lanes in front of me, oh, no, wait! It wasn't in front of me, it was RIGHT BESIDE ME! I had to go to the right lane to avoid an accident. The police car was now in the right lane behind me so it was impossible that they didn't see what happened 'cause I shifted lanes right in front of them with a loud and long horn. You think they did something to the lady that was driving the car? OH NO! Why are they even in the streets?

It doesn't stop there, you'll see people go left from the right-most lane in the roundabout, people going over speed and flashing you hinting you to move aside so they can go ahead and speed.

All-Super Bar

After reading this Windows 8 Concept I was inspired to come up with my own concept All-Super Bar.

The idea is really simple: The Super Bar in Windows 7 merged the Quick Launch bar and the task bar into one bar, the All-Super Bar merges the system tray with them too.

How will that work? Here's how:

You can still pin applications to the Super-All Bar, when you click on them they will run. However, instead of having a context menu pop up, it shows whatever commands and buttons the application needs, not necessarily in a menu; it could be a mini dialog box (kinda like what WMP's play, previous, and next buttons in windows 7).

The applications that reside in the system tray will appear in the same bar which increases their efficiency and usability.

The All-Super Bar will also replace the panel applets in GNOME.

The idea is still vague but it seems very interesting, instead of having 3 separate bars for not running, running, and hidden applications you just have one bar from which you can manage all your applications.

In my GNOME desktop I have DockBarX, the system tray, the notifications applet, the time applet, the logout applet, the show desktop applet, the Main Menu applet, and the Workspace Switcher applet.

I imagine a bar in which all of these are items on the bar.

The menu is an item that has the applications the custom menu I referred to earlier, the system tray items are added to the bar as individual items, the clock is an item by itself, so is the Logout and the show desktop. the Workspace Switcher can be different shortcuts for the different Workspaces, changing icons periodically to reflect the changes in that workspace.

Notifications will pop from whatever application in the bar.

Hard Work and Success

I've always heard this about successful and rich people: They work hard.I hear that and I think "Well, everyone works hard, it doesn't make much sense".

That is until I read Home based Businesses You Can Start In Your Pajamas in 2010, I opened the article thinking it would make everyone their own boss and I wasn't wrong; you COULD start one of the businesses mentioned there, however, what really surprised me was that as I went through the list, all I could think of was "Nah, too much work!", "Nope, too complicated!", "Not really my thing", "Not in the mood for that", "That's a big headache", etc...

What gives? If you have an idea you should act on it, imagine if Lary page didn't do anything about PageRank idea, we wouldn't have had Google and he wouldn't have been a billionaire. If Donald Trump doesn't follow up on his deals they won't happen.

Why Do We Still Drive?

Cars were invented over 50 years ago, back when electronics were just starting to become popular, back then, it would've been impossible for anyone to even imagine a car driving itself. Nowadays, computers are so smart they can drive, there are cars that can actually drive, but I think that's not enough.

I think the real revolution will be when future (flying?) cars are invented, we're gonna need a new infrastructure, one that controls cars, one where cars don't drive, but rather, are driven by a central system.

Have you seen the movie Babylon A.D.? No? OK, imagine cars flying between buildings like you see in sci-fi movies, here's a picture to make your imagination's life easier:

Now, imagine if cars had sensors, buildings had emitters and a central system that controls all cars. You ride in your car, you choose your destination, your car sends that information to the central system, the system calculates the shortest/fastest path and starts moving your car, since it knows where all the cars in the city are, it can avoid accidents very easily.

Why let humans drive when computers can do the work? Why risk people's lives by allowing people to drive? People sometimes drive crazy, computers don't! People sometimes get drunk, computers don't!

So if ever someone who reads this blog and designs a future car, please consider this! ;)

Microsoft Imitating Emacs

If you've used both Emacs and Microsoft's new ribbon interface which can be found in Microsoft Office 2007 onwards you'll probably be able to relate to what I'm saying.


Emacs is known for it's multi-key shortcuts: Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C to exit, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-F to open, etc..


Let's take Paint in Windows 7 for example, to save as you press Alt, F, A (Alt shows the shortcuts, F opens the file menu, and A is for the Save As menu item), Alt, H, RP to crop the image (Alt shows the shortcuts, H opens the home tab, RP is the shortcut for Crop).


However, the way they implemented it is a lot more intuitive than Emacs's; you can learn them in no time, you just press Alt and all the shortcuts appear in front of you, not only that, having the shortcuts organized by menus and tabs makes it a lot easier to get used to the shortcuts; you press the shortcuts for the menu and then the shortcut for the item in it.


All this supports what I said previously about open source's initiatives.

The Little Details

As Jeff Atwood said:

Ah, yes, the stereotypical programmer response to most projects: it's trivial! I could write that in a week!*

I thought it was just me, apparently it's not. It turns out that all programmers think that way, they see Twitter and they think "A table for users, a table for tweets, a user page, and a settings page."

