Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

Four Lebanese Jailed For Rude Commentary On Facebook

Weird bit of news from Lebanon…

Four Lebanese university students have been jailed for a week for making crude remarks on the Facebook social networking site about the singing talents of a woman they met at a party, media reports said on Thursday.Local newspapers reported that the students, all male, were ordered to be detained on January 10 after the young woman’s father objected to the authorities in the western town of Zahle.

The four were charged with slander and “violating public morality” and were ordered to be held in preventive detention despite objections by human-rights groups.

[Source: Now Lebanon]

 

When people get thrown into jail for stuff like this you can’t help but feel how long the road ahead still is.

Should this really be an issue? Don’t these judges have anything more important to do?

[Via: AndFarAway, Beirut Spring]

Blogger Does Arabic, Hebrew And Persian

Blogger is finally available in Arabic, and two other Middle Eastern right-to-left languages: Hebrew and Persian.

Blogger

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, they have added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

I think it’s great that they’ve done this, it will make a lot of people’s lives easier. I know many people who’ve been using Blogger to publish their blogs in several languages like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew for some time now.

Some of these people who have a little technical know-how were able to play around with their blog designs and templates to flip them around into something nice and presentable, but the result with others wasn’t such a nice view, even though they eventually got to get their ideas across, which is what counts most I guess.

Anyway, very welcomed move from Google’s Blogger team. May blogs from this corner of the world flourish even more.

[More: Blogger Buzz, Mashable]

Muslim Athlete Disqualified Over Uniform

Another stupid act by some school over a Muslim girl’s choice of clothes…

… Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia’s Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday’s Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt’s cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith…

[…]

[M]eet director Tom Rogers said Kelly’s uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event. Uniforms are required to be “a single-solid color and unadorned, except for a single school name or insignia no more than 2 1/4 inches,” he said.

[Source: Yahoo! News]

Flexibility, Freedom, Respect, Understanding… These are all words that seem to be missing from these people’s dictionaries and vocabularies.

Such a big fuss over some non-issue. Just be and let be for God’s sake.

The True Legacy Of George W. Bush

“. . . as Bush basks in the glow of his own fantasy, the suffering in Gaza, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, along with the savage occupation of Iraq, continues to fuel widespread anger and rage.. . . he has, with Israeli encouragement, isolated governments, even friendly governments, in the Middle East that raised feeble protests. But his day is past. There is open revolt. Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Palestinians, and three-fourths of Israelis, do not believe Bush can affect events in the Palestinian territories.

. . . The agenda of the Bush White House is exposed as irrelevant, myopic and counterproductive. Most Arab countries are in open defiance of Washington and are actively reaching out to Iran.

. . . It is the end of the road for George Bush. The world takes less and less notice of him. He strutted and swaggered across the stage. He bellowed and raged. He plundered and murdered. And now he wants to be anointed as a peacemaker. His presidency, like his life, has been a tragic waste. But he at least he has a life. There are tens of thousands of mute graves in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq that stand as stark testaments to his true legacy.”

Chris Hedges, The End of the Road for George W. Bush

 

[Via: A comment left by The Vigil on AquaCool]

 

Apple’s MacBook Air, The World’s Thinnest Laptop

Apple just introduced the world’s thinnest laptop in this year’s MacWorld.

The MacBook Air turned out to be a reality, and what a beautiful, amazing reality it is.

MacBook Air

Features

– .16 to .76-inch thickness on top
– Weighs only 3 pounds
– 5 hours of battery life with everything running
– Intel Core 2 Duo Processor at 1.6 or 1.8GHz
– Motherboard the length of a pencil
– 13.3-inch screen, LED backlit
– 2GB RAM standard
– 1.8-inch 80GB HD or 64GB Solid State Drive
– Multitouch trackpad with gestures. Pans, zooms, rotates, etc.
– 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1
– Optional external HD for $99, USB-bus powered
– Built-in iSight
– Full backlit keyboard
– It’s “Green”: Mercury and Arsenic free LCD and glass, Aluminum frame can be recycled. PVC free on circuitry, and less packing.

