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It was not total lights out in the major cities, but dimming/reducing lighting temporarily was at least helpful. Here are some pictures by the Discovery website here.

I have encountered this annoying bug recently on my Linux box. I have a laptop with a widescreen monitor that gives me a 1440×900 desktop area (not much i know). I’ve noticed that with any desktop manager except for KDE3 i would encounter a problem whereby the screen would be displayed at the correct resolution but windows will not maximize to the full screen but instead to an area that is 1024×768 in size at the top left corner of the screen.

The weird thing is that the display driver is configured correctly, and i can see the full screen area and can move the mouse and windows around .. it is just the full-screen on flash and maximizing windows that does not work as needed. Another thing that added to the weirdness is that things are working perfectly fine on KDE3.

Anyway, i found the easy fix to this problem. The following file
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager contains some configuration for your display manager. The following two lines demonstrate the problem:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA="auto"
DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto="1024x768_60 64.11 1024 1080 1184 1344 768 769 772 795 -HSync +Vsync"


It says in the comments that this is supposed to help laptop devices somehow .. i didn’t totally understand that part. However, some online searches revealed some advice to comment out one of the lines. What i personally did to fix this problem is modify the first line above so that it won’t refer to the configuration on the second line. So i have something like this:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA=""

I am posting this here so that it could help somebody some day … when i was facing this problem i did a ton of search and found nothing. So, if your screen is displaying a small area (1024×768) in the top left corner of your monitor, this might be the fix.

I have come to the belief that i operate in a sinusoidal pattern of eagerness and laziness. I am now in my laziness period of this sine curve and boy does it suck. I hate the feeling of having to do something but not wanting to do anything. I hate sitting there like a waste of air and space contributing nothing to nothing. But alas this mental recession is almost over. I can feel days of more energy coming up ahead; or so i hope.

Note: Just to let you know how lazy i am getting, i thought about writing more in this post, but i am too lazy to do so.

I have to apologize for not submitting a post for the Blog About Jordan Day on time. The truth is that i have been extremely swamped for the past few weeks. In any regards, i think better late than never to submit. What follows is my post for BAJD which is really a reflection of a recent conversation i had with a friend of mine.

It is no surprise that the world is facing a huge economic crisis. Jordan, and indeed the rest of the Arab world, has not been spared from this crisis. As we all scramble to recover, it is worth noting that we face additional challenges. Although Jordan has shown many good development projects that aim to expand the potential of students and entrepreneurs, we should observe that that this development has not been uniformly distributed across the different areas of the country. Most of these initiatives have concentrating on the capitol Amman, which makes sense since it is the biggest city in the country. However it is just as important to provide good opportunities to residents of the other places of Jordan. This will dampen the disparity between Amman and most of the rest of the country.

One way this could happen is by expanding infrastructure projects to the rest of the country. Infrastructure projects are great because they employ a large group of people to build and provide benefit a large group of people for a long time after they are built. Infrastructure projects include upgrading schools, hospitals, waterworks, electricity, roads, ..etc. As great as these projects can be, we have to realize that the government’s has a limited amount of financial resources (specially in this global crisis).

So what can we do ? This is a perfect opportunity for citizens to contribute to the well being of their future, their children’s futures, and the country as a whole. For example, many people these days prefer to buy land and keep it until it gets expensive and then sell it. All this time the land sits underutilized. Why not grow something on it for example ? This would require working hands, but there are many people who are out of work and would be available to do this job. Plus the land’s produce can either increase the export of the country or at least feed a few more hungry families.

I think the road to a bright future for Jordan, and many other Arab countries, is through citizens trying to utilize the limited set or resources that we already have. When i compare our situation to that of people from other emerging developing countries (like China and India) i notice that what we lack is a grand vision of how should we move forward as a unit as a country. No doubt that Jordanians and Arabs are skillful people, so imagine what we can do if we put our hands together and look forward ?