Year: 2005

Damn Find & Replace!

Today was a really shitty day!
I woke up, still in a good mood from yesterday’s meetup, and I thought I’d get online to check my emails and read the comments left on my blog.

I did that and all was cool.
And then I found this one blog spam comment in one of my old posts.
So, I did a search by the title of the post, which was about the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. For some reason the search returned many results, so I wanted to search again and narrow it down, only instead of writing in the search field, I wrote in the replace field and I clicked enter.
I quickly realized what happened and clicked stop in the browser, but it was too late, every single post on my blog got screwed up and all the content was lost and turned into an endless stream of Adobe Macromedia shit.

I got in touch with my host in an attempt to find a recent backup to restore my database from, but they didn’t have any.

So, I had to re-import my data from a backup I had that was done in mid July, and I had to re-enter each and every post from then up to now, which is over 80 posts.

I’ve been working on it all day long and I just finished. I’m exhausted. And if I wasn’t as addicted to blogging as I am, I certainly would have quit the whole thing alltogether.

So, all the posts are here. But without the comments and trackbacks 🙁
I have the comments in emails that are sent to me, but I guess it’ll take me a longer time to restore those.

After the 6th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

We just came back from the sixth Tunisian blogger meetup in Sidi Bou Said.

This meetup was organized on a very short notice and barely 2 weeks after the last one in Kelibia, and as not many people confirmed their attendance, we were afraid there’d only be 3 or 4 people present.
Surprisingly and luckily, it was a great success and 12 people showed up.

We sat in a corner in the beautiful Sidi Chebaane Caf

International Amateur Film Festival in Tunisia

Tunisia will be hosting the second edition of the International Amateur Film Festival starting from August 27 until September 3.

Organized by the Tunisian Federation of the Amateur Scenario Writers in conjunction with the Ministry of the Culture and the Safeguard of Heritage, the Festival will include an international contest of amateur films as well as conferences and workshops.

The jury of the contest is formed of distinguished international personalities such as famous Egyptian director Charni Rached, Senegalese director Modibo Diawara, Tunisian producer Hassen Daldoul, Venezuelan director Litchy Athualpa and Belgian director Greta Van Beptein.

Sperm Donor Reality TV Show

Billionaire television producer John de Mol, behind the pioneer show Big Brother, will test the limits of reality TV with a program in which a woman searches for a potential sperm donor to conceive a child.

His new TV station Talpa, launched earlier this month, confirmed it will air a program called “I want your child … and nothing else!”.

“The plan is that we visit potential donors and — of course on camera — decide which man is most suitable,” the 30-year old woman who will feature in the program said in an interview with De Telegraaf newspaper.

“Afterwards there will be artificial insemination,” said the woman who was identified only as “Yessica” and who has bought a house with a room for a child.

The show is a one-off competing with four other reality TV programs, one of which follows five former prostitutes starting a cafe. The program receiving most votes from viewers Saturday, after all the shows have aired, will be turned into a series.

I wonder what mad idea they will think of next?

Whatever Happened to Arabia.com?!

Today, I thought I’d check out Arabia.com, the portal that once was regarded as the jewel of Arab portals.

So much money was thrown into it, with round after round of funding, and investment after investment, the biggest being from Prince Waleed Ibn Talal of Saudi Arabia.

They got into everything from news, to free email, to instant messaging, to mobile logos and ringtones, to forums, to marketplaces, to offering internet connections… the long list goes on.
And they recruited a huge team of people from all fields, both in Amman and Dubai, making them the biggets Arab internet company.

Each new version had a cooler design and released more features making the portal bigger and bigger.

They sponsored TV shows and events, aired a bunch of ads here and there and promoted themselves like there was no tomorrow.

And then, after the internet bust in the west, things started going not too well for Arabia too, as people realized that it was costing too much without making enough money, and so Arabia started falling faster than it rised.

New versions started losing the cool design touch they used to have, as they started working on the designs in-house. The content started to shrink, the services started to dissapear, layoffs started, and well you know how it goes.

The last time before today that I checked on Arabia was a few months ago, and it was still alive with a bit of news and some services.

