Ali's Blog

Why do we get upset or feel upset?

Ali — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:36:00 +0000

Been thinking recently why do we get upset?

I think its one or more of what I am listing below occur.

1. Expectation

It’s our human nature, we set expectations, when they aren’t met, we feel bad and we get upset. This is a topic by itself, so I am gonna give examples here to make the picture clear and then move on to the next point. We usually set expectations for everything in life, even when we design an electronic circuit, we expect it to work as designed, if it doesn’t for any reason, we feel upset. But its nothing compared to the feeling we get from getting unexpected behavior from people we care about.

We usually expect a certain behavior from people who we care about, when something unexpected happens, we get upset, sometimes it reaches to depression. When we care about someone, we think that person is an angel. Specially, when this person cares about you too.

When someone cares about us, we set the expectation of us being the only special person, we expect to get all the care that could ever be given. But this creates so much pressure on the other person. Thus makes both upset.

We have to accept the fact is that people care on different levels, you may care so much more than the person cares.. People have different behaviors, sometimes words betray people and words slip unexpected. and I know the idea of accepting this is just painful and makes us upset.

2. Abilene paradox

Quote from Wikipedia: ”The Abilene paradox is a paradox in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of any of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group’s and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire to not “rock the boat”. “ _{– Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox}

Group of people could be even two people, we sometimes do things to please the other person or other people, but after sometime, it becomes heavy and we get upset and start pointing fingers.

3. Feeling Lost / Feeling Lonely / Losing someone or something

Sometimes we just feel lost, we don’t know what to do, where we want reach with our lives.. This feeling sometimes is caused by unsatisfied expectations. It could be caused by feeling lonely. Feeling lonely is when you miss someone so much and this person is not around. It could be because of losing someone! Its our nature to forget and expect that this person will last for us forever.

4. Fear

Fear is a very important factor, fear from being able to reach the expectation, fear of being lost.. Can’t find enough words to finish this part.

At the end, it all related to expectations we set. But there could be a different view, expectations can give hope too.

Galaxy Nexus – Review

Ali — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:17:27 +0000

Every few months, I buy a new gadget.. I rarely write reviews, but I found that writing reliefs me, and gives me the comfy feel. and Since one of my friends always demands reviews for everything I buy. Hence, I am writing this review. Please do keep in mind that whatever I write about this device is solely my own opinion.

I got this device on December 1st, 2011. This gave me enough time to evaluate the device.

Hardware / Design

This devices is equipped with 4.65″ HD Super AMOLED Screen, 1 GB RAM, 16GB Storage, 5 MegaPixel Camera, Front facing camera and 1.2Ghz clocked CPU.

I absolutely love the device design, really slim slick and curved. Lightweight, causing it slip from the hand, I dropped it few days ago.

The screen on this device is Wow. I just love this screen, and its size. And the above Tech specs speaks it all.

Battery Life
Its a new battery, and honestly, I think its awesome… I manage about 7 to 8 hours heavy almost continuous use. On low usage, having few emails running in the background, I managed 1 day out of the phone. Comparing this battery to other devices I owned, including iPhone 4, I find this battery superior to the others. Keeping in mind that I run this device on VIVA Bahrain HSPA+ Network.. This network drains any phone battery, including iPhone 4.. However, this phone manages longer standby periods even on VIVA Network.

Camera
Usually Camera’s are not that important for me, however, I cannot say its a bad camera, but it could have been done better. I love the speed of its captures, however, sometimes due to speed, it loses focus. So, you gotta touch the screen for focus and capture.

Network Speeds

I have managed to get about 8.7Mbps Downlink and 1.9Mbps up on VIVA network, that was first day I got the phone. Today, I am facing issues with VIVA Network making me unable to go more than 1Mbps on any handset I got. So, probably gonna post a pic when I get my issues fixed.

Software

ICS is what android should have been. Being an iOS user for sometime, I think, ICS has reached to a stage where is can compete with iOS.

