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Aramex Solution to Kuwait Customs

Bashar — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:45:01 +0000

Good news. The following just got sent out by Aramex:

Hello Shop&Shippers!

We understand it’s been a rough week for all of you, but finally, Kuwait Customs’ policy has cleared up, and we’re happy to say that online shopping is about to become more fun than ever!

So here’s the bottom line: regardless of the goods value, all shipments are subject to customs clearance. We’ll clear all shipments in one bundle, and pay the charged customs duties accordingly. You read correctly; it’s on us!

In this case, you will only endure the following charges:

* 1 KD handling charges
* 5% of order value for Kuwait Customs duties (applicable only to orders valued above $100 USD)

However, self-clearance option is no longer available for our customers. You can contact us at [+ 965 1 820011] for further details.

Happy online shopping!

Your friends at Shop&Ship,

So you can add an extra 1 KD + 5% on most of your shipments, but Aramex will take care of the customs. One thing though not mentioned is the clearance time. Since they will clear items in bundle, will it be daily, or weekly? Nevertheless, it means at least slight more delay for items arriving in weekends, and that all your packages will come pre-opened!

I still think this is totally unfair and greedy from local business owners pushing for such tax on individual items, but at least now you can still shop online.

Aramex promising resolution to Kuwait Customs Problem in next 48 hours

Bashar — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:49:13 +0000

Shop&Ship Twitter Update:

And this is the linked-to tweet from their product manager:

WARNING: Visit his twitter page at your own risk. Extremely eye breaking colors.

Best Wishes!

Aramex ranking among countries

Bashar — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:49:13 +0000

I was talking to my friend last night about the recent new Kuwait Customs regulations and how this is going to affect Aramex more than anyone else. My guess was Kuwait must be the largest market for Aramex Shop&Ship at least, being computer and internet savvy society with a good average income. So here are the rankings around the world according to Alexa.

In percentage at least, judging at the numbers, this seems true. Now whether Kuwait is the absolute largest market (or at least has been so far), that’s something else.

Cute Spammer

Bashar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:26:22 +0000

OK, so if you’re really bored, Gmail Spam folder has some real fun stuff in it, like this lad here greatly appreciating if I link back to his new ebay & craigslist killer sites. He just failed to mention the stock option I’ll be getting out of this.

Dear …

I would greatly appreciate your help launching my two new sites
by linking to them from your home page.
< spam site 1 >
< spam site 2 >

< spam site 1 > is a local & international site to buy, sell, trade, or auction most anything
and my goal is to be bigger & better than ebay.com or craigslist.org.

< spam site 1 > is a National Real Estate.

Thanks…
Have a Great Day!

B. cute spammer

P.S. I will be adding more features and options as these sites grow.

To be removed from future mailings… please send an email to:
RemoveMe@< spam site >

Hold on your online carts, Aramex packages will go through customs!

Bashar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:11:31 +0000

The following is an email from Aramex Shop&Ship notifying customers of new Kuwaiti Customs Authority regulation:

“Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for choosing Aramex as your transportation partner.

The Kuwaiti Customs Authority has recently notified us that all courier shipments containing non-documents shall undergo customs inspection upon arrival at Kuwait airport. While Aramex shall continue providing its clearance services, we are unable to provide a specific time frame as to the duration of the clearance period, which may exceed five working days. Aramex therefore encourages all its customers who require speedy clearance to collect their shipments’ documents for self-clearance at the Aramex Ardiya office.

Should you need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us on + 965 1820011.

Best Regards,

Aramex Shop&Ship Team”

So only letters and documents can pass through. But otherwise, each and every package of yours will have to go through customs, so you will have to add an extra 10-15 KD at least on top of your online purchase price, add to that the 2-3 days delay on average, as many packages will arrive just before or during the weekend and will have to wait for next working day to clear them. I would say however it’s 7 days in most cases, as if you’ve been to customs clearance once before, you won’t wanna do it again, and neither does Aramex I’m sure. They’d rather collect their payment upfront, since the hassle is not worth the extra 5 KD charge.

