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It’s sometimes nice to see how Cinescape brings movie on their worldwide release date, and with our early weekends, we actually get to see movies such as Star Wars before so many other countries. But that’s for certain top movies. Others however have to wait long enough, perhaps to get a discount on the price before they show up. I remember reading about the movie 88 Minutes for Al Pacino, and just today I saw it coming soon to Cinescape.

28/8/08 when the movie is actually released 18/4/07! 16 months late is really not a cinema movie anymore. It’s already out on DVD for $25. But that’s not as bad as it gets. I recall 1.5 year old movies which had ratings of 3-4/10 being brought to the big screen. Wonder why would they bother showing them, unless if they got them for FREE somehow!

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Is anyone else facing this or is it just me? ShowtimeArabia.com is not returning anything since yesterday.

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A relative and close friend of mine was on his honeymoon for 2 weeks across Europe. On his last night in Paris I was talking to him over Gmail. He was talking to me about Euro Disney and how marvellous it was. He was taking the train next day to Barcelona. He said it’s more cost effective, but hard with the large amount of baggage they are carrying.

Two days later I heard his baggage, wife’s laptop (with all their honeymoon pictures), money, credit cards, and passports were all stolen at the train. How hard can it be? Their honeymoon ruined, photos lost, money and cards stolen, and no passport to go back home. New passport can also take up to one year.

Now, to get papers for traveling back home, he has to reach Kuwait Embassy in Real Madrid. Unfortunately, the office was closed for summer vacation, and now he has to reach Malaga. No passport so no air travel, no train tickets available, and Taxi would take 12 hours. I tried to search for available transporations, sent him an email thinking how would I even start my email after what happened. I figured this would be the best thing:

“Salam ***,

I heard about what happened to you. Really sorry to hear that, must be real bad. Nevertheless, you are all safe and have each other, and that’s what matters.”

As much as it’s hard for someone to accept it, even me who was saying it, it remains true for observer. All is lost can be overcome, as long as you are still alive. Two days later I heard he managed to DHL his documents and just needs to wait for his papers now. OK, I said. What’s happened is history, let them go out and enjoy their day. They got their papers and are on the way back right now to Kuwait.

Oh and by the way, without passports, they couldn’t continue their honeymoon as planned to Canary Islands and had to stay in Barcelona. They missed their flight!

Crashed Spanair airplane from Real Madrid to Canary Islands

So now somehow they owe their lives to the guy who stole their baggage, and their mistake of keeping passports in their baggage rather than next to them. A friend of mine was asking me few weeks back how could a bad thing be good in other way, arguing why we should be thankful to God in all matters. I was trying to bring him good examples, and this one is the best one I can remember right now.

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So I just finally got my self a NetGear ReadyNAS device and was thinking of trying the Time Machine that everybody have been talking about for long time. Unfortunately, for either technical or business reasons, Apple has made it that Time Machine by default does not use NAS drives. Why exactly? I don’t know. I just know that Googling for a solution, I found lots of similar requests, and lots of complicated long procedures, some suggesting you must have 2 MacBooks to get it to work. Others were as simple as one command line.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now personally, I am still facing other problems that might be related with access to the drive, but at least now I can select the drive as the primary location for backup. I will update if I find anything else also related.

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I still remember when I saw videos of this service when it was still in labs. Photosynth from Microsoft is a new technology that is now being open to the public. The technology takes a collection of photos and smartly creates a 3D environment out of them. What’s cool about it is now it’s open to the public, with 20 GB of storage per user, and you can start building your own environments with pictures from your digital camera or even mobile phone.

