shahine.com/omar/

Last night was the Microsoft Bay Area Holiday Party. It was held at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. This was the best holiday party I've attended. The Asian Art Museum is a spectacular building. There was great music, lots of food and everyone was in a great mood. I'm going to have to go back to see the artwork!

As a party gift they gave out Abacus'. I don't know how to use one though. I have this magic calculator button on my keyboard .

I saw this ad last week at the same Bart station. I wished I had my camera, but I'm glad some one did!

Now I know it's an HP ad, but at the time I didn't.

Lets face it. The FTP client in the Windows XP Shell is a piece of junk. It always locks up explorer, spews random error messages, and has a problem just working.

However, I am loathe to pay for an FTP client. I stumbled upon SmartFTP today. It's free for non-commercial use. Sweet, my favorite after donationware!

Really excellent article written by Clemens on dasBlog and Blogging phenominon/software. You can read it here, check page 34.

Clemens posted DasBlog 1.5. This is the first release that I put a lot of work into. It's now running on my site and took all of 5 minutes to copy up.

The features for this release (both large and small are)

• new dasBlog theme designed by me. I like it . It is mostly XHTML + CSS and renders well in WinIE, MacIE, Safari, Firebird. This took forever to get right!
• Seach capability (check out the search box below the calendar)
• Ability to delete comments (for comment spam)
• Better support for RSS clients. We now support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This should be a huge bandwidth saver for you folks with popular blogs.
• Can change password from Config page
• Can Test SMTP settings out
• New admin UI that is a lot cleaner (styled like tabs in a few of the themes)
• NewsGator plugin for posting to DasBlog
• Category pages render all posts for that category (determined via preference)
• Fixed problem with cookie corruption

For the next release I'm working on photo album functionality that is closely tied to dasBlog's current way of doing things. I'd also like to see Story support (Harry is working on that), and a theme designer for folks who want to change aspects of their theme w/o creating a brand new one.

This is a sweet phone. One of these days I’ll talk a bit more about it, but let’s just say that for me, this phone has improved my quality of life. It’s just kick ass having my exchange data in my pocket and wirelessly syncing to exchange server every 30 min 24x7…

Motorola MPx200 Smartphone - Next Generation (AT&T)



List Price: $299.99
Our Price: $169.99 (when purchased with service plan)
You Save: $130.00 (43%)
Special Offers: $170.00
Price After Special Offers: Free

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

If you are like me, traveling is all about taking the bricks along with you. I have 2 laptops, my wife has one, and each has their own power brick. Then there is the pda, phone etc. Luckily, USB charging, like my Motorola MPX-200 employes is a lifesaver, but that doesn't help me with my laptops. Also, because I always fly American, and they have power in almost every seat (the only US carrier that does this I think), I also cary my Targus Auto/Air adapter.

However, this is still too much bulk (2 bricks, one for AC and one for flying). Enter the Kensington Universal Auto/Air/AC adapter. This is an all in one brick that can be powered by AC, DC (car adapter and plane adapter) as well as charge some limited accessories. Kensington is actually just reselling the iGo Juice adapter, which is hard to come by these days. I picked up this adapter at CompUSA this past weekend for $99.99 and they gave me a $20 rebate as well bringing the total cost to $79. Cheaper than the comparable Targus Universal adapter which doesn't even power my Apple PowerBook :-(. The Kensington came with tips for my PowerBooks, my Toshiba Tablet and my wife's Vaio. Kudos to them for including so many different tips (each tip is specific to the brand and model of laptop you have).

Looks like the Mac OS has a particullarly serious security vulnerability as reported here. In this case, a malicious DHCP response can grant root access to the hacker. Once you have root access you can pretty much do what you want to the computer.

What does this mean to the average user?

Anyone who can gain access to your network can gain administrator (root) access to your computer and therefore steal your data or launch attacks upon others as soon as you reboot your machine. System administrators and users of affected software should read the section "Workarounds" for immediate actions to protect their machines. It is important to note that WEP security in 802.11b/g (AirPort/AirPort Extreme) wireless networks is generally not sufficient to protect your network from access by an attacker.

http://www.carrel.org/dhcp-vuln.html

Why oh why is something simple so hard.

I hate downloading zip files. Here is a typical scenerio:

• Download file from web site
• File is Ziped and placed in some cryptic temp folder by IE
• I select Open from the download dialog
• Compressed XP folder view opens
• I can't use the files in this folder, I have to extract first blah blah
• By default XP will extract to the same lame temp folder.

I want a program that will simply unzip a file when I double click it on my windows desktop (this is where I typically save downloaded files). I don't want to see what is in the zip archive, I want it to just extract the files in a new folder, and delete the zip archive for good. Then I can install the app, or use the application or whatever. I don't want to use a "wizard" to do such a simple thing.