Let's face it, we all think that way, and the surprising part is? It's true; you CAN create a usable version of Twitter over the weekend, you CAN create a usable browser in a weekend, and you CAN create a usable version of Stackoverflow in a weekend.

Why does software take us so long to create then? There are two reasons: The little details and the little details.

• The little details: The first little details refers to the little details of writing code, for example, the little silly bugs that take ages to find, spelling mistakes, forgotten variable definitions, wrong passwords, wrongly placed files, difficulties with the programming language/framework being used, etc.. All these are problems that a programmer faces that take much of his time but there's no way to predict them.
• The little details: The other little details refers to the little details of a website/software that a programmer usually doesn't think about when making the one-weekend claim.

The best example of this is the reason why I wrote this blog post: In the project I'm working on now, it took me barely 30 minutes to create both the interface and the tables (what programmers usually start with in a project). What comes after that is what usually takes long. Because of some previous experience with Flex, I decided to implement the login system next, so I googled for a way to do it with Flex and Zend and the way that I found required the use of Cairngorm, having used it before, I didn't mind using it now. So I started changing my project to use Cairngorm, separating the different screens into views, adding the model, the controller, the VOs, etc... I started creating the PHP files. After about two hours I had a working login system. Next I wanted to populate a tree control with some data from the database, now because I didn't know how to do that in Flex it took me about 6 hours just to do that, as simple a task as it is.

Programmers don't like planning ahead and dealing with charts and stuff, we like writing code, and I don't see any way to change that any time soon; programmers will still want to write code before they plan, it's in our blood.

The Internet

I know I've blogged about how we can't live without all the technologies we have today but this post is dedicated to the Internet.

It's amazing how many things you can't do when you don't have access to the Internet.

You can't check your email, you can't play Tinker, you can't work on the software you're writing 'cause the documentation of the framework are online, you can't get the story you're reading--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--because you can't find out what lynch means, you can't find a solution to the problem your phone is having, you can't find a background for the website you're designing, you can't check your Facebook account, and you can't remove the tag from the photo of you your friend just uploaded.

It is scary how dependent we are on a single fragile technology. With Google Chrome OS coming, moving everything to the web, one can't help but wonder what will happen if ever something happens to the Internet, will our lives ever be the same again?

Seek the Truth

Why is it so hard for us to seek the truth about what we believe in?

This is how a typical person's belief goes: That person is born, his parents teach him what they believe, once he's old enough he starts to question his belief, but convinces himself that what he believes is right, even though he's not fully convinced with that.

Why do we do that? So we won't have to accept the fact that we've been wrong for so long. That and because we are taught that you should believe blindly.

I don't know about you but I think that is wrong!

If you're taking a test, you write your answers, and before you give your answer sheet, you review your answers and you find a mistake, do you correct it or do you just submit it as it is because you don't want to accept that you were wrong? Sounds silly, doesn't it?

Which is better? Dying believing the wrong thing or correcting yourself and dying believing the right thing?

'So Jesus said to those who believed in him, "If you obey my teaching, you are really my disciple, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'
John 8:31-32

Seek the truth damn it! Question your faith, if it is right you can never prove it wrong, and if anyone can prove it wrong then it's wrong, so you might as well not believe it.

Take Christianity for example, it's been around for over 2000 years so far and no one has been able to prove it wrong, no one can say "It couldn't have happened because if it has actually happened XXXXXXX would have been impossible". No one can say that.

On the other hand, certain Christian beliefs are obviously wrong: Kneeling and praying before statues. COME ON! It's mentioned in so many places:

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Matthew 6:6

and

"Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the LORD your God."
Leviticus 26:1

There you go! A belief proven wrong.

Some might argue that not all Christian teachings can be found in the bible and that many things were started after the bible was written. That raises a lot of questions, one of which is: How do you know who is credible enough to tell people what to do? The pope?

"You shouldn't wear black all the time!", that is one of such teachings, there are many wrong things about this: It's either OK or not OK to wear black, how often is not relevant; it's not in the bible; the reason they claim you shouldn't do that is because black is assosicated with evil, but that is in humans' eyes only, not God's for God looks at the heart.

And don't even get me started on Hail Mary and the rosary!

You know what I think? I think people keep coming up with such rules so they'll feel good about themselves and feel they are righteous and worthy of God's forgiveness, but you know what? Read your bible!

"...I no longer have a righteousness of my own, the kind that is gained by obeying the Law. I now have the righteousess that is given through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is based on faith."
Philippians 3:9

We're Still Missing Something

So there's this guy who lives in another country that I ask for advice, usually, I leave him an offline message on his Yahoo Messenger and he IMs me when he goes online.

