Blogger who insulted Islam jailed for 4 years!

An Egyptian with radical views on Islamic culture and politics was jailed yesterday in the midst of an international outcry.

This guy is a 22 year old former law student who had been disowned by his own father who subsequently called for his sons execution under islamic law! His blog enties were published on his weblog sandmonkey and supposedly contained entries that sullied the country’s reputation and also spreading information disruptive of public order, defaming the president and finally spreading hate upon Islam.

Before this he was expelled from his University for derogatory posts about the University and its staff. This case in point is seen by human rights organisations as a ploy by the goverment to punish Internet activism.

The interior ministry in the country have formed a new department for confronting computer and Internet crime and new appointed laws make the process of closing down subverive sites easier. Identification is a big area now also with blacklists being created which means certain individuals are forbidden from going online!

It is probably obvious at this satge that Egypt is a state controlled press society and numerous bloggers have in the past of been accused of such acts. Seven bloggers were amongst dozens of people arrested at student demonstrations but this guy Suleiman was the first blogger to be jailed.Bloggers people bloggers!

Until 2 years ago there were still only anout 30 blogs written in Egypt, which has a population of 80 million!I find that shocking beyond belief.

Now more than 3000 men and women are blogging in the major towns and cities in egypt. I think this is fascinating story and I just imagine that If I wrote about our taoiseach here in Ireland Bertie Ahearn in such a manner would the matter be this severe! Obviously not because were not a state controlled press society but someone stop the madness, a guy was arrested for posts in a blog, Insanity bloody insanity. What about all the paedophile webrings and online fraud. No doubt this a touchy issue but surely this goverment has larger issues than this.And if they have to deal with it delete the site or find an alternative solution.Jailing a blogger for four years because of the content on his blog is not right in my opinion. It s kind of like an online witch hunt. You cant stop online internet opinions or attitudes no matter how hard you try. You may not like them but the information highway prevails. This country should embrace technology and try to uphold their principles and culture at the same time but to stamp down on this with such authority is facist behaviour.

UFC 70 Manchester Arena

Nice one! Got my ticket for UFC 70 in Manchester yesterday taking place on April of this year. There is a picture of the arena:

The line is smoking up at the moment with some top contenders fighting from the heabyweight and lightweight divisions.

Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic (22-4-2) vs. Gabriel Gonzaga (7-1)*

Michael Bisping (12-0) vs. Elvis Sinosic (8-9-2)*
Tito Ortiz (15-5) vs. Forrest Griffin (13-4)*
Andrei Arlovski (10-5) vs. TBA*
Alessio Sakara (10-5) vs. Victor Valimaki (9-3)*
Dennis Siver (10-3) vs. Jess Liaudin (10-8)*

David Lee (5-2) vs. TBA*
Cheick Kongo (9-3-1) vs. TBA*
Abdul Mohamed (12-4-2) vs. TBA*

Arlovski, Bisping,Tito and Crocop!!!! Thats a fairly good nights watching at the UFC. Cant wait for this one, it’s going to be epic!!!

Day Lights Saving Time – A big issue?

If you operate or support a network from the United States, impending changes to Daylight Saving Time (DST), courtesy of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 signed by yours truly Mr.Bush, its going to affect your operations.

So usually DST began on the first Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October in the states. This year, thanks to an energy bill President Bush signed in August 2005, DST begins three weeks earlier on March 11. (DST also ends one week later; this year, it ends November 4.)

Implications I ask? Well for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 they are good to go. Both OS versions either have the changes built-in or the changes were part of a previous service pack.

But you’ll need to update other Windows systems in the company.

Possible problems that can arise because of this issue are:

• Authentication systems: Systems that rely on accurate local system time (e.g., Kerberos) to grant system access will typically fail, denying authentication credentials to valid users.
• Time-based access control systems: Erroneously granted access could result in a violation of security policy. Systems could grant access during a time it should be denied, or they could deny valid users access.
• Logging systems: Incorrect timestamps result in an inaccurate audit trail.

To be honest I dont see how authentication is affected because  Kerberos uses UTC, not the local representation. Therefore even if the patch isn’t applied authentication will still work, lots of apps will be affected but not authentication.Not to fret because with every flaw microsoft have a patch or software or something to sort it! ; )

Im going to take that with a pinch of salt. Anyway you can run a patch to sync the times.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_it1

The power of Microsoft Power Toys

Essentially PowerToys are additional little programs that developers work on after a product has been released. These little apps are time saving delights that make alot of things that you wish you could do possible. Its interseting to note that these little tools are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft. So if they dont work you are going to be using Mr. Google but saying that they are well developed and work well. There are a whole list of these little tools for download but I opted for the following:

HTML Slide Show Wizard

Open Command Window Here

This is just so handy, I code vb script, Kix and a bit of shell scripting so itmakes just that little bit easier easy to test code. Navigating to directories gets tiring. Efficient laziness.

Alt-Tab Replacement

Tweak UI

Image Resizer

CD Slide Show Generator

With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show

Virtual Desktop Manager

Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.

Taskbar Magnifier

Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.

Webcam Timershot

This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate. Not that I will use this in work but it looks cool!

Some of these tools add functionality and allow you to add your own unique style to the OS layout which is pretty cool.

Very Cool Pic!

Took me a few seconds to figure this out. As I was casually surfing and listening to some nice deep progressive house I came across this. Its wicked it kind of plays with your head a little. I thought it was a drawing at first!