So added days for delivery, added cost, and ten times extra headache, Kuwait has made online shopping literally impractical. This is a blow for Aramex themselves however more than it is for the end user, who will go with the more convenient path now. I bet this is the best time for Aramex to reduce prices to cover the difference.

Now as for Kuwaiti Customs, I’m not sure why they would have to go through each and every single individual package, when most shipments are from trusted merchants like Amazon, with a bill specifying all that’s inside it. Well maybe I know, but I mean it won’t be a reasonable explanation for such a call. But let’s just say that’s fine, they lay the rules, and they have their wise reasons. Do they have the capacity for it? Before you say you want to check each and every package, can you handle all that load? For some Disney kid’s cartoon, I had to carry the package, guided with security guy, back and forth twice from the storage to the Ministry of Information hut to authorize it. And that place of theirs is so tiny a think guy can barely walk between the desks with one Pakistani guy who clears it. How can all the packages go through this one person? And that’s just for the DVD, let alone all the other items inside. I heard any item that has a charger has to go through Ministry of Commerce. No comment!

Has anyone paid the customs a visit, you will see what a mess the process is, and how overwhelmed they were already without inspecting all these Aramex packages. Now if you want to inspect the package, I say fine. I’ve got nothing to hide (most of the time!). But give us a process. I don’t have to waste a whole day, running from one building to the other trying to follow a process that insiders keep arguing about it.

So in a nutshell, for the foreseeable future, I say put on hold the items that can wait. Ohh and… I Love You Kindle!

Alex, the first Android e-Book Reader Is Coming

Bashar — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:22:30 +0000

Spring have revealed what will be the first Google Android Mobile OS based e-Book Reader, called Alex, which features dual-screen with built-in 3G & WiFi, and a battery that lasts for days. The upper 6inch screen that uses the Electrnoic Paper Display (EPD) is similar to Kindle for e-book reading, while all the hyperlinked multimedia information and other 3rd party input will go on the lower 3inch color touchscreen LCD display, thus giving you colorful touchscreen web browsing experience, while still staying on the same e-book page. And you don’t need a US or AT&T network to do your browsing as well.

Not only that however, but authors can embed images and videos to go along with the text being read. This really comes over the Kindle problem having to flip pages back and forth to see the picture in discussion. I’ve had once to seek the image of the web and print it to make things easy. This one has videos on top of images as well. Readers will also get the chance to attach their images and notes to the material being read.

My only major take on it is the size, which is like %33 taller than the 6inch Kindle. A bit inconvenient for reading I presume. Otherwise, the look of it seems promising. We’ll have to see about the response time.

TrustedReviews also writes about Que, another upcoming e-Book reader that might turn some heads. The reader sets itself apart with the shatterproof plastic display, a definite plus given a friend’s Kindle screen crash incident, and adds to it the touchscreen and a built-in WiFi, and AT&T 3G Network (Why AT&T?).

This leaves Amazon Kindle with nothing but the book collections they have. Which brings up the question, What about book formats? Que will at least support PDF, Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Will it have other proprietary DRM formats? What about Spring? What will happen to people who bought Kindle books?

Seems to me inevitable we will go into years of eBook reader formats war that will only cost consumers and producers money until they settle on one format.

With Mac rumored eBook reader just waiting to be confirmed, and with these two new comers shaking the competition, I really don’t advise anyone to buy an eBook reader now. Yes I bought mine few months ago and I love it. It’s saving me a lot of money, and giving me enjoyable reading. But as things stand now, better wait.

PS3 V3.01 Slowness Fix

Bashar — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:59:43 +0000

If you’ve updated your PS3 to the latest V3.01 and are facing some problems in performance, this simple fix might help. Note that I immediately updated to 3.01 passing 3.0. I suffered from slow game response for several games like Ghostbusters even at 480p, and Uncharted 2, while other won’t run at all like X-Men demo. FIFA 10 was running fine though. The main PS3 menu was also so slow in showing the icons. So see if this helps.

