Hi folks ! I really don’t know where to start from but life went busyier than I thought. I’m still alive, that’s the most important.
Actually I’m still working on e-Government projec, and between the lines coding two new big projects. The first is a business solution that I’m developping in a partnership with an IT company here, and the second is a mobile social network that you probably heared about it somewhere on this blog (I might have forgot to post it otherwise 
) or elsewhere (who knows ?!).
Most of my others projects are in stand by, starting with OpenHandset Magazine, ITACTU, … etc. I’m also out of Storage and have to move to a bigger server soon, and of course moving from $120 monthly to something like $180 monthly at least, while I’m not really ready to pay an extra $750 yearly.
In the mean timeI’m trying also to study - surprisingly- and get certified in some specific fields. I have already bought a book from Amazon, and few other kits to prepare certification exam that I’m currently working on them. It’s very hard to manage all these jobs, in addition to my family and studies, but I hope to find time to breathe ! I want to apologize to all people who sent emails and didn’t get any answer yet, my mailbox is more than overwhelmed, but I’m trying to manage daily time to answer so just be patient.
Happy Eid !
Yesterday we adopted a kitty, we called Foufa. We went to a veterinary medical center in Jeddah just behind Fayfa Mall in Tahliya, and it was probably the best cat available that day for adoption. Foufa is a female, about 7 months old, and already pregnant ! Unfortunately we don’t know nothing about the father, but hope her kids will be like her 
She looks very quiet, calm, and most certainly very spoiled. Here is some Photos that I took today. Continue reading Foufa, our new kitty
I’m lazy as usual to write anything here, not because the f*k*n blog study, but many things are changing in the last days so quickly that I could not find the time to get reorganized. Last weeks I have been working in Jeddah, finalizing one of the projects that we have been working on it since 2 years or more. Last week I removed my wisdom teeth and had my temperature up to 40C.
My car is annoying me as usual with a silly new battery that kept me home during almost the whole Friday. We usually go out the weekend, but it could happen that we spend the last two weekends at home for a reason or another.
Today the program at home also, but today we are going to celebrate something special, I don’t know how to call it, but it is usually called birthday. That’s it, today I’m Thirty !
Since I’m announcing nothing here for long time, I wanted to profit and announce something very special that is going live in about two weeks in US. It’s the first public beta of the next generation of Mobile Social networks : Amigolo ! I have been working silently on this project for many years and currently doing the latest checking to be 99.9% ready for launch. Four domain extensions have been registered for the project : com, net, org and mobi. Amigolo is more than a social network, it’s everything lazy people like me will need in their mobile phones to make business, keep in touch with their families or friends.
Stay Tuned !
This Friday I was in Jeddah spending some great time with my wife, and for the second time I drove from Makkah to Jeddah in about half an hour - the first was to the airport and took almost an hour and half. We profited to have a look on the red sea, the weather was defintely great and the view was amazing. Below a pict that I took from my Canon A560, resized but could give an idea 
It become annoying that until today I still don’t have a driving license, and don’t know driving at all ! I didn’t even tried to drive, so around one month before hajj I went to a driving school very close to Arafat and registered to get my driving license. They give me a date after two weeks or something to start courses, but there should be always a time to start. Driving schools here are very different from the ones I knew in Tunisia. In Makkah there are only two schools in total, one close to Arafat and the other one in Chmeissi, direction Jeddah.
Those who know already driving can take the 5 days package, people who don’t know anything at all - like myself - have a 20 days package. In these 20 days I took only 17, and every week there are two days for road signs. More annoying in these courses that you feel yourself in the primary school, more than two absences are not allowed, courses start from 4h30 until 20h30 including two pauses of half an hour or something for Maghreb and Isha prayer.
Only Nissan cars there (Sunny and Altima), and the exam is always on the Altima only. We drive in a closed place only inside the school, and it’s there also where the exam take place. So you won’t have to exceed 30km/h in any case. I got the chance to drive the Altima few time before the exam, and the last day they took us to Arafat in a larger place, where we can change speed more freely and can reach 70km/h.
The exam itself didn’t took more than 5min, the officer took my file then asked me to drive. Then okay, go to the computers room for road signs exam, the most easy exam ever. I finish it in two minutes then went to work. Tomorrow morning my driving license will be ready. I’m just happy ! Now moving to next step and finding a suitable car :-/
The story started around July 2007 when I recieved my first Admob check with my name spelled with N instead of M. I become Haten for sometime, and the check passed without problems. It was a small amout that I spend it without noticing that it have been already collected when I was in Istambul.
