Year: 2003

Movies i’ve seen recently

Well, for people who know me or who have been reading my blog for a while, they know it’s virtually impossible for me to go through a week without watching a minimum number of movies, but i just realized that there are a number of good movies i’ve seen recently that i haven’t blogged about yet, so here goes…

How to lose a guy in 10 days
I really liked this movie, it’s one of the best romantic comedies i’ve seen lately.
The idea and the movie are very funny and true. Kate Hudson and Mathew McConaughey are perfect for the lead roles.
The kind of movie you wouldn’t get bored of watching more than once.

Sweet Home Alabama
Another romantic comedy which is quite good and sweet too. The kind of movie you’d watch once and like and that’s it.

Father of the bride : Parts 1 & 2
Now this is a great movie. Both the first and second movie are great and come at the same level. I loved it. Steve Martin is awesome in these two. A friend of mine told me about it years ago, and i only got to see it last week.
I love the style of the movie and the humour it has in it. I’d see it again and again anyday.

I have a feeling i’ve seen another movie that i’ve forgotten to mention. But well, if i remember what it was, i’ll update the blog 🙂

Today, i’ll be seeing Matrix Revolutions (in French !!! AAARRRGGGHHHH !). Expect a post about it as soon as i’m done 😉

Eid

So the Eid was on tuesday 25th 🙂
As foreseen, my wife and I went for a tour among relatives, then finished it with a dinner at my parent’s place.

Yesterday, we just visited one relative we weren’t able to pass by on tuesday, and then i gave my wife another driving lesson (reminding her of driving a normal gear car), and then we went to Carrefour to develop some films and waste time 😛

That was basically the Eid for me this year 🙂

PS: Turns out things got messed up in my brain again, the Douz festival doesn’t start this week, it starts this week next month, lol…
Oh well, you can’t blame me for a simple mistake like that, i was hungry and mindless for God’s sake, lol…

Eid Mubarak

Well Eid El Fitr is just around the corner (tomorrow or the day after), ushering in the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and giving us our normal food-driven lives back.
Ahhh, i miss those coffee breaks at work 😉

The Eid in Tunisia is a great occasion for extended families to see each other and stay in touch, as they go around visiting each other and wishing one another a happy Eid.

This year, just like last year, we’ll call my wife’s family in Jordan, then we’ll be going for a spin among my relatives wishing them a happy Eid.
I think my mom will be cooking Mloukhia, which is my favourite dish. So maybe we’ll be having dinner at my parent’s place after we finish visiting the relatives.

The second day of Eid will most probably be a day of laziness for me, as i’ll try to cover all the close relatives in day one 😛
Maybe we’ll go out somewhere or just relax at home and watch a movie.

The Douz Festival starts this week too, so going down south again and attending it would be a great idea, if only i had the money to afford it.

Anyway, Sneen Dayma and Eid Mubarak to everyone 🙂

BlogAfrica

BlogAfrica is a new blog directory for blogs from Africa or that talk about Africa.

“BlogAfrica is a new project designed to increase the numbers of people
blogging in and about Africa and to increase the visibility of weblogs about Africa. We’ll be featuring great Africa-focused blogs created by authors within and outside of Africa, running workshops in Africa that bring together African bloggers with bloggers around the world, and, eventually, providing webspace for webloggers in Africa.”

The first BlogAfrica workshops will be taking place in Ghana in January 2004.

I think this is a very interesting initiative, and i hope it makes more people from Africa get into blogging.
I’d certainly like to see more bloggers blogging from Tunisia…

Flex

So, what once was code-named Royale at Macromedia has finally become Flex, and it’s in it’s Beta phase.

I’ve been reading some whitepapers and articles about this, and i’m really excited about it and can’t wait to play around with it, i’ve even applied for the beta program, i hope i get chosen.

Basically Flex is a Rich Internet Application Server that does almost everything the same as any other application server would, but generates swf flash files in the end.

It has a special markup language called MXML which is very XML-like, reminding me of ASP.NET and ColdFusion, but even easier, i’ve taken a quick look and i already feel like i’ve got a good grip on it.

It’s interface will be event driven using ActionScript 2, and it will be able to use WebServices, HTTPService and RemoteObject to access data.

Flex actually runs on a Java Application Server for the time being, but there will also be a version that runs on Microsoft .NET.

I think it’s great that developers will be able to produce rich user interfaced applications a lot easier now using Flex, and i hope that it works out great and grows into something big.
I think the main criteria that will make or break it is whether it’s fast or slow, if it’s going to mean minutes and minutes of loading time, then it will certainly fail.

An idea i have is that maybe Macromedia could have all the basic stuff such as the textboxes, buttons, …etc in Flash Player so that all the application would do is return certain tags for the player to interpret and display, instead of making it part of the returning swf. In short, something like the browser, where the load is thrown onto the user’s machine not on the server resulting in bigger files to download.

Hi Magazine

Yesterday, as i was looking around for any interesting magazines to buy, i came across hi, the Arabic-language American-backed magazine targeted at the Arab youth mainly and Arab brains generally in an effort by the American government to brainwash us and promote the US to us.

Anyway, the first thing that struck me was how cheap it was, it only costs 1 Tunisian Dinar (70 US cents), which kind of makes it the cheapest magazine i know of, but the paper is high quality thick glossy paper, the kind of paper other people usually use for just the cover. It’s also got a good amount of content, so it’s quite a thick magazine.
So i’m thinking that they’re actually losing money making this magazine, and that they never planned on making money out of it, it’s more of a long term investment, in which the final revenue is a generation of brainwashed Arabs.

Anyway, i bought it out of curiosity to know what’s in it and how the content is formulated.

And well, it covers a lot of stuff from music to fashion to sports to technology to anything that would interest their target readers. And in between all that, and in the articles themselves, and at the bottoms of the pages, and in their replies to their readers’ messages, it’s basically a bunch of US promoting messages and ideas making the US sound like a one big happy perfect tender loving country.

The one thing that seems to escape these people’s minds is that nowadays there’s a television or at least a radio in every home, and that by simply turning it on and listening to the news their whole effort will get flushed away by news of the US and it’s tyranny throughout the world.

I think Arab readers should buy the magazine anyway, as it’s dirt cheap and has some nice content, but they should be careful about the messages they’re getting out of it.
In short, here’s my prescription: Read it, then make sure you listen to the news just after finishing it 😛

Response Times: The Three Important Limits

Was just reading some articles on useit.com, when i came across one about response times, which is quite interesting.
Anyway, it’s also funny when you see how only a few people consider response times when they’re developping stuff these days.

Here are the 3 important response time limits:

– 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.

– 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.

– 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

So, how’re you doing on those 3 limits ? lol…

You can read more here.