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26 June 2007

Facebook - Friend Requests

Sometimes you receive friend requests for Facebook on an email address other than the one you used to register on Facebook. The problem is that when you press on the link at the end of that email, you have no choice but to register for a new account using the mail you received the request on.
Here you are an example of the links you receive in such emails:
http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=1111111&k=1111111&r&v=2
So, in order to overcome this, just remove the "&r" part of the link. and you will not be asked to register for a new account then.

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23 June 2007

Egypt - Is it Still a Regional Leader?

We were taught in schools that Egypt is the leader of the Arabs and their big brother with its bzillion years history and wise role. But, is this still true now!? In fact I think the Egyptian leadership has shrank due to many reasons.

Some may claim that Mubarak's regime is focused on some minor internal affairs such as preparing his son Gamal to succeed him. And this is the main reason that Egypt has lost its regional place.
"Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime has focused much of its energy on ensuring its continuation. Egypt has entered a period of political uncertainty; given Mubarak's advanced age (he turned 79 in May) and deteriorating health, the president could either die or become incapacitated in the course of the next year. Mubarak's absence would destabilize the country's political system, as questions would arise about his potential successor's ability to govern as effectively as he has. Thus, Mubarak is working assiduously to hand over the reins of power to his son, Gamal", Intelli-Briefs.

Soft Power.

To be honest, I do not think this is the only - or even a major - reason. Let me first define what is soft power.
"The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks", Soft Power, Wikipedia

"Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will", Joseph S. Nye Jr., The International Herald Tribune.

So you can sometimes use the Media or any other source of advertisement in order to affect the others and capture their minds and let them want what you want, and do what you want them to do.

Another concept that we may need to define here is " The Sphere of Influence"
"A sphere of influence (SOI) is an area or region over which an organization or state exerts some kind of indirect cultural, economic, military or political domination. Also, in some areas of habitation, shopping or retail outlets or indeed destination outlets, have a sphere of influence over towns of certain areas. A country within the "sphere of influence" of another more powerful country may become a subsidiary of that state and serve in effect as a satellite state or de facto colony", Sphere of Influence, Wikipedia.

The Death of One Leader, and the Birth of Another One.

In order to unite the neighboring countries, Gamal Abdel Nasser called for a pan-Arabian unity, where he focused more on the ethnic (Arabic) characteristic of those countries. He supported the revolutions there and one of his goals was to have neighboring countries with similar secular and social ideologies in order to position those countries within the Egyptian sphere of influence hence obtain a leadership position among them. Radio stations such as Sot El Arab (Voice of Arabs) were established in order to help in spreading Nasser's propaganda. Then it was 1967 when the Arabic armies were defeated under the leadership of Egypt, and the idea of pan-Arabian unity became more foggy. During that war, Ahmed Said of Sout El-Arab famous incident when claimed that we were kicking the Israeli Army's ass and later on people realized that he was bluffing. Such incident and many similar ones made such pan-Arabian media looses its credibility. Twelve years later President Anwar El Sadat sign a peace agreement with Israel, and Egypt's membership in the Arab League was suspended for about 10 years.

On the other hand, many others believed in a religious-based instead on an ethnic-based unity. You can take the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudia as examples. During the 70's Saudia started to market their own version of Islam (the Wahabism), either by printing low-price books, or by sponsoring preachers and scholars across the Arab word. Many people went to work in Saudia especially because of the high standard of living there, thanks to the oil explorations there. The presence of Holy Mecca there made people see them as the only infallible source of Islam. It was even normal to see people here in Egypt wearing the Saudian dress (Jalabiya), and listening to Quraan reciters from the Gulf area instead of the famous Egyptian ones like Mohamed Refaat and Abdel Basset. Several books and fatwas were produced targeting the major Egyptian symbols. "Nagib Mahfooz is Kafir", "So is Taha Hussein", etc. Cinema, theater, and various forms of art were attacked in the name of Islam, simply because this was of the main methods that Egypt used to spread its culture across its neighbors. And as a result Saudia started to emerge as an alternative Arab leader instead of Egypt, with a sphere of influence that covers most of the Sunni world.

[Updated] In fact the Egyptian government has committed many mistakes. First of all it helped in the spread of the Wahabism, because they wanted to benefit from their ideas about obeying the ruler regardless of his deeds. The government control over Al-Azhar which is also financially dependant on it helped in affecting its image and people started to loose trust in it as well, and accepted the Wahabism as the only alternative to Al-Azhar.[/Updated]
"First of all, I think the regime now plays a dangerous game for letting the Wahabism spread , [because] Wahabism calls to obey the ruler whether he was good or bad. Don't forget [that] this sect was spread in Arabia with the help of Britain in order to stand against Mohamed Ali and his influence. Another why it is spreading in Egypt, simply because now the people don't trust Al-Azhar because it follows the state", Zeinobia.

The CNN Effect.
"The CNN effect or factor refers to the process by which the coverage of foreign event by CNN causes that event to be a primary concern for its audiences, which in turn forces the federal government to act", Robinson, The CNN Effect.

Here in the Middle East there is Aljazeera effect instead of the the CNN effect. Aljazeera news channel started broadcasting in 1996, and since then it became the main source for news for both the Arab citizens as well as politicians. If you come down to the streets and ask people about their opinion in stuff such as the Iraqi Resistance, Hezbollah's war against Israel last summer, or even other local issues in their countries you will sure see Aljazeera effect in their answers. In 2002 another competing news channel Al-Arabiya started broadcasting with its own agenda too. CNN became what it is because they were able to have reporters behind the enemy lines during Gulf War I. They were able to cover the war from the battlefield. Aljazeera gained its position during Guld War II, and the fall of Baghdad. Now if we look at Egypt, it didn't try to have its own news channel in order to have its effect on the Arab streets. And please don't tell me that we have Nile News, because I am sure that no one watches it.

