I have read the news about a new threat to the Windows platform, I thought I might as well fire up my Dell and update the OS.

I turned the thing on, updated my antivirus first, I then went through the grueling process of updating Windows.

The web-page told me that there are 14 critical security updates I had to make to plug some holes in the OS.

I looked at the total size, it showed me that it was only 20Mb, now that shouldn’t be so bad.

I was wrong, those 20 megs took me 3 hours to download, although my connection was fast enough, the process of checking every other minute with Microsoft’s servers was idiotic.

After reaching the 14th and last patch, it took the system forever to move a bit. Then the page told me that something happened that prevented me from finishing the process and that I should start all over again.

I was dumbfounded, all over?!

I rechecked and surely I had to start downloading the 14 patches all over again.

This is but one aspect of the lovely Windows environment, my question would be, why would people tolerate this?

I know I won’t any more, I have that Dell machine for one purpose only, that’s to write in Arabic.

Best of luck to all you Windows Worm Watchers, or the next www.

As I walked into my favorite coffee shop, the cafe’s manager pulled his head out of a customer’s laptop.

“Mr. Mazen, we have been waiting for you” he said.

“Why? What’s the matter?” I asked wondering.

“We have just installed a new DSL wireless network and we can’t get any customer to log on the network” he explained.

I sat next to that frustrated customer (who I didn’t even know) I worked my way through Windows XP’s aggravating windows to connect that PC to the internet, 15 minutes later the PC was online.

“Mr. Mazen” said the manager apologetically would you connect the two other PCs?”

“Sure” I went to the other customers’ PCs and connected them all, it took sometime, and seemed like each PC had a different way to connect, with a different set of annoying problems, but in the end I connected all three PCs.

“Sorry sir for all this inconvenience” apologized the manager.

“No, not at all don’t worry about it”

“you still need to connect your PC” said the manager.

“Oh yeah, but I would like you to witness how I do that” I said walking to my table, I pulled my Mac from its case, woke it up from its sleep, as the manager sat next to me looking at my monitor, I turned airport on, then fired up Safari.

I was surfing the net in a blink.

“That’s it?” asked the wide-eyed shocked manager.

“yeah, that’s pretty much it” I assured him.

“Mr. Mazen I used to work as a network technician” he said “and I have never seen anything like that, I will get a Mac”

All the sudden the first client I helped shouted out from his table

“Me too!”

A friend of mine came to me asking for my advice on buying a new laptop, naturally I recommended a Mac, mentioning that with the new Macs you can run both Mac OS X and Windows (XP or Vista) side by side on the same machine, plus it has been proven to be the fastest “PC” ever.

He took all my blabber with a grain of salt, and bought a brand-new shiny Dell, that had a cute sticker saying that the thing was Windows Vista compatible.

TWO DAYS LATER…

I got a call from my Windows-jolly friend asking to meet me urgently, so I met him in a local cafe, he walked in while talking furiously on his cell, after he ended his call he looked at me.

“I have a problem” he said while veins on the side of his forehead twitched.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him

“My Dell caught a virus” he said ” The damn thing is two days old” he added.

Now I know that his system had both a solid firewall and an antivirus running, after checking on his system, I found out that the bug attacked both softwares first, then nested in his directory.

I then found out that it was sending packets of information to a certain IP address, after monitoring that IP I tried to locate it on the map, turns out that the hacker used a funneling method to hide from anyone who tries to locate him, slick!

“So?” he asked “can you fix it?”

“Yes, but I won’t, it will take at least half a day plus all your data will be erased”
I then gave him a phone number of a technician who I know to be good with PCs.

Now the moral of this story, is that if you are using Windows, try to play it safe, you never know what could be out there, but if you have a PC and want to be safe use Linux, it is safe, but the best part that it is FREE, I use linux Ubuntu on my Dell machine, you can either download it for free or ask them to send you a copy, they would even ship any number of copies anywhere in the world FREE.

But the best advise I can give you is to buy a Mac, you will 100% safe, plus you can run Windows on it if you still want some worms and viruses every now and then.

People who know me, know that I have switched form Windows to Mac, and the same people know now that I have switched from Windows to Linux (on my PC).

And now I am reaching a point where I am really getting fed-up with Linux in favor of the Mac.

Now what people don’t really get is the reason why I tell them to switch to the Mac, so let me make it clearer.

When I rave about the Mac and tell people that it is the greatest operating system you will ever use (it is), I am not trying to convert you to a new religion or cult, it is one of those situation where let’s say you’re a little kid who has been to a giant theme park, and you come back telling all the kids in your neighborhood about how awesome this place was.

“Oh you won’t believe what I saw! that place was really happening, you should check it out.” now look at the part where you would say “you should check it out” that’s what happens when Mac users tell others to check the Mac out. And yes it is that good.

I have been a Mac user for over 3 years now, and I have helped tens switch to the Mac, but the interesting part really is the magic you get when you use an Apple computer.

There is something special about it that can’t be described in words, it is a feeling you get, a cozy warm feeling inside you while looking at your Macintosh desktop, you miss it when you’re away from it. And when you’re sitting in front of it you feel of becoming one with the machine, even the word machine is too harsh to describe it.

