In the past few months I have been getting requests from Arabs all around the world, some from Egypt some from UAE and many from Europe, in countries such as UK, Germany and even Finland.
All sending in emails asking me to resume my coverage of Qalam Rasas, you see few months ago I used to talk about each episode and provide some videos of the episode too. There was one reason why I stopped doing that, its because I am lazy, who knows me knows this scary fact 
Anyway, I will try my best to cover each and every episode from now on, that means starting from the episode of the 13th of June 2008.
The reason why I started the coverage is because I felt that Hamdi Qandeel was not given the same interest as other political shows, lets say such as Alqahera Alyaum with Amr Adeeb, I watch all kind of shows, but I see a huge coverage for Alqahera Alyaum, 10 O’clock and those kind of shows.
Forums, Yahoo Groups and many many Facebook Groups cover and discuss and upload videos of those shows, except of Qalam Rasas, although Qalam Rasas is the most daring show of them all, no one, I REPEAT, NO ONE can say on their shows what Hamdi Qandeel says on Qalam Rasas.
That is why few months ago I created the Qalam Rasas - Hamdi Qandeel Facebook Group, join and discuss and find out all about the show.
Here is the episode of the 6th of June 2008:
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June 13th, 2008
I know that earlier I have said that Buzzword is great and questioned why is Zoho and Google and others are so fixated on using AJAX and so on. I have used nearly all sort of online word processors like Google Docs and Zoho Writer and Buzzword and others, I also was invited to try some private betas of other services. All have their pros and cons, but today I found out that Zoho Writer is the best.
I was helping a friend editing an essay, so there was big number of documents going back and forth, some from MS Office and some from Open Office and so on. On my Toshiba Qosmio G30 NoteBook I have not installed anything of this sort, I was depending on using an online application.
So when I started my browser Zoho Writer was not my first choice, a mistake I will never fall in again sure, anyway so after trying some of those web services, they were either slow or did not have all tools I wanted. So after all that horror and time wasting I “remembered” Zoho Writer, and you just do not know how thankful I am for doing so, Zoho Writer REALLY knows what you need in a word processor.
I was in a hurry so speed was an issue and Zoho was just amazing, fast and full of tools and the saving and exporting to many formats was so simple and hassle free. So If you are looking at doing some serious work USE ZOHO WRITER.
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April 7th, 2008
I don’t want to ride the wave like others crying out load and saying this is the worst day in my life, but it is sad, it is sad because Stage6 in my opinion was the only REAL logical future pathway towards high quality videos online, REAL high quality, I know there are other web services now that do provide this service, but again in my opinion it is not with the same ease like Stage6 because stage6 uses a format we all knew for a long time which is DivX.
Now they are claiming that they tried to convert it to a private company or to sell it but those plans couldn’t be implemented:
So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.
Now, why didn’t we think of that before we decided to create Stage6 in the first place, you may ask? That’s a good question. When we first created Stage6, there was a clear need for a service that would offer a true high quality video experience online because other video destinations on the Internet simply weren’t providing that to users. A gap existed, and Stage6 arrived to fill it.
In simple words, the costs are just too much to handle, especially when other services are there providing high quality video streaming. I guess the people who got screwed the most are those sites which were built totally depending on Stage6 videos embedded on their pages, those are going to face big problems and they will need to switch to other services. The funny/sad/crazy thing is that Stage6 is giving only 3 day notice to access the videos on the site!!
Most people are moving now towards Google Video and Veoh, I think Youtube have already announced that they are going to launch a new service for high quality videos, I guess people might jump to that also. But again the kind of ease and quality that Stage6 has I still cant see it anywhere else, who knows maybe a new service might come up and cleverly fill this gap which will be created by the shutdown of Stage6.
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February 26th, 2008
I think by now everybody knows how much I just love watching this show, I wish it is a daily show such as “Alqahira Alyaum” and “Al3ashera Masa2an”. Hamdi Qandeel is just genius, he makes it seem so simple, he says what each one in this Arab world wants to say, its like he collects the thoughts of all the people in the Arab world and put them in an hour episode.
Before having this blog I used to have an active channel on youtube, having hundreds of videos from “AlQahira Alayaum”, “Al3ashera Masa2an”, “Qalam Rasas” and other shows, I used to get a lot of requests from Arabs who live abroad from all nationalities to upload some parts of the show. I used to upload as much as I can but it was time consuming, anyway I will try to upload the FULL episode of “Qalam Rasas” weekly on Google Video.
In this week’s episode the most strange thing is the interview Hamdi Qandeel had over the satellite from Amman with “Hayat Elhowaik” and from Cairo with “Hussain Ahmad Amin” from the American University. It was about the new rules the Arab governments trying to start to lower the freedom level in the private Arabic channels, especially the political shows, the discussion showed the real meaning of those new rules when we see one of the makers of those rules not having any manners in the way he is discussing the matter. As usually a very interesting episode by Hamdi Qandeel. Enjoy!
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February 20th, 2008
MySpace just announced that their developer platform will be lauching on February 5th 2008, developers can Pre-Register now by going to http://developer.myspace.com.
Although late in the game, but MySpace should be able to tackle the dificulties and mistakes of their rivals Facebook easily from the start. The main points MySpace will be focusing on is privacy, monetization, and data ownership. They will also be looking into helping the developers monetize their applications by having a revenue share program. MySpace new developer platform will be supporting Google OpenSocial.
[Via Mashable]
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January 30th, 2008
Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.
Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.
To read a full review click More…
As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.
The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.
But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.
We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.
The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.
In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.
Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.
There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it. You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.
Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.
The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.
For a full help guide for Buzzword Click Here.
In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.
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December 4th, 2007
Meebo is working hard to make it so tempting for you to ditch your current standard IM’s and use their service. The first step was taken a while ago when Meebo announced that they have a new 3rd party development platform.
More than 200 developers joined in, and the initial result is that there is 20 new games now that can be played on Meebo between you and your friends. Some of those games are Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Sudoku Wars, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Connect4, Texas Hold ‘em, and more.
This is just a first step, Meebo is planning to enter the world of Video, Music, Shopping, and more serious applications too.
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November 21st, 2007
EverNote is a great tool to organize all your notes, web articles, images, parts of office documents and all different kinds of notes. Google Desktop Search can be used for quickly finding your notes, share your notes via email and instant messengers, notes can be categorized manually or automatically and you can synchronize your snapshots from your mobile or PDA. This software is specially useful for Tablet PC users, because it has handwriting recognition.
Normally to get this software you would need to cough up 50 bucks, but only today, and within the next 16 hours from writing this post you can get it for free from Giveaway of the Day. After going to the website carefully follow the instructions to download the software.
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November 15th, 2007
Well there were signs all over the net that there is a huge bidding war between Microsoft and Google and it seems Miscrosoft just wanted it more than anybody. The speculation was that who ever wins the bidding in the end will buy around 10% of Facebook, but the war ended with Microsoft paying $240 Million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. Which makes Facebook overall value goes up to 15 freakin BILLION Dollars, $15 Billion, wow, although this year they have made only around $150 Million in revenue.
So what is the deal exactly, well Facebook gets allllot of cash, employ some new employees, expand to other countries and so on, for Microsoft, it will be selling ads that show up on Facebook outside the U.S and share the revenue with Facebook, btw Microsoft already sell ads for Facebook in the U.S.
Who should we congratulate? who is the real winner here ? only time will tell.
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October 26th, 2007
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