Adam and Eve's Origins

A German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an Egyptian went to an Art museum and were spending some time in front of the painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
After observing the painting for a while an intrigued observer asked the four men where they thought Adam and Eve's origins could be from.
The German said: "Look at the perfection of theirbodies. She with her slender and well-formed figure and he with that athletic body and bulging muscles. There is no doubt they must be of German origin."
Immediately the Frenchman reacts! "C'est Impossible! One can clearly see the eroticism that is exuding from both figures... She so feminine? He so masculine... And both so aware of the impending temptation... They must be French!"
Shaking his head in disagreement, the Englishman comments: "Oh No, Chaps it can't be! Note the serenity on their faces, their delicate pose, the sobriety in their gestures. They could only be English."
After a few more seconds of contemplation, the Egyptian exclaims: "I do NOT agree with ANY of your theories! Look closer, they do not have clothes, they do not have shoes, and they do not even have shelter. All they have is ONE apple to eat and to top it all off it is prohibited! They don't protest and they STILL think they are in Paradise!?? Clearly, these two can only be Egyptians!!!"

Tags: Fun, Egypt, Gr33n Data

You've Got a Mail from The FBI

IF it says it's from the US Central Intelligence Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation, avoid it like the plague. An e-mail is going around, claiming to be from the CIA or FBI. And if you open it using Windows, you'll be in big trouble. Source: http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,97983,00.html

Tags: Computer, Security, Gr33n Data

I'm Back

I was on a business trip out of Egypt and just came back today. Hope that all the bloggers are fine, and looking forward to continue posting soon. Welcome back to me :) Tags: Blog, Personal, Gr33n Data

Murphy's Law of Availability

A law that I especially like for Murphy: "Brains x Beauty x Availability = Constant" Source: Cold Desert Tags: Social, Murphy, Gr33n Data

Blogetiquette

I think people need something like a Bloggers Code of Ethics in order to tell them what they are supposed to do, and what they are not supposed to. Is it ethical to blog while you are at work? To what limit you can say whatever you want in your blog, and can you insult someone or swear there? Are you supposed to leave others comments there or can you delete the ones you do not like, or think that they are inappropriate? What kind of comments are not acceptable? Also, there some other questions that are not ethical related ones, however they may be important to know. Is there a acceptable limit to your posts length? How frequently shall you update your blog? Shall you blog in your real name or use some screen name for security? What kind of personal you are not supposed to write on your blog? I know that these last ones do not have standard answers, but sometimes you need to have something like blogging etiquette or blogetiquette. By the way, this is my post number 206 and I was supposed to dedicate it to the good looking car, Peugeot 206. And that is why I am using this picture :) *** Updated 14 November 2005 *** Ahmad has sent me this useful link, EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers Tags: Blogs, Ethics, Gr33n Data

Remote Controls

When I was a kid, it was normally to have television sets without remote controls. At that time, there were only two channels in the Egyptian TV (Channel-1 and Channel-2). So it was not a big problem then to deal with TV's without remote contols. Then in the late eighties they added a third channel and after that they reached eight channels or so. At this point remote controls were not luxury any more, and people started to use them to switch between them different channels in order to find a suitable programs to watch. Actually they all suck, but we didn't have any other option then. Then there was the satellite Era, where people found themselves receiving hundreds of TV channels from all over the world. At this point we didn't use remote controls to find a suitable program to see, but there was the joy of switching between these channels forward and backward so quickly. It was very common to someone sitting on the sofa, and moving between the different channels one after the other for hours without watching anything. May be it was because most of these channels didn't worth watching and may be because people were happy to find such huge number of channels and wanted to watch them all at the same time. A similar situation is happening here in the Blogsphere, there are too many blogs to read. And sometimes I just move from one blog to another without reading a single post in any of them. Sometimes I may see the posts titles, and sometimes just the blog design. I try to make a list in my mind for my favorite blogs, and sometimes blog aggregators are useful to see what's new out there. It might be true that excess of information is sometimes worse than the lack of it. Tags: General, Whatever, Gr33n Data

