Categories
Lebanon Politics

Lebanese Air Force Bombing Terrorists

Wednesday Annahar newspaper showed a picture of an LAF helicopter bombing Fath L Islam positions in Nahr L Bared Palestinians refugee terrorists camp, sadly I heard that the bombs the LAF is using are launched from Lebanese made launchers because the countries that “are helping us” fight terrorism help us in a really weird special way, apparently to fight terrorism you need helicopters without missile launchers (UAE removed the launchers before sending the Helicopters) and if things get complicated we get some ammunition, new equipment and heavy arms are something we don’t need to fight terrorism apparently.

The US only makes promises and rarely delivers, it’s still better then other countries who never deliver, but I guess it’s not entirely there fault, let’s face it we will never get decent equipement just from help, we need to buy new stuff from any country that is ready to sell us and it’s the government’s job to find those countries and buy ammunitions.

Anyways in spite of all this the army is fighting and exterminating those terrorists and here’s the picture from Annahar newspaper taken by Michel 7allak.

Lebanese Air Force

Categories
People World

Photos from Miss Teen USA 2007

A couple of pictures from Miss Tenn USA 2007 from la Republica website.

Miss Teen USA

Miss Teen USA

More Pictures
From Digg

Categories
Operating System

Windows Vista

I recently bought a new Laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed, before buying it I read a lot of reviews about Vista, its bad sides and its good sides.

Windows Vista Logo

 

A lot of people complained about Vista and hardware incompatibility, I didn’t have this problem since my Laptop is preloaded with vista so everything was compatible, another problem a lot of people complained about is vista’s memory usage, well that’s true vista uses a lot of memory so buying it with 512MB of RAM (Microsoft official minimum requirement) will certainly give you problems, I have 2GB of RAM so I have no problem in memory usage but I have a sidebar gadget that always shows me the amount of RAM used, when I power up the PC it’s usually around 32-37% (I have a lot of Toshiba stuff running in the background) I work on a lot of stuff together (Firefox, VB.NET express, Photoshop CS2 are running simultaneously many times) and I never fill the RAMs (53% now with the apps mentioned above and MS Office Word 2007) so I recommend 1,5GB of RAM and more if you want to get Vista running smoothly.

Some of the other problems with Vista are software incompatibilities, and well to be honest Microsoft can’t do anything about it, the software makers have to update the applications they make, another problem was moving files in Vista! It used to take 5 minutes to move a 5MB folder because all what windows was doing is calculating the remaining time instead of moving the file, Microsoft issued a fix for this bug a week ago and moving files is a lot easier now.

Vista User Interface

One great thing about Vista is its ease of use and nice graphical interface (Aero).
Searching in Vista is great! All the files are indexed so finding a file takes just seconds and the files start to appear as you type your search, Searching in vista is the easier way to get somewhere so you get a search box in every corner, You have aWindows Vista Search search box in every file explorer so finding a document in a folder with 1000 files takes a second, there is a search box in the start menu too, so instead of searching in the huge list of programs you just type the first characters and Vista shows you the program you are looking for. Searching is also made easier with tagging, so you can tag any file you have with many words and when you search the files those words make the document easier to find (very handy for pictures).

Windows Vista NetworkingAnother good feature in Vista is the networking, it connects and configures everything for you, that’s a very helpful feature for beginners, when I first got the laptop and connected it via LAN to the internet it detected the settings and I had internet immediately, the same connection needed configuration in XP, I bought a wireless router after that and connecting wirelessly to the router was also very easy. The only bad side about networking in Vista is advanced stuff are harder to reach. I have a shared Hard Drive on one PC and in XP all we had to do is find the computer the drive is connected to and access the drive, in Vista I had to manually type the HDD location on the network to access it.

Here’s a list of some other features worth mentioning in Vista:

  • Windows Photo Gallery, All your photos are shows and grouped in a nice easy interface you can navigate, you can also edit the pictures to fix Red Eyes and similar mistakes.

Windows Vista Speech Recognition

  • Windows Speech Recognition, similar to the one that was available in MS Office, but it now covers the whole OS, easy to use but not always accurate.
  • Windows DVD Maker, make your DVDs from windows.
  • Windows Movie Maker, an improved version similar to the previous ones
  • Windows Calendar, Organize your schedule from windows! It used to crash after the reboot when you add a new appointment, but it’s now fixed.
  • Windows Meeting Space, A new and improved Windows Net Meeting, I didn’t try it yet but they say it’s nice and easy to use.
Categories
Lebanon Politics

Orange Tayyar Land Rover

OTOToday I saw this Orange Land Rover with Tayyar signs, GMA pictures and FPM’s slogan all over it parked in Rimal Beach Resort! I know every one is free to like whoever he wants, but seriously this guy needs to find a hobby!!! I am pretty sure all he thinks about is politics!

