Libyan Facebook

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Don't use Twitter

While we're on the topic of heat, there's this funny post that has been floating around the internet for a while now, check it out below :


And that warning doesn't apply to this post :P.


* just in case anyone is going to get self-righteous on me, yeah I did edit the original post alot :P, and trying to read such small font is really pathetic of you. Edited : Damn it isn't that small .

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Libyan Doctors Forum

Recently found this website and given that we have so many doctors in the blogosphere I thought they might be interested in it.

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Technical Evolution

Check the difference between a 1 GB hard disk from 20 years ago and 1 GB flash memory today, can you imagine carrying that in your pocket ?

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10 classic clueless-user stories

#1: Icon by any other name

I had one user, the sweetest lady, who was not very computer literate. After she got her new computer, she said, “Where are my programs?” I told her that I had made shortcuts on her desktop to the programs she used. She said, “When I click on the icon, that’s not the right program.” When I asked her which program she was referring to, she said, “The third icon down.” I asked her which program that was. “Oh, I don’t know the name of it. I just know on my old computer, it was the third icon down program.”

This one took a while.

– nabess

#2: Money’s worth

Client: I don’t understand why that accounting software cost so much. It’s only been used once.

Consultant: What do you mean, it’s only been used once? You use it every day.

Client: No, I don’t. You used it once when you put the program on my computer and it’s been sitting in the box ever since.

…Time to get my money up front….

– BWestly

#3: IRQ sale

One of the contractors in my office ordered a new computer through his company. Unfortunately, he ordered a NIC with an RJ45 connector and we were on a coax network at the time. This was back in the days of Win95. I informed him of the problem and said I had a spare NIC to give him if he would order the correct NIC to replace the one I provided.

He got on the phone with his company and complained about the NIC. This guy thinks he is a computer genius, but really just thinks that bigger, better, and more are always the solution. So he ordered everything he could think of in this computer. Not a single bay was open and most of the slots were filled. Needless to say he had an IRQ problem. His company gave him the number of the computer company and told him to call their sales department. I was happy to see him on the phone because then he wasn’t bothering me while I set up his computer. I overheard him say to the sales department, “My land guy says I’m out of IRQs. Can I buy some more of those?”

– Idbollert

#4: Retention dissension

We currently have a great policy for keeping e-mail to a minimum. It’s only kept 90 days, then it’s deleted, so if you want to save it past the retention period, you have to put it into a file somehow.

This has been in effect for several years, but amazingly, we had a couple of executives in the legal dept who built up 40,000 messages in their inboxes each, without having any deleted. I finally got the connection when the new “retention policy” was published. The company lawyers who wrote it had a line in the document that excluded themselves from the policy and made sure they could keep everything forever!

– msholtva

#5: ####

One of our marketing managers complained that he couldn’t make any sense of a telephone management spreadsheet I’d sent him because he couldn’t see when the calls were made. I explained that each worksheet in the spreadsheet had a name and the name indicated the applicable month. Two minutes later, he arrived at my desk saying that he still couldn’t make any sense of the spreadsheet because there were no dates in the worksheets. I opened my copy and showed him that the dates and times were in column A. He then tried to tell me that I had sent him the wrong file because his column A just had “stars” in it! Oh boy-was his face red when I showed him how to expand the column! Makes you think, huh?!

– PhatKatz

#6: Must have been the instructions

Back when floppy disks were the only portable medium (good old 5 1/4 and 3.5 inch disks hold not much more than a mere 360K), I was working as a field engineer for a third-party support firm. Remembering two calls always brings a smile to my face.

Caller #1: A guy rings up and says that he has just received his new update on four 3.5 inch floppy disks and he followed the instructions supplied with the update to the letter. He had a problem with the machine reading the second disk, just would not accept it. After a few probing questions, a site visit was required, so I attended the next day and was amazed by what I saw. Yes, the guy obviously had a problem reading the second disk after following the installation instructions:

1. Insert disk 1.

2. Run setup, click OK when asked.

3. When asked, insert disk 2.

What I found was that he had not removed the first disk and had actually managed to get both disks into the floppy drive AT THE SAME TIME. Ooops.