Back to KSA in mid-October, the second check was waiting, but this time my bank noticed the mistake and they told me that my name is Hatem and not Haten, and of course that I have to fix it and reissue a new check . This have to be fixed one day or another, so Admob support corrected my name as I have indicated in my settings and send it.
Now the N is corrected by M so it should be my name ? Well, this time my bank told me that all my name isn’t written correctly not just the last letter ! According to my bank and my residential permit, my name here in english is Hatim ! Go and explain them that you used to write your name in French during your whole life.
I went to another agency close to me and they accepted the check without even looking at my name, so I’m sure that next time they will verify and notice that my name (in French) is different from my name (in English). I’ll have to change the agency every time, or simply write my Name exactly as it’s written on my residential permit.
So until now I got Hatem, Haten and Hatim, next time I don’t know how they will spell it, but I’ll have to deal with it.
Ca fait un bail que j’écris rien ici, manque d’inspiration, ou manque de temps, ou peut être les deux. Dans les trois cas, la reprise après le mariage était quand même lente surtout au niveau de phpmag, mais ça va reprendre dans les jours à venir j’espère bien. Ca bouge surtout coté ITACTU ces derniers jours avec des articles quotidiens, analyses des dernières actualités et tendances, mais surtout deux nouveaux produits ITACTU qui vont voir jours dans les semaines à venir et un nouvel auteur Hatem Zidi qui a fait son entrée dans l’équipe. Donc après itactu.com et itactu.mobi, on va lancer itactu.biz et une autre extension qu’on va annoncer plus tard.
Sinon le dernier né aujourd’hui s’appelle Open Handset Magazine, qui sera dédié; comme son nom l’indique; à l’Open Handset Alliance et Android. A part les actualités et les analyses, le site va inclure des données technique sur la nouvelle plateforme Android, tout ce qui concerne le développement, les applications, les handsets … etc.
Finalement le paresseux que je suis n’est pas vraiment aussi paresseux
As usual I’m spending few time off from my perso blog, but not totally off. This month was pretty busy and many things happened together, starting from my friend Salah who is leaving the team where I’m currently working by the end of this month, my vacations getting closer, … I have a lots of tech news to announce but after vacations and can’t tell anymore about it at this time. The only thing that I’m worrying about is taking the responsibility of the IT team here, even that I used to during Salah’s absence.
The good news that by next month I’ll be starting a new life, as some of you already know that I’m getting married. So I hope to fix any issue here and there before mid-August so I can be completely off for some good vacations, better called honeymoon I’ll just keep an eye on hostphp.org server in case anything wrong happened, I have putty installed on my N80 for quick access.
Hostphp is currently hosting more than 50 websites, and the most busy one is wikimobs.com which currently serving more than 1million page views monthly, followed by phpmagazine.net with half a million page views monthly. Did I mention that Sadri started a new blog at BrainFault.com ? not at hostphp, but just for info
ça devient de plus en plus pire chaque jour, et récemment c’est mon email @php.net qui a était victime de spam à gogo. Le problème que cette fois mon adresse est tombée dans des listes de spam “Tunisiennes”. Quand, comment, qui, j’en ai aucune idée !! Le premier spammeurs je vais pas le lister ici, parcequ’il a pris le soin de mettre un lien pour se désinscrire, malgré qu’il a pris le soin de m’inscrire dans 10 listes differentes. Le second tunisiait.com, le journal de la net économie et du Management !! ça a l’air sérieux jusque là, sauf que lorsqu’on vous envoi un email non sollicité ça devient pas sérieux du tout.
Messieurs de la Net économie et du Management, ce que vous faites ne rime pas du tout avec votre activité commerciale. Si vous avez un message à faire passer veuillez utiliser la publicité, ou une agence de communication sérieuse. Avec le spam vous avez obtenu gratuitement une mauvaise publicité pour votre site.
Yesterday the server encountered a pretty long downtime which wasn’t very common. The problem as usual “WikiMobs”. I disable it temporarily until fixing memory issues. I have updated the service Tuesday, and after that the traffic increased considerably, and probably attracted some annoyance with it. Pageviews was averaging 20′000 per day in the beginning of the June, and now it’s more than 80′000. If it continue in this way it’s going to exceed 2Millions pageviews per month which is huge and definitely require server upgrade.
Anyway currently everything seems to be working fine. We’ll try to get more things done in the next hours.
