Omar Abdel-Wahab

Omar's blog

Internet is back!

After 12 days of half dead connection, long offline nights, below 20KBs/s download speeds over any DSL connection, almost no YouTube, hardly reading e-mails, reaching Google in above 690ms, Internet is finally back!

Second cable cut in a year

For the second time in a year, FlagTel cable that connects Egypt with Internet was cut near Italy.

After the black January 23rd, December 19 is another offline day in Egypt thanks to the Egyptian government paying no attention to what happened earlier this year.

Installing and Configuring Solr on Debian GNU/Linux

After installing and playing around with Solr on my Gentoo box, I had to deploy the same stuff on Debian Lenny/sid.

The difference between the two distros wasn't huge but it worth mentioning that Tomcat 6 didn't hit Debian's experimental until the moment I am typing this.

The installation of Tomcat 5.5 and Solr 1.2 from APT is as easy as:

Synaptics Touchpad and X configuration on Gentoo

I use two mice on my Gentoo box due to few good reasons. Trying to get them to work all the time took some time though I am not sure if that's because I am too stupid to make them work together.

Anyways, here's what worked for me:

~ # less /proc/bus/input/devices

Find the line that says "Handlers" below your Synaptics and the other mouse.

The Most Unusable Design in History of Mankind: Filgoal.com

Being the football fan that I am, following like 7 football championship, it's very important to have some website where I can read follow-ups, watch summaries and goals, read few articles, etc. So I am a big fan. I was trying to find a decent football website in the Arab area, since I need to read more about our local championships.

Celebrating 2GBs of RAM

Argon, my first and last (so far) machine, has been suffering shortage of RAM due to the immense Java and Apache applications running simultaneously in addition to the insanely greedy Firefox.

Today I bought Argon a 2GBs memory module running at 667MHz and I intend to double it very soon. I hope this small boost will whet Argon's appetite for the time being.

argon ~ # free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2024        711       1312          0        114        247
-/+ buffers/cache:        350       1674
Swap:         2925          0       2925