FPM Land Rover

Tayyar Land Rover

Categories
Personal

Multitasking

As you already know, yesterday I didn’t have internet for most of the day, so I had to do all my work at night in the same time!

I was working on a Big Update for Exoleb so I had more than 50 pictures to crop, resize, fix (brightness, level, contrast) and add Exoleb logo to, while doing all this I was also writing the posts and adding the photo gallery code to them, talking to a couple of people on MSN Messenger and working on a small “photo managing” application that I thought of while editing all the pictures, to make things more complicated I decided to change the way post are written in Exoleb to see people’s reaction, but writing posts this way takes a lot of times so even if people like it, I don’t think I am going to do more than 1 post like this every update.

I finished everything at 1:30 this morning and went directly to bed, I usually stay up later than this but I’d be talking to people on MSN instead of doing all this! So that’s the first time I am tired of working on a PC!

Categories
DVD TV Series

M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H Logo

M*A*S*H is a TV series from the 70s and the 80s that I used to watch on the Paramount Comedy Channel (Now ShowComedy) a couple of years ago before they stopped it, two weeks ago I saw Season 1 and 2 in the DVD renting place so I got them and watched them.

M*A*S*H is about an American Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War and the way the staff is dealing with the war.
“Hawkey” Pierce, the main character is a sarcastic surgeon that hates the war, his friend “Trapper” McIntyre is basically a slight variation of his character that’s just a little calmer, together they “ruin the war” for Major Frank Burns, a cheap person that’s also a bad surgeon and Margaret “Hotlips” Houlihan the head nurse, they do all this while showing us the ugliness of war for everyone participating in it in a funny unique way.

M*A*S*H Cast

 

Other characters are:

  • Colonel Henry Blake: He is the one in command (well sort of), he also hates the war and everything in it, Hawkey and Trapper always manage to manipulate him to get what they want.
  • Radar O’Reilly: The company Clerk, he is the colonel’s assistant but sometimes he seems to be the one in Charge, he is called Radar because he has the ability to know stuff before they happen.
  • Maxwell Klinger: A Libano-American who’s only goal is to leave the army, to achieve this he dresses like a girl hopping he gets discharged for being crazy!

(Some of the characters do not participate in all the other seasons)

You should really watch the show it is entertaining and funny and it keeps getting better as the episodes pass (season 2 is better than season 1 in my opinion) All the seasons have been released to DVD so I hope the DVD store gets them soon!

Categories
Lebanon Politics

2006 Summer War

Last summer was supposed to be one of Lebanon’s greatest summers, tourists where everywhere and the economy was recovering from the shock it received after the murder of Rafic Hariri the previous year. That was until the 12 of July, on this “Holy day”, Hezbollah decided to kidnap a couple of Israeli soldiers to exchange them with Samir L Kuntar who’s basically a guy who entered Palestine with a Palestinian organization to Liberate Palestine but who is still considered Lebanese by Hezbollah for some reason, That’s not all the Government members (Hezbollah was part of this government) had also agreed that Hezbollah can attack the Chebaa farms to free them but that the government was supposed to take care of the prisoners issue through “diplomatic channels”.

Anyways Hezbollah attacked and Israel “replied in a proper way” (for Israel that means destroying Lebanon), so for 34 days Israel bombed the bridges, factories (Important military ones, ex: Milk Factories, pre-fabricated houses Factories…), Cellular towers, TV Antennas and every village in south Lebanon killing more than 1200 civilian, Hezbollah replied by launching rockets at Israel some of them destroyed a couple of buildings but most of them did nothing.
Israel also tried to enter Lebanon but Hezbollah succeeded in inflicting heavy damages to the Israeli troops so during the 34 days they were never able to control a village!

After 34 days, on the 14 of August 2006, UN resolution 1701 was voted and the war ended, Hezbollah declared victory over Israel (A Divine Victory to be precise) and that was it, you cannot question Hezbollah’s decision to launch the war and you cannot say we didn’t win -not that I don’t like winning, but 1500 martyrs (civilians + Lebanese Army + Hezbollah fighters), a destroyed economy and no goals achieved aren’t really my idea of winning and that doesn’t mean we lost by the way- so let’s just hope a new divine war is not declared anytime soon because we are seriously tired of holy battles!