I am no poet, but I know that there is a connection between Me and my Mac, it is smart and intuitive.

So the next time you hear me or any Mac user raving about Macs, remember the kid who’s been to the theme park, we want you to explore the same happiness and fun we felt.

PS. Since Apple switched to Intel processors, you now can run both Mac and Windows on the same machine, although the author advice you not to install a crippled operating system (AKA Windows) on your Apple computer.

When I was a kid, I used to remember the story of Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Well there is a real Humpty Dumpty, and it is called Microsoft and the connection with Humpty Dumpty’s story is that their income fell 28% in the 2Q.

So could this be the beginning of the end? What do you think?

I had the pleasure to be invited to my first Mac game night here in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Turns out this is one of the social activities that the Jeddah Apple User Group (JAUG) organizes every now and then.

So here’s what I saw, Mac users in Jeddah gather in one of its generous hosts’ houses, the host had a room setup for the event, offering the guests free wifi, crackers, nuts, chips, warm beverages, and soft drinks, everything a Mac geek might need.

Everyone got his Mac with him, while the host offered extra Macs for those of us who didn’t have a portable, the group then sets up a wireless network to play a game in two teams, that night’s game was “Call of Duty 2”.

To me it was a great chance to meet new friends, and share our views on the iPhone.

I will post an update with pictures of the event, once I get them.

You are thrilled and excited to start off a new diet system, by the time you’re done you will be looking sleek and trim.

After going through the first day or two, you start to feel how burdensome and hard this process is, to add insult to injury, everyone you know, is aware that you’re working on a diet, and everyone is examining your body’s shape every time they lay their eyes on you, disappointing you by saying “You look quite the same, aren’t you suppose to be on a diet?”

That by its self adds a lot of pressure and stress on us, feeling judged and monitored all the time by people’s harsh perceptions, while all we want is to benefit our selves by simply loosing some weight.

The main problem could rise because we don’t really understand how our bodies works, so let’s take a closer look at understanding how the human body works.

To make things clear and easy, think of the human body as a primitive tool, its main objective is merely to survive no matter what, it doesn’t care about how it looks from the outside, as long as it is alive and well.

By using diets which are based on any type of fasting or depriving your self from food, would lead the body to think that it’s under attack and won’t get any food soon, which makes it start to react in a way we don’t want, it will think that you’re stranded on a desert island or alone in a jungle with no food around to eat.

The body will think that it should start to preserve its self as much as possible, just incase the worst happens, by storing energy in the form of fat into its fat cells, and by doing so, it will either start to gain weight, especially on cheat days that are included in the diet system, or at least preserve its fat reserve banks as long as it could.

Now that is not what you wanted when you started the diet, did you? So how do you make your body react in the way you want it to, you want to loose weight not gain, right?

The trick is to delude your body, by making it think that there is more food coming in on regular bases, while all the food you give it is low in calories but large in quantities.

By feeding your body around the clock all the time, it will relax and start to burn beyond the actual needed metabolism it really requires, every time you eat something light in calories and large in amount it will burn a little more from the stored fat reserve banks it has. Fooled by the amount you’ve just had.

Understanding this simple concept and keeping it on your mind, the next time you begin a new diet, people will start to notice how effective it really is, but most importantly, is the fact that you feel full all the time, and good about your self and your results, by the time you’re done you will be looking sleek and trim.

This article has been originally published on:
EzineArticles
Linux4India
RusBiz
Articles FAQ
Live Page Rank
Among other website.

If you read most of your daily news over feed readers or RSS aggregators, then skip this article and go do something else.

The reason why I am writing about RSS feeds, is because of how great I personally think this way of keeping your self on top of things is. If you think that reading newspapers is the best way to get news, think again, you have to keep in mind that newspapers provide readers with news that are a day or at best a couple of hours late, so it’s stale news by the time you read it.

In the US, some magazine publications have shrank there copy sizes dramatically, removing the news sections, simply because their readers know about the news before the publication hits the news stands. Now most publications provide their own take and opinions on those news articles instead of running the headlines, simply because it’s a waste of ink, paper, and time.

I have been using feed aggregators for years now, and people tend to get a shock to see how updated I am when it comes to the latest news, I would surprise anyone when I start talking about the latest tech news, a day or two later they call me up telling me, “you’re right, I have just read this in the newspaper”.

You see man-kind is advancing in numerous ways, ways we never even dreamt of, take blogs and the way they have evolved, or listening to podcasts, and how much fun and informative they became. But I will address both on a later article, now let’s focus on RSS.

RSS means Real Simple Syndicate, well that’s one definition, it has a lot of meanings but simply it’s information that come to you upon subscription, but what makes RSS unique? And how is it different from Ezines or emailed newsletters?

Ezines and newsletters are both delivered to your email account, and to be honest we tend to ignore them at times, because they are too long to read, we would waste hours going through heaps of information, so we tend to pile them up in our inbox, till we get fed up with there inbox-presence and decide to read them over the weekend, now this is old fashion, no one does that any more, or at least shouldn’t do that any more, you see technology has advanced a great deal, and now getting informed is easier, and much more fun.