Caller #2:

Me: Hello, Tech Support.

Caller: Hello yes, I received this update from you for my new PC, but it cannot read any of the floppy disks you sent me.

Me: Hmm. Can you please explain what’s happening?

Caller: OK, I opened the box and read the instructions telling me to put in disk 1 and run setup.

Me: Good; next?

Caller: So I got the disks out the box and put the first disk into the drive after removing the protective cover.

Me: Protective cover? Do you mean the little white sleeve that the disk comes in?

Caller: No the big black cover that the disk comes in. Is it supposed to be that hard to get the disk out?

At this point I fell off my chair, only just managing to put the caller on hold before breaking out in a laughter fit. When I attended his home, he had not only managed to take out the disk from inside the disk casing, he had actually managed to get it lodged into the drive and then broke the heads of the drive when he tried to get it out.

– darkside

#7: Memorable lessons

Several years ago, our organization finally got a T1 connection, so everyone suddenly had access to the Internet. The firewall with content filtering software was installed, but we were still playing around with the filtering settings.

Lots of our workers were complete newbies, so I had to teach a class on using browsers and e-mail clients. I had a mixed class of men and women, most of them completely new to computers. One of the guys was a very religious man, and everyone there was well aware of that.

At one point, I asked everyone in the class to enter www.yahoo.com in the URL box. After a moment, I heard a gasp, followed by everyone in the room busting out in laughter. Seems my religious friend didn’t know how to spell “Yahoo” and had instead entered “Yuho.” To his shock, and in front of a room full of witnesses, he was immediately transported to a raunchy porn site! The poor guy will never live it down!

– Quiet_Type

#8: If it don’t fit…

Back in the early ’90s, I was the PC support person for a tire manufacturing plant. Most of the computers had dual floppy drives (5 1/4 & 3.5), but there were some old clunkers (IBM PCs) with only 5 1/4, as well as some state-of-the-art 286 Compaqs with only a 3.5″ drive. It is latter that this story is about.

I got a call from a summer engineering student that her disk had gotten stuck in the drive. When I got to the computer I found that she had her work on a 5 1/4″ floppy. She was trying to load this work on one of these new Compaqs. The disk was too big, so she decided that, since the material that the floppy is made from is the same, if she were to fold her large floppy in quarters to make it fit the drive then the drive would still read it. Thing is, this person was otherwise a very smart, logical person. I also had a fairly good rapport with her, so I asked her, “How is the drive suppose to spin the disk if it is folded?” The lights came on, cheeks reddened, and she made me promise not to tell ANYONE what just happened. I didn’t in that job, but we both had a good laugh.

– support

#9: Not a speck of dust

I work for an engineering company. I had an engineer (with an engineering Ph.D., no less) call me about a broken mouse. When I arrived at his office, he showed me the problem by moving the mouse smoothly from one side of the mouse pad to the other while pointing out that the cursor moved in jerks. I showed him how to open the mouse, remove the ball and how to clean the crud from the rollers. After this, the mouse worked perfectly. He was quite happy and I left satisfied that this “problem” had been solved to everyone’s satisfaction.

However, the next morning, I again received a call from Dr. X to say that his mouse was broken. This time when I arrived, he moved the mouse from one side of the pad to the other while the cursor did not move at all. When I turned the mouse over, I found that our engineer had decided that the mouse was poorly designed to allow all of the dust and debris to enter it. To correct this poor design, he had applied scotch tape over the entire underside of the mouse! I have to admit, he would probably never have had a dirty mouse problem again!

– ESchlangen

#10: Most important meal of the day

User: “Is sausage bad for printers?”

To this day, I wish I had replied, “Patties or links?”

– Mchappell

Source

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Libyan Windows - Updated with translation

Upon popular request I've translated some of the dialog boxes below; but the translation isn't literal as the original text is in the local Libyan dialect, so I tried to translate it into the best available English phrases that make it funny ;) .