Categories
Internet Lebanon

The Internet is Back

In Lebanon you can’t have decent internet, it’s either an over priced modem connection, a bandwidth Limited ADSL connection (that didn’t reach my area yet) or a not very legal (nor illegal) Cable connection depending on the region, I picked the 3rd option, so I have a 256K connection with unlimited bandwidth.
What’s bad in this connection is that it is not very stable, usually they manage to make it work 24 hours a day, but sometimes it just disconnects for an unspecified period of time, for example yesterday at midnight it disconnected and it just came back 10 minutes ago (18 hours!), but that’s the best we can currently get here, so I just have to live with it!

Categories
Internet

Hotmail Upgraded

Apparently Hotmail (or Windows Live Hotmail) got improved and is now out of Beta, so I just checked my Inbox and I now have 5GB of storage (Google charges 20$ for 6GB!), and according to Hotmail’s program manager that’s not it, Hotmail should also be faster and easier to navigate now.

Here’s the full list of updates:

Performance: We’ve been hearing you loud and clear across the world: speed is one of the most important aspects of a web-based email service. We’ve spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we’ll continue our work on performance in future releases.

Quality of Service: Our last release went quite smoothly, and we’ve been continuing to monitor the live site to make sure that we’re providing e-mail that is reliable – you always want to be able to get to your mail, and we hear you!

More storage! Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail, we’ve given you more storage. Free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage.

Mail retention changes: We’ll be increasing the amount of time that we leave messages in your junk and deleted items folders over the next few months.

Contacts de-duplication: Do you have five different entries for the same person in your Contacts? Yeah, me too, but not anymore. We’re the first webmail service to roll out “contacts de-duplication”. If you get a message from “Steve Kafka” and click “add contact” but there’s already a Steve Kafka, we’ll let you know and let you add Steve’s other e-mail address to your existing “Steve Kafka” contact entry. We’re just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There’s also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts.

Show content more easily: Hotmail blocks images and links in messages from unknown senders for your protection from spammers and phishing scams. Now you can click directly on the gray square or link to decide if you want to show content in a message. (It’s still not a good idea to show content, especially images, in messages from spammers. Just loading the images in a spam lets them know that you’re reading their e-mails.)

Spam-fighting: We’ve made it possible to report phishing attacks like those fake bank notices or fraudsters who want your checking account number so they can supposedly make a deposit. Just click “report phishing” if you think you’ve found a dangerous scam. In the junk folder, click “not junk” to help train our filters. Every mail you report does help make our spam filter smarter, but fighting spam takes constant vigilance. Spammers always find a new trick whenever we thwart their old tricks.

Right-to-left languages: Support for Hebrew and Arabic is now out of beta! If you speak these languages or want to see Hotmail in a totally new way, go to Options and change your language. We fixed a lot of bugs for users of Hebrew and Arabic, so we hope the whole UI works better for you now.

More space for your email, a.k.a. smaller header: We heard you asking for more space for your mail, so we shrunk the header in this update.

Forwarding messages: You can now forward mail from your Hotmail account to other accounts. For now, if you have a free account, you can only forward your mail to other Hotmail accounts. (Paid accounts get more choices.) This is great idea if you have a few different addresses and want to consolidate your mail.

Cobranding: This is what we call showing the logo of an organization for whom we are hosting email. Hotmail is currently hosting e-mail for universities (and a few ISPs) around the world, so we show their logos in Hotmail.

Accepting meeting requests: If you receive a meeting request, such as one sent from Outlook, you can now click “accept” and have it added to your Calendar. This had existed for years in MSN Hotmail, and we’re adding it to Windows Live Hotmail now.

Vacation replies: Now Hotmail can automatically tell your friends why you haven’t written them back in a few weeks.

Classic version jump to page: In the classic version, we’ve made it easier to jump to different pages of mail. This will be very handy as you grow into your new 5 GB or 10 GB account.

And finally… Drumroll please… we know this is going to be a big hit with a lot of you out there in blog land. I hope you remember this as the Hotmail team listening to what you want.

You can turn off the Today page (if you want to). If you’d rather see your inbox immediately upon login, you have the option to turn off the page of MSN news (called the Today page). The choice is yours.

Categories
Lebanon Politics

Hezbollah in Canada!

Apparently not all Lebanese go to Canada to escape politicians, in fact some of them decided to even put up posters of the opposition in Windsor, so now Canadians can also enjoy the sight of Hassan Nassrallah surrounded by Michel Aoun, Emile Lahoud, Salim El Hoss and L Istiz Nabih Berry!

Opposition in Canada