Today I received and email from DU informing me that all Blackberry services will be baned in UAE starting 11th Oct as per TRA regulations. Few moments after that it started to spread accross the media check
Great move!!!
The only reason I can see for such action is, all BB services are encrypted and can’t be intercepted by the government, so the decision was to ditch the bad service that provide privacy to mobile users, so now privacy invasion is legalized by law.
I think we should have expected that as some funny survey happened a week ago

This month a survey of BlackBerry subscribers commissioned by WAM found that there were “concerns” about the safety of data among UAE consumers. Three-quarters of the survey respondents said they would be worried if their e-mails were being stored by an independent organisation outside the UAE.

I think anyone can get how unprofessional and non objective this survey is. Most of the BB users are using public email services (Gmail, Yahoo or hotmail) and most of they are using Social Network application (Facebook mainly) and all of these information are defiantly stored outside of UAE, and personally I would trust RIM way more that I can trust Etisalat or DU.
At the end please TRA, if you want to stop BB service to invade our privacy, please do (as there is nothing much we can do anyway to stop you), but the least you can do it to respect our intelligence and not try to convince us that it is for our own good.

After suffering for few years with Etisalat poor customer service, I was excited to move to a new apparment where the internet service is provided by DU and I hoped for a better customer service.I turnes out that I could have been more wrong.
Last night I have sufferd from a weird problem when most of the sites were blocked with the gracious Freej lady with the bomb “Suef safley” page. These sites include some unmistackably safe sites such as google, yahoo, digg, the list can go on. After 15 min of poking around with all 101 troubleshooting steps I’m still stuck the same problem, I called DU customer service. In less than 30 sec a sercive call agenet answered which was the only good point during my whole experience.
After breifing him about the fact that I can’t browse the most common sites and telling him about all the steps I’ve done to troubleshoot the issue, I kept getting some stupied answeres from him such as this page -surf safely- shows only for restricted sites within UAE without even listening to me when I told him that even google, yahoo are now working. After few minutes I managed to convince him that the sites I’ve been triying to access is completely safe, then he started to ask even stupider questions such as did you change any of your local security settings, ….
Again I spent another few minutes trying to convence him that it is something wrong is going on with their servers and asked him to connect me with the technical team, but I was out of luck this time (he insisted that i should just wait the problem will magically solve itself).
After almost 30 min I was tired and finally gave up and though I’ll have to wait until someone important to call them and shout for them to take this matter seriously. At the end he suggested to file a complain and after giving him all the information again his response was that the technical team will contact me in 72 hours (3 days!!) to rectify this matter.
Then today morning at the office the same issue happened again, but in about 10 min the issue got fixed (I’m assuming that the big shouty guy called them).
In my openion this clearly shows the level of ignorance of the customer service and the lake of understanding the severity of the issue in hand.
I’ve done a bit of research on that matter as soon as the service was back up, and I found that it is not the first time that DU had this issue (which clearly means that they never learn from thier mistakes). Last time they blamed telco’s web filtering software herewhich is clearly not a valid execuse (these things should have been tested thoroughly before deploying it to such a critical environment and I doesn’t justify the 8 hours for them to take action on the issue)

At the end I would have to say that I’m disappointed but not really surprised as when monopoly comes from the door, quality goes out of the window.
I would have to mention that it is not the first painful experiense with DU as I had to wait for more that 6 hours waiting in line for my registration (I’ve been planing to increase my internet connection bandwidth but the bad memory keeps me from going)

Where Apache2.2 doesn’t have a directive to make URL insensitive mod_speling.c module enables you to do the trick. Here are the steps to enable it on Debian based Linux (in my case Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala)

1. cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
2. ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/speling.load
3. sudo vim speling.conf
4. In vim write the following lines
<IfModule mod_speling.c>
  CheckCaseOnly on
  CheckSpelling on
</IfModule>
5. Restart Apache server
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

As I’ve recently installed a new Ubuntu 9.10  machine in a secure environment behind MS ISA Server. I could not install any application using apt-get or update a ruby gem however I was able to browse the web when I set the proxy server on Firefox settings .

After some googling I found out that the problem is that Ubuntu doesn’t support NTLM authentication out of the box. As a workaround to this issue I found NTLM Authorization Proxy Server

For details steps how to run NTLMAPS use the following link
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Web-Browsing-Behind-ISA-Server-HOWTO.html#s4

After installing NTLMAPS

1. open System -> Preferences -> Network Proxy
2. Select Manual proxy configuration
3. Check Use the same proxy for all protocols
4. Fill HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 and Port: 5865
5. Click “Apply System-Wide”

First of all I need to clarify that I’m not part of the anti Microsoft mania, I certainly have come concerns about some quality aspects in their products – but who doesn’t. Any way I found myself deliberately ignoring everything about all Microsoft 2010 development tools (i.e. DotNet framework 4.0, C# 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010). As I’m trying to think why am I not excited about these products this time, I used to get really hot every time Microsoft announces a new generation of their tools, I came up with these reasons about my indifference towards the new release.