Backup all your important data. For me, this was just the save games and I could manually transfer them to a USB stick. Note that PS & PS2 game saves may not backup automatically through the Backup utility, so if it’s just saved games for you, you may wanna do manual backup
Make sure you followed Step 1 and have all valuable data backed up.
From PS3 menu go to Settings -> System Settings -> Format Utility -> Format Hard Disk -> Full Format.

NOTE: This may take few hours, and I haven’t tried Quick Format. So if you wanna try it first, please do so and let me know how it goes.
Do the first time PS3 settings.

That should be it. For me, now the PS3 menu works quite fast, and I’m enjoying Uncharted 2 now.

Good luck!

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

Bashar — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:31:49 +0000

That’s the motto to live by, at least when dealing with PS3, and I should’ve known from the last PS3 update. But hey, I’ve given Sony more faith than they ever deserved.

My plan to beat sleepless night with some gaming to finis Ghostbusters and get ready for Uncharted II turned out to be worse than I could’ve imagined. Since I’m having problems with so several games after the latest PS3 v3.01 update, I opted to install the latest Ghostbusters patch thinking it may be related to the problem and actually fix it. Well it didn’t. And not only did I waste 15 minutes waiting for it to download and install, but it actually somehow deleted my saved game progress! How on earth and what kind of a patch would delete your saved games?

Fact is, I could see a saved game file from the PS3 menu, and obviously from the date, here is my saved game mocking me. It’s just that the new patch doesn’t pick it up.

I tried deleting the game, re-installing it to the original version but that didn’t help either. Is there a way now? There is no way I’m gonna replay the whole game. And hey, we I still have the flickering thing.

Would a demo be a good test drive to tell if game will work or not before I buy it now?

UPDATE: Fix For Save Games

This really made me laugh out loud. If you turn your Display Settings by Custom to 480p you can find your saved games and resume the game. Set it back to anything higher and you lose it! So the smart guys tied the save of the game to the display settings?

With 480p, game still loads much slower than before, but game play seems tolerable. Now how about Uncharted 2! I gotta do more testing to know how ugly it’s gonna be.

BBC Earth Collection Bluray One Day Amazon Offer

Bashar — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:09:43 +0000

The great Planet Earth documentary in Bluray plus Earth: The Biography from BBC is on one day sale from Amazon.com.

Secrets for easy Leopard tweaking

Bashar — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:50:42 +0000

Secrets for Mac is a cool free tweaking utility that will integrate right into your System Preferences, allowing you access to tons of customization options for Leopard, and the 3rd party apps you have as well.

Ofcourse there is nothing absolutely new in this, but it will just save you the hassle of searching for options, and writing long commands like “defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1” to enable the X-ray mode.

If you know secrets and tweaks that are not listed, you can submit it as well.

[via LifeHacker]

Ever tried Example.com?

Bashar — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:54:21 +0000

So often we come across examples in sites and textbooks like http://example.com/… to explain a certain point. But I’ve always wondered how would you ago about using someone’s domain to give an example, and how those people felt, and wouldn’t they argue about using their site to give inaccurate URLs for the sake of example?

But if you try to go to example.com you will know the answer.

You have reached this web page by typing “example.com”, “example.net”, or “example.org” into your web browser.

These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) have wisely reserved the second level domain names example.com, example.net, and example.org for use as examples. The following Top Level Domains are also reserved:

.test
.example
.invalid
.localhost

That’s good to know and stick to. Full details here.

Google Reader Secret Code

Bashar — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:06:50 +0000

1- Go to Google Reader & Login if you haven’t already
2- Click UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A

Now you have 30 lives (unread topics) in every subscription. And just for fun, click the Like & Unlike button.

No, I didn’t try infinite number of permutations until I found this.

