IraqiGeek’s Blog

Going through my day

C. S. Lewis once said:

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

This is a very accurate description of how I feel as I go through my day.

Its a good day today

Today, is a very, very, very good day. In fact, its the best day I had in a very long time.

First “non-staff” flight for the A380

This Friday morning, the Airbus A380 made its first “non-staff” flight from Toulouse in southern France with about 200 journalists and media members on board as passengers, and some 48 tonnes of fuel for the one hour tour.

Yesterday, I watched CNN’s Business Traveler with Richard Quest as he flew on board this awesome superjumbo.

According to Richard, the plane was fitted in a 3-class configuration which enabled the plane to carry “only 519 passengers”!!! This is already more than what the venerable Boeing 747-400 “jumbo jet” can carry. Considering that the A380 is certified to carry 800 passengers when fitted entirely with economy class seats, the plane on Friday had only 65% of its seats capacity and 25% of its passenger.

Again, according to Richard, the plane was very quiet. One could barely hear the engine noise in the mics during the show, which while not an accurate measure of noise, is somewhat of a statement to how quiet the plane is.

I look forward to seeing this majestic monster enter service later this year. Heck, I’m even thinking of going on to Singapore for a weekend (Singapore Airlines the launch partner for the A380) just to see how it feels to be on board such a huge monster of a plane on a long haul trip.

The longest day in my life

Today, is going to be one of the longest, if not the longest ever, day in my life.

Abbas Chechan Iraqi Poetry

A very touching poem about Iraq, the Iraqi people, their suffering, and their future.

Wonder when, if ever, we will be able to call Baghdad home again…

Thanks to Yaarub for the heads up. Miss you guys…

Blog Upgrade

After delaying this for more months than I care to count, today I finally upgraded my blog’s WordPress Installation. Now I am running the latest WordPress 2.1, up from 1.5.2. Some changes under the skin include moving from Anders Holte Nielsen’s Counterize Plugin to Steffen Forkmann’s Counterize II for statistics, and installing Akismet for comment spam filtering.

Proxy upgrade

Last Friday, whiteFyre released the long awaited version 0.5 for his PHProxy script. As I noted in a previous post, I spent some time over the weekend adding logging and filtering capabilities to the new release. Today, after re-styling whiteFyre’s script and adding the code for Google’s AdSense, the new version is available at the same old home for my proxy at http://proxy.iraqigeek.com.

As usual, I will not hesitate to ban any users who try to surf pornographic or gambling websites. So remember: If you abuse it, you loose it!

Modded PHProxy 0.5b2

Ok, after about a year and a half of waiting, whiteFyre finally released a much awaited update to his popular PHProxy script. It was more like a major rewrite than an upgrade, but it fixed quite a few issues that PHProxy 0.4 suffered from.

However, the new version still lacked descent filtering capabilities, and had no logging capabilities, which is vital to catch offending users and keep the filtering capabilities up-to-date. So, I took it to myself to add those two functions during the past two days, though I’m not much of a PHP programmer.

Without further ado, here is my modified logging and filtering version of PHProxy.

iPhone: Another proprietary device from Apple

Four days ago, I commented on the iPhone announcement and had some doubts about what Apple’s plans were about allowing third party developers to write applications for the iPhone.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long to answer that one. It looks like the iPhone will indeed be a closed environment. As iTWire reported yesterday quoting his Jobbiness from an article in The New York Times saying “We define everything that is on the phone,” and “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.” Is there anything more they need to say?

Those statements are fundamentally fundamentally wrong. First, Mr. Jobs seems to think that developers aren’t capable, not on their own, to write good applications for the iPhone. Second, somehow he thinks he has the right to control what the users of the iPhone can and can’t run on their devices. And third, he seems to think those users aren’t smart enough to distinguish between good and crappy applications written for their devices.

In any case, Apple has no right to control what users can and can’t run on their devices. Once a user has paid for a device, any device, he/she owns this device and should be able to run anything they see fit on it, and it doesn’t matter if what the user wants to run happens to be a crappy application that will somehow ruin the device. Whether his Jobbiness likes it or not, people have the right to be stupid.

For me, this closed environment around the iPhone simply ruins the deal for me. When I buy an electronic device, I want to be able to run anything I see fit on it, without regard to how that may affect the operation of my device, cause its MY device.

Osteomoronosis

The other evening, out of my frustration with most of the people who would go through heaps to reach a forum or chatroom only to ask some really stupid question, I wanted to come up with something that described their cases. After a few minutes, and a few Google queries, I found a new disease that fit the illness those people suffered from.

So, without further ado, I give the world:

Osteomoronosis: a chronic disease in which stupidity has deeply infiltrated the patient’s body down to the bone.

OR

Osteomoronosis: a chronic disease where the bone marrow of the patient degenerates into idiotic matter.

Patients suffering from this disease are susceptible to a high mortality rate due to the stupid actions they usually commit.