Ammar Ibrahim's blog

I got Debian almost a month ago from Yaman. I've been tryting to insall it since then, I spent almost one hour every week, hehe!

The problem was updating the kernel, it really killed me. Then I found this page Debian Kernel 2.6 How To which also Isam recommended it. I managed to get it up and running at last. Now all I need to do when I have sometime is to configure the Video card & Audio.

I hope I'll have more time in the coming days so that I could get used to Debian. I have not fully migrated to Linux. Simply because Dreamweaver doesn't run on Linux natively. But Macromedia are planning to port it sometime soon .

Imagine a bike, normal bike, protesting against bush! Isn't that impressive?

Bikes Against Bush was created by Joshua Kinberg. Joshua, an emerging-technology artist and activist based in New York City. He felt that he needed to protest in an unusual way against Bush's administration.

The idea is that there will be protestors(Bikers) riding thier bikes in Newyork. The bikes have spray devices attached to them, accepting messages from the internet. The messages will be painted to the streets of Neywork!

I wrote the message "Bush is killing innocent people all over the world". Please write your own to stop people from voting for Bush. There are one thousand reasons to be against Bush.

As I have been recently working with more clients from the US, it's becoming harder to communicate. I decided to do a trick to get myself a US phone number.

As I have been recently involved in delevering sophisticated communication solutions utalizing Voice Over IP, I managed to do the following in order to get the service.

I got a server to be placed in the states, and installed some FXO cards.

Connected that server to a PBX that "listens" to my fixed line US number

Whenever somebody calls me, I get the server to transfer the call using SIP protocol to my computer at home

Simple isn't it whenever somebody rings the phone in the states, I can answer them in Jordan. And they probably think I live in DC.

Now what I'm looking for is a hardware "IP/SIP Phone" And a really long range normal cordless phone. I got some Telephony cards at home, So basicly I can route that incoming call to that long range phone. I'd have a roaming US number!

Good news is that this service will be offered very soon to customers in the middle east by IPFloat. Contact me if you need more info

Yesterday I went with Akram Baker to Century Cinema. We watched FAHRENHEIT 9/11. Honestly, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And it's also very funny, yet very sad.



Michael Moore tries to tell you the turth behind the attacks of September 11th & invasion of Iraq. The documentary explains the secret relationship between the Bushs & the Saudis!

First of all, it shows how Bush didn't win the elections. And how his cousin, brother and others helped him to cheat. And when he became a president, things were not lookin' good, he spent 42% of his time on vacation.

Afghanistan, It's so weird that it was all just for an oil pipe line.

What really shocked me, is when the director went to Iraq and he spoke with some soldiers. They put on a CD in thier tanks, some aggressive music "The roof is on fire". And they go hunting Iraqis. These dumb immoral soldiers think it's a video game. They don't fight for a cause.

Everything in the documentary is so logical. Every person involved in Bush's administration seems to be a corck.

While I was browsing Egypt LUG, I came across the first arabic Linux ad. You can check it out yourself.

Download movie. MPEG XVID

I came across Sage a couple of days ago. It really made a big difference on how I browse the Internet.


Sage is a Firefox plugin. Check the installation page. I wrote earlier about RSS news feed reader. But this one, is much more advanced and really nicer.

When I like a website I add it to the bookmarks, When I really like it, I add it to the list of news feeds I read everyday. Then you end up with a big list of sites that you want to read from. Here's how Sage helps.

First, there's a Search for feed button, when clicked; it'll automatically discover what feeds are available on the site.


Second, you don't need to go over the feeds clicking everyone discovring if they added a new article( blog, news..etc). You click on "Check Feeds" And it'll mark those feeds that have been updated with a red star!.

Giving birth? Hell no! It's the pain of teeth! It's 6 am! I only slept for one hour! I've been trying to do everything to stop this pain! I can't find the pain killer. I would shoot myself now to stop this pain! damn it's so killing me. I have to wait till 9, probably then I can go to a dentist.

As Browse Happy suggests, The first rule to browse the Internet happily is to get rid of Internet Explorer. Because IE can make your browsing experience unsafe. Next thing to do, switch to a better(safe) browser. You can also read stories of people who dumped IE to a better broswer.