The Sticks and The Carrots.

Sure soft power is not enough. Even USA depends on its economics influence and military force all the time. So what about our sticks and carrots. Many Arab countries such as UAE and Saudia now have multi-billion dollars investments here in Egypt and for sure they can use such economical influence when needed. On the other hand I don't think Egypt has significant investments outside its borders. About the military force I am sure Egypt is supposed to have the biggest army in the region but since the last war that we were engaged in was more than 30 years ago, it is really hard to prove if we still have our sticks or they are broken now.

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22 June 2007

Wget and DOS For Loop

Most of the time when you want to download a file, you righ-click on its URL in your browser and choose "Save Target As", to save it somewhere in your local hard drive. But imagine the case where you want to download about 100 files, saving each file individually will be really boring and time consuming. So let me first introduce you to a tool called "wget"

"GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts", GNU Wget Page.

The good news here is that they have Windows binaries in order to run it on your Windows PC. Now, one more thing to mention is that you can write a simple "For" loop in DOS.

FOR %variable IN (set) DO command [command-parameters]

Let's say we want to download the Holy Quraan from Islam-Way website. Each Sura is stored in a separate file, and these files are named "001.mp3", "002.mp3", etc. And the files are all stored in the following location, "http://download.quran.islamway.com/quran3/133".

So, go to "Start Menu" and click on "Run", and write "cmd.exe" there and hit the "OK" button. Repeat this step three times in order to have three command prompt windows open. Then write the following commands in the open windows to download all the files. Now, make yourself a cup of coffee and grab a book and start reading it till your computer finishes downloading.

for /L %i in (1,1,9) do wget http://download.quran.islamway.com/quran3/133/00%i.mp3 -O 00%i.mp3
for /L %i in (10,1,99) do wget http://download.quran.islamway.com/quran3/133/0%i.mp3 -O 0%i.mp3
for /L %i in (100,1,114) do wget http://download.quran.islamway.com/quran3/133/%i.mp3 -O %i.mp3

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09 June 2007

IP-TV: Joost and Babelgum

If you're not that much into networking and TCP/IP stuff, please skip this paragraph. A long while ago a friend at work - he now works in Cisco Systems - was preparing for an IP TV and VoD (Video on Demand) demo for one of our customers. We then had a debate about Multicast. In fact I was never able to like nor understand such technology. In web content, you request a page from the server and it gives it to you, then another user requests the same page, and so on. But when it come to a continuous stream of data like TV broadcast, it is hard for a server to serve that huge number of subscribers continuously at the same time. So my friend's point was that in order to stream the content from one point to a huge number of subscribers, the streamer has to send one stream to a multicast address and this stream shall then be copied/splitted by the routers in the path in order to deliver it to the appropriate subscribers. I was then obsessed by the P2P (Peer to Peer) technology, so I told him why don't we make some kind of Media Player that can take a stream and distribute it to other neighbor nodes in order to reduce the load on the main streamer. And guess what, it seems that my idea then wasn't really bad.

Joost and Babelgum are two new softwares which are trying to create a new way of watching TV online. Believe me, after a short while everything will be online. They have signed contracts with TV channels and content producers in order to broadcast their content to the users. According to their model, users will not pay any fees, but they will make money by having Ad banners in their softwares. They both depend on a Torrent-like P2P technology where the content is broadcasted from a certain location, and each client (node) acts as a small streamer. So beside watching the content you are also copying it and passing it to your neighbors. Today I wanted to try one of them, but you know the creators of Joost are those who created Kazaa a while ago, so I was afraid to install it and find my PC filled with Spywares and Adwares later on, so I preferred to try Babelgum instead. The content there is not that rich, but may be it is because they are still in a beta-trial phase.

The problem with those softwares that the content there will always be tailored for their main users in Europe and USA. And that's why I think people here shall start creating our own version of IPTV softwares and sign with the local content producers such as ART, Show Time, etc. Egyptian Radio and TV Union can also provide them with Arabic movies, series and documentaries. Such project can be sponsored by local ISP's. By the way the (co-)founder of Babelgum Silvio Scaglia, is also the chairman of one of the Italian ISP's.

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07 June 2007

Social Vulnerability

I know that many of you are discussing Social Networking Services. We are all now obsessed with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter as well as Blogs. But let me ask you, isn't it risky to expose our personal info for anyone to see it. Photos, family members and friends names, daily routines, and much more, are just published and seen by hundreds, if not millions, of strangers.
Forget about those freak conspiracy theories. In fact if the CIA is going to waste its time gathering info about you and me then they must be idiots. But people with bad intentions can do various things with such info, from digitally manipulating your photos to Social Engineering.
Please watch this video to know what I am talking about.



One of the main problem with the published info online, that once it is out there, it is really hard to de-publish nor remove it.

But on the other hand, isn't it really fun to share what you are doing with your friends, I admit that despite all these concerns, I do blog and have a Flickr and Facebook accounts. I was able to find many old friends and create new ones as well from such services. Flickr made me interested in photography, and having an account there was the main motive for me to buy a dSLR Camera.

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