Archive | April, 2006

Desert Rose (Adenium Obesum)

Desert Rose (Adenium Obesum), originally uploaded by malyousif.

I got these cuttings as a gift this morning, I’ve gone to 4 garden centres in Bahrain before receiving them and they didn’t have any Adeniums in stock, and they didn’t know when they would be getting any in…

These are going to be my pride and joy if they “take” into my garden (in pots initially). I fell in love with this plant immediately I saw it the first time.. absolutely gorgeous.

(this is my side cabinet in the office by the way)

references, if you’re interested in this plant: 1, 2 and 3.

MUSCATI is a CRIMINAL!

He had this, and threw it away! He just threw away the origin of the revolution called the Internet (ok, I’m emotional and exaggerating, but hey..) while spring cleaning!

Muscati spring DOESN’T EVEN EXIST IN THE GULF WHACHWRONGWIVYOU? You go an throw away A SPECTRUM+?! Man, I’m jumping on a plane right now to come to Muscat to beat you up!

On the other hand if you can retrieve it, I implore you to keep it (or give it to me!) or give it away to a museum or something, it’s such a shame that that gets thrown out. I remember when dad bought us the ZX81 and then the Spectrum, then Spectrum Colour and then the XL.. unfortunately we didn’t keep any, but I can tell you those were the start of my brothers and I journey into technology. What memories. I was the least active one in computers as well!

Google understands Arabic

If you didn’t catch my reference to the availability of Arabic/English and English/Arabic machine translation by Google as I’ve mentioned here, then this is from their blog. I thought I would highlight it again as this is an extremely important development. At last we have a very workable, and completely free translation service rather than the usual Arab companies offered restrictive engines. (hat tip for this one goes to me brother Hani, thanks!)

We recently launched an online version of our system for Arabic-English and English-Arabic. Try it out! Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. Our system works better for some types of text (e.g. news) than for others (e.g. novels) — and you probably should not try to translate poetry … but do stay tuned for more exciting developments.
Google Research

What does violence get you?

Burnt police car by demonstrators in Bahrain
Whoever did this should receive the maximum punishment permissible by law. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to continue to burn tyres, rubbish bins and most certainly there is not one single reason in the world to throw Molotov cocktails at police cars. This is a criminal act, regardless of political motives.

The country has been suffering from a small band of criminals especially on the Budaiya highway and Sanabis going on rampages almost every night. Every road in the area carries the pockmarks of burnt tyres. Innocent people in villages were suffocated by the burning tyres smoke and then tear-gas lobbed at these pricks by the police to try to control a situation.

There are 30 or so people apprehended, some received jail sentences and others are awaiting their fate in the next few days: the first lot demonstrated at the airport, the second and third and probably fourth lots were “demonstrating” to demand the release of those originally, and then subsequently imprisoned. And pray how are they “demonstrating”? Why by resorting to violence, burning things, stopping people from enjoying their evenings or going shopping and then this, burning police cars.

There is no doubt in my mind – taking the coordinated nature of these riots – that they are all coordinated, and some ass hat is “directing” these morons on where, when and how to demonstrate.

Well, I don’t have any sympathy for them and hope they rot in jail for all I care. To hell with them. If quite a number of community leaders have beseeched them to demonstrate peacefully and they didn’t heed the advice… well, let them live with the consequences of their actions. For a very long time.

So we have Salafis supporting bin Laden and being ultra-sectarian against the Shi’a, and we’ve got these twits who are most probably Shi’a on the other side burning and “revolting” against the government. The rest of the people of this country which (I hope) constitute the vast majority who are against both these extremes are caught in the middle, and nothing will release us unless we ALL stand against both of these extremists.

Violence is not the way forward. Especially at this critical juncture of our history.

Ahhhh… Muharraqis

Very pretty aren’t they? Kids fronting a demonstration in Muharraq yesterday in support of “the Iraqi resistance” and the Palestinians. The demonstration was organised by some group calling themselves “National Justice Movement” in cooperation with the Shura Islamic Political Society and National Constitutional Grouping which brought out about 150 people, according to Al-Wasat (arabic).

brainfart! Now for the brainfart >>

The Shura Council’s Secretary-General Abdulrahman Abdulsalam denounced the children who have infiltrated the demonstration without the organisers’ knowledge, wearing bin Laden imprinted T-shirts, re-iterating his condemnation of such behaviour and is not by the organisation parties.

He would say that wouldn’t he? Oh, this is coming from a die-hard salafist who stood for elections in Arad in 2002 and failed (thank goodness) where Othman Sharif easily beat the crap out of him… Sharif of course got through on the backs of Shi’a voters in a predominantly Sunni area because voters there detest Abdulsalam because of his sectarianism, hatred of the Shi’a and being a Wahabi, and even though they objected to the name Othman (long story, maybe another time) they voted for him anyway – sectarian? You bet, on so many fronts!

But let’s stay with the current story: he and his lot want the Americans out of Iraq, and they also strongly denounced the Anglo-American occupation and praised the “resistance” in Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad and Mosul. They conveniently left out Karbalah, Najaf, Basra etc as they are (screw up your face and hold the tip of your nose as you have just smelled a 3-day-old dead rat in a closed space) Shi’a!

And this prick wants us to believe that they didn’t PUSH these children to wear those t-shirts and lift those placards with their god on them without their complete knowledge, encouragement and acceptance?

And this twerp is still in the sensitive position of Secretary-General of the Shura Council? The government actually condone his actions?

What would it take to get these people to realise that this is not the way to do things in this day and age? What would it take to get them to understand that their bin Laden is nothing more than a simple-minded brain-washed criminal? Until when will they stand with a criminal just because he happens to share their religion? And if bin Laden’s own brothers, family and country disowned him, why the hell do we have people in Bahrain not only supporting him, but raising their kids to believe that HE represents the right path?

No, as long as the government and society are not doing anything to educate people through their mosques and papers and clearly and unequivocally condemning bin Laden and his ilk, and as long as they not only support, but encourage sectarian strife, then this is the least of what we expect.

Next step (especially as we’re coming up to elections) is bombs in crowded places…

Anyway, here’s a translation of the full article done very very well, considering it’s just a beta feature of Google’s Arabic to English translation engine.