Archive for November, 2009
Stupid Decisions
Posted by Bloggylife in thoughts on November 30, 2009
I was talking to my friend, Oryx, and she mentioned that in Sudan you are not allowed to bring in a DELL laptop because it’s American, but you can bring in a Toshiba.
OK, what’s the first thought that came to your mind …
Do they know that Toshiba laptops run Microsoft Windows!!! Which is an American company!!!
I wonder who comes up with decisions like these without thinking!
What’s the solution do you think, instead of thinking this way, why not put a team together to build an operating system that we “Arabs” might convert to, but wait, wouldn’t that sit atop Intel/AMD architecture, my GOD, would we go that far as to produce our own!!! We can’t even produce a song without fighting 
I sometimes want to pin point what’s wrong with our nation, but never quiet reach a conclusion … there are so many wrongs that one doesn’t know where to begin yeraqi3 shino wala shino …
IT Thoughts
Posted by Bloggylife in thoughts on November 30, 2009
What do you do if your ethernet connection is blocked?
Go wireless
Movie: Julie & Julia
Posted by Bloggylife in entertainment on November 27, 2009
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I watched one of the many movies I have lined up, I wanted something light, so I decided to give Julie and Julia movie a try.
Julia Child and Julie Powell – both of whom wrote memoirs – find their lives intertwined. Though separated by time and space, both women are at loose ends… until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible.
I absolutely love Meryl Streep, her performance in this movie rocks! She’s the type of movie star that always surprises you with her characters and the way she does them, she is one of my favourites of all time.
Julia Child, is an American woman who decided to learn French cooking while in Paris with her husband. she mastered it pretty quick and decides to pursue other possiblities. Mean while in the present, Julie decides to take up a challenge and see it through all the way for a change by cooking all Julia’s recipes in a year and document it all on a blog.
I really enjoyed this movie, Meryl performance was refreshing and worth watching the movie for.
Link: IMDb
Google Translate
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on November 27, 2009
I did write about this before, but I love Google and what they have to offer.
How their services take over our daily vocabulary.
Does a day go by without one saying, “Did you google it?”
Now I’m using a new one, “I’ll wave it to you” when I’m using googlewave 
I notice now, for Google Translate, you can write an Arabic word using English letter and press the spacebar and it’ll automatically convert to Arabic, without the hassle of (alt+shift) between Arabic-English keyboard settings 
If you translate to English, a small speaker icon appears and you can hear the word out and it’s only for the English words so far. I tried French, but the feature is not included.
When typing in the box, the translate is done live on the wire! Isn’t that cool, so you can see the formed words interpreted at each keystroke, it’s kind of fun
The one thing I’m missing is having a spelling checker, I’m not sure why my browser doesn’t do that! I do remember that it’s included within my Chrome or was that Firefox, will check it out laters.
Go Google, keep ‘em good things coming 
My Siblings
Posted by Bloggylife in family on November 27, 2009
Away from my sister and brothers, but they are always on my mind! When I organized my room and now it is more spacious, I thought, “If only my sister would see me now”.
-3ad oohwa daloo3 moo naqis- But sometimes I can’t help but spoil them and then I have the nerve to lecture them “You are spoiled” I try to find a balance. I’m having a beginning of a cold right now and I remember my big brother, when he has the flu, I ask him to stay away, “Your germs are too strong for my body stay away from me”, he’ll have the flu for 3 days and I for 3 weeks! As any loving brother, he’ll literally rush into my room to just sneeze! He’ll throw his used tissue in my room or just come in to get tissue! I’d scream at him, “ya3nee, you don’t have tissue in your room” and he’ll innocently reply: “I want yours, it’s softer”. The only person so far, that I catch the flu from in a blink of an eye.
I dreamt of my youngest brother today, he’s 16 now but I dreamed of him as a kid, I looked at him and thought, I left you a big boy! But I just picked him up like I used to do when he was a baby and carried him around, he had the cutest face smiling at me -3ad oohwa daloo3 moo naqis-
I made a mistake and asked my youngest brothers what they want me to buy them, and told them not to ask for expensive stuff, the emails I got from them, asking for this and that -فتحت على نفسي باب- But sometimes I can’t help but spoil them and then I have the nerve to lecture them “You are spoiled” I try to find a balance.
