Osama’s Blog

I visited the website of my travel agency today and used their online reservation system (they use Amadeus), and reserved a ticket on Qatar Airways (The agent for Amadeus in Qatar) … I paid for the ticket online with a credit card… and got a confirmation code…I had previously bought electronic tickets from Air Arabia, printed the ticket from their website, and took it to the airport for immediate boarding… but something felt wrong here… there was no option to print a ticket … just a confirmation code…I called the travel agent, and they told me to come by this evening to collect the ticket.

When I visited them, after going from employee to employee with my printout, every one of them looking at it for 10 minutes, calling a phone number, and transferring me to the next one… they finally told me to go to Qatar airways, and that they will issue the e-ticket.

So off I go to Qatar Airways’ offices, and waiting for some time (it was crowded), I was referred from one employee to another.. until they told me that the card was charged, and they have a confirmation code, but that since this was done today, a ticket number has not been generated yet they said come tomorrow …

My rants:

1. Shouldn’t an e-ticket be available without going to their offices… ?
2. Shouldn’t it be available immediately….?
3. Why is it easier to reserve a ticket the old-fashioned way?
4. Why do they call this thing an e-ticket? because there are no carbon copies?
5. …. ???

The Best

• Crash
• Fight Club
• The pursuit of happyness
• Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
• Syriana
• Running Scared
• Lord of War
• Dot the i
• Before Sunset (not After the Sunset)
• Lucky Number Slevin
• Amistad
• Apocalypto
• Rain Man
• Memento
• Being John Malkovich
• Confederate States of America
• Rocky I, II, III, … Rocky Balboa
• The Prestige
• Children of Men

Good

• The Day After Tomorrow
• Signs
• The Firm
• Big Fish
• Con
• The Butterfly Effect (1)
• Donnie Darko
• The Jacket
• The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Matchstick Men
  
• Flightplan
• Sixth Sense
• Good Will Hunting
• The Big White
• The Final Cut
  

Worst ever

• Once upon a time in Mexico
• Desperado
• Snakes on a Plane

“November 15th, a new era in television news.” - Al-Jazeera English is live.

Ten years after it started Arabic-language broadcasts, Al-Jazeera launched an English-language news channel.
http://english.aljazeera.net/

The 5th anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder that my first name is not welcome in many places (mostly by americans)… do you really think having the same first name as somebody makes me bad? How about all those who carry the first names of sinister characters in human history.

I’m proud of my name, my name identifies me, it’s one of the arabic names of the lion, and I refuse to change it even if only online… in late 2001 I was kicked out of so many IRC chat immediately after entering channels just because I use my name.

Get a life! This is my name, and you’ll have to tolerate it.

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….

Naming a company is one of the most difficult taks ever,

People in Qatar take the easy route, it’s mostly a cultural issue, the Arabic language is so descriptive, that having an abstract name is almost never a choice.

Most company names have the following structure “Country/Place/Nationality Company for Something and Something“, for example (these are out of my head, if this is your company name, consider it free advertising, or contact me to remove it):

• Qatari Company for Computers and Maintenance
• Lebanese Company for Trees and Gardening
• American Company for Food and Beverages
• London Company for Sewers and Drainage

Some try to escape the pattern, but most don’t… by the way… most their logos are the first letter enclosed in a circle.

Igor’s Naming Guide is one of the best guides to naming companies (and products/services), these company names break all the “rules”.

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:

When you develop a mono-lingual application are you using unicode/utf8???

I find it really unneccessary (even though many people would disagree), to use Unicode in an Arabic-only application or web app, I really recommend using the standard encoding of arabic text (about 99% of the worldwide arabic electronic text is encoded in windows-1256). I really would have preferred to use iso8859-6 but nobody uses it.
I only see utf8/unicode as an option if you need to mix many languages in the same string or database column.

Here’s the comparison for arabic text: