Syria Planet, the community site for Syrian bloggers, is now online, it features an aggregator of member blogs (Syrian or about Syria), and forums for arranging activities and meetings, and discussing what's going on in Syria and the blogosphere, among the other things.

While waiting for ADSL to be enabled in my area, which (I've been told) will happen soon, I did some tinkering with my Gentoo Linux workstation to make it more protected against remote attacks, and I thought of compiling a list of security measures against the dangers of full-time Internet connection. Obviously the list is not complete, but it has tips that can surely help.

Some people here have a habit of blaming the US government for almost everything bad that happens to the Arab or Islamic worlds, for them America is the root of all evil, and they manage to create a conspiracy theory involving the US around every single event they don't like, while I blame clerics and media for this, I won't discuss the details, instead I'll talk about an example in which a conspiracy theory that exceeds logic still manages to find its way here.

I haven't blogged in a while, sometimes I was busy with work or uni, other times I didn't feel like posting, I have a long list of things to blog about, will start with what I think is an interesting topic later tonight, this post is going to be a quick round up of the last two weeks.

I got a digital camera, it's a Sony CyberShot S600, I was looking for a point-and-shoot digital camera that supports Linux, I'm very new to photography so I didn't want anything fancy with manual controls or anything, setting everything to auto is more than enough for me.

I did further improvements to the site's theme, first I switched from fixed-width to a fluid layout, the main reason is making use of more screen space for posting images (more on this in the next post), I also changed a couple of colors and created a new favicon.

It's the Syrian Telecom who usually bans websites here, but this time it's the other way around, Slashdot has just banned a Syrian ISP's proxy server (SCS-NET), I'm getting the following when trying to browse Slashdot through SCS-NET:

Tomorrow I will apply for a visa at the Belgian embassy, the reason is attending FOSDEM (an Open Source developers meeting), I was invited by Mozilla Foundation, which generously offered to cover flight expenses, the meeting has a very interesting schedule, there will be a Mozilla developers room with an interesting schedule as well.

While going through the Blogosphere reading posts on both sides of the crisis, I noticed that some sites have buttons or banners to show support for either side, a quick glance through No4Denmark.com and SupportDenmark.com clearly showed why the Islamic world is failing to explain its point of view to the west.

The other day I happened to watch TV, it was a talkshow on bluetooth security from a user point of view, viewers could call in and ask questions or comment on the topic, someone called and started to ramble on the "ethical dangers" of bluetooth, then and out of a sudden, he moved to talk about the cartoons thing, it started with something like (translated from Arabic): "And just like how bluetooth is dangerous, so are the cartoons that offended millions of Muslims everywhere, Everyone boycott Danish products! ...", at that point I was like: enough already! What on earth does this topic has to do with basic bluetooth security? The whole cartoons thing has turned into a hysteria out of control.

We, a group of Syrian bloggers, have created a planet that gathers Syrian blog feeds, it's still in the initial stages, check it out at planet.syriamirror.net.

Flatforum has been updated to be compatible with Drupal 4.7 and PHP 5, for those interested, please test the CVS package, and report any remaining issues.

Here is a quick tip for Firefox users under Linux, if you find loading the current text in clipboard as a URL when middle-clicking on the current page annoying, then go to: about:config, search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL and set it to false.

I have used XMMS for my music playing needs since my first days with Linux, it looked and acted like Winamp, and back then this was more than enough for me, years passed, XMMS hardly improved, but I kept using it, recently I started looking for alternatives, although XMMS was doing its job, I thought there might be new features in the world of Linux music players that I was missing.

Number of consecutive exclamation or question marks is inversely proportional to poster's intelligence.

Has this been said before? I googled around to find out, this page is as close as I could get, if not, I declare it a new Internet law.

Here are some little time wasters I play often, the first two are based on popular online services, "Guess-the-google" is based on Google image search, and "memry" is based on flickr, warning: both are very addicting!

HEAD version of BiDi theme has undergone some changes, it doesn't require core patching any more for bidi functionality, and can be installed by copying its files like any other theme, these updates are compatible with Drupal 4.6, if interested, please test and report issues, if all is well, the 4.6 version will be updated soon.

I've jumped into the bandwagon and registered a del.icio.us account, there isn't much there yet, but the list will grow over time.

I also enabled aggregator, and added del.icio.us bookmarks feed.

This story happened many months ago, I don't remember the exact date, but I still remember the details, a "403 forbidden" error page reminded me of it today, here it goes:

If you went through the Syrian hardware market shopping for an LCD monitor like I did several weeks ago, you will realize that options are really limited, unlike other computer parts (CPUs or mainboards). Available LCD models usually lack DVI input, are not a well-known brand, and most of the time warranty conditions aren't clear on what they cover, I think it's because the average buyer can't tell the difference between VGA or DVI, or doesn't know what response time is, and as a result there is no market for high quality (but slightly more expensive) LCDs.

In irc://freenode/#drupal:

Jan 18 13:42:36 <chx> ayman: thanks for the great new flatforum
Jan 18 13:42:43 <chx> ayman: it's real nice
Jan 18 13:43:02 <chx> ayman: now, here's something for you: Dries asked me to enroll flatforum into core.

I have finally replaced the aging 17" CRT monitor connected to my workstation with a shiny new 17" LCD!

It's a Philips 170X6FB, while shopping around I kept in mind that I wanted:

Today I committed another contribution to Drupal CVS, a rewrite of flatforum, which is a template/module that makes Drupal forums look and act like other popular forum packages, the module was outdated, with the help of the original author (chx), I took the project over, did the rewrite and released a package for Drupal 4.6.

The other day I was browsing an extremely popular Syrian website, when I found a very serious vulnerability in its code, I wasn't looking for exploits or anything, but a page URL was screaming "exploit me!", I emailed the site admins notifying them, with their MySQL password and a link that opens the site control panel without any form of authentication as proofs, the problem was fixed later, I won't reveal the identity of the site or the details of the exploit for obvious reasons, but I'll explain the problem in general.

I don't know how I managed to survive for years without some sort of version control for my projects, first I used to manually make backup copies of my project folder in case I wanted to revert back or compare revisions, later I relied on Eclipse for a very basic version control system, Eclipse stores copies of project files after every save, and lets you compare revisions. Next, I decided to write a script that made backup copies of my projects folder, and archived them according to date/time.

After migrating the site to Drupal around 2 months ago, I've settled on Blix as a theme for my site, I did some modifications here and there to give the site a somehow unique look.

Today I downloaded an Arabic PDF file I wanted to read, but for some reason, neither xpdf nor gpdf (Linux PDF readers) could display characters correctly, the document was created using "Acrobat Distiller 6.0 (Windows)" as its properties page said, perhaps this was the reason, anyway, the first thought I had to solve the problem was using Google (as it has the ability to display cached PDF files as HTML), unfortunately the file wasn't cached by Google, so I had to look for another way, I searched for an online PDF-to-HTML converter, but all results were down, not free, or useless for some other reason.

Yesterday I made my first commit to Drupal contributors CVS!

My first contribution is a BiDi theme simply called BiDi, from its README:

Arabeyes.org proudly announces the availability of the Arabic version of Firefox 1.5, the Arabic version was released simultaneously along with English, and it is officially available at Mozilla.com.