Box Title : No way is this happening ! :-t

To be honest I really can’t do this [-( …. You want to delete windows system files !! L-) …….. How many times do I have to tell you not to change things you know nothing of, acting smart, then after you mess up you go around looking for someone to fix it for you ? :-w

Button : OK whatever you said


Title : Are you crazy :-/

You've got to help yourself out here, you only have a 64 MB Graphic Card and you're downloading San Andreas ~X( ......... It would be better for you to cancel the download ?

Button : OK !
Title : So you don't say windows is messed up >:D<

Button1: I changed my mind and I don't want to do anything anymore :(

Button2: Leave the old file

Button3: Make a soup

Button4: Do whatever suits you :-??



Title : The Rubbish Bin

What ???? have you filled up the hard disk or is just that you don't want this file anymore ? You know that you can't get back what you delete right ? Once the garbage truck is gone thats it and its all for free we aren't getting 6 LD or anything ( LD = Libyan Dinars and 6 LD is the average monthly bill for garbage removal :P ) .

Button1 : I still want it

Button2 : Get rid of it




Title : You Thief !!!!!!

Isn't it enough that you are using an illegitimate cracked copy of Kaspersky, you want to update it as well :-w X( ......... you should be thanking God that we still haven't removed it ...... Just use it the way it is don't get greedy .

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Wireless Missile Launcher

Well these should take the boredom out of the office hours >:).





You can get more details from the original source here if you want to buy it ( yes its for real :-O).
Here's a demonstration of a battery of the previous wired version I found on Youtube thats been tweaked with a camera for tracking :

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Finally, Blogger is compatible with other blogging systems - Updated - Updated Again

On my previous post a discussion was brought up on the motives behind Blogger canceling the ability to link back to your blog when commenting. Two theories were thrown around, my initial was it being for security reasons and the other theory was that Google was trying to sideline other blogging systems and their users :-B .

Well yesterday I started to notice that a Blogger icon would appear beside a commenter's name, if he was using a Blogger id, later in the afternoon I noticed a drop down list below the commenting section allowing you to choose were you were signing in from (Google/Blogger, AOL, Wordpress, Live Journal, TypeKey ).

I signed into a Wordpress account I have ( for backup :P ) and found that I actually can comment with either one of my identities ( Blogger/Wordpress ) by simply switching between the different choices in the drop-down list, as long as I was signed into both. This is a great feature for non-blogger readers ( Rein, Melantrys ) from either Wordpress or Typepad or any other system; as they won't have to worry about their identities being forged and they won't have to create a new blogger account to comment on blogger either B-) .

Even though I'm not a great fan of large corporations and I do have my reservations on some of Google's privacy issues, but I have to admit this is Great ! <:-P

Update :

Well blogger has made a post explaining the premise behind its move to support OpenID and how it went about doing it. It also apologizes for "prematurely" disabling commentator link back support as quoted here :

"
The "Other" URL field

Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft.

Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.

"


Update - 21/12/2007 :

Now you can add a URL of your website our blog to your nickname ............. so everything is back to normal :P.

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Here comes another bubble

As most of you have probably noticed by now a lot of investors are on a shopping spree of the newest Web 2.0 technologies like facebook, skype which many fear is going to end with a second internet bubble similar to the dot-com bubble. The following video is highlighting this theory while at the same time making fun of people who are making the same mistakes all over again :P.


and here are the lyrics, courtesy of Podesk Videos:

"There's absolutely no bubble in technology"
Peter thiel october 31, 2007
investor, Facebook

got me a CS degree
honor roll, MIT

moved to Palo Alto
opportunity Knocked

thought i had the perfeect plan
took a job at webvan

traded in my twenties
for a worthless pile of tech stock

Suffered throught the market crash
lost a giant wad of cash

Pink slips, burger flips
would you like some fries

happy days are here again
lary page, sergey brin

time to write a business plan
so i can be like those guys!

here comes another bubble

it's a monster rally
all around the valley

first you need a buzzword
(Ajax)
then a second and a third

pick at least two industries
you'll revolutionize
(newpappers + friendship bracelets)

find yourself an engineer
feed him pizza, buy him beer
(product placement : Samel Adams)

