Subzero Blue

Al-Jazeera Online in Japanese

Flamboyant Japanese internet tycoon turned politician Takafumi Horie has said he will bring Arab news broadcaster Aljazeera to Japan, hoping to provide a greater variety of views to the public.

The 32-year-old entrepreneur on Monday said his firm, Livedoor, which offers a portal site much like Yahoo! along with other internet services, has signed a deal with Qatar-based Aljazeera to distribute its news online in Japanese.

Horie, an unsuccessful candidate in last month’s parliamentary election, wrote on his blog that he was trying to diversify Livedoor’s news content.

I think it’s good that Al-Jazeera’s news will be reaching more people in the world, giving them another view of the events that take place in the Arab world.

I’m especially looking forward to their English news channel that should be launched soon.

TunisCity G

TunisCity, the biggest mall in Tunisia, opened it’s doors on September 29th.
I thought it would be better to avoid the first days of it’s opening because it would be too crowded, but our curiosity got the best of us yesterday and we had to go check it out.

TunisCity is on the outskirts of Tunis, located at the beginning of the Bizerte highway, which would make you think it’d be harder for people to get there, but that was not the case, the parking was crowded and there was a long line of cars waiting to get in to the parking or the areas around it.
What’s amazing is that even though I hate crowded places, my curiosity won over my instinct, which was telling me to just turn the car and go home.

Anyway, I confirm that this is the biggest mall in Tunisia now.
It’s design is pretty nice and I though the interior was pretty cool.
It’s bigger than Carrefour and better organized.

It was so crowded you’d think everything was for free, especially inside the hypermarket section “G

IAEA rejects Arab call to discuss Israel

The UN atomic watchdog has unanimously called for a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East but rejected an Arab call to denounce Israel as a nuclear threat.

The IAEA conference rejected discussion of “Israeli nuclear capabilities and threat,” as proposed in a resolution by Oman, despite a strong push for this by 15 Arab states plus Palestine.

I think this is total hypocrisy!
The IAEA, the US and Europe go on and on and on about Iran and how it could be trying to build nuclear weapons even though they’ve been assured millions of times they’re not, yet Israel that is known to already have a stockpile of nuclear weapons and which rejects to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty isn’t even pressured one little bit about it.
I can’t find anything else to call it but hypocrisy!
This is why the UN, IAEA, US, EU don’t have any credibility with the people of the world!

Ties With Israel

While going through the daily news, I came across this article on the english website of Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth about Turkish and Tunisian ties with Israel.

The article talks about an interview the prime ministers from both countries had with the London based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, which reported on the visit of both prime ministers to Abu Dhabi, where they spoke about relations with Israel.

Both prime ministers say that their countries’ ties with Israel serve the Palestinian cause and are aimed at finding a solution to the conflict.

The article goes on to say that Tunisian prime minister, Mr. Mohamed El Ghannoushi said that there was no direct conflict between Tunisia and Israel, and that his country was fully ready to recognize Israel and normalize ties, but added that this would

Computer Idee

Cover: Computer Idee Today, when I got home, I found this big letter stuffed in our mailbox. It was torn on the edges as if someone tried to peek in.
I wasn’t expecting anything, and the technical magazines I usually get come in transparent covers so I didn’t know what this was.

When I opened it, I found a really great surprise.
It was “Computer Idee”, the number one computer magazine in Holland, yep that place they also call The Netherlands, and it was in Dutch.
Hmmm, so why was I so happy about it, especially that I don’t understand one word of the language??

Well, it’s because this issue has a feature about blogs, in which a number of bloggers are profiled. And yes you guessed right, I am one of the bloggers who were interviewed for this feature and profiled in it.

I’ll be scanning the article and putting it up here asap. It’s a shame I don’t have a scanner at home.
I’m truly honoured to be featured in this magazine. I’d like to thank Remko who interviewed me and wrote the feature article again.

100 Dollar Laptops

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it will launch a $100 Linux-based laptop prototype this November to help schools in developing countries adopt electronic learning.

The machines will also be targeted at schools in advanced countries that want to greatly boost the number of children who own their own laptop.

MIT expects commercial versions of the machine to start appearing at the end of next year.
MIT plans to unveil its prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society on 17 November in Tunis, Tunisia.

The 500MHz laptop will run a stripped-down version of the Linux operating system.

To overcome the lack of power access in many towns and villages in poor nations, the laptop can be powered either by an AC adaptor or a wind-up mechanism.
The machine will also be ruggedised and Wi-Fi-enabled, and is expected to use an AMD processor.