Google Celebrates Bar Code Invention

Bashar — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:22:30 +0000

This is a nice simple one :). I thought something went wrong for a moment. Did you know Barcode can be just a font on your computer?

Though I’m not able to tie it 100% to the logo. I can see the G and the E, but I get lost in the middle. Is it me, or is it because there are multiple barcode types? Or did they misspell Google in Barcode language as well :P?.

Lawsuit against Sony PS3 v3.00 firmware update

Bashar — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:39:03 +0000

You would think things are supposed to get at least better with newer updates and upgrades, but a quick look at reality tells you, you’re wrong! Vista is the successor of Win 95 in it’s disastrous results, and is being phased out with a new fancier Windows 7 named one. Snow Leopard with all the hype is yet to amuse me once, and last time I updated to latest PS3 v3.01 the totally unexpected happen.

All of a sudden I noticed short trailers I downloaded are not playing smoothly, and they pause for a second or so every now and then. Playing some simple games as well like Wall-E, the game was flickering a lot that you can’t focus. (Note: Wall-E game is my punishment for getting my kid into PIXAR world)

Now it seems that’s not only me, but a whole group are filing a lawsuit against Sony for their latest firmware update which apparently is damaging some PS3 units, costing $150 to repair! So I guess I should be thankful, and perhaps slow down on PS3 usage until a newer fix comes in. The funny thing is, the lawsuit is coming from v3.00 and Sony claims it’s v3.01 fixes most issues, while I never had the chance to try v3.00 as I installed v3.01 directly, and yet I’m able to get these problems.

Guess I was lucky not to turn on my PS3 so often lately. I should do that more often. Ohh wait, I didn’t buy my PS3 as a souvenir!

Movies in 3D, finally of high quality

Bashar — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:20:26 +0000

After the positive feedback I got about it from a friend, I decided to give Cloudy With A Chance Of A Meatballs a try (what a silly name huh? They couldn’t just call it “Meatball Clouds”). My first impressions from the trailer wasn’t up high, but I thought it could be worth a few laughs for a computer-animated movies fan like me. What my friend told me about the IMAX 3D glasses experience however made me determined to go and try it, and I’m so glad I did!

For the first time in my life, this is a real good clear 3D view that I can enjoy. The 3D glasses there are so good, and you can see some high quality 3D picture. You do see the double picture however at the slightest of a head twist, so you gotta keep your head straight. Also, your eyes might get a bit tired, I took the glasses several times for a few seconds just to relax my eyes. But it’s a great experience I don’t think anyone should miss. Cinema had good crowd even though it was only in the early afternoon and in a working day.

The real catch is, there is always one, you have to set in family section, and go back furthest you can, avoiding side seats I guess is a better choice as well. Bachelor seats are so poor they should not be sold, or sold for half the price with a message saying “We cannot guarantee best picture from this seat”, or else just say it “We guarantee a hardly enjoyable experience from that seat”. There was one poor guy only in the bachelor section. I felt sorry for him.

The fascinating experience makes me regret failing to catch the Monsters Vs Aliens in 3D, even if it was only available outside Kuwait. And hey, I just got this two days ago from Disney.

Sad to miss such an opportunity. Now what movies would I love to see again in 3D? Hmmm…:

Wall-E
Incredibles
Finding Nemo
Monsters Inc.
Should I just say PIXAR?
Monsters Vs Aliens (received strong feedback for it’s 3D release)
Coraline
Dinosaurs

In terms of non-animated movies, I’d love to see Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man. Transformers? I’m sure it’s gonna be great, but their sequel kinda makes me lose the passion for it.

Finally, a possible good YouTube revenue model

Bashar — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 05:41:03 +0000

When Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion just 3 years ago, many argued about the value of this purchase, with YouTube’s high running costs and the lack of any revenue model. And it did fail to stop losses for the past 3 years as well, and all Google got from it was new lawsuits, now that the video service is under the big G umbrella.