Give him just a fraction
of a fraction of the pie

need a good domain name
must be cheap, can't be lame

something cool like
flickr, meebo, wikiyou, mahalo, bebo

"telephone" without the "t"
"digg" but with a triple "g"

make your elevator pith
("We're going to change the world!")
code it up and flip the switch
(internal server error)

here comes another bubble
(VC #1: friendship bracelets and news is a game changer.)
the VCs are backing
(VC #2: The next wave of the web will be friendship bracelets.)
baby let's get cracking

blog, blog, blog it all
blog it if it’s big or small

blog at the cineplex
(justin.tv)
blog while you're having sex

blog in the locker room
babies blogging in the womb

blog even if you’re wrong
won’t you blog about this song?
(Yet Another Stupid Web 2.0 Video)

launch party, nicely dressed
what the point? sausage fest

blue shirt, khaki pants,
looking like a line of ants

need to get a facebook page
all these guys are half my age

twenty nice, past my prime
i feel so behind the times

here comes another bubble
(Matt is broke)
in a year we swear
we'll all be billionaires

make yourself a million bucks
partly skill, mostly luck

now you can afford a down payment
on a small house

if you want a bigger one
hillsborough, atherton

better hoipe the same thing
happened to your spouse

IPO... luky you
have your cake and eat it too

Party yacht, party jet
why not buy a matching set?

build yourself a rocket ship
blast off on an ego trip

can this really be the end?
back to work you go again

here comes another bubble
(im in ur serverz making thingz better!!, Twitter has problems!!)
and when we are gone
(You looked better on Myspace)
this will still go on

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The New Alliance between Russia and India

Russia and India recently held a summit that ended with a number of strategic agreements, luckily for us an India hacker managed to infiltrate the communications system at the conference and provided us with a copy of parts of a discussion between two diplomats from both countries after the signing of the agreements.


source

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حتى تصل إلى النجاح

I just go this in my email and I thought it was worth sharing ..... so i hope you enjoy it :). I also would like to apologize in advance for not providing a translation to my non-Arabic readers, especially ibeebarbie and rein :).

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Liberal vs Conservative Brain Activity

According to a research paper just released by a joint team of researchers at the university of New York and the UCLA, which was reported here and here, it seems that the idealogical differences between liberal and conservative leaning people is a result of differences in the way their brains process information .Of course only subscribers to the Nature Neuroscience journal have access to the original paper, so my opinion is based on the two articles I've linked to above.

To sum it up it seems that liberal minded people act less habitually, are more accepting of new ideas and are more tolerant of ambiguity, which was induced from the increased brain activity ( compared to that of their conservative counterparts ) they exhibited before making any decision in the experiment they were put through; when faced with a conflicting situation . If you want in on the details of the experiment you should read either one of the above articles, here are some excerpts from the LA Times article I liked the most :


"The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research."

"Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when............"

"Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.""

""There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals."

"...........it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation......."

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Blogger Blog's Backup

Given the recent debacle on Highlander's blog, I thought now would be the appropriate time to make a post on how to backup your Blogger Blog ........... I mean I don't want any of the blogs I frequent to be lost or taken offline :P .

Even though there are many tools out there that allow you to save/backup your blog or any webpage for that matter, there aren't many that allow the restoring of your blog automatically ( if even partially ), i.e. , without having to restore the whole blog on a post per post basis. As an example of such software, that only allow backup, we have WinHTTrack ( which doesn't work with the new version of blogger but is totally free ) or WebsitePacker which isn't free but you can download a shareware version of the product that is good enough .

There is on the other hand a number of good solutions that allow backup and recovery of blogger posts even though blogger doesn't support them, which makes them more cumbersome . The program I preferred the most is called 'Blogger Backup' and can be downloaded here.


Below is an image of the main dialog page of Blogger Backup and I've summarized its advantages and disadvantages below it :



Advantages :

• - It's free and open source, for those among us who might want to customize it :P.

