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Don’t forget to be part of Firefox’s Download Day!

Mark your calendar, wrap a ribbon around your finger or write a little sticky yellow note. Download Day will start on June 17, 2008.

If you prefer to no longer receive emails from Mozilla concerning Download Day, you may unsubscribe here

The sender of this email is Mozilla Corporation, 1981 Landings Drive, Bldg. K, Mountain View, CA 94043-0801.”

Mark you calendar, iPhone, HTC, sticky notes, or any other way. Just don’t miss it :). Next Tuesday

Popularity: 16% [?]

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The Ministry of Communications (MOC) is the central authority in Kuwait for internet and phone, which includes ISPs, phone lines, and mobile operators. Such a big responsibility that can take the country both ways. And unfortunately, the way they’re doing it can only take us backward I am afraid. MOC is known to be trying to commercialize everything, that they are banning the VoIP as an evil technology, and wants us instead to stick to regular international calls, that cost around $20 for 10 minutes (including the dialing and waiting time!), and I’ve tried some international call cards that don’t even work.

Below is a quick summit of things MOC is doing, and not doing!:

• MOC Taking on VoIP: Purely because it’s affecting the international calls income as they state it. The only way to allow it is if ISPs arrange for a solution on commission basis, i.e., they control the price, and take part of the money! I can only guess how competitive that can be.
• After years and years of hearing about the Fiber Optics. It’s being layed down, installed, soon we will have it. News last year spread fast about activating and giving Fiber Optics accounts for users in South Surra. This didn’t even last for 2 days before MOC stopped giving new accounts. I didn’t follow up really what happened then, but some people tell me know the ministry stopped installing new fibers for one reason or another.
• Audit Bureau blows up 140 million KD  ($526.5 m) of pending money collections from the MOC side. So if you’re so much after our VoIP money, why didn’t you do something about this? Ohh, probably this is all because of us geeks. MOC was busy fighting VoIP, bloggers, and other sort of evil stuff that they forgot about their 140 million KDs! But did they stand still when they heard the news?
• MOC started disconnecting phone lines without any prior notice, with the excuse of system failure or miscommunication between departments in the ministry of COMMUNICATIONS! The same news story tells how even people who paid their bills are not getting the service back yet! So you’re ready to disconnect now and collect the bills, but you don’t know how to turn it back on?
• MOC is taking legal action now to recover the slept over 140 million KDs.

God bless MOC.

Popularity: 16% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Chika was so kind with me when she finally found out I am the last one untagged. The Last Man Standing. Not that I like it, and I can’t promise you will like it as well. Here we go:

The Rules:

1. Link the person(s) who tagged you.
2. Mention the rules on your blog.
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them.
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

The Quirks:

1. Socially, I am a disaster. Unlike many Kuwaities, and I can attribute part of that for being such a geek. I go to Diwaniyas, yes, once every 3 months or more. I usually go out in groups of 2, including me. You get the idea.
2. Being a programmer, I can’t use IDEs for programming. For years, I stuck to the wonderful, fast, bugs free Notepad. I upgraded then to rich editors, such as Notepad++ and now amazing TextMate. It’s actually the killer app made me want Mac in the first place.
3. I am a natural disaster in graphics. No matter how hard I try, I just don’t have it. My last attempt was end of Jan for my kid birthday cake picture. You don’t wanna see the results.
4. When typing, every 10th click is the Ctrl+S button. It’s just natural.
5. I cannot focus on one thing for a long time. I have to go walk around, think things over in my head, just like Bojacob :).
6. Ketchup and Mayonnaise is a must for many type of meals, I even add Mayonnaise to Macaroni sometimes. If Mayonnaise is not there, Hommos can take it’s place, but not Ketchup alone. It’s a sin!

Since there is no one else untagged, says a lot about my popularity, I am tagging the one person I know only, MrMMM. Even though he’s technically, blogospherically dead. I’m still tagging him.

UPDATE: I tagged another one. Seems you have to search hard to find them. They’re like pearls. Dr Mahbob is tagged.

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Just like Yahoo started sometime back, Google is in co-operation with AVG scanning their search results for malware sites.

And while this is good in concept, I found the scan to take way too long, that I don’t think people will generally wait to see the result. An option to turn that off was not spotted. This could be troublesome for people with slow connection. Luckily, Google is not mad at my blog, but they better be careful. They don’t wanna make Yahoo’s mistake, or some say trick ;).

Popularity: 23% [?]

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People who know me must know how much I adore animated movies, and every year I keep waiting for Pixar to strike me with another masterpiece. Wall-E is what I’ve been looking for since last year, and it’s coming this end of June. Looking at the release dates on IMDB however, Kuwait is still not listed!.

This is sometimes incomplete I know. But I look at Cinescape coming soon movies and I still can’t see it! I also don’t recall seeing any poster about it there. Could they possibly be missing it? Kung Fu Panda is coming one week after the US release, and it’s not a big of anticipated as Wall-E at all. Any body has some idea?

Popularity: 26% [?]

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With the release of popular open source Firefox 3 approaching, Firefox have launched a huge ambitious campaign to make it to the Guinness World Record of software downloads in one day, the release day. Join the campaign, and help Firefox make history if you like here. See how the current map overlay is. Kuwait so far has 152 pledges. Yeah that’s right. 152 is my number, which means there are 151 geeks in Kuwait who have beat me to it. Thanks to being so lazy and busy to check the news last week. Our number though is not bad, compared 8442 in China!, 6889 in India. The majority in 80,000+ comes from the US, and surprisingly to me, Brazil has 36,000+!

With no such previous Guinness World record already registered, Firefox would make it into the world record anyway. It’s just a matter of by how much, and Firefox is aiming to beat it’s own 1.6 million downloads for Firefox 2. Pretty smart move I say, Good luck. I’m for it. FTW!

Popularity: 21% [?]

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