This time, it's urgent, leaving him an offline message and hoping he checks it sometime soon is not an option so I sent an SMS to a guy that probably knows his phone number so I cab send him an SMS asking him to go online but I didn't get a reply.

My next attempt was to ask his friends in that country for his number but I didn't find any of those online either.

I left him an offline message and I sent him an email hoping he'll see one of them somehow.

I checked his Facebook profile for his phone number but he doesn't have it there.

I asked mutual friends from other countries if they have his number but they don't.

So I tweeted asking people to tell him that I need to talk to him. My twitter is linked to my Facebook status so it'll show there too.

With all that done, I still haven't talked to him and I don't know when I'll get to.

It's really frustrating knowing that we have all this technology and we still can't get in touch with someone we know if we need to do so fast.

We're still missing something that allows us to get in touch with anyone anywhere.

Precious Comfort

So I'm sitting in Dubai International Airport and I see all those people either getting on their airplanes or waiting for their flights--like me--and I look around me and notice all the stuff we have that are there just for our comfort: chairs for people to sleep on, charging stations to charge people's phones, ready-to-eat food, fligts on which you can sleep and wake up when you arrive, and the list goes on!

Considering we're just evolved animals, this is way too much; we've invented way so many things for our comfort, maybe even too much!

If, for one reason or another--God forbid--we lost all these things: No comfy chairs, back to sitting on rigid uncomfortable chairs; no airplanes, back to traveling on ships and busses; no cell phones, back to using land lines. I know I can't live like that. And I doubt anyone can. We got used to living in a civilized manner that it became impossible for us to live on our own, hunt for food, and al the other things our ancestors used to do.

Don't get me wrong, all these things are nice, but in case anything happens and we have to give them up we're doomed!

A Story That Touched Me

Today in church, after the worship, before the speaker starts his talk, a woman wanted to share something, she's from Iraq, it was related to the last hymn we sang which had to do with God breaking the chains.

Her son, an architect, after graduating from college, got excited so he started working on these big projects to make big profit, of course, that also means big risk.

His father and uncles advised him not to do that but he still did it anyway, he ended up losing a lot of money and borrowing money.

One day, one person he'd borrowed from wanted his money back, since he couldn't pay, he was arrested until he could pay.

Now, cells in Iraq aren't up to par, they're small with lots of people jammed into them, there are so many people that they can't sit so they'll fit, they have to stand. The toilet is in the cell itself. It's hot and dirty.

He was put in a police station in an area where there are no Christians.

His father and uncles didn't do anything 'cause they'd advised him and he didn't listen. But his mom went to the police station every day, once in the morning and once in the evening bringing him food and stuff, she even brought bibles and distributed to the people there, though they are Muslims.

Every time she asks her son to pray to God to get him out of trouble and every time he says to her "Don't tell me that, find me money!" and she'd tell him "Son! If only you pray! God can do anything, he can shake the foundations of this cell and set you free!"

After two weeks she said to him "If you want me to keep visiting you have to pray!" so he promised her he will."

Next morning, on her way there, when she was near the police station she saw a big crowd gathered.

When she went closer, one of the guards that knows her 'cause she goes there everyday told her "Saddam ordered that all prisoners are set free"--I remember the day that's happened.

It's really amazing.
Hallelujah! :D

(10+2)*5

While browsing Lifehacker today I stumbled upon a post that features a simple application called Procrastination Killer.

The idea behind it is explained on the page, simply put, you work for 10 minutes then you take a break for 2 minutes, thus the 10+2, you repeat that for 5 times (12*5=60) and you get a full hour.

I've been using it the whole day now and it seems to be working; I'm finally getting some work done! But it's so annoying, you HAVE to take a break, and it's just 2 minutes long, by the time you have something fun and interesting to do the break is over. Like, just when I started to type this post the message popped up saying that my break is over, luckily, it doesn't start counting until you press the button so I'm taking a 5-minute break instead!

Let's see how this goes.

Windows 7

Just recently, I downloaded and installed Windows 7 RC and I've gotta say I'm impressed.

All my laptop's Vista drivers worked just fine, Windows installed most of the drivers through updates.

Everything just works, which is something I really missed in Linux, the closest it got was with Ubuntu but even then it wasn't as easy as it is with Windows 7.

It's fast, it's light, no unwanted features and an amazing new UI.

I'm a big fan of the changes they made to their UI, I like how you can keep only one window open by dragging it and shaking it, and all the other windows will be minimized, do that again and they're back.

And I like the new taskbar I don't know why no one's thought of it before.

I can safely say that M$ has officially outdone itself and that I am actually willing to pay for Windows 7 when it's released.

Playing .3gp and .mp4 files on Ubunut

I know, I know, I've been posting lots of how-tos but that's basically for me to find them and share a method that works with others.

