whirlpool's blog

our metal mushrooms

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 23:02:29 +0000

Imagine if this hack was done to the countless number of redundant satellite dishes in Cairo. At least two dishes will be needed on every building communicating with other dishes on neighboring roofs in a mesh network. Instant free (or extremely inexpensive) connectivity for everyone. But illegal of course.

And, according to this we can point all those satellite dishes to the heavens and connect them and create the largest radio telescope ever! It will make mockery of the Very Large Array.

If you use ROX Filer

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:54:28 +0000

Several months ago I wrote this ugly bash script to supplement my favourite file manager, ROX.

This script pops up a text entry box, using zenity for your search term. It will then use find to find the files in your home directory, /home/pub, and cdrom. It then creates a temporary folder with symlinks to the matching files, and opens it with ROX.

#!/bin/bash

autosymlinks () 
{
        dir_path=`mktemp -d ~/tmp/gxsearch.XXXXXXX`
        find ~/ /home/pub/ /mnt/cdrom -iname "$1" -exec ln -s "{}" $dir_path \;

Global Positioning System

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 14:37:13 +0000

I have got a Garmin eTrex Legend handheld GPS unit. :-P

Managed to get 22,710 waypoints for egypt from GEOnet Name server

Loaded all waypoints as csv in Gnumeric. Clicked on chart:

Converted the waypoints file to a plucker document. Placed it on my PalmOS PDA. around 300KB only ! Sorted them using sort first. So locations near each other are near each other in the document. Plucker "Find tool" is fast enough. Not as powerfull as grep though.

LINKdotNET in deep trouble

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 21:21:59 +0000

LINKdotNET's CEO and president Khaled Bishara was arrested on fraud charges in New York. Read this or this http://www.jordantimes.com/thu/news/news5.htm

This is super

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 09:08:22 +0000

The following is a link to a TV ad that was shown on the Egyptian state TV in 1995. It is fantastic, if you got the bandwidth or patience download it.

And it is in the public domain too.

Webcam stop motion

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 11:35:42 +0000

To me the coolest thing one can do with a 24 hour available internet connection is to continously download webcam shots from different parts of the world. Save the series of images locally and produce a video out of them. Pretty cool actually. You can have a look at my first sequence.

The webcam is here

I wrote a 10 line python script to grab the photos and by a simple mencoder command, I create the video.

The python script:

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib, time, sys

Death of an old monster and birth of a devil

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 09:33:35 +0000

Yesterday, I had lots of trouble with my home server. It is a Pentium I 233 MMX 32MB RAM running as a gateway, firewall, proxy and does some bandwidth shaping. It seems that the amount of hardware errors increased to an extent that software can not handle anymore. I am having lots and lots of kernel panics and so on. I think that all the hardware trouble is because of the failing hard drive. I think that the drive is failing and I should no longer depend on it.

So, I will be downloading Devil Linux. It is a live server distro that can read its configuration from a f

testing blah

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 14:51:45 +0000

ahlan beek

Once upon a time

Sun, 6 Jun 2004 12:13:05 +0000

Once upon a time there was a planet full of trolls and lawyers. The lawyers were like any other lawyers. And the same for trolls, they were like any other annoying trolls. Suddenly the population of trolls and lawyers increased on that planet to unimaginable degree. The lawyers started to ask for rules and bylaws and trolls started asking for coffee and tea. Coffee and tea plantation on this planet were not sufficient, its a planet with no equator. And what the lawyers asked for was too complicated for IANALs. Then suddenly an idea came to a group of lawyers and trolls, that they would create a space ship and take all the lawyers and trolls with them. As they were the only two groups of people not happy with their planet.

My first blog post

Sat, 5 Jun 2004 08:16:52 +0000

I am sick.