Grenaissance

A couple of weeks ago I was in Carrefour buying some stuff. We needed a shampoo then, and I usually don't care much about what brand to buy. But at that time, I found myself getting that Shampoo in a dark container called Clear. Most of the time, when it comes to such kind of products, their marketing campaigns address women only, as if they are the only ones who are clean on this planet. So, when Clear created a new marketing campaign claiming that their product is made specially for men, I found myself buying it without thinking. We like it when we feel that people are creating products specially for us. Even if the generic products are going to be as good as those custom ones, or even better, but we still like the feeling of being privileged.

I used to blog in English only, and then when I decided to write in Arabic too, I decided to do my Arabic blogging in a separate blog. May be, cause I am sure that not all the ones who read my English blog - Arabs or non-Arabs - will like reading my Arabic blog too, and vice versa. And now when it comes to my English blog, I write about technical or non-technical (Social, Political, Humanitarian, etc.) issues, and here comes another problem, not all those readers who like the non-technical issues here will like those technical ones too. I even had plans to write some deep technical stuff, but I always back off because I was afraid that this may freak some of my readers out. And, you know, most of the professional blogs such as ProBlogger, TechCrunch, and LifeHacker are mono-themed blogs, they have one main theme or domain of subject, and most of the posts there fall into that domain.

So after some thinking, I decided to split this blog into two separate one. This blog (Gr33n Data) will be for technical posts only, while the new one (Not Gr33n Data) will be for the other topics.

I don't know if this is going to be a renaissance for Gr33n Data, or let's call it Grenaissance for short? Or is it going to be the first nail in the tomb of my blogging experience? Anyway, let's wait and see, and looking forward to seeing your feedback.

Oh, wait a minute, here you are Not Gr33n Data's feed, if you want to subscribe to it in your Feed Reader:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NotGreenData

Tags: Personal, Blogging, Gr33n Data

Resident Lions for Evil Lambs

A couple of weeks ago we decided to go to the cinema in order to see "Resident Evil", but the cinema was "Complet" then, so we decided to see "Lions for Lambs" instead. It stars Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise. So the cast was enough to expect an acceptable movie. You know, we have our own scale to rate movies. A movie can be either Good, or a Computer Movie, which is the one that doesn't worth the money paid in the cinema ticket, a Computer Movie is one of those movies that you can see after downloading a pirated version of it on your PC.

Lions for Lambs, I really don't know why they insisted to translate its name here into "Osood wa 7emlan", which mean Lions and Lambs. Anyway, this movie is a typical Computer Movie, the main idea of the movie is really good, but it is more like News Headlines than a real movie. Meryl Streep is a journalist who had an interview with Tom Cruise the senator. The conversation between them was mainly about the War on Terror, and how the Republicans - whom Cruise belongs to - have involved the United States in continuous unplanned and useless wars. The university professor, Robert Redford, who is also the director of the movie by the way, inspired two of his students to volunteer in the army in order to do something important with their lives and for their country as well. He later on realized that the country needs good men in decision making positions more than its need for fighters. Redford's students who represent the American people, are the Lions who have the will and the power to pay their lives for their country. While the Senator - Tom Cruise - represents the Lambs who take critical decisions for their country from the Air-Conditioned offices.

As I told you, the main idea is not bad. But the movie itself is really boring. I also think it is a weak movie from a technical point of view. I like what Matt Pais of the Chicago Tribune wrote about it; "Lions is more of an imitation of life than a reflection on it". The only reason to enter such movie is when the only other choice is to see "Resident Evil", which I watched last week. "Resident Evil" is a typical action move made for teens where a group of hot chicks keep slaying some nasty zombies and nothing more. In fact, if "Lions for Lambs", is a computer movie, then "Resident Evil" is just a turned-off computer movie.

Tags: Cinema, Lions for Lambs, Resident Evil, Politics, Action, Review, Gr33n Data

Yahoo Pipes

You may have many friends on Facebook, but most of them don't know your blog. You can add the address of your blog to your Facebook profile so that they can visit it. You may also edit the "My Notes" module there, so that your new posts are automatically grabbed from your blog feed and displayed there. But wait a moment, what if you have more than one blog, and Facebook allows you to add one feed only!?

Yahoo Pipes, can solve this problem, it's a tool where you can do various operations on your feeds. For example I mixed the feeds of my blogs (I mixed the feed of this one with my Arabic Blog) and then sorted the output by date in order to have a new sorted feed ready for being imported into my Facebook notes. You may also filter your feeds in order to remove some posts from there based on any criteria you want.

Playing with Yahoo Pipes is so simple. You have different modules there and each module does a certain operation. You just drag and drop those modules and connect their inputs and outputs to each other.

In my case for example, I connected the output of two modules of the type "Fetch Feed", to the input of another module called "Union". "Fetch Feed" is used to get the content of a certain Feed. "Union" then mixes the output of those feeds. I then added another module called "Sort" in order to sort the output of the "Union" module by date. Then you have to put another module called "Pipe Output", in order to tell it that you want the resulting feed to be taken from there.

You may find more uses for Yahoo Pipes, just keep playing with it and tell me about your plumbing experience.

Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes, Feed, RSS, Atom, Facebook, Blogging, Gr33n Data

BlogRush

You may ask what is that grey box found on the right hand side of my blog template. You know what, I am one of those bloggers who like to check their blog statistics everyday, and keep some fireworks beside their PC in order to celebrate the event of having 100,000 visitors to their blog. BlogRush is ... do you still remember Web Rings, it is a bit similar to Web Rings. Posts from other bloggers are displayed in this box, and so are your posts displayed on other bloggers blogs. It's like sharing traffic with other bloggers. However BlogRush is more intelligent than Web Rings, whenever someone visits your blog, you earn more points, and the more points you get, the more your posts are displayed on others blogs.

BlogRush is a "Cooperative Syndication Network." It's a network of blogs that run a small "widget" on their pages. Each time this widget is loaded it will contain 5 clickable headlines which are the blog post titles to other users' posts. Clicking on any of these links will open a new browser window and load the blog and full post. Users earn "syndication credits" based on each time their blog loads the widget as well as each time any of their referrals (users that signup after clicking the "add your blog posts" link on the widget) loads the widget. They also earn additional credit based on all the activity through 10 generations of referrals. 1 Syndication Credit = having one of their recent blog post titles served inside the widget on another member's blog.

Any way, if you like the idea and want to have a similar widget on your blog, go and click on the "Add you blog posts" link found on the widget.

Tags: BlogRush, Web Rings, Gr33n Data