Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

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

Whatever happened to Maktoob?

I’ve known Maktoob ever since they were first born into this world as a little startup that offered a heavy java applet based free arabic email service out of a villa near the 2nd circle in Amman / Jordan.

As the Internet boom reached the Arab world, Maktoob grew and they started venturing into other fields slowly but steadily unlike others.

They started by growing their site into a portal and creating a number of other big services inlcuding an auctions site Mazad Maktoob which was very interesting and maybe the only arab auctions site that worked.

They later launched CashU a prepaid Internet shopping cards service which did really well and made the internet more usable and international services more accessible for the everyday person.

Anyway, after that, I kind of lost track of what they were doing and where they got to in their business.

So today, I thought I’d check them out and see whatever happened to them.

It seems they’re still advancing at the same steady pace. Their email service now offers 1GB of email space, Mazad Maktoob is still going on quite well, they’ve launched a match-making site called Mabrook and they have a bouquet of other smaller but interesting services.

I’m not sure about how financially successful they are, but they’ve managed to keep the company going this long.

This post is not an advertisement for Maktoob and I’m certainly not getting paid for it, although I wish I could be 😛
I just thought it would be interesting to pick a web company every now and then and trace it’s steps and how successful or unsuccessful it has been.

If you have a web startup or company you would like me to write about and you’re willing to pay, then just let me know 😉

Iran Next if Bush stays

George W. Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.

A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership.

The official said: “If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran.”

So, they’re still in the middle of all the mess they created in Iraq, but they’re still thirsty for more war, more blood, more chaos and more death. And they’ve already got their sights set on Iran.

As long as presidents like this rule the U.S. and the hawks remain to control the government, the US will continue to wage war after war and the world will never live in peace.

Americans’ first and only concern for the time being should be regime change in the US itself. They have a lot cleaning up to do in their government, and the upcoming elections are a good chance to kickstart this effort.

[Via Je Blog]

Allawi cold-bloodedly shoots suspects

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners – handcuffed and blindfolded – were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city’s south-western suburbs.

Iraq’s Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done.

One of the witnesses claimed that before killing the prisoners Dr Allawi had told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents.

Could someone please remind me in what ways this new government is better than Saddam’s?
I can’t quite find the difference.

[Source: SMH]

The old man & Bush

One sunny day in 2005 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Ave, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the US Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”

The old man said, “Okay” and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.” The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same US Marine, saying “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?”

The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it,”

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir.”

[Via eclecticism]

Beckham’s Missed Penalty Millions

The ball that David Beckham blasted into the stands when he missed a penalty in England’s Euro 2004 quarter final shootout defeat by Portugal has attracted a 10 million euro bid (Approximately US $12,384,000) on ebay and it still has 7 days to go so the price could go even higher.

Pablo Carral, a 25-year-old Spanish football fan who claimed the trophy when it landed in his arms in Row Q of the Luz stadium in Lisbon decided to put the ball up for sale on the Spanish site of Internet auctioneers eBay after a British newspaper offered to buy it for 18,000 euros.

This is one hell of an example of a fat lucky chance dropping into someone’s lap from the sky (literally).
Why doesn’t something like that ever happen to me?

Update: After running checks on the bids, eBay’s Spanish site decided to reduce the top offer for the ball from 10 million to a mere 23,650 euros ($29,270) after concluding that pranksters were behind hiking the price to astronomical levels.

PHP 5 Released

So the long-awaited PHP5 is finally out. I can’t wait to play around with this baby when I find time for it.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

  • A better Zend Engine II
  • Better XML support focused around the excellent libxml2 library.
  • SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects.
  • A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
  • SQLite has been bundled with PHP. (After all MySQL sold out and went commercial on them)
  • Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.

Obviously, like all other programming languages, PHP is moving more and more towards the whole web services model and making it easier to use PHP for such stuff.

[More: PHP.net]

Reform, Democracy and the Media

A media conference held by Al-Jazeera TV channel in Qatar this week tackled the thorny issue of what role, if any, the broadcaster should play in spreading political reform throughout the Arab world.

There are different views on this from people arguing that all media has an obligation to be involved in politics, to others who think that media should just inform and not reform, while other people would just like to see the channel translate its audience growth into income (obivously management, “I don’t care what you do! Just show me the money.”).

Anyway, I think this is a very interesting and important issue.

Al-Jazeera has access to over 35 million viewers who trust it and believe what it tells them. I don’t know of any political party in the Arab world that enjoys that kind of privilege.

So should it take advantage of this to push reforms?
Or should it just keep itself to informing people and opening their eyes to the truth?
And if media chooses to interfere with politics, where is the limit?

I think that Al-Jazeera have been a good source of non-propaganda news and a great forum for different people to express their opinions over the past years. That in itself reformed Arab media in a way and pushed for more transparency.

They can’t play the role of a political party because they’re not but they can contribute to and push forward the reform process by offering different opinions, showing what the truth really is and breaking the old limits of speech freedom.

The media can challenge and pressure governments putting them in a position where they have to be transparent, change and listen.

Still, having media interfere with politics isn’t always good because of the media’s power to sway public opinion according to it’s ideas or interests sometimes.

So, yes for media contributing to reform, no to media controlling it.

Oldest forward in my inbox

I don’t know how or why this popped through my mind.
I just thought: Go to the oldest non-personal, non-legally-dangerous forward in your email inbox, copy it and paste it in your blog.

So here it is, the oldest forward in my inbox on my laptop (I’m sure I have ones that are a lot older on my pc):

DEAR RECEIVER,

You have just received a SYRIAN virus. Since we are not so technologically
advanced in SYRIA, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on
your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know.

Thank you very much for helping me.

FATTOUM
Hacker

> Date: 11/12/1998

lol…

And maybe, just maybe, this could start a meme.
Or maybe not.