1. C# makes the forth version of the language in less than 10 years, and as I believe every thing they add to the language now negates the original objective of the language.
2. 5th version of the .Net framework is an alarm that Microsoft will move to a new technology leaving all .Net behind
3. My experience with every new version of Visual Studio that they add new features, fix some bugs and add much much more ones.
4. I looks like Microsoft have lost track in MVC implementation, instead of growing it into a complete application framework (as rails and django). I believe this what happens when you still someone else innovation without giving proper credit even internally.
5. All I can expect from SharePoint 2010 is that a huge investment from the business and developers to move from v. 2007 to 2010. (A large number of businesses are still using SharePoint 2003 because they don’t want to redo everything again.
6. For me alder versions of SharePoint gave us nothing but trouble because the marketing folks in Microsoft are pushing it really hard beyond it’s capabilities and raise the business expectation really high causing delays and huge investment thrown away to satisfy these expectation.
7. With all the data access technologies Microsoft have released in the last few years (ADO.NET, LINQ, Entity Framwork  ) non of them is remotely comparable to the awesome ActiveRecord Library in Ruby
8. I think DotNet have became a huge plate of technology spaghetti and it would be a wise decision to start working on something simple.

At the end I have to wait and see how the development community will receive and evaluate the new generation.

A Development version of Google Chrome OS is finally released, while it is a pain to access the source code and compile, there is a unofficial alternative solution mentioned here by TechCrunch. In the first five min playing around I found that it is still a long way to be ready for the market as it is really unstable (which is expected in a development version of the OS). The second problem is that it still doesn’t support any non latin characters, in my case it didn’t work with arabic characters.

After felling in love with the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). While installing Ruby on Rails i stumbled upon a problem as installing Ruby on Rails from Ubuntu repository will install version 2.3.3 not 2.3.4. While the difference is not huge between the two versions but I like to start the next project with the newest version of Rails. After pulling some hear (as if there are much of it anyway) After some googling I concluded the steps here:

1. Install Ruby
   $ sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential
2. Download RubyGems
   $ cd ~
$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
$ tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
3. Install RubyGems
   $ cd rubygems-1.3.5
$ sudo ruby setup.rb
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
4. Install Rails
   $ sudo gem install rails
5. Install MySql
   $ sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
$ sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
$ sudo gem install mysql

Then have fun coding on the best framework on the best OS

As I’m building a client tool that uses SharePoint web services to store documents. I’ve started with VS 2008 but I couldn’t find Add Web Reference in the context menu anymore and I couldn’t use WCF to connect to SharePoint asmx. After some frustration, cursing and thinking about giving up VS 2008, I found that the some brilliant guy in Microsoft decided to make our life just a little bit worse.

I’ve used the following steps to add new web reference:

1. Right click on References folder, and then click Add Service Reference
2. In Add Service Reference dialog, click Advanced button on the bottom left corner
3. In Service Reference Settings dialog, click Add Web Reference button on the bottom left corner, then you get the familiar Add Web Reference dialog
4. After following these steps for the first time you will see Add Web Reference in the context menu of References folder.

I have been trying to enable permatalinks on wordpress with no success for the last few hours, after some research I found the following steps:

1- Make sure the following line is uncommented in httpd.conf
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

2- Look for the section “AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files”, then change the value of AllowOverride to All

AllowOverride All

3-In the wordpress installation folder, create a file named “.htaccess”

touch .htaccess

4- Change the permission level for the .htaccess file to be writable by wordpress

chmod 777 .htaccess

5-From the wordpress admin interface enable permalinks from the settings tab, then click save changes

6- Secure back the .htaccess file

chmod 664 .htaccess

Have FUN

I’ve just came accross Apple response to FCC’s questions regarding to removing Google voice from iPhone App store, as expected they have kept AT&T out

“Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application.”

Personally, I have not been affected directly by the removal of the application as it doesn’t work in UAE and I’ve lost my iPhone already.What really bothered me is Apple response to the questions, for three reasons:

1- Apple said they reject applications if they have bugs or disturb the stability of the iPhone, I don’t think Apple can be judge here as the iPhone itself still have some bugs and being fixed with updates. Also I think users are smart enough and the natural selection will do it’s job in here as if the application is buggy people will not use it anyway and this should raise the quality bar realy high.

2- Apple said that they removed GV because it replaced some of the phone functionality on the iPhone, Also here I think users will shy away from GV if the functionality was not done tastefully.

3- Apple is rejecting VOIP on 3G application due to the deal with AT&T. What about other providers and what if they are willing to provide such a service (not that Etisalat would ever do that)

Personally – in spite of all what Apple said – I think AT&T had a say on that removal as it might be a real threat to their profit with free text messaging through GV. At the end Google announced that they will release a web version of Google Voice for the iPhone, can wait to see how Apple/AT&T will react to that.

My conclusion to this responce it that Apple is telling iPhone users “You are bunch of idiots, we know better and we will give you only what we approve as good for you”, Sorry apple I don’t accept that insult, as much as I love all Apple products I can’t see myself carring iPhone till the control freak in Apple leaves.