Engie's weblog

According to Wikipedia, tethering is a method to share the Internet connection of an Internet-capable mobile phone. This sharing can be via cable, or wirelessly over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi — if Wi-Fi, the tethering feature is often branded as a mobile hotspot and can typically service several devices. As a result of a sometimes slow ADSL connection, I decided to have my own mobile hotspot as a backup. Indeed, mobinil offers a relatively acceptable plan of 110 MB / month for 20 EGP. Exceed your quota during the 30 day limit, and the speed drops AFAIK from 1.2 mbps to 64 kbps. After all, for me this is a good backup plan to accomplish quick logins and short browsing. So, I went straight to Ovi store and downloaded Joikuspot Light edition 3.1. To have free apps downloaded to your PC, just click the app, then click `send to a friend` button. The address bar changes to something like `http://store.ovi.com/content/12345/send-to-friend`. Simply replace the in the address bar from `send-to-...

It has been long since I last wrote here, but I believe the idea I am about to discuss is worth highlighting. After Jan 25 Revolution, I am having a new state of mind. It is refusing the conditional thinking. For many years, I have been doing many things without questioning `is it necessarily?`. I mean, for a very basic example, whenever you turn on both hot water and cold water taps, warm water should flow, right ?  ... Not necessarily! Many scenarios can take place. One of the taps may be broken, both may be broken, the heater may not be working, the water may be warm but carrying rust, water may be already cut off or indeed warm water may come out.. You name it. My point here, these are two things interacting with each other based upon our action, yet the results are not guaranteed. What would you think of human beings interacting with each other, again, at a very basic level ? If you scold me, there are many scenarios, I may ask you why you are scolding me, I ma...

A quick hack to just download yum updates for a later install: for i in $(yum list updates | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v ^* | sed -e '1,3d'); do yumdownloader $i; sleep 1; done Of course you can put them all in one file and download without using for loop, but I didn't want to write any files to the hard disk. Also, you could have used $ yum check-update but I am more used to $ yum list updates. Keep the system up to date ;)

I will leave you with a nice screen shot, testing Google with Google's safebrowsing

If you are an Apple-products fan, please take it easy or leave now as all of this post may not appeal to you. Starting from scratch, Apple has a trend in marketing its products. 1- Build version one with incomplete features though the technology is present and cheap. 2- Market the product as the simplest thing ever next to "saying 123". 3- Build version two with a little bit more features and much higher price. 4- Claim that upon user demand you had to add these features. 5- Keep the little secret inside, it is tying software to hardware. Looking at iPads, I get a sense that Apple is not respecting its users. Making things overly simple and thrwoing in standard features slowly in next versions is lame. You > iPad supports 3G. Me > well my 2-year old Nokia mobile does too! You > iPad has capacitive touch screen. Me > What devices on earth don't now?! You > iPad is lightweight. Me > Technology devices are supposed to be, no news! You ...

I donated one USD to Wikipedia a few days ago. It really made me feel worthy :) This is the body of the email they sent me, I am adding only two CRs [carriage returns] just for the blog to look better: Dear Angie, Thank you for your gift of USD 1.00 to the Wikimedia Foundation, received on October 20, 2010. I’m very grateful for your support. Your donation celebrates everything Wikipedia stands for: the power of information to help people live better lives, and the importance of sharing, freedom, learning and discovery. Thank you so much for helping to keep Wikipedia freely available for its 380 million readers around the world. These funds support technology and people. The Wikimedia Foundation develops and improves the technology behind Wikipedia, and sustains the infrastructure that keeps it up and running. The foundation has a staff of about fifty, which provides technical, administrative, legal and outreach support for the global community of volunteers who write and edit...

While walking, an engineer, a system administrator and their boss found a lamp. They rubbed it, and lo and behold; a genie appeared. "You can have three wishes, but since there are three of you, I'm going to give each one of you one wish," spoke the genie in a large, booming voice. The engineer said, "I wish to be working for NASA in making the first spaceship to transport astronauts to Mars." With that, the engineer disappeared in a puff of smoke. The system administrator said, "I wish to be in an island filled with machines that never crash so I could study from them and learn". The administrator smiles as he vanish in a puff of smoke. The boss said "I want both of them back in the office by Monday." -- Unfortunately I can not recall where I found it online, but it spent a good long time on my HDD.