Red Africa

I'd like to congratulate all Ahly fans for their fourth African Champions League title. They really deserve it, and they are just one title away from Zamalek's five titles legend. Africa is usually known as the black continent, but today it is a red one. Tags: Football, Soccer, Africa, Egypt, Gr33n Data

DL Most Popular Downloads - November 05

Download.com Most Popular Downloads (Week ending November 06)

1. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition: 1,172,942 downloads
2. Spyware Doctor: 872,347 downloads
3. ICQ 5.04: 581,741 downloads
4. iMesh: 553,928 downloads
5. LimeWire: 477,272 downloads
6. WinZip: 458,086 downloads
7. Morpheus: 405,976 downloads
8. Spybot - Search & Destroy: 375,030 downloads
9. All-in-One Secretmaker: 346,977 downloads
10. Registry Mechanic: 340,469 downloads

As you may have noticed, five items of the top-10 are spyware removal and other security related programs (Items 1, 2, 8, 9, and 10). Also there are 3 items for file-sharing (Items 4, 5, and 7). And finally there is ICQ (Instant Messaging program), and WinZip (File Compression Utility). It's clear that one of the main concerns of PC users is their security especially with the rise of the Ad-Wares and Spy-Wares phenomenon, as well as Worms and Virii. Then comes the file sharing software's, which may be because most of the interesting stuff on the net are copyrighted and not shown on usual web pages, so file-sharing programs are the best way to get such illegal stuff like MP3's, Movies, Cracked software's, eBooks, etc. It is interesting that most of the file-sharing programs contain spy-wares and ad-wares like Kazaa and may be iMesh too. The only file sharing program that is ad-ware free - simply because it is an open-source software - is called Shareaza, however it is not shown here. Tags: softwares, Internet, Gr33n Data

Iraqi Daily News!

"A series of attacks in the Iraqi capital Thursday targeted police and civilians, including a suicide bombing at a restaurant that killed at least 34 people, Iraqi police said", CNN.

This 20 days old baby was killed with his family few days earlier It seems that he was co-operating with the U.S. occupation forces!

So, are we supposed to get used to these daily news of those insane suicide bombers!? And shall we get used to seeing dozens killed everyday just because those ill-minded bastards think that they will go to heaven by blowing their dirty bodies up into innocent people!? Tags: Terrorism, Iraq, Gr33n Data

Welcome Back, Dear Ubuntu.

It's been a while that the partition table on my laptop has been corrupted. This has happened after re-installing Windows, which has screwed the partition table up, and made me lose my Linux partition as well. But today I succeeded in fixing the problem by using "Partition Magic" side by side to "Partition Table Doctor". The problem was that "Partition Magic" was not able to load because of an unknown error, so I used another software called "Partition Table Doctor" to fix it and then used "Partition Magic" in order to fix the Partition Table and get my /ext3 - Linux partition - back. Then I installed my favorite Linux distro that is called Ubuntu and here I am writing this blog post from there. Tags: Ubuntu, Computers, Gr33n Data

Jordanians: "Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!"

"Hundreds of angry Jordanians rallied Thursday outside one of three hotels attacked by suicide bombers, shouting, "Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!" after the terrorist's group claimed responsibility for the blasts that killed at least 56 people. In an Internet statement, al-Qaida in Iraq linked the blasts at the Grand Hyatt, the Radisson SAS and the Days Inn hotels to the war in Iraq and called Amman the "backyard garden" for U.S. operations", Yahoo News. It's really interesting that earlier this year, a suicide bomber's family - Raed AlBanna - in Jordan celebrated his so called martyrdom after blowing himself up in the town of Hilla south of Baghdad, killing at least 120 Iraqi. Hope they now know the difference between terrorism and martyrdom. Finally, May Allah bless the souls of the victims. Tags: Jordan, Iraq, Terrorism, Gr33n Data

Jordan Blasts

"Suicide bombers with links to al-Qaeda are believed to have carried out the attacks on three hotels in Jordan's capital that killed at least 57 people", BBC News But the victims of the attacks on the Grand Hyatt, Radisson and Days Inn hotels in Amman were mostly Jordanians with at least 300 people wounded. Does AlQaeda - or whoever has the same beliefs - think that killing innocent Jordanins will help in their *Holy* war against the evil crusaders !!? Tags: Jordan, Terror, Gr33n Data

