After a long time of comparing Notebooks and Netbooks, I decided to buy a MacBook from Apple.

I must say it feels a lot comfortable than GNOME, as stylish as KDE, much stable than Ubuntu and a heart full of BSD.

I quickly installed most of the stuff I needed for my daily stuff, migrated my stuff from my last Linux laptop, got few things tweaked here and there and everything was as good as I wanted it.

Another happy mac user.

I spent this week discovering new services provided by Nokia for their customers. I must say that Nokia is investing a lot in the segment.

The story began when I purchased a Etisalat Line back in early 2008. Etisalat managed to lose a client in 14 days for two times in a row.
Let's see how they managed to do this brilliant work.

I have recently purchased a 3.5G USB modem from the Egyptian Mobile Broadband provider, Etisalat.

So far I have tried all packages provided by Etisalat Egypt (384Kb and 3.6Mb) and I must say they're 100% working under Linux exactly as expected.

Using NetworkManager 0.7 which is currently available in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, Gentoo and Debian Experimental, I managed to use the USB modem with few clicks under both KDE and GNOME.
Etisalat ships with the modem a windows application to send SMS and browse SMS directory on the SIM. KMobileTools (KDE) managed to do the same job in a perfect way and I think gnome-phone-manager or gnokii can do exactly the same job.

After reading this weird yet true post I decided that I will fart and do another fart app.

What happened in this world?

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!

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.

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:

# apt-get install solr-tomcat5.5

The problem for me is: Tomcat 5.5 is way old and caused me few issues with relatively bug updates to Solr. So I wanted to install Tomcat 6 which will be done with these steps:

# cd
# apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
# wget http://apache.osuosl.org/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.18/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.1...
# tar zxf apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz

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.

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.