no, it is not a typo in the post title, “Technologia” is how some people translate technology to Arabic.

there is two reasons for me to write this post; the first one is that I started translating A list apart articles as part of the Arabic a list apart project, the second reason ( which might be late to talk about, but anyway…) is what happened in ArabnetME conference regarding the language speakers & panelists were using.

since my early days with computers I was with the idea that “In order to learn computer the right way you need to learn it in English”, and I still believe in that…

wait, didn’t you just say you are translating technical articles to Arabic?

yes, I did, the thing is: no matter what I or any other guy working in this field thinks, people are more and more getting into this thing called “web development”, and most of them are not coming from a strong computer background, and getting most of their knowledge from the web itself, and judging from the quality & quantity of the Arabic content on the Internet most of them are not getting a good guidance, that’s why I believe projects like Arabic a list apart and the like are very important, not only for Arabs, but for anyone uses the Interwebs.

ok, now for the other part, ArabnetME, unless you have been under a rock or something, you’ve heard of arabnet, where for the first time in the region, all the big players of the web in the middle east are gathered in one place to discuss the problems and future of the Internet, in this particular region. for those who haven’t been there, the efforts where enormous, and the result was a world-class conference, but on the side there was a fight going, and it started on twitter, the people were arguing about the fact that most speakers and panelists are speaking in English even though this is a conference for Arabs, some even said it should be called EnglishNet, well I can understand where are these comments are coming from and I’ll try to explain my opinion on the subject.

First of all, the fact that most speakers and panelists hold Arabic names doesn’t mean they are fluent in Arabic, especially if it is Technical & Business terms we are talking about, what does that make them? betrayers? no, they just happen to work & live in a non-arabic speaking countries which also happen to be leading the web, so when you have arabic speaking “wadi el silicon” you’ll have an Arabic speaking conference, until then, you’ll have to live with English.

Point two, who said this conference is only for Arabs, who is gonna invest in all those Startup projects then? what about the reporters who are reporting about this to the world?

Lastly, the fact that the language in the conference is English does not contradict with the fact that we need to create Arabic content, it is not like either all in Arabic or nothing in Arabic.

that was my opinion on this issue, feel free to leave yours in the comments (your opinion I mean ) and see you later in a post shorter I hope (:

salam (:

she: what do you do?
me: I’m a web developer.
she: what does that mean for a technology-retarded person?
me: I develop the web to be a better place for people like you.
she: in English please!!
me: I make websites.

remember the little bookmarklet I did to easy your tweeting experience? no? check it out then.

I’ve added a little new feature to it, youtube URL shortening. for example if you are watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esdl_3kKSBk and wanted to share with your followers, you click on tweet! bookmarklet and the link shared on twitter would look like this http://youtu.be/Esdl_3kKSBk which gives you more space to talk (15 more chars to be accurate). pretty awesome right?

the whole point of this bookmarklet is that sometimes all what you want to say about the link is in the title and you don’t want to shorten the URL because the tweet and the URL together are less than 140 and the URL gives the users an idea about what is this link (for example if someone can’t access youtube for some reason)

anyway, hope you like it, enjoy your tweeting and give me any feedback you have

salamz

There is too many ways to avoid censorship or websites blocking, one of the best ways is to use a proxy server and if you are in syria you already know that facebook doesn’t work (except for https), anyway using a proxy have it’s drawbacks (it could be slow, it stops working, …),so here comes the solution “FBps”.

How to install it:

all you’ll need is: firefox, greasemonkey & the FBps script.

after installing greasemonkey (if you don’t have it already), visit FBps and a window pops out asking you if you want to install the script, accept and you are ready to go, test and give me your feedback  (:

How does it work:

the basic idea is really simple, it just redirects any request to http://facebook.com to https://facebook.com

Create your own:

it is not rocket science you know, it is only one line of code, a magical one  though , so if you are a developer and would like to give it a tryor you would like to port it something other than firefox please be my guest, here is the code

window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/^http:/, 'https:');

it worth mentioning that this same line is taken from Dive Into Greasemonkey book in the GMailSecure example by Mark Pilgrim.

Hope you find it useful

cheers (:

I just can’t get this quote out of my head, so I’m blogging it.

“Be civil to all,  sociable to many, familiar with few, friend to one, enemy to none.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

update: explained in twitter jargon

• civil to all: not having a protected account
• sociable to many: following a bunch of tweeps
• familiar with few: replying to tweets and getting into twitversations with some tweeps
• friend to one: well… that’s general but fits anywhere
• enemy to none: blocking 0 users

(: