Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

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

Madagascar

Last night we watched Madagascar, a DreamWorks SKG animation, voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith and Cedric the Entertainer.

The movie is about a gang of four spoiled zoo animals that find themselves on an adventure in the wild of Madagascar.

I’ve seen the trailer a number of times and have been really looking forward to watching it.
And it turned out really cool, even though I thought it would be just a bit funnier, but I really enjoyed it.
I loved the psychotic penguins, they totally rock and are so funny! They have to be spinned off in a movie of their own.

I think this is one of DreamWorksSKG’s best animations yet. Something I like in their animations are the pop culture references, whether it’s in Shrek, Shark Tale or Madagascar.

I give this movie a rating of: 7/10.

Ten Things You Can Do to Jump-start Success

1. Read or listen to something that motivates you every single day.
2. Keep a journal of your daily progress and carry it with you wherever you go.
3. Make goals and re-write them every day.
4. Keep track of every person you meet.
5. Begin investing a portion of your income today.
6. Begin looking for opportunities to build passive income (money that you don

Bush Plot To Bomb Al-Jazeera

US President George Bush planned to bomb Arab broadcaster Aljazeera, British newspaper, the Daily Mirror reports, citing a Downing Street memo marked “Top Secret”.

The five-page transcript of the pair’s talks during Blair’s 16 April 2004 visit to Washington allegedly shows Bush wanted to attack the satellite channel’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar and that Blair talked him out of it.

The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key US and Western ally and enraged the Middle East, maybe even leading to bloody retaliation.

So this is what Bush plans for his strongest and closest allies!
And this is how the leader of the “free” world believes in “Freedom of press, media and expression”?!
Should be very reassuring…

[Sources: Daily Mirror, Al Jazeera]

Top Online Activities

According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project research, using a search engine is now the No. 2 activity for Web users.

The project also found that those likely to spend more time on search engines tend to be in their 30s and well-off.

Email remains the top internet activity for web users, and news is now the third most popular Web activity.

If I were to list my top 5 web activities, I guess they’d be:

1. News
2. Search
3. Email
4. Blogs
5. Chat

I almost get all my news off the net, find it easier to search for things on the net than bother to remember them, still have to use email although I’m starting to hate it, love blogging and reading blogs, and well it’s always nice to have the occasional chat with friends.

Stealth

Last night I watched Stealth, an action, adventure thriller, as they call it, featuring Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx and Josh Lucas.

The movie turned out better than I expected. The trailer actually doesn’t do it justice.

I really liked the flight scenes, they were very well shot, and the fighter jets looked awesome in action. The explosions looked cool too.
The characters were pretty well developed for an action movie, which is good for a change.

Other than that, the story isn’t something that extraordinary, revolving around three pilots and a renegade AI driven fighter jet.

The movie was directed by Rob Cohen, the guy behind ‘XXX’ and ‘The Fast and the Furious’. I personally think this is his best movie so far.

My rating for this movie would be: 6/10.

Middle East Freedom Index

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranked 20 countries on 15 indicators of political and civil liberty.

The EIU scored each country on a 10-point scale, awarding one point for the least political freedom and 10 for the most.

The indicators used to score freedom in each country are: Election of head of government, Election of parliament, Fairness of electoral laws, Right to organise political parties, Power of elected representatives, Presence of an opposition, Transparency, Minority participation, Level of corruption, Freedom of assembly, Independence of the judiciary, Press freedom, Religious freedom, Rule of law, and Property rights.

The results came out as follows:

1. Israel 8.20
2. Lebanon 6.55
3. Morocco 5.20
4. Iraq 5.05
5. Palestine 5.05
6. Kuwait 4.90
7. Tunisia 4.60
8. Jordan 4.45
9. Qatar 4.45
10. Egypt 4.30 		11. Sudan 4.30
12. Yemen 4.30
13. Algeria 4.15
14. Oman 4.00
15. Bahrain 3.85
16. Iran 3.85
17. UAE 3.70
18. Saudi Arabia 2.80
19. Syria 2.80
20. Libya 2.05

[Source: BBC]

After the 8th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Last night we had the 8th Tunisian blogger meetup at Biwa in Les Berges du Lac, and as usual it was a lot of fun.