Enter RSS or news feeds, the major difference is the fact that instead of reading news off your email inbox, or typing a URL and going to a news website, you get the news to your aggregator of feed catcher software, once you subscribe to a feed the site will send the latest news to your aggregator software, you can select the length of the news feed, so that you can read a summary of the news, instead of having to read the whole thing, time is money, and this is especially true these days.

Let’s say you subscribed to a news site, you fire-up your aggregator, it will grab all the latest unread feeds on that news site, after going through them, the aggregator will remove them, and refresh to update your feeds with new news.

No time wasted, and you got what you wanted thanks to XML technology, what can be better then that, well aggregators come in different types and forms, there are the free ones all over the net and of course there is the paid subscriptions, but to round them up, aggregators fall under four major types.

Online aggregators:
Thanks to the advancement of what is known as Web 2.0, you get online software like Gmail, Flickr, Digg, the new Yahoo home-page, or even an online aggregator, most of these aggregators are free to subscribe to, they work efficiently, my personal favorites are Bloglines, and Newsgator.

Aggregator Notifiers:
These are small simple softwares that you download to your machine, they will notify you with a popup with whatever news hits your subscription, you can download them after joining an online aggregator and they will sync with the aggregator’s server, to check on new feeds.

Browser built-in aggregators:
You can find these in free browsers like Apple’s Safari 2.0, which comes with Mac OS X Tiger, you can also find it on Firefox, or Flock on all major Operating System platforms, and also you can find it on Internet Explorer 7.0.

Aggregator Software:
These are designated software where its only job is to grab news feeds for you, there are a lot of those, but the best would be NetNewsWire for the Mac platform, and FeedDemon on Windows, but to use anyone of these you have to pay an annual subscription.

What you should do next:
Now you should go to one of the available aggregators, and subscribe to one of them, after doing this step you should pick the news feeds you want to subscribe to and choose them, that’s it. Simple, easy, and sufficient.

I recommend that you try a free online subscription to see how useful this technology is before paying an annual subscription and downloading an RSS reader.

Stay informed 24/7 and Enjoy!

Pictures taken from the Mac Game-Night that I talked about before are available here.

But what I didn’t mention on the previous post is that our host Dr. Khourshed, has prepared a great feast for everyone, and I would like to thank him for that remarkable generosity.

Sunday night I got a call from a kind person called Obey, he told me that he represents a Mac group in Jeddah called Vector group, and wanted me to attend the weekly meeting as a guest.

I was ecstatic with the offer and honored to say the least, “it was a pleasure” I told him.

Last night I went to the gathering location, which was one of the member’s house, I was greeted by friendly faces, some of them I met before in another Mac group, but others where new to me, Obey posted on the group’s site an announcement stating that I was going to show-up , so I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of Vector’ members last night.

We talk about a lot of things like:
My recent article on MyMac.
My horror stories with Windows.
My podcast (ExplorePod).
The gear I use to podcast.
Formats I offer to listeners and viewers.
Blackberry’s trickle in the Saudi market.

Among other stories here and there, the host offered a generous feast, but I had to split, because I had another appointment with a friend.

Last night had a special flavor to it, I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot from the group, whenever I sit with such old-hand Mac users I really feel humbled by the wealth of knowledge they have about Macs and Apple products, I can fairly say I gained a lot just by being around them.

So I would like to thank Obey and the rest of the gang for giving me this opportunity to know them more, and I would like to get another chance to spend more time learning form the masters.

we tend to store almost all our life in these machines

I store a lot, and I mean a LOT of stuff on my Mac, and I would safely bet that you do the same on your PC (Personal Computer).

With computers we tend to store almost all our life in these machines. We tend to forget this simple fact, these are machines and they can crash, now crashing is a relative issue depending on which OS you might use, but I will not get into that debate, any machines do eventually crash, whether that’s a software or hardware failure.

Before I go on a trip I backup my whole system to an external hard drive or a DVD (or CDs), you never know what could happen when you’re away from home.
But we tend to forget backing-up on regular bases when we are at the comfort of our homes.

So after reading this post, stop anything you’re doing and get your self a hard disk, a USB, a DVD, or even a CD and back up all your important documents, it won’t hurt you, but you will feel better after doing it.

Back up NOW!!! Delaying that task for later won’t sound like a good excuse.

Now this would be interesting to try out, Volaris airlines a Mexican LCC (Low Cost Carrier), has introduced a new item to their offerings.

“We’re the first to use iPod’s. We like it because no one else has it,” said public relations officer Alfonso Collantes.

Volaris began handing out the 30 Gigabyte iPods free on February 8, but will soon start charging 50 pesos per flight (US$4.56).

The iPods are loaded with Mexican TV shows and pop music, but the airline plans to offer U.S. sitcoms and other music genres.

I think I should market my podcast ExplorePod to be offered on Volaris’ iPods, think of it as an in-flight entertainment, just like the articles you find in the complementary magazines. if you happen to work with Volaris let me know!

Via: Reuters