Month: November 2007

Categories
My Applications

A Digital Ruler

A lot of time when I am modifying or making a site, I need to get the width and height of a certain area of the screen. Usually I used to take a screenshot of the screen, go to photoshop and cut the area I need to see the size of it, but that used to take time so yesterday I made this little tool that does the job for me.

It is a window with an empty area in it, just put the window around anything you want to measure and it will give you the size of it directly (in Pixels). You can also set the window to take a certain size you need or change its color.

Here’s a Picture of the Digital Ruler running:

ruler screenshot

To download and run the program you need to agree to its EULA, If the program doesn’t run you probably don’t have the .Net Framework 2.0 (available in most computers running Vista and XP) so download it from here.

DOWNLOAD

Categories
Blogging Internet

Lebanese Blog Spam

I receive a lot of spam daily on my blogs and most of it gets filtered by the Akismet anti spam plugin so I usually check the filter once per week to see if any clean comment was marked as spam. Two Weeks ago a comment caught my attention, the website of the writer of this comment was Lebanese so I first thought it was a wrong catch and wanted to un-spam it, but before I did so, I noticed many more similar comments also caught in the filter so I realized the comment was really a Lebanese spam message!

Since that date the Lebanese Blog Spam has been increasing, most of it gets caught by the filter but a few manage to get through it so I manually mark them as spam while moderating .

Here are some screenshots of the spam messages, the first 3 were caught in Exoleb‘s spam filter the other two made it to moderation (Haifa’s one in Exoleb, Fairuz’s one here).

3 lebanese spam caught in akismet

lebanese spam blog

lebanese blog spam

Categories
Internet Lebanon

Testing the speed of Free Wi-fi Hotspots

I am currently at Shtroumpf and I decided to test the speed of the free Wi-Fi they offer. I am going to post the results in the Free Wi-fi Hotspots page, keep in mind that I am not the only one connected to the access point so the results may not be very accurate.

Note that I will try to test the speed of the net at every restaurant I visit and I’ll keep the free wi-fi hotspots page updated with the results.

Categories
Lebanon Politics

Should Dimyanos Kattar be the next Lebanese president?

Should Dimyanos Kattar be the next Lebanese president?Elie El Khoury is currently posting every day in his blog a topic addressed by Dimyanos Kattar in his various public appearances. He allready covered 4 topics which are:

  1. The role of the younger generation
  2. The role of Lebanon
  3. The middle class
  4. The role of the diaspora

By reading the posts you can tell that Kattar is not like the other presidential candidates, he does not come from a feudal family, he respects everyone and he has the will to work to build a better country.

I recently watched parts of an interview with him on NTV and discovered that this man is more than just an economist. During the war he was part of the red cross so he witnessed the atrocities committed by all the parties and helped ease the suffering of the Lebanese instead of taking sides like all the other presidential candidates. After the war he worked on many economic projects for Lebanon eventually becoming the minister of economy and finance in Mikati’s government. During this period Lebanese started to know him better and I personally admired the work he was doing and was surprised to see during one of the interviews that his home is just a modest normal home unlike the homes of the standard Lebanese politicians.

Kattar has all the qualifications that enable him to become a good president but in Lebanon people like him rarely succeed, he is an educated, clean person who worked for Lebanon all his life but can he lead the country with all those crazy politicians in the wild, how will he make a government liked by everyone and not be attacked by everyone? In a normal country he would make a great president but can he change anything in Lebanon if he does not receive some backing from the people?

Categories
Lebanon Politics

Clashes in Bourj L Brajneh

They just wrote on LBCI that clashes may have started in the Palestinian camp of Bourj L Brajneh!

Update: on Lebanon file they are reporting that the clashes are on the “3amaliya” and “sa7it l kodess” side of the camp, the clashes are between Fate7 and the Kiyada l 3ama. Palestinians are on high alert in the Badawi camp.

Update 2: on Tayyar.org they wrote its a problem between two persons.

Categories
Uncategorized

No internet

Apparently the servers of my internet provider have been attacked by a virus so while they are fixing the problem they stopped the internet conection (the game servers are still working).
I am writing this post on my brother’s N73 via wap, the browser on the cell is great but alfa’s wap is very slow.

Categories
Lebanon People

Kuwait to Beirut on a Bike

bike trip kuwait beirutA group of bike riders from Kuwait are currently on a trip from Kuwait to Lebanon, they are going to cover the 6000 km of the trip on there bike passing in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan to finally reach Lebanon. The trip started on November 9th and they plan to finish it on the 30th of November. One of the riders set up a blog to cover the trip and he plans on updating it whenever he finds an internet connection, you can check it here.

Source

Categories
Funny

Whoop

whoop

From Flickr via Digg

Categories
Lebanon

Lebanese Army getting 3 Bombers

Naharnet is reporting that the USA is sending 3 bombers for training purposes to the Lebanese army, the aircrafts are some A-3 Skywarriors that originally retired in 91, its better then nothing, we can’t really complain since we are not paying for them but I just wish that the USA supports the army as much as it talks about supporting it.

Here’s the picture of the plane, I am not sure the ones they are sending look exactly the same since they are training versions.

Lebanese Army getting 3 Bombers A3D Skywarrior

 

Categories
Blogging Internet

How to view Blogger in English

In Lebanon a lot of people are connected to the internet via a semi-legal cable provider since the services provided by the Ministry of Telecommunication are very slow or very limited in bandwidth.

The cable provider are subscribed to worldwide providers mainly from Russia and Turkey so because of this a lot of time websites identify you as being Russian or Turkish and show up in the language of that country. Google does that the first time you connect to it but pressing “View Google in English” under the search button fixes the problem and remembers your choice, ImperiaOnline a multi player game I’ve been playing lately also opens in Russian every time I visit the site but unfortunately doesn’t want to remember that I press the little British flag every time I enter it. Another website that also thinks I am Russian is Blogger, it does that every time I access a blogger’s profile but doesn’t offer me any way to switch back to English so today I had the idea to go to blogger main page to see if I can select me preferred language on it.

When I accessed the page I was surprised to find out that it was in English! I tried refreshing a profile I was checking but it still showed up in Russian so I clicked on the Language selection Drop Box on the top of the main page and chose “English UK”, I refreshed the profile again and this time it showed up in English!