What made this meetup even more special is that we had some international guests with us, which was really great and such a pleasure for us all.
Our international guests were: Rebecca MacKinnon, Jeff Ooi from Malaysia, Mite Nishio from the Dominican Republic and Isam Bayazidi from Jordan.

The other blogs represented in this meetup were: Adib, Mouse Hunter, Infinity, Evil Drako, Blogeuse, Jaz in the city, Tom, AquaCool and Subzero Blue.
We also had some non-bloggers with us who we’re working on pushing into blogging 😉

I would like to send a special and big thanks, in behalf of myself and all the bloggers, to my new good friend from the Dominican Republic Mite Nishio for the very nice gifts he brought with him to the meetup.

The meetup started at 8PM and went on until 1AM. We had a nice dinner together and talked about so many things; from blogging and stories surrounding blogging, to ideas for Arab blog-related projects, to Merengue and music from the Dominican republic, to the Tunisian and Arab blogosphere, to places to visit in Tunisia, to capital punishment, to so so much more.

As usual it’s always great to meet bloggers offline and to connect with them on a personal level and just enjoy some quality time together, forget about blogs a bit, have a good laugh, discuss different issues…etc.
I personally extremely enjoy these meetups which are getting better one by one.

Last night, we also talked about the next blogger meetup that will be held next month, and that will be a really cool one. We’ll be posting the details about it soon.

WSIS Reflections

So, as my previous post already told you all, I was at the Kram Palexpo, as it’s now being called, for the World Summit on the Information Society; One of the greatest events that have ever been held in my dear country Tunisia.

I’d like to talk about the organization a bit before I move on. I think Tunisia has done a really good job organizing this event. The badging process was really smooth and practical even though there were a lot of people. Security is really high. The Kram palexpo has been extended to cover the space needed for the summit, the ICT4ALL expo and all the parallel events. In short, I’m really proud of Tunisia’s organization of the summit.

Now back to the summit itself…
One of the main points everyone was talking about and wondering about going into the summit was Internet Governance; Will it remain in the hands of the US or will a world governing body take it over.
As expected, things will remain as they are with the US holding on to full control of the internet.

News reports chose to put it this way: “the delegates reached to an accord that leaves the supervision of domain names and other technical resources unchanged. They agreed instead to an evolutionary approach to Internet management.”
Which is a nice way to say that the US told everyone to buzz off and keep their hands off the internet.

As I said earlier, I took a quick tour of the ICT4ALL expo, which I will certainly have to go back to in these coming days.
I met a number of old friends (offline ones as well as online ones), as well as some new great and interesting people.

Now, some of you might be asking what I was doing there and how I got in.
Well, today was mainly part of my participation in a really exciting project called ReachOut which is organized by the British Council and CholertonShand, in partnership with the WSIS Youth Caucus.

The project’s idea is to encourage and enable open discussion between young people from Arab countries and the United Kingdom about issues raised by the United Nation’s World Summit on the Information Society.

So a group of really interesting people came together today from different Arab countries (Libya, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia), and we got to know each other, visited the Kram palexpo together, and then went back to the British Council where we had a live video conference with another group of equally interesting people at Oxford University in England.

The topics discussed revolved around the different uses of ICT as a tool for development and its role in globalization, culture, dialogue, e-learning, …etc.
It was a very rich discussion that we all hope to build upon and create projects out of the ideas we’ve been brainstorming about.
The event was and will continue to be blogged live here.

I’ll be going back to the Kram palexpo tomorrow, and will hopefully meet some more interesting people that I’ve gotten to know online and get to talk more to the people I met today.
I will also be taking a lot more pictures and trying to get some good quality ones, as the ones I took today were rushed and ended up not so good.
Anyway, I put some online on my flickr here.