Anyway today, instead of the orange Arabia homepage, I found the default Apache server page asking me: “Seeing this instead of the website you expected?”
Well, yes, but I can’t say I didn’t expect this day to come.
It’s a big shame.
R.I.P Arabia.

If it makes you feel any better, PlanetArabia.com who were one of Arabia’s main competitors have dissapeared as well.

Google Talk

As expected, Google have jumped into the instant messaging and voice-over-IP arena with a new product called Google Talk.

I’ve downloaded it and played around with it a bit and tried chatting to a friend through it.

I like its minimalist interface and how it directly finds people who are on your email contact list and are online using Google Talk.

The chat interface is very simple and it’s simply all about text. There are no emoticons, nudges, winks, and all those other flashing and jumping things that other messengers have. It just gives you plain text, although it does recognize the popular emoticons and displays their text in blue.
I actually kind of like that. I hate talking to someone and being flooded by a bunch of smiley faces jumping around and making faces at me or some stupid animations coming out of nowhere.

But they could’ve at least put in some text styling options, which aren’t available.

Just like all other IM clients, it notifies you when you get an email in your inbox.

It doesn’t have a search engine box built in, which is weird, as you’d think Google would never forget to include that.

I haven’t tried out its voice capabilities yet, but according to Om Malik who did, the quality of sound was great.

For the tech people within you, Google Talk is based on Jabber, which means it’ll be able to communicate with other Jabber based clients such as iChat on Macs.

I’m not sure if I’ll be using it that often, but well I think it’s quite good for a first effort.
But it still needs some more features, that everyone got used to, to be able to go head to head with MSN, Yahoo or AOL messengers.

The Phantom Of The Opera

Yesterday, we watched the movie interpretation of “The Phantom Of The Opera”.
I’ve been wanting to watch it for a long time after all the good reviews I read about it on other blogs.

I’m a big fan of movie musicals, such as “Moulin Rouge”, “Chicago” and well from my childhood days “The Sound Of Music”.
These movies mix two of my favourites arts in a beautiful way: cinema and music.

Back to “The Phantom Of The Opera”, it’s a great movie. But how can it not be with such musical splendor and a great story behind it!
Eman and I have been humming the magnificent tunes constantly ever since yesterday, lol.

It’s a really well done movie, the directing, acting and singing, lived up to the greatness of it and presented it wonderfully.

Gaston Leroux wrote a beautiful story, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is a musical genius and Joel Schumacher made it into a great movie.

I really recommend this movie if you love both cinema and music. It’s just beautiful.

My score for it: 8.5/10.

6th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Well, ok, I know it’s a bit too quick to have another one already, I mean this is the third meetup in less than a month, but well it’s the summer season and we all wanna have fun 🙂

Some Tunisians abroad, as well as non-Tunisian bloggers should be making it to this blogger meetup, so that should be cool.

The suggestion, it seems, is for Friday 26th at Sidi Chebaane Caf

Magnetic Cards to Enter Mosques in Tunisia: Not True!!!

While checking Google News today, I found a rather weird and alarming bit of news about Tunisia, taken from a site called Jihad Unspun.

The article claims that Tunisian Muslims must now carry magnetic ID cards to enter mosques for prayers.

It says, “According to Al-Hadi Mehanna, Tunisia

Touch And Feel 3D TV

Imagine watching a football match on a TV that not only shows the players in three dimensions but also lets you experience the smells of the stadium and maybe even pat a goalscorer on the back.

Japan plans to make this futuristic television a commercial reality by 2020 as part of a broad national project that will bring together researchers from the government, technology companies and academia.

The targeted “virtual reality” television would allow people to view high-definition images in 3D from any angle, in addition to being able to touch and smell the objects being projected upwards from a screen parallel to the floor.

WOW…
Japan is making all the world’s sci-fi dreams come true.
From robotics, to 3D TV, to communication technologies to everything.
They’re already living in the future, using technology that the rest of the world including the US will only get after a few years.

The cool thing though is that no matter how far they move into the future, they still hold on tight to their past, history and traditions; making a successful and beautiful blend.
I totally respect them and would love to visit Japan someday. I wish I get to.