The codec works for mplayer (not totem) so you need mplayer, and, if you want, gnome-mplayer so run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer

It'll pull some dependencies, including mplayer itself.

Then you need to go here and download the tarball for your architecture.

It has a README file, just follow the instructions there, copy the files and your videos should play.

Source

Getting Prism firefox 3 extension working on Ubuntu

I've been trying to get it to work for quite some time now but never really bothered to look for a solution... Just now I decided to google a bit, and I found a solution.

To fix the problem, all you have to do is to open the .desktop file that the plug-in creates on your desktop and change “/usr/bin/firefox-3.0.3/firefox” to /usr/bin/xulrunner .

That's all folks!

Connectiyo, again!

Yes, I have worked on Connectiyo before... This time it's not going to be an all-in-one website, in fact, it's going to be exactly the opposite of that; It'll barely store any data, here's how it'll work (I think I've blogged about this before):
There are so many social websites today, each has its own profile, status, info, etc... There are websites that try to put them all in one place but they end up adding to the mess rather than fix it; they all have "what are you doing" and their own profile.
Connectiyo is different; it won't store any data of its own, it won't even have its own accounts: It'll use facebook connect.
It will allow you to gather all your contacts from everywhere (Yahoo, Google, facebook, twitter, etc) all in one place, merge the same contacts, eventually, you'll everything you need to communicate with your friends in one place, and the cool thing is that, unlike similar services, they don't have to use the site for you to see their updates.
I really think this'll work out 'cause I actually have a problem to solve unlike before.
I started designing the interface, and I started reading about using facebook's API with Flex, however, I still need to finish my final project (final changes), after that I'll be free to work on Connectiyo, I might even start a blog about it (Yey!).

PS: I had to choose between this project and another crazy idea I have. I might blog about that one soon.

God bless you all!

Linux's Desktop Environments are Failing It

Don't get me wrong, the current one (at least GNOME) is fine. Here's the whole thing:

Around a week ago I was thinking about Windows 7 and how much improvements to the UI it has and how innovative it is and I started wondering why Linux isn't as innovative. I was about to blog about it but good thing I didn't.

Just a few days back I came across an article about GNOME 3.0 and it said that they'll have a major UI change, it said they'll make GNOME Shell the main interface, I got excited 'cause I really like revolutionary stuff, so I started googling GNOME Shell, sadly, it looked awful and pretty weird!

That's when I realized that Linux developers ARE innovative, just not in the right path, there are some cool stuff (rather, a lot), but they're really screwing it with their desktop environments.

Don't get me wrong, GNOME now is awesome, just yesterday I was playing a video at the back, chatting on FB in firefox, and chatting with another friend in Pidgin, all at the same time; I reduced the opacity of both Firefox and Pidgin so I could still watch the video. Now that's cool!

The thing is that both KDE and GNOEME are failing, I used to use KDE 3.x and I was very happy with it (I used to even despise GNOME a bit), but after KDE 4 was released and I tried it, I just didn't like it, and after all major distros shifted to KDE 4, I had to shift to GNOME, now I like GNOME, it's fine.. But it looks like GNOME will screw things up with version 3.. At the same Windows 7 comes with a lot of improvements to its interface, I'm seriously considering shifting back to Windows once Windows 7 is released.

Productivity Script

I've seen the productivity script on Lifehacker for both Mac and Windows, so I decided to make a Linux version of it, here it is:

#!/bin/sh
zenity --question --text "Consider if this is really how I need to be spending my time. Continue?" --ok-label=Yes --cancel-label=No

while [ "$?" == "0" ] # while test "$var1" != "end"
do
sleep 12
zenity --question --text "Consider if this is really how I need to be spending my time. Continue?" --ok-label=Yes --cancel-label=No
done

Make sure you make it executable.

I hope you enjoy it.

What are you doing?

That sentence is starting to annoy me, every single website I join asks me what I'm doing, why on earth do they care?

Why can't they all just sync their status with facebook or twitter? Well, very few do but the majority just have their own field with no way of synchronising it with any other site.

As I've said before, the least thing the web needs today is another place to store your data and no site out there that aims at gathering all your information in one place does just that.

Every website that promises to "put all your social networks in one place" or "centralises your on-line identity", they all end up adding at least one thing: the net work part; they all ask you to add friends...

While I was thinking of this problem, I did come up with a solution that doesn't involve making friends to share things with your friends without having to make different friends... as a matter of fact, it even helps organize your contacts from the different places.

I might go for it one day, but I'm still working on Deskiyo and it's still interesting. So this is just a thought.

Stretching Images in Flex

I needed to do this today and I had to search a lot before I found the right article that explained it so I decided to share it.

If you need to put an image in your application and you want it to stretch/shrink to the size of the Image component, just change the image's 'maintainAspectRatio' property to false.

You can see the article where I learned this along with an explanation here.