It is a complete redesigned OS, it features soft-buttons which already existed in HoneyComb (Tablets OS). A new Lock screen and a new way of answering calls.

It features resizable widgets and screenshots!

I believe at this stage, ICS is ready to compete with iOS at moment.

I got myself a gift, Galaxy Note!

Ali — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:39:37 +0000

Few days ago, I purchased a Galaxy Note. Keeping in mind that I preowned a Dell Streak and I was completely in love with it. Galaxy Note gave me the same feeling. Love on first sight. I love devices with such big screens, makes it easier for me to edit documents and browse the web.

Hopefully, when I have time and use the device for sometime, I will post a review.

For the time being, you can watch my unboxing video.

Special Thanks to Mohammed (@madridlad) for making this video.

Extend LVM Partition online

Ali — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:24:57 +0000

I have been facing this recently at work. Luckily, we run a private cloud on VMWare Infrastructure with Storage on EMC SAN. I’ve got some production machines running RHEL and CentOS RHEL Clone. Recently, some of them started running out of disk space. Luckily, setup was done using default install. So, LVM was used by default.

So, I asked the VMWare admin to add an extra virtual disk for me on each of those machines. and I extended (/) partition to the new disk.

Keeping in mind to follow the procedure is: /dev/sda was the only disk for each machine. So, when we added an extra disk, it was assigned /dev/sdb

Using fdisk, create a new partition:

fdisk /dev/sdb

Make sure you make your choices as primary and assign it first partition.

So, once created, it shall be assigned /dev/sdb1

pvcreate /dev/sdb1

This will create a physical volume for the LVM.

And after creating the physical volume we attach it to our existing Volume Group.

vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1

Then we extend the Logical Volume which is mounted to (/) by 20GB, make sure you change the number to the attached disk storage.

lvextend -L +20G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Then we resize the filesystem, since we are running default installs, it runs ext3, so extending it online using the command below:

resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Verify the new storage size using:

df -h

It must show the extra 20GB or whatever disk size you added.

Prayers for Mohammed Albanna

Ali — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:43:18 +0000

Few days ago, Mohammed Albanna had a bike accident. Today, I went to see him, hearing that he have become better. I heard good news from his mom saying that all surgical operations were done, no more required, and he is recovering. I went inside to see him in the ICU, and when I saw him, I had this indescribable feeling. I can’t see my friend hurt. Old memories flashed before my eyes.

We hold a very old friendship, goes back to 1994. Though, our families are related, we first met in Bahrain Science Center.

We studied there, had fun, and enjoyed time. Yes, I still remember those memories last they were yesterday. I remember when we were learning Visual Basic, and you designed the Game Interface for me using Bordered Frames. We were kids back then! I still remember when we used to sit in the Computer room formatting Ali’s Computer.. I wish you Remember?! It was Compaq, looked like Apple Machines back then.

And years later we got busy with our lives, and then we meet again in Bahrain World Trade Center. I still remember our chats, I still remember when you said that you wanted to get a BMW 335 Coupe. I still remember when you bought one.

Now I miss seeing your car in the car park, I miss seeing you in the elevator in the morning. You go to floor 14 and I go to 15.

I pray for you my friend, and hope that when you get better, you read this blog post and remember our child hood.

Friendship and Love

Ali — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:48:31 +0000

Could friendship and Love coexist? This question that I have heard many many times. Today, I decided to write about this topic. Sometime ago, I have written a post to define What is Love?. It may not be the full clear picture, but it should serve the purpose for this post.

Before I start into details about the correlation between Friendship and Love. I shall define what is Friendship?

Friendship is the state of being friends. Its an interpersonal relationship between people. Makes those people so close. People cannot be friends without love anyway! Love is what makes us!

There is a list of values that required as keys to success friendship.

Love – I will talk about this later in types of love.
Trust – Without trust, what is the relationship?
Honesty – Its a key for trust.
Mutual understanding – It is a key for success, however, conflicts could occur, but the above keys allows to clean the air and things get back to normal.
Respect – Its the key for mutual understanding.
Desire the best for the others
Enjoyment.

