Madaba & Google Maps

June 7, 2009 | 9:42 pm

For a while now, Google Maps has been displaying the names of towns and cities in the countries’ local languages when you pan over them. So for example, when you go over Japan, you’ll see the name of towns in Japanese with English subtext. This is similar for European and Arabian countries.

Interestingly enough however, Israel-Palestine has been mostly blank with only English written there. That made me curious because Google, like many other tech companies, tries to remain neutral when it comes to international political issues, and i wanted to see how they handle this one. So i kept on checking back often.

Today I noticed that they started to display Hebrew names in pre-1967 areas (which is politically safe). Interestingly however, the Hebrew words only appear when you are not zoomed in to see the individual city names.

Anyway, what is really funny is that they have hugely misspelled the Arabic name of Madaba. Here is a screenshot below:

Madaba

Btw, I couldn’t find a link to report this mistranslation, otherwise i would have reported it.

Comments
3 Comments »
Categories
Funny, Internet
Comments rss Comments rss

Too many usernames & passwords

June 6, 2009 | 8:31 pm

This is indeed rediculous. Not only that, but i also hate it when services require you to sign up with a username & password even if you just want to try that service for a brief time. Too many user accounts online, ultimately you run out of memorizable unique passwords, and sharing passwords or using a service-dependent naming scheme is not wise. Check out this website for a neat tool btw.

In these days (and specially if the whole “cloud-as-a-service” model is to become successful, oh and it will) we should have a concept of a single global account, or a managable federation of accounts that form a global account, that would allow people to “turn on” services on the web to try them out (or use them), and then “turn them off”.

I know about openID, but having a single account (be it from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo) to log in to many places is too “big-brothery” for my taste. Plus, not all online services allow users to use openID, even though they really should.

It is bollocks! Bollocks I tells ya! *shaking his fist*

Comments
2 Comments »
Categories
Annoyed, Internet, The Geek In Me
Comments rss Comments rss

Welcome to Your New Computer

May 31, 2009 | 12:37 pm

Let’s rethink what a computer is.

Computers are no longer those bulky devices under or on your desk. They are no longer those thin and slick laptops on your desk or lap. These have become merely interfaces to computers and computation power.

Your new computer is somewhere off in the “cloud”; you don’t own it, you can’t touch it, and you don’t even know exactly where it is. Your computer today is really a collection of hundreds of thousands of what you used to think of as computers before, all of which working in unison to provide you all the services you need.

Your new computer is on the Internet. Actually, your computer today is the Internet. The Internet is no longer an auxiliary service to complement the rest of your computation needs. The Internet today is no longer just a service, it is everything. Although our desktops and laptops are capable of doing wonderful things on their own, but if they are disconnected from the web we tend to think of them as useless.

The Internet today can stream you an infinite collection of videos, movies, TV episodes, and live events. The Internet can let you call, email, IM, and handle all your communication needs. The Internet can take care of your office needs of word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, team collaboration, and database. The Internet can store, organize, or even help you edit your photos. The Internet provides you with games you can instantly enjoy.

While this is not new, what is new of the past two or three years, however, is that you can get all these services with minimal configuration on your end, and with all these services running in your browser, and we’ve only just got started. This is the new Internet. This is your new computer!

With this, all the old debates of Windows vs Mac OS vs Linux are kind of irrelevant these days. All of them connect you to the same Internet, and that is where all the new applications run. What is relevant however, is the emergency of the new Internet Operating Systems. Unfortunately there isn’t much debate about this. However, if you think about it, companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Live, are all competing to build your next operating system, or the environment where you work.

The closest of these to a full-blown “operating system” is probably Facebook. This of course is no wonder because they bought the Internet start up Parakey that was interested in building a hosted, virtual, Internet operating system. If you look at Facebook, they even adopt the mantra of existing operating systems. They have a little bar at the bottom where your notifications appear on the right (just like where your system tray icons would appear in Windows). You can install different applications to your profile, you start your applications by clicking on a menu from the left side of your bar. Developers have an API and programming languages to write programs to run on the Facebook environment. So it is in effect a full-blown “operating system”. I only put the quotes here because it technically doesn’t manage your hardware like a “real” operating system does, but it is pretty much everything else for you.

This is very exciting. Your new computer data and services are available to you 24/7 around the globe. It is very exciting because you no longer have to manage and maintain your computer as you inadvertently had to in the past. Previously, you would buy a computer to use it, and you’d end up administering it just to keep it running, which took away from the time you can actually use your computer to derive some benefit out of it. To realize this, think of how much time you had to spend to install applications and fix problems that you encounter (computer doesn’t work, this or that program don’t work ..etc). Now, all that is gone and taken care of by somebody else. You can now derive benefit from your computer without any extra effort.

This is also exciting because it creates new problems for us to think about. For example, we are now no longer owners of our data and computation. It is probably companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Zoho that own your data. So how do you ensure that your data is still safe and confidential ? Your new computer services run on hundreds of thousands of machines in a distributed fashion, how do you make that possible ? Your new hosted services are expected to be up and running (available), and extremely responsive, 24/7 and around the globe, how do you make that possible ? How do you integrate the experiences of millions of people so that we can facilitate collaboration while still protecting security ? and how do use users’ experiences to create better services ?

This is the new Internet. This is the new world of “cloud computing“. This is your new computer. Welcome to your new computer.

Comments
3 Comments »
Categories
Internet
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

Blog About Palestine Day 2009 - The Harvest

May 23, 2009 | 6:34 pm

This is the last of my Blog About Palestine Day 2009 posts. This harvest post contains a sample list of more than 30 articles (in 4 languages) and a video contributed to this magnificent event on that solemn day by YOU (and people like you). They are presented in no particular order here:

English:

Arabic:

Bulgarian:

French:

Video:

Thank you everybody for your contributions! Many personal stories about first hand experiences of the Nakba were told. Many stories about the Palestinian identity, and living in diaspora were discussed. Many wonderful poems were written. Many first hand present-day accounts were shared. Many visions for the future. It is all because of you, and thanks to you.

I know for a fact that i didn’t/couldn’t list all contributed entries here (simply because it is intractable). If you were not listed and would like to be listed, please let me know.

Blog About Palestine Day Blog About Palestine Day

Comments
7 Comments »
Categories
Arabiana, Around the World, Internet, Palestine
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

Blog About Palestine Day: Topic Suggestions & List of Participants

May 14, 2009 | 11:46 pm

Tomorrow is Blog About Palestine Day 2009. The community response has been very refreshing so far. So many people have signed up both on the blog announcement and the Facebook Event. The event has been advertised and promoted on Qwaider’s Planet and Toot. This is a true grassroots community effort and I am so proud to be part of this responsible and vibrant community.

If you would like to participate but you’re facing a mental writer’s block, here is a list of possible topic ideas that i hope you find useful. Also, I would really appreciate it if the title of your blog post was preceded by [BAPD] (for example “[BAPD] My Article About Palestinian Cities”).  Finally, I would really appreciate it if you added a graphical button leading back to the event’s page so that future readers can learn more about the subject and read other people’s articles. You can use the following code to add a button to your post:

Blog About Palestine Day

Here is a short list of blogs (that i know about) that have signed up for this event. This list is absolutely in no particular order, This list is absolutely not all-inclusive, if your blog has not been listed here, please let me know so that i can add it.

These are some of the seeds, tomorrow will be the blossom, and after that i will try to compile a harvest list of the articles.

Thanks again for your participation, and I look forward to reading your wonderful articles.

Comments
11 Comments »
Categories
Arabiana, Around the World, Internet, Palestine
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

« Previous Entries