Price: $1799

WOW…
I’m speechless, now that’s one great laptop.

[More: Apple MacBook AirGizmodo, TechCrunch]

Trading Places, Changing Perspectives

I just came across a really interesting post in which the writer puts himself in the others shoes, looking at the situation from another perspective, imagining how it would be if it happened to him and his country…

Some highlights:

It’s been eight years now. Eight long years. Sure, initially I was glad when China toppled the Bush regime and executed the “retarded tyrant” as I love to call him. It wasn’t that bad at the start, but as time wore on and I realized they weren’t leaving, it started to gnaw at me.[…]

Initially, people seemed to accept the fact that we needed help getting rid of Bush’s dictatorship. Lately, I think people have come to understand that the Chinese are really here for our natural resources.

[…]

Yes, I know they call me a terrorist and an insurgent. I like to think of myself as a freedom fighter. If someone invaded your country and killed your people, I’d like to think you’d fight too. I don’t expect to win but if I don’t fight, if we don’t fight, then all Americans lose.

 

Very worth the read, check it out here: We fight for freedom – or “What if someone else did it to us?”.

 

Middle East Indebted To Bush??!!

While checking out the news today, I came across what has to be one of the dumbest articles in the history of news and media; it’s so stupid I thought the guy who wrote it was actually just being sarcastic, but no it turns out he’s seriously deranged as he believes what he wrote.

The article’s title is: “Middle East indebted to Bush“; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read it; Do I even need to go any further to show how crazy this person is?

In the article he talks of the malignancy of the Middle East, how Arabs’ independence was won for them by Britain & France but they were still incapable of lifting themselves up from the broken ruins of their tribal culture, which he says is the root of Arab failure for which they blame the Jews and Israel instead of of embracing the modern world.
Interesting sickly twisted view of history and Middle Eastern affairs, don’t you think?

But it gets even weirder when he writes the following:

George Bush could have remained indifferent to the Arab-Muslim world’s malignancy, mouthing pieties as members of the ever fashionable lib-left political class in the West endlessly does, while watching the Arabs sink deeper into the political squalor of their making.

Instead, Bush struck directly at the most rotten core of the Middle East — Iraq, the land of two rivers, choked to death by the vilest of Arab tyrants in recent memory, Saddam Hussein — to give the Arabs an opportunity one more time to make a better future.

[…]

A democratic Iraq is George Bush’s formidable legacy, and the Arabs will be talking about him long after his contemporary critics bite the dust and are forgotten.

Unbelievable…
There is a person on Earth who actually thinks George Bush will leave a legacy behind him, and not any legacy, a formidable one too, in the form of a war that further tore apart a country that was already in ruins, installed a sectarian divide in the country, took thousands of lives from both sides, and did nothing but widen the gaps between people, ruin the image of America in the region, and fuel more hatred.

The only thing George Bush will be remembered for, his only “legacy”, is the fact that he is the worst President of the United States of America to date, something both Arabs and Americans agree on.

Hire People That Are Better Than You

In my daily readings I recently came across this entry, that I thought I’d share here, about how you should always try to hire people that are better than you, something I totally agree with, and breaks down the reasons into the following points (I’m resuming in my own words):

1. Trust: You’re more likely to trust someone with something if you know they’ll be doing it ever better than you could.

2. Quality: You’re sure there won’t be a drop in quality whether you’r ethere or not.

3. Fresh Perspectives: These people will bring different experiences, skills, viewpoints and ideas to the table that can only benefit your business.

4. Greater Options: These people’s different experience will open up new doors for you and your business to expand in.

5. Efficiency: If they’re better than you, you won’t need to spend as much time coaching them and explaining things, which means more working time for you.

6. Cost Savings: People doing quality work save you the effort of having to redo things, which translates into more time and more profits for your business.

Read the full detailed entry here Hire People that are Better than You (NHG Consulting).