A friendship is not a friendship without the above key values.

Friendship is in levels/grades. Some friends, are best friends.

Could Friendship and Love coexist in a relationship? / Could friends love each other?

In one word, yes!

Now, as I said earlier, love is a key to a successful relationship. As I said in my Love definition. Part of love is wanting to spend the rest of the life with this person. In this case, your friend. But this love is non-romantic. Unlike Marriage Love which is romantic, and it may involve sexual relationship.

As for me, I select my friends carefully. I love them so much, no one could imagine my love to them. Though, sometimes we get busy in life, however, our relationship stays intact. I have many differences with my friends, conflicts. Thanks to Love, we never loose each other.

On a side note: If you have someone if your life, who have those key values listed above, be friends.

Good friends are like Stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they are always there. And I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.

PHP Obfuscators and Encoders

Ali — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:46:08 +0000

A common problem with Interpreted Languages (eg. PHP, Javascript, Java, Python) is that its really hard to protect the source code. Today, I will talk about PHP Obfuscators and Encoders.
Two types of protection can be found for PHP, first type which is the easiest, Obfuscation. Making the code not human readable. An example of such product is ZenCrypt (I wrote a semi-review about it last year). However, a good developer or a reverse engineer can go about that, and alter the code to change its behavior, like bypass the license verification.

The second type is encoding, the encoder encodes the PHP script to some encrypted text (I don’t want to go into details here, but that’s the general idea). Those encoded scripts requires a loader, this loader decodes the script and runs it via the PHP Interpreter. Those loaders are simply PHP extensions. Example of those are ZendGuard and IonCube.

It is not hard to write a PHP extension, but it wont be adapted easily with most online hosts. Maybe Enterprise! But again, maintaining cross platforms is not an easy task.

Since IonCube and ZendGuard are widely supported with most hosts some came up with the idea of creating a hybrid obfuscator. The idea is to encrypt the code and have a php script to decrypt. But the decrypting script is encoded using ZendGuard or Ioncube. An example of such is phpCipher.

Last year in my post I wrote that I will be writing an encoder, I have been very busy since then. But last week I had the chance to start writing my encoder. I have most of the logic done. Once I am done writing my loader script, I will start writing the desktop app to encode the scripts. I am planing to release it on Mac App Store and online on my website for a small amount of money.

On a side note, I may offer my source for sale.

MBA Class – Leadership vs Management

Ali — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:06:58 +0000

In my MBA class, we are taking a course about leadership. I always thought that leaders are born with this talent. I still do, however, the professor and the article says otherwise, leadership can be taught to people. I can’t really figure this out, leadership is about coping with changes, motivating people and being able to guide and go over obstacles. Even if I agree that it can be taught from experience, yet, talent is different. Management can be taught, its about planing and it comes with experience.

The outcome of todays class is:

There are some characteristics that identify a leader.
Leadership can be taught, yet, I believe its a talent.
Leadership is not management, leadership is inspiration and motivation, people follow leaders.
Leaders have their ups and downs, there is a gray area, and it depends on how you see it.

It was a great discussion.

What is beauty?

Ali — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:20:00 +0000

This question popped up to my mind and it is inspired by the previous post (What is Love?).

Beauty is an interpretation of some kind of love or let me say liking. When we see something we like, we say its beautiful. Defining the word “like” will take another post, so I will stick with the word “beauty”.

When we see a person who is beautiful, it means that we either love this person, so we like everything about this person, then he/she becomes the most beautiful person in the world. Or we like something about this him/her, so it could be the shape of his/her face, the color of the eyes, or his/her hair cut/style. People sometimes look beautiful for the way they dress and depending on your mood.

If you notice, sometimes you see a beautiful person, and another day, they are just like the rest, the beauty is just gone. It could be that she/he was wearing something you like.

