Mahmood's Den

Here’s a blog that you should visit. Lorenzo tends the plants at the Open University’s KMI labs in England. But when he’s not doing that, he’s climbing mountains! and he’s off now to climb Everest to celebrate and commemmorate the 50th anniversary of Everest’s conquest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The difference is that he’s providing an “audio blog” rather than the low tech one you’re reading now! Here I am extremely happy that I’ve at last set up a web diary, albiet as part of the testing that I’m putting Xaraya to, but still just low tech text. I wonder if I could configure Xaraya to do video blogs! A bit ambitious considering that I’m still struggling with the Helix Basic Server that I used to stream my videos!

Come to think of it, I’ve been really blogging since 1986 when I started one of the first BBS (bulleting board service) in the Arabian Gulf. Called appropriately “Stray Cats BBS”, but that’s another story!

back to work now… just wanted to tell everyone about this guy that I really admire for what he’s doing.

A friend of mine, an artist, has written to me decrying the state of visual and auditory art in the Arab world in general and Bahrain in particular, complaining of essentially the bancruptsy of the traditional broadcast institutions as well as so-called “image makers”, the advertising agencies and post-production houses in the area, that he finds it hard to compete in the market and maintain his self-set rules and quality standards, thus even harder to purchase systems that I sell – although he is the first to ascertain that he is infatuated with the equipment that I sell – not just because of the name and resepect they engender in the market (Avid Technology specifically), but he believes that these equipment can give him a competitive edge by giving him time lost in the trivialties of technical failures.

Here is my response:
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couldn’t resist posting this one…got it from my friend Nabil, so blame him!

A Scotsman, an Italian, and an Irishman are in a bar. They are having a good time and all agree that the bar is a nice place.

Then the Scotsman says, “Aye, this is a nice bar, but where I come from, back in Glasgee, there’s a better one. At MacDougal’s, ye buy a drink, ye buy another drink, and MacDougal himself will buy yir third drink!”

The others agree that sounds like a good place.

Then the Italian says, “Yeah, dat’s a nice bar, but where I come from, dere’s a better one. In Roma, dere’s dis place, Vincenzo’s. At Vincenzo’s,you buy a drink, Vincenzo buys you a drink. You buy anudda drink, Vincenzo buys you anudda drink.”

Everyone agrees that sounds like a great bar.

Then the Irishman says, “You tink dat’s great? Where Oi come from in Dublin,dere’s dis place called Morphy’s. At Morphy’s, dey boy you your forst drink, dey boy you your second drink, den dey boy you your tird, fort and fit drink, until you are drunk, and den, after all dat, dey take you in deback and get you laid!”

“Wow!” say the other two. “That’s fantastic! Did that actually happen to you?”

“No,” says the Irish guy, “but it happened to me sister!”

Gnasher was in a pretty bad way over the last couple of days poor thing. Because I showered him in the weekend, he apparently didn’t dry enough to go back in the house with the air conditioning on.. and typical of me I blamed Frances for it! blaming the tick medicine she’s put on him after being showered.

The vet assured us that it is most probably him going in the house while he was still wet, although I towel him dry twice!

There you have it, the most exciting thing to happen to me lately… shower the dog, get him sick, then take him to the vet this morning. I hope the rest of the day and tomorrow are going to be more interesting!

rounding out the kids in the family to an even dozen! Maha corrected my counting this morning reading the posts over at http://alyousif.tv – my family site (discontinued).

I’ve been so busy at the office over the last 3 days that I didn’t have another chance to go visit my new nephew, but I’m sure he’ll understand…

I applied the (unreleased) Xaraya 0.901beta to the site and poof! The site dissapeared!

And of course only after this happens, did I look at the messages gathering in my inbox that said quite clearly that there are still some issues with the unreleased package on sourceforge… ah well, you know what they say: to every cloud there’s a silver lining!

I deleted everything, dropped the database, and installed the very latest “pull” direct from the repository, restored only the categories and articles tables, tinckered some more with the settings etc, and now finally we’re back online….

I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure… I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure… I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure… I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure… I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure… I promise (once again!) that I’ll try the updates on a test site first, and then apply them to live sites only when I’m sure…

but then, where the hell fun in that?

hehehe
good night!

Hussain… is the name chosen for twit number 13. And he weighed in at 3.360kgs.

Abeer just delivered a baby boy at 11:25 and all went well. Congrats to Alaa and Abeer on the latest addition. The name has not been set yet but I’ll let you know immediately I know.

When it’s the last item in the news broadcasts, not when Bush says it’s over!

The main thing on the news now is of course SARS. So like Afghanistan, Iraq is now is on the back burner. Forget about the war wounded, the children, the old people. Forget about the Geneva convension that stipulates that the agressor is responisble for the security of the country, forget about the most powerful nations on earth providing the basic necessities of life to a crippled country and people, by the sanctions, by that criminal Saddam and his cronies, forget about the hundreds of life lost in Iraq and the thousands more… it will now just fade with history.
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Thank Marcel van der Boom for that from a message he put up on the Xaraya public Knowledgebase news list outlining how a blog is set up using Xaraya, MozBlog and some very simple tweaking of Xaraya (no, no code was hurt while doing this procedure, just a few simple mouse clicks! – try that with PostNuke! or any other cms!)
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Hello and welcome to my site. Historically, Mahmood’s Den was the first site in the world to adopt the then new standard in content management systems, PostNuke. Now I’m proud to be once again one of the first active sites to adopt Xaraya, the content management system designed by a very dedicated group who released it in the public domain under the terms of the GPL license for the whole world to benefit.

this is a comment I entered at http://www.dinerminor.com and I thought I would reproduce it here. I hope John doesn’t mind!

I’m sure a lot of people join me in congratulating Team Xaraya on the release of the first public beta of Xaraya, but why should they?

Is it just a new toy to play with? Another piece of code to complain about? Another piece of software that forces you to become a software developer, engineer, visionary just to publish the articles that you want to publish the way you want them published? In short, I see Xaraya as the natural next step in content management platforms. Unlike its predecessors, it is deep, intuitive, and full featured.

No longer does the publisher (rather than the webmaster) has to be completely familar with several technologies. With simple configuration options available in Xaraya, one finally could remove oneself from worrying about technicalities and concentrate on publishing content… which incedentally what we all got into this game for in the first place.

Just set up Xaraya how you want it once, and then just worry about your content, content, content and never worry about if a permission is actually going to work consistantly, or if a module is going to be incompatible with the core!

Thank you Team Xaraya for this release, and we look forward to 1. I think if we just stop here, at 0.9 this is a major milestone as it answers most if not all of the needs of those frustrated *nuke webmasters!

mahmood

http://mahmood.tv