I would like to know what you are using? You can leave a comment

I woke up at 9:30, had only 3 hours of sleep. Then I Called a client to cancel the meeting because i'm sick. I walked into the room back again, and i found my mobile on the floor, I picked it up. Guess what? The screen is broken! seems like somebody called me or something, and the vibration made it fall over from the table.

And when I tried to check my email, there was no connectivity, and as usual when you call the ISP, they blame Jordan Telecom. Internet connection was available at 6 pm!
What a day!

I have been sick for 3 days. My throat is killing me, and I got a major headache all day long. I haven't been able to work the way I want lately Now I even have a bigger pile of work to do!

I logged in to my stats server today to see how things are going for the month of August. I was shocked! Look at the graph below! I must say i'm happy! I want to see more people using FireFox! read my previous post about FireFox

Isam Bayazidi created Jordan Planet. A Planet is a group of bloggers having thier blogs posted all together. What happens is that planet reads 'RSS' feeds of all those bloggers and puts them in a single page. Planet is open source and freely downloadable, written in Pyhton.

Jordan Planet so far has 5 bloggers. We'd love to have more quality blogs on our small planet . We're also looking for a logo.

I think this is the next big thing after wiki in building communities!

Today I woke up at 6:00 am. dressed up, packed my bag and met my friends( Salam, Hamoudeh, Dima, Samer, Shatha, Re'bal and Najwan) In Safeway near the 7th Circle. We we're heading to Wadi al Mujib; an hour and 15 minutes drive from Amman.

We got there at 8:10 pm. Each person pays 11.60 JDs for this tour. We were introduced to our guide; "Tawfeeg". We got up on a pick up then, and drove for almost 5 minutes. We got down. The first Kilometer is really tough. It's a hill in the desert. We were a bit exauhsted after we finished it. Now the fun begins! you just go down all the way after that. After a while, we heard the sound of running water, we started singing and jumping. We got to see the first sight of water then. We started walking in the water. at some stages it was over 1 Meters high! It was spectacular.

We reached a waterfall, almost 20 meters high. The guide opened his bag, pulled a loooong Rope, and next thing I know is that I was the first to go down! it's very safe, we were all tied up to a hook. I got down the water fall. Then, I waited for the others. It almost took an hour for all of us to go down. Then there were many nice things. The craziest thing was there was a small water fall, 1 meter high, then there was like Deep water, but you can't get it. Because the path was blocked with a huge rock. What happened is the that the guide jumped first asked us to jump after wards. He was floating in that area between teh rock and the waterfall. Then he'd ask you to hold your breath for 5 seconds and go under the water, he'd push you under the rock! very interesting. Funny thing that Shatha was really scared to go under thr ock, she kept screaming and telling the guide to throw her over the rock, the rock is huge! he was trying to convince her, but she made up her mind. and he had to push her over the rock.


We walked back to the visitors center. It was a 5 hour Journey. It's amazing. I really recommend it, everybody should go there. You really don't know what you're missing.

For those who have been living in the cave for a while. There a kick-ass browser called firefox from mozilla foundation. It's open source, lite, very usable And fast! runs both on windows, Linux and other platforms.

Out of all the great features, I want to show you what features i use most.

1- Tabbed browsing:
Imagine you're" google"ing for something, and you want to open 5 search results, you don't to have a seperate window for every item. you just open the link with clicking on the mouse wheel, or holding ctrl and clicking your left mouse button. it opens in a new tab! this is the best feature ever

2- RSS feeds reader
After you download the browser go to this page and download the plugin. After that go to the websites you visit often! I have slashdot, sitepoint, blogs i love to read. and add them as bookmakrs in the RSS folder. then click "ctrl+r" and the rss reader panel will show! Viola!

Click on any item, and it'll load the latest headlines from that site. it saves so much bandwidth, it's much faster.


3-Web developer Toolbar!
if you're a web developer, just go ang get the Web Developer Toolbar. It helps you debug your code and many other things

4- Search for link
when a page loads, just start typing. and firfox automatically starts searching for a link that matches what you are writing! really neat.

There are so many other features. Give this browser a try, and say goodbye to IE

Today I recieved a strange email:

Some executive manager got my bus. card from a friend of mine. She sent me an email with the subject "Web site offer needed".

the most important line in the email is "I don?t have any details to give you about the website, but I would be grateful if you can send my the offer with the regular details for any website"

Well, I really don't blame clients. I blame web designers for this. Could anybody tell people that building websites is not all about selling "components" or products. Check out this helpful article