I’d call my middle brother and say “I know you can’t live without me and ‘shooftee kefaya’ but do you need anything”
He’d just say, “aqoool, cheena temde7een nafsich wayid”
I can’t wait to see them again, though probably, they’ll just want to know what I got for them and then everyone will head out on their way, except habiiibteee my lil sister :* , I just hope they didn’t take over my room
I even know what one of my brothers will say about the below pic, “wAllah theeqa”
PC Infected: kbppsysguard.exe
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on November 25, 2009
My laptop got hit! I was down for most of the day with a trojan that I don’t know how it got installed, I just entered a cooking site, leqafa, and then stuff started popping up!
It disabled my Antivirus and everytime I opened my task manager, it closed it.
I booted in safe mode, F12, and scanned my PC and amazingly, neither AVG nor Ad-aware detected it. I booted back in normal mode and then my anti-spyware detected abnormalities in (…/AppData/Local/…) directory, so I decided to just delete it manually, but couldn’t do that while the malicious software was running, I couldn’t kill the process, thus I was not able to delete the executable.
I booted back to safe mode, it was located under (…/AppData/Local/ywuvh/kbppsysguard.exe) and deleted it, I deleted everything under Temp folder, I then searched my registry for entries (kbppsysguard) and deleted two. I didn’t empty my recycle bin, I’ll tell you why in a minute.
I restarted my PC and customized my scan settings and included the recycle bin and now it detected it! Weird!!
Anyway it took me almost all day to sort this out but thank GOD I managed to remove that silly infection.
I wasn’t able to browse and that seems weird because I successfully authenticated to the university network and got a public IP, but couldn’t browse … think what could be the problem ….
Checked my proxy settings on all of my browsers and it was configured to local host (127.0.0.1)! Removed that and happily browsing
Automating: My Way
Posted by Bloggylife in personal on November 25, 2009
When I’m asked to do a task or solve a problem, I like to do two main things if I can, generalize the solution and automate the process.
When automating, it’s not about being lazy, but being efficient ;) It’s not complicated and I don’t invest much. If I have a program that outputs a file, I’d run another program to read the output and organize it the way I want, I don’t edit the main program. If I have to run this main program several times with different parameters. I’d generate first different parameters files, create a simple batch file with simple DOS commands, that pass the parameters when running the main program, then run my program that takes the necessary information that I want and then renames the output files.
I’d leave it to run overnight because it takes time, and if you are lucky, you won’t face stupid things, like Vista updates being installed and the computer automatically restarting killing your run! Thank GOD in my case, all my runs were done
Irony Thoughts
Posted by Bloggylife in UK on November 24, 2009
In the class a group out of 11 groups was to present, they will be picked randomly. The instructor heads to me because that day I was sitting on the edge! And he announces, “She’ll pick the group, so if you want to blame someone blame her!”
I pick out a paper and open it and announce: “Group 1″
They were a group of 10 guys. Man, if they decide to beat me up I have no chance!
Two weeks after, I know another group has to present today, so I sit in the middle! I don’t want to withdraw again and be a target of another group. The instructor goes to a guy in the front and the guy picks a group.
“Group 11″!!
That’s my group and guess who picked it, a guy from group 1. I guess now we are even
This marks my first presentation
I !<3 Vista
Posted by Bloggylife in thoughts on November 23, 2009
Vista with its big butt taking up all my hardware space! It can’t seem to find big enough space to sit down quietly, it’s restless, noisy, unpredictable, all in all, it’s trouble and not worth it at all!!!
My laptop was for Internet surfing, entertainment and minor stuff. Now that I’m extensively using it, I’ve developed a Vista headache, things freeze up and stop responding! Even their damn MS office!!!
So why don’t I throw its sorry ass out, well because I don’t trust the next one coming in
Not in terms how big the other one butt is Nope, compatibility issues. And I don’t care if someone says what runs on Vista runs on Win7, because the later is just a “tarqeee3″ of the former, with my luck of things going wrong, even in their simplest form, they do! And I’m not in a place right now to handle “things” going wrong.
I got a Kingston RAM module off amazon.co.uk and now my RAM is upto 3GB and it seems that things are running more smoothly. I might upgrade to Win7 after my course ends. If I have any incompatibility issues with any of my important applications running, I’ll reformat back to Vista-Hell You can see the irony here, can’t you
Just Thoughts
Posted by Bloggylife in thoughts on November 23, 2009
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