Governments will be invited to buy the laptops on behalf of schoolchildren.

Now that is so cool…
I wish they do catch on and spread around the world, and that governments encourage them.
It would deal a big blow to Microsoft by producing generations of Linux users, but who cares as long as millions of children around the world have access to computers.

I wonder if I can get one too though, or if I’ll have to bribe one of my young cousins to get one.

Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia

Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs used an interesting and innovative approach to write an article about the freely distributable and freely editable online encyclopedia Wikipedia: He posted a crummy, error-laden draft of the story to the site and let the community of members work on it and fix it.

Jacobs wrote on the page introducing the experiment. Esquire “would print the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of the articles. So here’s your chance to make this article a real one. All improvements welcome.”

According to the Wikipedia page for Jacobs’ story, the article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours after Jacobs posted it, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours.

The final draft, which was locked on Sept. 23 to protect it from further edits, reflects the efforts of the many users who worked on it.

I think this is a truly interesting experiment.
I really like the idea behind Wikipedia, and the whole collective knowledge model, and I think it’s cool to see how it can be used for different purposes.

[Source: CNet]

Trackback Spam

If there’s anything I hate more than email spam and comment spam, then it must be trackback spam!

I’m getting bucket loads of trackback spam these days.
Just this morning I found around 40 linking to a bunch of porn, beastiality, fetish, gambling sites and what not.

The problem is that after the problem I had with my blog last August, MT-Blacklist, the plugin that I use to take care of comment and trackback spam, just stopped working efficiently on trackbacks because of some irregularities in the database that I only got to sort out this morning.

But still, even with the spam plugin, it’s very annoying.
Sometimes it just makes me feel like disabling all trackbacks from the blog, even though I don’t want to.

Being in a somehow violent mood after watching “Kill Bill” again last night, I wish I could go on a similar quest to rid the world of spammers.
I’ll have to pass by Japan first to get my Hattori Hanzo Katana though. And then the slashing begins…

Communication…

When I was younger, back when I was a teenager, I remember I used to write a lot of letters to my cousins in France and my friends all around the world. It was the most natural thing to just sit with a pen and paper for an hour writing a letter that would turn out 2 to 3 pages long.

Then came the internet and email, and suddenly I couldn’t even force myself to write one letter anymore. Either people upgraded their means of communication and started using email with me, or we’d be disconnected.
When I was in Jordan, my family would send me letters that I would read but rarely reply to just because I couldn’t bring myself to write one. This problem was only solved when my sister created an email address and became an intermediary.

But then that was too late, as instant messaging and real-time chats had come along, and I found email to be a rather slow and boring means of communication. That made me use email only when absolutely necessary.

The instant messaging market is still booming, but it’s no longer practical, with a huge list of contacts growing over the years. Catching up with my friends is now a tiresome act of switching between a bunch of windows and trying to keep up with a number of parallel and completely different conversations at the same time.

Now I have come to think that blogs are the best tool of communication, through which I can communicate with a big number of friends and people who share similar interests at once and get their feedback in an enriching and organized manner.

I wonder what’s the next step in the evolution of human communication…

MideastWire

While there are now more than 500 Arabic and Persian news outlets reporting stories from and about the Middle East, there is currently no affordable means for English speakers to gain access to much of this content. As a result, the overwhelming majority of English speaking businesspersons, students, journalists and others who have an interest in the affairs of the region are largely unaware of what the Middle East media is covering and how they are covering these stories.

Mideastwire.com, is a new news website, that aims to close this gap by offering a daily email newsletter of concise, translated briefs covering some of the key political, cultural, economic and opinion pieces appearing in the media of the 22 Arab countries, Iran and the Arab Diaspora.

Mideast Wire was started by four journalists associated with the Daily Star in Beirut; two Americans, Nicholas Noe and Seth Walls, and two Lebanese, Majdoline Hatoum and Maha al-Azar.

They wish to play a critical role in addressing at least one element of a global disconnect that continues to threaten a wide spectrum of socio-political and economic relationships, both here in the region and beyond.

I think this is a really great idea, although it’s a shame it’s not free, as making it a paid service limits it’s reach.
I understand that they need to make money to be profitable and keep on existing, but I think they should’ve gone for free content and built their business around smart advertising solutions.

Anyways, I wish them a lot of luck.
The Arab opinion must reach the whole world, and this is one great way to make it possible.

[Via: Thysdrus]