Thought I should share this with you. I guess till this day, I’ve always enjoyed watching anime cartoons that deals with robots and how some of them are human-friendly? and some that are evil that try to take over the world.

Anyway, finally, the life-sized Gundam robot in Tokyo has been completed and activated. And it is impressive, I will definitely pay a visit when I am in Tokyo. Here it is:

Gundam life-sized

And here is a video of the first episode of Gundam if you might be interested:

This reminds me, I am excited for the new transforms movie that is coming out this month!

At the time I am posting this blog, I have a slight belief that the current riots in Iran will not fade away any time soon and it will cause instability in Ahmadinejad’s governance. Currently, the government is trying to disband the riots and the communication among young people through blocking internet social sites (i.e facebook) as as well as disconnecting all cell networks.

If we look into the events that occurred during the election in more details, we will notice that it started with unfairness and abuse of power by Ahamdinejad to limit his opponents presence on the Internet as well as on TV. Here is a good blog post titled “Stealing the Iranian election” by Juan Cole explaining, with alleged evidence, how this election was nothing but more of a playout by the current gov’t and the supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Anyway, here is a video that gives insight of how this election was full of unfairness and corruption:

My team has done an impressive work in producing a video explaining what twitter is to the Arab world in “Arabic”, here it is:

Also, they have produced another one about blogs, which I will post it sometime later this week.

Enjoy!

As the world turns to China for being the least affected with financial crisis and as the next promising super-power country, China has decided to tightens its Internet censorship by forcing all new computers to be installed with its new firewall software. And this is the country that was promiting upcoming Internet freedom before and during the Beijing olympics.

Basically, the firewall application that is required on all new PCs, has the ability to block users from surfing prohibited websites (i.e pornography). But not just that, it all blocks any search a user is trying to make based on key political words or phrases. A user with many attempts to search for such prohibited words will be subject to imprisonment or fine.

The experts who saw the code for the application have noted that prohibited political keywords is much more than actual pornography sites. However, the chinese authorities are promoting this application as “healthy development of the Internet” and “effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread”.

Now here is something interesting, BBC and research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society have reported that this application has many security vulnerabilities that may case the PC to be easily hacked or spammed with spyware. I guess the chinese gov’t could careless about those issues as long as it can benefit out of the outcome.

Obama’s speech in Egypt was definitely a spectacular historic event. Various reactions has came out of his speech, and most prominent ones were:
- that many Arabs saying they can read between lines and they won’t bluffed (Maybe trying to interpret the speech with pessimistic/extremist perspective is Arabs cause of downfall?)
- Some Arabs were cheerful cause he was able to remind Arabs of their history and what Al Qaeda actions are “haram”
- And there if is FOX news, which has totally bashed Obama for buying in to extremism, that he disingenuous, and that he threw the intel community under the bus (?!?).

Well, here is a funny video of John Stewart ripping FOX news out for being “extremists”…

Link

Dries just blogged about one of my favorite music video out there, and I thought I should share it as well.

Here it is:

Well, let me quote what Dries said about this video in his blog post:

This video will bring a smile on your face.

It is a cover of “Stand by me” recorded by completely unknown artists all around the world. It started with base tracks by a street musician called Roger Ridley. These tracks were then taken all over the world where other street artists added vocals and new instruments to it. All done with a simple laptop, some headphones and some microphones. They never met.

This song marked the start of what would become a global collaborative music movement. Today, everyone can participate by joining Playing for Change. To date, seven episodes have been recorded and people are hosting screenings, musicians are holding benefit concerts of every size, fans are spreading the message. I wish I could play music (I can’t) but maybe it will inspire some of you to join.

Sounds familiar? I thought so too …

Now, don’t we all love Drupal?!

My $45/monthly VPS hosting with Godaddy is crap. I was reminded by someone on twitter, never met before, complaining about how slow my site is. And there I decided to screw it and just get myself a free account on wordpress.com. Utilizing CNAME functionality that wordpress.com offers, I’ve paid $10.00/annual fee to have domain “mrayyan.com” reflect my wordpress.com account.

After importing and everything, it works great! TIme has come to get rid of godaddy finally.

Watch and enjoy!

Found this cool web application called Wordle.net that visualizes any data that you feed it, including RSS feed, your delicious, or even raw text.

Thought you might be interested, here is the tagcloud of my blog posts:

The new release of Windows 7 operating system will have 7 versions. This will definitely confuse the hell out of consumers (what works best), IT team (what to patch and how), and Retailers (how to sale pitch all 7 versions).

Despite the fact that Windows 7 might be the best OS that will come out of Microsoft, with this attitude ~ I don’t see it going anywhere.