Once upon a time there was a program called Stuffit Expander, which was free, and did this. However, the company has since ridled this program with a bunch of useless crap, called it Stuffit Standard, and is trying as hard as it can to sell you the standard version with all this useless crap. I don't want or need it, I just want the old simple Stuffit Expander.

Anyway, in the meantime I've found this great free app which almost does what I want. FilZip is donationware (my favorite), and has nifty shell extensions that will do the “extract to here” in a folder named after the zip archive. Also, if you do double click the file, a simple window opens up where you can still do the “extract to here” unlike WinZip which asks you where you want to unzip the file contents. Don't ever ask me this question, I always want to extract to the same location as the zip file.

Maybe some one knows of an app that will do what I want, but for now, I'm happy with FilZip.

I am in New York visiting my parents. My Dad has been asking me about getting a Tablet PC for a while. You see he was a Newton user for about 3 years, and loved that device. Last year I switched him to an iPaq, but he still longs for the handwriting functionality and user experience of his newton (larger form factor, drawing, note taking).

So, we stopped by J & R Computer world and got a Fujitsu LifeBook T300D. We took it home and I loaded it up with Office 2003 professional, OneNote, and used the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard in XP to copy all his settings over from his Vaio. It is really amazing that it took me about 3-4 hours to do all this. Way to long in my opinion. But I'm thankfully that the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard exists, or it would have taken way longer.

Anyway, my Dad started using it today and it was fun to see and witness his reaction to the tablet. First of all he though the whole thing was cool. He seems to enjoy OneNote (note: I didn't even show my Dad Microsoft Journal, and I have no intention of doing so, OneNote is where he should be doing 100% of his inking, I never liked Journal and it only has one redeeming feature, which is the print to Journal feature that lets you annotate a document like paper).

The LifeBook is a nice piece of hardware. Much better than my Toshiba 3500. It's got a Centrino for one thing, but it also doesn't have a 1) crappy graphics card, 2) loud ass hard drive, 3) slow ass bus, 4) dim hard to read screen, 5) loads of crappy OEM software that switches the backlighting and processor/fan speeds every few seconds. So it's a nice improvement! One thing that doesn't work as well is the mechanical rotation functionality. It's very hard to align the screen when you are rotating, and it's hard to snap the screen shut when it's either in portrait mode or notebook mode. This is really the only downside the the hardware.

My Dad really likes Outlook 2003 thought. At first he was like “what's this? it looks funny”. However, a few hours later he said that he loved the new three column view and the new icons. It's amazing what people will notice!

It will take my Dad a long time to figure this tablet thing out. It's too bad that LoneStar hasn't shipped yet because he'll then need to get used to the in place TIP which will be new to him. He was obviously able to figure out how to use the Newton, so I'm not too worried about this. Another reason why the convertible is perfect. It lets my Dad ease into the Tablet functionality, it will be there when he needs it, but for now he still has his mouse and keyboard to use.

If you ever go to Japan, you must have Qoo. It's the best soft drink ever. And it has a really funny story to go along with it (Qoo is not male or female, and Qoo only says “Kooh“). Qoo is made by CocaCola and they even have a web site: http://www.qoo.com.sg/

Here is a snippet from the site (the Qoo story).

Very little is known about the origins of the cute character Qoo (pronounced "koo").

The Qoo drinker is someone who enjoys spending time with her friends, but enjoys daydreaming and living a carefree lifestyle, unburdened by life's little troubles. The Qoo drinker is optimistic, vibrant, and walks with a spring in her step. She is envied by others for her eternally youthful outlook and joie de vivre.

Qoo appears on all Qoo product packaging (300ml cans and 345ml PET bottles), in our cute and quirky TV commercials, even on our desirable Qoo gifts!

Anyone know if they sell Qoo here in the US?

Nice overview of Lonestar (aka Tablet PC 2004). Lonestar rules. I've been running it for a while now and it's made my tablet so useful in pen mode. One of my big gripes about the Tablet PC User Experience so far is that Windows XP is just so mouse/keyboard focused and that entering text via Ink was just excruciatingly painfully. I think over time my usage of pen vs keyboard went from 30% to less than 10% as the novelty factor wore off. However, with Lonestar I can do e-mails in Outlook quite efficiently (as well as browse the web etc).

Lonestar is going to be a boon for the Tablet PC and means that we get some much needed usability enhancements before Longhorn!

Here is a screenshot of something I've been working on... I'm 70% of the way integrating nGallery with DasBlog. Also, check out the search box... coming soon to a dasBlog near you.

I've finished up my NewsGator plug-in for DasBlog. You can download the installer by going to the GotDotNet DasBlog workspace releases page.

Lemme know if you have any suggestions or problems using it.

note: you need to enable the Edit Web Service in DasBlog. This is not enabled by default. You can turn this on from the Configuration page under Service Settings.