Osama’s Blog

Larry Cannell says “I Hate Files“, and I agree with almost every point.

Files are a major nuisance, and until another practical solution is universally accepted, we will have to live with them.

Online-only solutions cannot work until connectivity is not an issue, until it becomes an extremely cheap commodity.

Until then, maybe a hybrid solution that uses client-side software with network-based distributed storage that does not rely on folder structures and filenames could be acceptable.

From the dumbest piece of software in the last post, we go to the coolest … Microsoft should have done this in windows …

In windows there’s no easy way to see the size of a folder… (in Linux I would du it), but even in the detailed view in windows explorer it only shows the sizes of files, leaving the size column empty for folders, here’s the solution: Folder Size for Windows Explorer .

Here’s a nice comic from xkcd, you can order a t-shirt here.

Randall Munroe says:

This is probably the most popular comic I’ve ever done. It was spotted on the walls at Amazon headquarters and on some of the bigger blags. And now, as per your many email requests, here it is on a shirt!

Linux does not need much of the BIOS in our PC motherboards, most of it was made in the DOS days, and Windows probably still uses many BIOS functions, but Linux runs on many different platforms, and could get rid of the BIOS.

read more | digg story

I just installed Ruby/Rails on my ubuntu, and followed this tutorial, with my own tables and fields.

This looks promising, what I like:

• A clear way to do things.
• A unique database naming method (table and field names).
• Simple coding “scaffolding” that could be replaced by real code.
• Real MVC.

What I don’t like so far:

• I’m not sure, but a rigid framework like this could mean that even though most things can be done easily, some complex stuff could need a lot of work.
• Ruby, I didn’t go through a ruby tutorial, but seems simple enough.

Here’s a nice vid:

Most operating systems support the notion of time zones, this allows a computers that communicates with eachother from different countries to have a shared notion of time.

I like the way Linux deals with timezones, it allows me to choose Asia/Qatar, this is very different from Microsoft Windows.

In older versions of Windows my timezone (GMT+3) had two choices Moscow, Baghdad/Kuwait/Riyadh, since we were living in neither of those cities, It felt awkward to explain to a computer user why his timezone is not set to the correct City/Country.

Windows XP made it worse, they offer 3 choices, all they did is move Baghdad away from Kuwait/Riyadh after the Gulf War… But there are Many Countries in GMT+3.

I wonder how the Macintosh deals with this, and who knows what Microsoft will do in Vista, will they split Kuwait/Riyadh into different timezones….

I just finished Installing Ubuntu on my Linux Box, this post and the unicode one were written in ubuntu.

What I like so far:

• Better Speedtouch 330 Support ( I did download the drivers/firmware and read/saved the howto before installing)
• Cleaner interface than mdk 10.1 (I’m sure newer mandrivas are also good)
• FireFox 1.5
• apt-get
• It has the word “Drake” in it’s name
• Arabic support out of the box (شيء جميل)

What I don’t like

• Configuration is not as easy or integrated as mandrake/mandriva (mandrake control center) …. I may install webmin…
• I still haven’t gotten used to the debian way.

Here’s an interview with ubuntu’s founder, marck Shuttleworth:

I am contemplating the task of rebuilding my Linux box at home, it’s currently running Mandrake 10.1 and has 3 Hard Disks (2×18GB+1×160GB) and a DVDRW Drive…

Here’s What I’m thinking of:

• Replace 18GB Hard Disks with Larger ones (200GB?)
• Ubuntu - I really like the slogan “Linux for Humans“…
• Implement Software RAID (Mirroring RAID1 or RAID5)
• A New Partitioning Scheme (I wish we had Native zfs or Linux)
• A New Backup Strategy using rsnapshot

I just dugg lifehacker’s guide to mastering wget. wget is one of my favourite tools on Linux, and many of my scripts use it.

I am usually logged into my home pc even when i’m at work (ssh/putty are great) and whenever I want to download stuff I just wget it.

It’s also a great mirroring tool… just do a wget -r http://www.test.com/

an easy way to do incremental snapshots with rsync and ssh is described here