Eric Schmidt wasn’t showing any concerns, to the press at least, claiming YouTube monetization is not really a big problem. But when they started their attempt, this is how the YouTube page looked like:

First, most people going to YouTube are mostly interested in watching videos and won’t click non-related ads on the side. Second, this ad popping at the bottom of the video is more than annoying, and people are less likely to click it (intentionally). Not to mention Arabic ad text is unreadable as it’s showing disconnected characters.

But now finally, YouTube is offering YouTube video ads on the side of YouTube search results, thus enabling YouTube publishers to delivery targeted ads and spread the word about their videos. Now as to why people might wanna do that, I bet many would love to have their video spread and are willing to spend few bucks for the sake of it. Others are trying to reach for wider audience to attract attention to their skills through this media.

I hope this really picks up as it will eventually mean better YouTube service, and result in removal of those silly ads showing above the videos we see now. See the video below to familiarize with the service.

MAMP Pages Won’t Run On Snow Leopard

Bashar — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:39:16 +0000

MAMP, the Mac Apache MySQL & PHP bundled server, was running perfectly fine after I upgraded to Snow Leopard. Yesterday when I started it for some reason it didn’t ask for the password to run, the app seems to start but none of my web apps in the htdocs folder would work, as pages won’t open. Perhaps because of a recent Snow Leopard update.

I couldn’t find an exact similar problem on the web, but my MAMP was already an old version, 1.7.1. The solution was to upgrade to the latest 1.8.2 MAMP release. The problem ofcourse is how to migrate your web apps and database from the old MAMP installation to the new one. This forum post explains it pretty well, and in a nutshell it’s a matter of copying the old app & db folders to the new one:

1- Stop MAMP Servers and quit MAMP app.
2- Rename the MAMP folder under /Applications to MAMP_old (or abc if you like!).
3- Install the new MAMP app to your /Applications folder.
4- Copy the old /Applications/MAMP_old/htdocs and /Applications/MAMP_old/db folders to the new location under /Applications/MAMP.
5- Start the new MAMP app.
6- (Optional): From MAMP Preferences, go to Ports tab and click “Set to defaults Apache and MySQL ports” if you like it this way. I prefer it for localhost.

Monkey Island 2 Special-Uber Edition

Bashar — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:20:09 +0000

I can’t believe I call my self Monkey Island fan and I haven’t heard about this proof of concept for Monkey Island 2 Special Edition with 3D environment. And I haven’t even played the Tales of Monkey Island yet. I shouldn’t blog about this or else… Err, what do you mean I just did? Umm… back to topic.

Enjoy the videos.

Good Lord, He Did It Again!

Bashar — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:40:26 +0000

It was late at night and kid won’t get off my shoulders. The iPark It iPhone game looked cool enough and worthy of the $0.99 price to get him off my back. I approved the purchased, logged out to avoid another kid online purchasing incident, and then later on sneaked into bed in the next room.

Shortly before dawn I woke up with a dream or dizzy thought of kid having done it for a second time, buying games online while I’m unaware. It was silly as I know I logged out, but being who I am, and to make sure my iPhone sleeps besides me, I made my way through the dark to the phone in the next room and took it back. I just unlocked it and boom!

How does he do it? And I wish there were some decent apps among them! Well at least he finally got that fishing game he always wanted. And now I know why people use non-related animal pictures on their apps and books… targets totally different demographic! I’m sure glad he didn’t buy the diamond app though :P.

Things aren’t stopping here however. Few days ago he was shouting about some game he found to which I didn’t show much interest. Next time I opened the iPhone Safari I found this.

Luckily I use the Amazon app for iPhone for that, and the Safari session isn’t tied to my account. Otherwise this could’ve slipped in a quick checkout purchase of mine. Good attempt though.

Bionic Eye iPhone Augmented Reality App

Bashar — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:11:49 +0000

This Bionic Eye iPhone 3G S app is really useful for finding what you want, without having to look at your map if you wish.

