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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.

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.

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.

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.

Follow me on twitter

Ali — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:53:46 +0000

I have been a bit active on twitter.. I don’t know when I stop twitting.. However for the time being, you may follow me on twitter (http://www.twitter.com/alialmahdi/).