SKYPE-SB/2005-002

A security bug has been found in the "Skype for Windows user client" that can make it execute arbitrary code through a buffer overflow when Skype is called upon to handle malformed URLs that are in Skype-specific URI types callto:// and skype://. In addition, Skype can be made to execute arbitrary code during importation of a VCARD that is in a specific non-standard format. So, it is recomended to upgrade to the newest Sykep version (Release 1.4.*.84 or later). More Info: http://www.skype.com/security/skype-sb-2005-02.html Tags: Internet, Security, Skype, BOF, Gr33n Data

Printing Wikipedia, An Inverse Google Print

"Entries from Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users, may soon be available in print for readers in the developing world, founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday. He said content from the Web site may also be burned onto CD's and DVD's so computer users in places like Africa, who lack access to high-speed Internet, could consult parts of the reference work offline", CNN But do you really think that printing it is a good idea? I believe that one of the major advantages of Wikipedia is that it can be live updated with the most recent topics every day. Also since it is edited by anyone at any time - which helps in correcting any error s soon as it is detected - it needs to be error free before publishing it on some static media like a printed books, or CD's. Finally, I don't think that publishing it on paper can be cheaper than a Dial-up Internet connection in most of the developing countries. Tags: Internet, Wikipedia, Gr33n Data

Palestinian Child's Spirit, Alive Peace Maker

"The father of a Palestinian boy shot dead by Israeli soldiers said Monday he believes his son's spirit is alive in every Israeli after donating the boy's organs to Israelis waiting for transplants", CNN Tags: Political, Social, Israel, Palestine, Gr33n Data

Mysterious Eve, and The Mysterious Arabic Text

In a previous post I was talking about how writing in Arabic on the PC can be really annoying.

"When you try to put a full-stop or an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, the computer will put it at the beginning of it instead", Arabic Enabled @ Gr33nData

Then a nice Lebanese blogger called Mysterious Eve - she has a wonderful blog by the way - has sent me a comment there that solved most of the problems I was facing.

"the solution is easy. When you write in Arabic, align to the right, then insert dir="rtl" between div and right. plz email me if I wasn't clear enough.", Mysterious Eve.

In English; put dir="rtl" in the div tag to look like this:

<div dir="rtl">SOME ARABIC TEXT</div>

So I'd really like to thank her for her help, and hope that this may help other Arabic bloggers as well. Tags: Arabic, HTML, Technology, Gr33n Data

Arresting Abdul Kareem: Defending Islam or Offending It?

An Egyptian blogger - Abdul Kareem Nabeel Soliman - was arrested on Wednesday 26 October 2005 by the Egyptian State Security (Amn El Dawla). According to his family, his arrest might be a result of his writings that are attacking Islam. His brother said that Abdul Kareem has a tense relation with Salafis in his hometown of Alexandria. He added that they might be the ones behind filing a complaint against his brother. Sources: Manalaa.net , Miss Mabrouk, and Amr Gharbeia.

I've visited his blog before and I do really disagree with his writings about Islam; however I still cannot find any reason for arresting someone for what he says or writes. And for those who think that he should be arrested for offending Islam, I believe that arresting him is more offending to Islam. Because by arresting him you are just telling everyone that Islam is in a real danger because of a couple of blog posts. And finally I do believe that Islam is great enough not to need any security forces to defend it, and will never be in danger because of a couple of blog posts, or even millions of them. Tags: Egypt, Abdolkarim, Detention, Blog, Gr33n Data

Microsoft's Life Era

About every five years, Microsoft holds an event to introduce a "big bet" that Bill Gates is making in hopes of changing computing as we know it.

