Saudi Telecom Company STC, suffers a 29% fall in first quarter 2010. This is in my opinion strongly linked with the overbilling of thousands of customers – without proper reimbursment – following the adoption of a new billing system, made in India. Although the original article attributes the problem to the worldwide economic crisis, it looks more likely that defrauded customers punished STC by switching to Mobily who’s results have jumped 49% for the same period.
STC Down 29% Mobily Up 49% First Quarter 2010
April 24th, 2010Beautiful pictures of Eyjafjallakull Volcano Erruption
April 24th, 2010SAP SHAValidator
April 6th, 2010SAP SHAValidator is used to ensure that files downloaded from the SAP site have not been corrupted during download. It does that by calculating a SHA256 cryptographic hash. The problem is that this utility is provided as two JAR files, namely SHAValidator.jar and frog.jar, the later being used as look and feel library. As a result, a long command line has to be issued to launch the utility. I combined the two JAR files into one so as to allow a double-click launch of the utility or issuing java -jar SHAValidator.jar via the command line. Download SHAValidator here.
False Halal gets Doux and KFC in trouble
April 5th, 2010The largest French chicken exporter to the middle east, Doux, and KFC are in trouble for pretending to sell halal chicken while in fact using mechanized slaughtering methods. See Telerama.fr a mis en ligne le reportage censuré par M6 (French).
Moving to Linux
April 5th, 2010I finally moved to Linux on my desktop. After trying Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, I finally opted for Ubuntu as it has been easier to install software such as Limewire, Google Chrome, Skype and VirtualBox on top of a fresh installation. A word of advice though: Right after a fresh install, launch the auto-update so as to get the latest patches. Failing to do so will make the installation of the previously mentioned software troublesome. Crossover can be used to run windows applications and games on linux. This company is actively contributing code to the Wine opensource project.
U.S. War Crimes in Afghanistan
March 29th, 2010U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan are committing atrocities, lying, and getting away with it COMMENTARY | March 22, 2010 Jerome Starkey recently reported for The Times of London about a night raid on Feb. 12 in which U.S. and Afghan gunmen opened fire on two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials…read more
Accident in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on February 17, 2010
February 26th, 2010These are some pictures of the accident that happened in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on February 17, 2010
Back, at last!
February 23rd, 2010My site is back at last, several years after my site was destroyed for late payment. Although the money was available, I could not pay doteasy.com through my credit card. They simply deleted everything and shutdown the site. You might ask why it took several years to get back online. Procrastination. Well, in fact, it was simply not a top priority.