Osama’s Blog

I’ve been posting multiple blogs each day, it’s probably being alone in Egypt, and having all this time online, with nothing better to do. without any inclination to do anything useful.

It really is the only way to sanely talk to oneself.

I’ll just imagine somebody is reading my posts. :)

I know exactly how many reads these posts get, through Google Analytics, and it’s not much. I did not start this blog for a readership, it has always been a way for me to write some sort of diary, when I feel like it. And to post links and videos.

Looking at the dates of the posts, there have been months without a single post, and days with many posts. I write about whatever I want, whenever I want.

I really enjoy writing - sometimes.

I like to wear geeky T-Shirts, I have two of them on this trip to egypt, A Black “Gnome/FSF” and a Maroon “#/usr/bin/perl” T-Shirt.

My Gnome T-Shirt was pure black #000000, after passing through the laundry here, it became #333333, I like it’s new color

I haven’t bought any T-Shirts for a while, so I just went on and ordered some:

From ThinkGeek: Binary People T-Shirt, BODY tag T-Shirt, HEAD tag hat

From Google: Black is Back, Google Goes Long T-Shirt

The title I’m using for this post could be used to romaticise about something, about goals and direction, about the future, but I use it for a much simpler reason: actually crossing the road.

During this stay in Cairo, I’ve been living here, (that’s a Google maps link to my Hotel, Le Meridien Heliopolis).

Notice the four-lane highway, with cars whizzing by at speeds up to 120km/h? I cross that one everyday.

There are two ways to cross the way, by using an unnderground tunnel around 800 meters away from the hotel (in the same direction I go), or by doing it frogger style (the way many egyptians prefer to cross the road).

The Question is : Why do I cross the road?  

To get to the other side!

While waling around the city of Cairo (specifically Heliopolis), I saw these trains that are running above the ground on rails that sometimes cross the roads.

After a quick look at Google Earth, and checking the Community KMZ files, I found a KMZ that included Metro, Bus, and LRT lines, these were LRTs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail

I saw that they go close to my training course, and decided to try them if I ever get tired of walking. I previously sat on a bench on one of the stations, but never dared to go on the train since I did not know where it went.

The other day, I gave it a try.

I waited for about 15 minutes, GPSr in hand, and when it came I hopped in.

The trains don’t look as good as the trains in Wikipedia, They are old, mostly made out of broken wood, and the doors don’t always close.

There was a guy standing there with change in his hands, and a book of tickets. Not knowing the price for the ride I gave him 5 Egyptian Pounds (EGP), he gave me back 4.75, so the ride is 0.25EGP, around 5 cents. (The people on the train seemed to consider this real money, and not loose change, a girl paid 0.5 for herself and a friend, and her friend paid her back 0.25.)

The trip was very bumpy, with the train swinging left and right and a top speed of 30km/h (measured by GPS, the average speed is about 12km/h, so some people jump off before it reaches the station when it’s closer to their destination).

At one station, a guy came in with a box full of decks of playing cards and shouted trying to sell them “only 1 Guinea, the playing cards that are sold everywhere for 3″, in another station, an older guy had a box of magnifying glasses, the Sherlock Holmes type “High quality magnifying glasses, good for reading small text” he screamed.

It was a facinating ride, maybe I’ll do it again.

Jeremy Allison writes about DRM in his article “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!”.

I think that DRM is the most inappropriate technology for this time. What I don’t understand is why media companies don’t embrace the so-called “web2.0″ phenomenon.

Whenever DRM is used, there’s a challenge to break it, as can be seen by the AACS fiasco, and the bytes that start with 09f9…

Any music can be listened to free on the radio, and will probably be available online in many legit and pirate sites. Those who really like the artists will most probably buy the CD after listening for a while.

Any video content will be watched by most of those who want to watch it, It’s only a matter of time. The latest Hollywood blockbuster movie will be aired on Free To Air Television in a few years,and those TV shows will probably be re-run a million times all over the world.

I think the producers of TV Shows, and TV Channels could benefit from publishing their content online (maybe even with the ads), they will gain:

• More visibility, some shows may not make it big on a few test channels and be canceled.
• A larger audience, instead of the few thousand people watching, you could possibly get millions of people watching.
• Automatic Time Shifting: The people who want to watch a show do not need to wait for every Tuesday at 9:00 PM to watch their favorite show, they can watch and re-watch it anytime they want to.
• This also saves the failed shows from fading into oblivion.
• Maybe users could share the bandwidth in a p2p manner, as in joost.

They could even host all their stuff on youtube …. instead of sending cease-and-desist letters.

Today I saw a sad Macbook in Virgin Megastore (Cairo/City Stars Mall) … The problem with the new macs running on intel processors, is that they could run windows.

I saw a Windows XP screensaver, moved the mouse and got a Windows XP user selection dialog (The one with the pictures), I was really hoping that this was a compatibility mode or something, and not a reformatted macbook…

Then I searched the net, this is a VMWare-like solution to running windows, that Apple Markets, called Parallels Desktop.

After Apple’s move to intel x86 CPU’s, it’s now possible to do things that were previously impossible….

Have a look at VMWare’s Fusion for MacOS, that as the video shows, will provide Unity between MacOS and Windows Applications.

I had read somewhere that recursion (and most of the recursion examples taught in programming courses) is not always the best solution for many of the proposed topics, I was arguing this issue with a friend who gave me this example:

He wanted to print out all subsets of the string ABCD, with the letters in the same order, so you would get subsets like ACD, but never DBC …. He said that recursion is the best method to use.

He would start with ABCD, then start removing characters recursively, the first iteration would go through ABC, ACD, ABD, BCD then ABC will go through AB, AC, AD …etc.
I thought about it, and then gave a different solution, I just counted from 1 to 15, and checked for the 4 bits, if a bit is 1, the corresponding letter is printed out, my brother who studies Electrical Engineering noticed that this is like applying Digital Systems concepts to programming (it’s the Engineer in me, Those years of EE education were not wasted).
We agreed that this was the most efficient solution for this problem, I don’t abuse the stack, and only use 2 ints (could be short ints if you want )
Here’s the C code, you can change the constant NUM to any number of letters.

I seem to live online more than offline…

• When I need any information I either type it in the top-right corner of my firefox browser (Google Search - ctrl+k), or type a URL starting with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and appending what I want to read about, replacing spaces with underscores, and starting each word with a capital ….
• I can be contacted using email or google talk much easier than by phone, I may ignore or forget about missed calls on my mobile phone, but i’ll always read my email and respond to chats (I’ve been using Skype in this trip to egypt to call home, and I’m impressed by the quality - but my previous audio experiences sucked only because of the dial-up connections used at the time).
• I watch more videos online than TV, using Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, Digg Videos, Joost and StumbleVideo.
• My main news sources are online, even though I get a free newspaper at work and I have satellite TV at home.
• I buy lots of stuff online … amazon, woot … and many more.

Today, I took a long walk in Cairo, Egypt.

I have a training course here, and I want to exercise by walking instead of using taxis for anything nearby.

I have my Garmin eTrex Venture Cx GPSr with me, and used both Google Earth, and Wikimapia to store waypoints for the training center as well as nearby restaurants, supermarkets, and computer shops.

Yesterday evening I walked to a McDonald’s close to my hotel, and found a supermarket on the way, Today I went to my training center and stopped on the way at chilli’s for lunch.

I was wandering around, and saw I was 2km NE of my Hotel, so I used “Find Waypoint” to navigate my way back… Walking around in a city you know nothing about with a GPSr is easy!