This word has a very complex meaning, I tried to express it in my own simple words.

Disclaimer

Ali — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:59:40 +0000

Every blog needs this. I should have done it earlier, but I guess I never knew what other write. But now, I created a page that contains my blog disclaimer. This disclaimer applies to my blog and twitter, considering twitter as a microblogging tool.

This link for my disclaimer: http://almahdi.cc/disclaimer/

What is love?

Ali — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:55:01 +0000

What is love? It is a question that have been asked by Hussain Nasser (@hnasr). So, here is my answer. Keeping in mind that everything I write here is my own opinion, some people may agree and some don’t.. So please don’t flood me with comments saying that I wrote the wrong thing or I have a weirdo opinion.

Love can be applied to everything, you can love a person, or a computer or even a pet. But I will define love based on loving people.

When I chat with my friends, we joke and we say that love is a band-pass-filter. What it means is that when we love, we only see what we like. Love is like glasses with filters, that makes us not only see what we like, it may even makes us like things we didn’t like.

Love is the butterfly effect when you see the person you love. Love is when you feel alone without this person around you, even though everyone else is around.

In love, beauty doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter if the person you love is beautiful/handsome or not, because love makes everything beautiful.

Love is when you want to spend the rest of your life with this person with no regrets! Love is happiness. Love is the most beautiful thing in this life. Love is what makes us. We can’t live without love…

Sometimes people mix love with sex, this is not true! Sex has nothing to do with love. Sex is a physical thing while love is a feeling. Attraction is not love. Liking an attitude is not love.

Viva Bahrain 3G network and Phone battery life!

Ali — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 20:20:49 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, using Viva 3G network consumes more battery than any other network in bahrain, zain and batelco to be specific. To make the story short, Viva 3G network is actually setup on HSPA+ which consumes more power than 3G.

Brief Technical Information: Quoted from Wikipedia:

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhanced 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, also dubbed 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

zain and Batelco provide HSPA+, however, the phone has to switch to it when it requires high speed access, but on Viva, HSPA is the default.

I bought myself a Dell Streak

Ali — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:32:59 +0000

Few days ago, I sold my iPad.. For few reasons.. 1st, I couldn’t find a proper use for it. I used it for browsing, but its size was too big for me. I thought of purchasing the Galaxy Tab, since its 7-inch… I went and I grabbed one and I tested holding it and walking with it. Didn’t wasn’t good either. The Dell Streak is the perfect size, yet, good screen. I immediately fell in love with the Streak. So, I bought one.

Why I don’t jailbreak my iOS device?

Ali — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:01:59 +0000

I just had a conversation with my friends. Why I don’t jailbreak my iOS devices.

A basic overview:
Jailbreaking the device basicly means getting root access to the device. It’s a Unix term to get administrative access to the device. Allowing you to install apps and customize the system.

What is a patched app?
Patched app is like saying infected with a virus.

What is my argument?
Apps can be patched and they have root access to your device. This means they can collect data and information about you with you knowing it.

You can say trust the community and stuff like that. But that’s what I say.

Loading fixed width lines in MySQL

Ali — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:28:37 +0000

Today I required to load a file into a database, the file requires some parsing to be loaded. Normal developer would load the file using a programming language, do the parsing and insert into the table. However, for me, I thought I would do it using MySQL DATA LOAD, it is faster and yet, no programming language required to load the files.

I am posting a sample code on how to parse files line by line using MySQL.

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘path/to/my/file’ into table [table-name]

(@line)

set field1 = SUBSTR(@line,1,10),

field2 = SUBSTR(@line, 11,12),

field3 = SUBSTR(@line, 48,19)

Now, what I did, is I just parsed text, since the file was not delimited but it had fixed width.

