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Library of Alexandria by kbahey · 2000-05-18 01:32 · Score: 1 · on Boo No More

[If Julius hadn't been such a power hungry jerk consumed by fits of jealousy we might still have the library at Alexandria.]

As a native Alexandrian (the original one, not the fake on in Virginia :-) I am glad to see that some people got the historical facts right.

The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been wrongly attributed to the Arabs.

By the way, the Library is being rebuilt (I think it will open this summer) on the original site, and it is really impressive.

However, some works are sure to be lost forever in that fire! Very sad.

Another sad incident is when the Mongols (under Hulegu) invaded Baghdad (1258 C.E.) and used the books in the library as a make shift bridge for the cavalry to cross the river. It is said that the river was blank (from ink) for days! Too sad to think human heritage permanently lost.

Eyelids IP address! by kbahey · 2000-04-24 16:35 · Score: 1 · on Net Access On The International Trip?

I am not on the net when I blink. How do I give my eyelids an IP address?

Of course there is a solution! Use the Embedded Eye Lid DHCP (EEL-DHCP) . It only supports DHCP, so you cannot run a mail/web server of it, but until we release Full Embedded Eye Lid Server (FEELS) it should do the job.

By the way, what do you do when you sleep? Brain implants is the answer!

Language, Software, Web, and Microsoft! by kbahey · 2000-01-30 02:09 · Score: 4 · on Why Linux Makes Sense for India

The article raises very good points about the issue of software localization / internationalization.

Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface, ...etc.)

Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.

Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.

Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).

In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.

When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.

When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!

Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.

So, where does this leave Linux? There are:

No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!

I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!

I have some links on Arabic on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.

--
Have you checked out Muslim Investor?

I use nomonthlyfees.com - Read more about it! by kbahey · 2000-01-06 08:14 · Score: 1 · on The CIHost Saga Continues

After trying out a few other hosting companies, I bit the bullet and subscribed to NoMonthlyFees.com.

I am with them now for about 2 months, and they seem OK (not exceptionaly great, but good value for money).

They use Red Hat Linux on Intel servers from a larger (and more expensive) hosting company called Alabanza.com

They have a lot of nice features, including free parking of extra domains (I host Baheyeldin.com, as well as 2BITS and Muslim Investor all out of one account on NoMonthlyFees.com. Also, a few subdomains as well, including Saudi Arabia Internet Service Providers and Middle East Internet Statistics, and my own personal site khalid.baheyeldin.com.

They offer you stuff that others charge for, like mailing lists, lots of POP accounts, MySQL, PHP, ...etc. They charge extra for SSH access (there is no Telnet due to security reasons).

I think about it this way: at 180$ for lifetime hosting, this comes up to 15$ a month for a year, which is about what you pay for others or even less. Anything after that is a free bonus for me...

Downsides:

The Apache log sometimes doesn't get written to at all for a whole day. It has been a few weeks since I reported the problem and they haven't solved it (well it was the holiday season in the USA, ...etc., so may be that is it...)
They have a few minutes of downtime every few days for some reason, but I can live with that...

E-Mail me if you have specific questions...