Even inside a big mall like the Avenues this can be useful, let alone walking down the street between malls! And this app can be yours for $0.99! It currently has versions for the US, UK, France and Tokyo. Alas, I really wanna try it badly. I didn’t like the fact that I need to buy a separate one for every country. But hey, if you’re traveling (and roaming), what’s $1 really?.

[via intomobile]

Bing Map Vs Google Map

Bashar — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:59:52 +0000

Kinda feels like fill in the spaces map right? And yet sites like Expedia.com and Hotels.com insist on putting Microsoft before their customers.

It took him 3 years

Bashar — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:07:49 +0000

It would seem my 3 years old kid was having the time of his life when I approved the FREE Jurassic 3D Rollercoaster iPhone app install and then naively handed the phone back to him without signing out. He didn’t waste anytime even trying the game, and by the time I found out, he had already made his collection.

Glad I stopped him there or else this would’ve cost a fortune. Now I’m not sure if we can call this social hacking or something like that, but the kid took his extra miles and there is a weird feeling inside me that makes me happy and proud of it. After all, he made his first online purchase (with my money!).

I gotta take extra care with my Amazon orders now.

PS: Yes, I have a bad hand writing. No, that’s not the worst it can get!

All AT&T Phones for one cent with 2-year service plan

Bashar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:32:24 +0000

For one day only from Amazon, all AT&T phones (Why is iPhone not there?) are yours for one cent! But ofcourse the catch is a 2 years contract with AT&T. So it’s US offer, and it’s for people who can sign-up for new plan with AT&T no matter how bad they are.

Happy Eid Ye Filthy Scallywags

Bashar — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:30:53 +0000

Not every year does the two collide ehh? Well almost! And now ye can have yer self extra special Eid celebrating the Talk Like A Pirate Day. Telltale Games is offering the first episode of their Tales of Monkey Island this Saturday for FREE. Offer lasts for only 24 hours, so “Take All You can… Give Nothing Back”.

The even better Monkey Island Special Edition is also made available for half the price from Steam until Monday.

Enjoy the Eid, and insult your opponent safely.

Rails finally working with Snow Leopard

Bashar — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:10:00 +0000

So far Snow Leopard have given me nothing but a hard time, crashes, and wasted hours that I could advise anyone not to upgrade, while I keep my ego and refuse to downgrade. After the 1 hour+ Snow Leopard upgrade, I’m getting slower login time, very frequent crashes upon uploading or downloading simplest of files in Firefox, TweetDeck occasionally, and even Safari, so don’t you be blaming someone else in your ads Apple.

The worst however was the expected, and it was Rails, until today. After the upgrade, running my existing sqlite based rails app gave me the error:

uninitialized constant SQLite3::Driver::Native::Driver::API

StackOverflow had the right advise to fix the problem:

sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Except it gave me the error

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Ruby on Rails blog gave the instructions to upgrade MacPorts and then all the ports installed.

$ sudo port selfupdate $ sudo port sync $ sudo port upgrade --force installed

The process however gave a “MacPort no suitable image found.”. I followed the advise here and downloaded a fresh MacPort install. You can get one here.

After that I was able to do the port selfupdate and sync, but the port upgrade failed saying:

C compiler cannot create executables

I tried several tricks here, Googled a lot with no luck. I had to leave it for sometime to finish some other work. When I tried today to repeat the three port update steps above, it worked just fine. After that, I just needed to redo the “sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby” and all went fine I’m happy to say.

Special thanks for TWG for their support on the matter. They did point out the problem as a bug in MacPort but I thought otherwise.

Hope that helps someone else out there.

The Windows 7 Upgrade Marathon

Bashar — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:13:13 +0000

Comparing it with the previous Windows Vista SP1 Upgrade, an official Microsoft Software Engineer (or so he was) has posted results about the Windows 7 Upgrade performances over machines with various hardware levels, and different data profiles in terms of stored data and installed apps.