CNET which is covering the story in much high details is speaking highly of the speed and performance of the new service from Microsoft. There is also a video interview there for you to watch. I think the service is interesting to try, and I will probably try to create a synth or two. This coming from Microsoft, alongside the Microsoft Surface means Microsoft Labs are still not dead, and are capable of bringing new technologies to the market. What I hate about Photosynth however so far is this:

• “Operating System: Only Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) and Windows Vista are supported at this time.” - So no Mac, no Linux. Luckily however, Microsoft for once is considering Firefox in their equation “Web Browser: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, and Firefox 3″.
• “All synths are public. Your photos will be visible to everyone on the Internet.” - First thing I want to try is my home, and perhaps my home is not something I want to share publicly. Their point of view ofcrouse might be, they are baring the cost of storage, bandwidth, and processing, so what they want in the end is to build more and more 3D environments of the realities.

Thinking of the ultimate goal if this thing is executed properly, if they could create 3D worlds of all the locations which already have a lot of available images on the net, you could search the map for your location, and see 3D views of it instantly.

For a tutorial on how to create a Synth, click here.

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OK so I’ve been discussing this yesterday with several others. Qnet is not a charm, but their support seems a bit better than others. I either cursed it or was punished for saying something totally untrue. I renewed for 512 kbps yesterday, which makes me ofcourse entitled for 1024 kbps. However I got a confirmation message today that it’s renewed, and still the same old speed. I’ve been trying to reach Qnet support now for 30 minutes. Absolultely no one answering! I talked to sales two times. Once they sent me to answering machine, the other he naively sent me again to technical support, when I literally told him there is no one answering. I call again, and you can tell one guy just quickly put me on hold. Everytime I call again, you get a message saying you have been transfered.

Is anybody able to get hold of them? My guess is, they’re having some big cricis, or big party and no one is welling to let go of it!

UPDATE: After almost an hour trying, I finally reached a nice guy from Sales who explained they are under heavy load. Still, no excuse for not answeing my call for over 30 minutes of contunuous trying. However, he did what the other two sales guy could’ve done and saved us all grief. He quickly got my phone number, checked the DSL status and told me connection upgrade didn’t take place yet, maximum by 5 pm.

Thank you in person. Qnet, rethink the load you are taking. Under heavy load I might have to wait for 3-5 minutes, but definitely not 30 minutes without anyone to reach.

UPDATE 2 (16:15 UT): Time have passed 5 pm locally and I still did not get my connection upgrade. I try to call them and get a message “Since all technical support operators are busy, we are sorry that we can’t take your call”. So they can’t even queue me up for a call. Now, it’s a full day with not only technical problems, but not being able to reach the technical support for assistance.

UPDATE 3 (22:00 UT): So it’s one hour passed midnight locally, and still no technical or sales person will answer any call at Qnet. No matter what is happening, even if their building is on fire, there is always a way to automate voice message, or send one of those stupid bulk SMS notifying us of the problem.

FINAL UPDATE (7:00 UT): Finally, a mysterious guy contacts me from Qnet, gets my username, and tells me it’s just a matter of reconnecting. Was a lot easier if they tell it from the start in their SMS confirmation. Thanks mysterious guy. When testing with Qnet bandwidth test, I got this:

Because of low latency they say, I am getting this higher download rate. Upload rate is close to what it says here. For most people it won’t matter, but for people doing lots of FTP uploads, or worse, SFTP, it will be still painful. Upload always has been!

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There are always those good & bad plugins, and sometimes rise a plugin, where it must basically be a built-in feature. That one plugin is the famously growing Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin by Techie-Buzz. Every now and then, or once a security hole was found and a patch was released for it, we would need to go through the Wordpress sometimes painful upgrade steps. Even if it was called 5 minutes upgrade, it was still a tedious job to look after, and I like many others have become lazy catching up. So lazy that when I finally wanted to upgrade, it was a huge gap and my upgrade for some reason failed, the blog stopped working. I restored the old version and lived literally by the quote “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!”.

Then I kept hearing about this plugin over and over. I never expected it would work though for my old release, or it would be that easy. Luckily, I just tried it two days back, and not a single problem. Only thing is, one of the old plugins is not supported anymore. What the hell? What used to take long time for download & upload, then sometimes fixing, now takes few minutes.

Thanks a million Techies.

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