Mac OSX Defrag

Ali — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:08:55 +0000

On my daily life, I deal with VM Images and File processing.. Large files.. This causes my MacBook to slow down due to Fragmentation… My solution was always to backup to an external drive and restore back, and it solves the fragmentation problem and the MacBook Performs better. However, this takes really long time. Especially with large disks. Today, I tried iDefrag from Coriolis Systems. I purchased the Application using Paypal and gave it a try. It worked like a charm. It took 4 hours to finish, but I can notice the speed of my VMs. And Apps load a bit faster. Good Application to keep the performance of your Mac OSX.

Keeping in mind that your Mac OSX defragments any file less than 20MB automagically, however, large files get fragmented, to defragment, you can move the files to external disk and move them back. However, this takes time and requires you to have an external disk to backup the files.

I got my self an android Phone!

Ali — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:18:25 +0000

Hmm, I couldn’t resist acually… So, I got my self an Android Phone… Its an Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition. Its not the best Android Phone… However, since I love cars, its price is good for me… and it got everything I want..

Since I started Mobile Development for sometime now, it has been my excuse for Android development… This app is not a new idea, however, its a new implementation. I will release the details as soon as I start testing the app. Its going to be available for Android and iPhone.

Why did I get an iPhone and not any other android phone?

Ali — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:07:36 +0000

I am being asked this question a lot lately. Well, I cannot compare the iPhone to other android phones because android is an OS.. It would only be fair to compare iOS to Android… I honestly can’t say which is better. I used both, I did a research… Probably it will be my secondary phone. Android is a wonderful OS. I really like it.. It has plenty of features… On the other side, iOS was the reason behind all those Operating Systems to come out and yet, I see it as the best…

Honestly, the only reason that made me buy iPhone 4 is the Apple Logo, and Apple products are the most beautiful products… I am an Apple geek, and I love the life style Apple gives me

Don’t get me wrong, Linux and FreeBSD are still in my blood. I am still using Linux on my Desktop and FreeBSD on some of my servers.

Hacked using WP Lost Password?

Ali — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 10:42:04 +0000

A Saudi guy was trying to hack my website… Of-course, due to my knowledge of security, his attempts were not successful. But he reminded me of the method, thus I am posting it to help other WordPress users to secure their blogs.

Simply he tries to reset the password using wordpress lostpassword function.. I will not post the details of the method, so people don’t try it on other blogs..

However, if you maintain a wordpress blog, you can disable the function using a simple plugin:

/*

Plugin Name: Disable Lost Password Feature

Plugin URI: http://www.almahdi.cc

Description: This is a plugin to disable Lost password feature in wordpress. I have found this plugin online and I can’t recall the source or the author.

Author: Unknown, Posted by Ali Almahdi

Version: 0.1

Author URI: http://almahdi.cc

*/

function disable_password_reset() { return false; }

add_filter ( ‘allow_password_reset’, ‘disable_password_reset’ );

function remove_password_reset_text ( $text ) { if ( $text == ‘Lost your password?’ ) { $text = ”; } return $text; }

function remove_password_reset() { add_filter( ‘gettext’, ‘remove_password_reset_text’ ); }

add_action ( ‘login_head’, ‘remove_password_reset’ );

function remove_password_reset_text_in ( $text ) { return str_replace( ‘Lost your password?’, ‘’, $text ); }

add_filter ( ‘login_errors’, ‘remove_password_reset_text_in’);

?>

Upload to plugins directory and enable in the plugins… This will protect you from lost-password attacks.

Switched the Internet from Menatelecom to VIVA

Ali — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:31:03 +0000

I have been using Menatelecom for over a year now, it was good, however, I never had success with VOIP with them… I didn’t want to go back to Batelco, it used to disconnect all time, due to the SWITCH being too far and having a very bad ADSL service. I tested VIVA for few months now.. It is simply great!! Even VOIP is perfect! So today, I made the switch, and I am totally connected to the internet via VIVA.. I get about 3Mbits in my house due to low coverage.. Browsing speed is awesome! I connected it via a 3G router, and now my whole house is connected via VIVA. Everybody is happy now! Tomorrow I will pass by Menatelecom and disconnect the line.