• - Given that it backs up the blog to a local Hard drive there is no limit on the blogs size, except the free space on the Hard Drive

• - It backs up the blog on a per post basis and it also allows you to recover them on a per blog basis. This actually allows you to restore your posts to blogs other than your own ( as long as its on blogger ) if you want to move to another blog or share a post with another blog you're a co-editor of .

• - It preserves the timestamps of the original posts.
  

Disadvantages :

• - It doesn't back up images uploaded to blogger, even though any saved images that are hosted on external servers would be preserved in the posts, as the links are preserved. This also allows videos embedded in posts to be preserved.

• - Comments can't be restored; this is due to an inherit limitation within blogger ( so that commentators can't be impersonated ), but there are other programs/web solutions that restore the comments as part of the original post. An automatic solution to this isn't provided in this program.

• - There is a limit on the maximum number of posts you can restore each day, which is imposed by Google, at most you can restore 50 posts on a given day and the program keeps count of that.

Now to get to how the backup/restore process of your blog using this program. I have broken up the process into two sections in the first I demonstrate the backing-up and restoring of posts while in the second section I demonstrate the backing up of the images.



A- The steps required to backup your Blog posts :

• - After downloading the software and installing it which is fairly simple and straightforward, or at least it should be, you have to add your blog to the list of blogs you wish to backup or restore. To do that you simply click the drop down list adjacent to the "Available blogs" label, which will allow you to add, remove or edit a blog simply by clicking the "[Add/Update/Remove Blogs]" option in the list.

• - To Add you blog(s) you can either simply log into blogger through the programs interface, by entering your blogger user ID and password then pressing the 'Log into Blogger and Get Blogs' button. There is also another manual method for adding blogs which you can access by pressing the 'OR Manually add a Blogger blog' and enter the link to your blog and your blog feed in the appropriate boxes and your blogs name and press 'Add Blog' and hey presto there it is.

• - Now to actually start the backup press the 'OK' button at the bottom of the dialog box so you return to the main program interface. Then you simply have to press 'Backup Posts' button; but before doing that you should configure the setting for backing up to suit your needs. My personal preferences are to get all posts, set no limits on the maximum number of posts per file and to use one file per post and tick save comments ( even though a method to restore them hasn't been added to the program yet, but its work in progress ).

B- The steps required to restore your Blog posts :

• - To restore your blog all you have to do is pick it from the list of blogs you frequently backup/restore ( from the drop down list adjacent to the "Available blogs" label on the Main Dialog box ).

• - Then press the 'Restore Posts' button, which will open a dialog box asking you to choose the posts you want to restore from the backed up posts ( you can choose multiple posts using the shift or control key ), press OK and its done. You should note however if you restore an already existing post you will get two duplicate posts :P.

C- Backing Up Blog Images :

• - To backup the images saved on your blog insert the following URL into your browsers address bar, where 'blogname' is your blog's name in the URL to your blog :P :

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

• - Then simply save the resulting page. The page will most likely be saved as an htm/html file with the name search and will be accompanied with a folder called search_files. In that folder you'll find all the images on your blog. You should note that the number 1000 in the above link refers to the number of posts to display so if you have more than 1000 posts on your blog you'll have to increase that number to accommodate it .

So everybody should start backing up their posts :P

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Uploading personal video's to Blogger

Well given that today is Bloggers 8th anniversary, Blogger has enabled a number of new features ( while messing up some of the old - like RSS - for some bloggers ) among them the ability to browse the profiles of other bloggers who share your interests. By clicking one of the links on your profile, that highlight any of your interests or your profession, you will be directly taken to a page that lists all the bloggers that share that interest or profession with you, kind of like Googling ( well its Google so its to be expected :P ).

But For me the most important feature that they added was the ability to upload a video from your personal computer directly to your post, which you can do by pressing the new video icon on the top of your post editor that is located beside the image upload button. There is a 100 MB limit on the video size so if your video is bigger you would have to split it into 100 MB sized pieces.


Even though the uploaded video would be technically saved to Google video; but no public access would be allowed to it ( at least thats what they say :P ). Below is an example of a video I uploaded to make sure it really works ( hattip to Trabilsia for previously sharing it with us ) :P.

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An Engineering Perspective of Women

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