Notice something? Windows 7 Upgrade results for what they call a Super User with 650Gb, and 40 applications running a mid end hardware could take up to 1220 minutes, that is more than 20 hours and approximately a whole freaking day! And nowadays, with terabytes hard disks, I don’t think bragging about a 650 Gb as a super user means anything, since lots of people have this amount of storage. True many maybe have it on an external media, but lots of users still have it on their main machine.

Leaving that apart, who doesn’t have 125 GB on his machine nowadays? My iPhone has 20 GB, and it’s only been with me for less than 2 months! They call a user with 125 GB a Heavy User, and if you are that user, and hold a high end hardware, then swipe that silly smile off your face, as you’re in for 3 hours upgrade time as well! Compared to the Snow Leopard of 1 hour or so, leaving aside all the issues inside ofcourse :). Clean installations it seems are quite fast, but hey, who want’s to reinstall all his apps and do all the config once more?

But the truth is, I really gotta take my hat off for those people who for once it seems did something quite courageous and honest, releasing performance benchmarks that could make sense in real life. So much better than this home-made browser comparison really.

[via arstechnica]

Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides

Bashar — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:29:22 +0000

Finally, Jack Sparrow is gonna ride the seas to stranger tides! Just wonder why don’t they get Ron Gilbert to enhance the story, and win even more fans? Arrgh!

What is this GROG Argentineans drink?

Bashar — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:32:37 +0000

OMG, I kept reading comments over Grumpy Gamer for someone to tell me it’s a joke, but this is what a prank ended up causing in Argentina! And what’s SCUMM anyways?

And this is the Dr’s official page.

iPhone 3rd Party Apps Won’t Run Possible Fix

Bashar — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:26:35 +0000

There is a common problem with iPhone 3rd party apps in which all of a sudden, all those 3rd party apps won’t run. You click, and they just flash on for fraction of a second and then disappear. I have had this problem in the early days of the iPhone (although it’s technically still early now as well), and I tweaked with iTunes Store Authorize Computer, re-installed few apps and it all went OK. Last week however I had the same problem, only thing is this time I have already done the Authorize Computer on.

To make it clear for anyone reading this, here are the conditions of my iPhone, as my problem may be a bit unique.

FACTS:

It’s an officially unlocked iPhone 3G S 32 GB
Because of the geographical restrictions, I ended up having two accounts. One for Kuwait and another for US, and since I bought some apps from Kuwait store, I still have both accounts running with their apps on my iPhone
I have set Authorize Computer for the Kuwaiti account

PROBLEM:

All of a sudden, and after I got the alert for 7 pending 3rt party apps update, most of the 3rd party apps won’t run. I was busy so I left it for a while, until all 3rd party apps stopped running, and the pending updates were now 10.

SOLUTION:

At first, I tried removing one app, which was the old buggy Facebook app. I’m not sure if I followed this suggested Facebook removal possible solution or tried it out by my self, but I remember that it didn’t fix the problem at the time, so I left it for a while again.

After that, I logged to the US account, did the 3rd party apps update and got the new Facebook app. 3rd party apps were running again then, except some of them. Which ones? The Kuwaiti store one, and i had 3 pending updates to go, which were from the Kuwaiti store. I logged out of the US store, log in to Kuwaiti store and did the update (Yes, it’s a pain we shouldn’t have to suffer). After that, all 3rd party apps were running fine. And they lived happily ever after (so far!).

CONCLUSION:

There seems to be a weird link with the Facebook app here, but it would be really odd if that app is affecting the overall phone performance. The more logical cause for my case at least is that the iPhone is getting confused with updates from two different accounts, or else, it’s a general case that when there are pending updates, those pending updates (may) affect all 3rd party apps. And I tend to incline towards the latter cause, which apparently does not affect all phones.

Is it a bug? No. Apple would argue it’s an iUpdate feature to make sure you enjoy latest of all your 3rd party apps.

Hope that helps.

Question everything, Einstein said

Bashar — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:28:23 +0000

BlogAllAlong

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