On Tuesday here at the Palace Hotel, Bill introduced what he's calling the "Live era," in which software and online services and applications work together, portions paid for by advertising and subscription revenue. Microsoft showed two online platforms, Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live. Windows Live looks like a cross between MSN and SharePoint. It's a customizable home page, with new features to be added as the beta continues.While Microsoft Office Live is a set of small business services, including Web hosting and e-mail that is built largely atop SharePoint and incorporates the old bCentral hosted services. Source: eWeek

The first (beta) iteration of Windows Live is now available at live.com. The website, which currently works only with Windows Internet Explorer — support for Firefox and other browsers is forthcoming — has a search engine like Google, access to news and information services like Yahoo and MSN but one more thing — a great deal of customization. When you first visit the site you see a sidebar with headings such as “My Web,” and “Gadgets” as well as information categories including Business, Entertainment, Health News, Science & Tech and Sports. Gadgets is a series of mini-applications such as e-mail, customized stock quotes, horoscopes and a ticking clock that all run from within the browser (unlike Apple’s Widgets, they do not run from the computer’s desktop). You can select a gadget from the list and drag it to any portion of your personal live.com page. “Office Live” is targeted to the estimated 28 million small businesses worldwide with fewer than 10 employees. The basic free ad supported service will include a domain name, a web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web e-mail accounts — each email account gets up to two gigabytes of storage. For a fee, Office Live will also provide access to 22 business applications to “help automate daily business tasks such as project management, sales and collateral management, customer management, expense reports, time and billing management, and secure internal and external collaboration.” While this initiative marks a step forward for Microsoft, it is hardly a revolutionary concept. Sun and Oracle, for years, have been talking about using the Internet as the nexus for future computer operating systems. Google has been marching steadily forward launching many new services that go way beyond its original search function and Yahoo is continually expanding its offerings. Even AOL, which has traditionally been a dial-up access provider, is repositioning itself as a web services provider with free e-mail and other services. Source: CBS News

Tags: Microsoft, Technology, Gr33n Data

Manalaa.net: Position On Top Time Trick

Since you can change the time tag when creating a new blog post. You can write it now, but set the date and time to two hours later, or even the following day. So the point is that many people just change their posts time and/or date to make them appear on the top of Manalaa.net - or any blog aggregator they are member of. That's why I think that blog aggregators shall discard the time tag that comes with the posts, and use the time when they crawled to the blog instead. Tags: Blog, Technology, Gr33n Data

February 29, 1980.

I've successfully made a post with a date prior to 1990. Just see this post.

Publish Now, Or Save It For Tomorrow !?

Sometimes you find yourself having too many topics to talk about in your own blog and some other times you can't find anything to say. So do you think that saving posts for the future is a good idea? Just write the ideas in your blog and save them as draft and publish them later so that your blog users will find your blog being updated frequently. But on the other hand, do you really think that your mind can run out of ideas and new topics? Why not just publish whatever is in your mind now and sure you'll find something to write about tomorrow? As for me I prefer the "Just post what is in your mind now" more than the "Save some posts for tomorrow", as I think that the more you write and the more comments you recive on what you wrote, the more ideas you get in your mind. Tags: Internet, Blog, Gr33n Data

Arabic Enabled

In a previous post I've asked people if they prefer my English blog or my Arabic one more. Actually I myself prefer writing here in the English one, as I hate writing in Arabic on the PC. One of the reasons is that I can find the English letters more easily than the Arabic ones, also because when I want to say something I prefer to say it in Arabic but when it comes to writing I prefer it in English. Other than these previous reasons, the main reason to hate writing in Arabic on the PC, is that I believe that those programmers who are responsible for arabization are really bastards. And when you ever try writing in Arabic you will always see freak stuff like the following ones.

• When you try to put a full-stop or an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, the computer will put it at the beginning of it instead.
• When there is a sentence of both Arabic and English letters, the computer will just makes its best to rearrange the letters so that no one will be able to read it.
• Brackets and braces are real pain in the a**. (Where '*' = '*')
• Trying to use the backspace and delete button will delete any letter but the one you really want to delete.
• Sometimes copying and pasting a paragraph may result in rearranging the sentences there.

Tags: Arabic, PC, Gr33n Data

Happy Eid

It's been announced that Eid Ul Fetr - End of Ramadan Feast - will be next Thursday here in Egypt, and I think many other countries as well, so I'd like to wish you all the best and a happy Eid.

Tags: Eid, Ramadan, Gr33n Data