osama i. al-dosary

Guys! Its official. I am an addict. I don’t care that its medically not supposed to be addictive. It is!

I’m not talking about tobacco, rather coffee. Or caffeine to be accurate.

Have you ever encountered a situation where a specific book becomes popular in your office or social circle? Then you start to hear lingo and new buzzwords referencing that book. And you find your wanting to read that book, simply to be in the loop. Unfortunately, you might not have the time to go to the bookstore, let alone read the book.

Don’t despair! Here is a free site to get the jist of things quickly, and maybe decide if you really want to read that book. Its called, WikiSummaries: Free Book Summaries.

OpenSync seems like a noble project. I always have a hell of a time trying to sync my devices togethor. Often I loose information and numbers when syncing with Outlook contacts because Nokia phones use different formats. Not to mention the head ache of syncing Nokia phones to non-windows. Not an easy thing to do. Although, many use iSync on Mac, I can’t seem to get it to work. Same problem with Ubuntu. If such a project makes progress it could allow for greater compatibility between platforms and devices and less synchronization troubles.

I want to write about what I see as a common misconception. That boredom means free time. In fact, I think boredom has very little to do with time at all. Boredom in my opinion, is about the mind not having anything challenging to do. To use a computer analogy, its like when you look at your computer’s CPU utilization and it says CPU 99% idle, even though you might have tons of applications open and the I/O might be very busing because you are sending files. … Maybe that is not such a great analogy, but you get my point.

Looking at dictionary definitions, I think an interesting description of seen is that on Wikipedia:  “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.” (as defined by C. D. Fisher.)

Unfortunately, being bored with worked in my current cultural environment also means not having anything to do at work. With the exception of one person that I’ve discussed this with, almost everybody has this misconception, and start to solve my problem by telling me to what to do with my “spare time.” … annoying, huh?

I think the simplest definition I would use of boredom within work-life is: The lack of intellectual challenge.

So now that we have that out of the way, I can say what I really want to say … I’m bored.

Although I’m considered a well paid professional working for one of the most respected high-tech company in the US, and in a consulting/“knowledge worker” position, I feel really bored with work. And have been for most of the past 4 years that I have been working for this company. The intellectual challenges that I face during work are few and far between. Interestingly, when I was NOT working for such a prestigious organization I was not as bored. Although the work load might have been less, there seemed to much more room for innovation, creativity and free thinking. This seems to be very contradicting to me. I would expect that such an organization that is often considered a leader in business and technology would have more intellectual stimulation for its employees. But that is not the case.

I’ve analyzed this a lot in the past few years to try to understand what the issue might be. Some of the ideas that I think might be the root cause of this predicament:

• Workload too high to allow for self-improvement and creativity. I rarely have the time to do something that I feel is a good job. I feel that I almost everything I do is just enough to get by. This is dissatisfying, given that I am somewhat of a perfectionist and take pleasure in doing things right.
• A smaller cog in a bigger engine. Such companies are structured in a manner where innovation has clear specific sources/departments, and basically everybody else does what their supposed to do mechanically.
• That I work for a predominately sales division, where management usually does not value independent thought. Simply making the immediate sales numbers is all that is required, or noteworthy. How the numbers are achieved is a side note.
• Racy sales culture, where everything is urgent and important. And I mean everything. But planning and strategy seem to take the back burner.
• Unclear sense of achievement. Given that I’m part of a sales organization, as mentioned, basically an achievement is a sale.  There are few problems that I see with having a sense of achievement here:

1. Sales cycles can be very long, so it be a long time before you see any fruits of labor.
2. When we get a PO or LI, people start to party. Yet, while others are celebrating, the work is not done yet. The design might need to be revised (or not exist), or there still might be issues that might cause use to lose the win.
3. In sales you often lose deals, which can feel that you have wasted a lot of time. What is much worse than losing is not knowing that you have lost and continue to put effort, while that account team are not clear with you about the situation.

• Unclear team role boundaries. This isn’t apparently a problem, but it is something that I miss from my previous job. In my current company job role boundaries are not as clearly defined. When I say boundary I mean there is a clear line of who’s role this certain task belongs too. Depending on who I work with I’m asked to do different tasks, which in my opinion might not be mine to do.

Still, I have no conclusion yet as to why I am bored exactly. I’ve also had the idea that this role is not suitable for me. But I quickly discard that thought. There are many aspects of my job that I love and believe that I do well, such as presenting technical information, disseminating knowledge, coaching Engineers, etc. I also love the business aspects.

If I had to bet what the culprit of my disatisfaction is, I would say it was the workload, racy urgency culture and unclear achievements.

What do you think?

I updated the Ubuntu HCL site with my experience of the previously mentioned 3g mobile connect card. Take a look here.

Huawei E170 (Networking) - Ubuntu Linux Hardware Compatibility List

My 3g mobile connect card I got from Mobily was detected automatically on Ubuntu, which is version 8.10. The connect card is Huawei e170. The first couple of times I tried connecting it didn’t work. When I checked the settings I found that everything was empty except the “Number” which was *99# and the “APN” was “web2″.

I thought I remembered that the APN was “web1″, so I changed that and it worked. Then I configured it to automatically connect. So as soon as I connect the USB 3g mobile stick it detects it and connects right away.

Using it on Ubuntu is a breeze compared to using it on my XP partition. First the detection of the USB device is slow, then I have to start the Huawei software, then it queries the USB device to check network status, which can take about 10 seconds. Then if everything is ok, I have to click on “Connect”.

Btw, when I checked the configuration settings for the software I got from Mobily, it turns out that “web1″ is for postpaid accounts and “web2″ is the setting for prepaid accounts. I have a postpaid account.

This can be considered as negative mark on the Ubuntu HSPA driver. It should have given the choice of both prepaid and postpaid, then know the right APN for each. Where it only asked to use Mobily or STC.

I stopped allowing commenting on my blog about a year ago when I found that I had over 7 thousand spam comments. I didn’t know how to stop the spam until recently I’ve added the spam utility through WordPress, called Akismet.

Now I have the task of deleting 7′000 comments, which cannot be done all at once through WordPress. Through WordPress you can only mass delete 20 posts at a time.

I’m not very familiar with WordPress, but I found how to delete all the spam comments. Basically its done by running the following SQL command through phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='0'

(Which I got from this helpful link forum posting:
WordPress › Support » deleting over 10,000 spam comments without using moderation page)

Interestingly command didn’t delete the comments that I had approved, so it seems the “0″ in the command means: unapproved”.

Often documents are written in Arabic using specific Windows fonts, so when the document needs to be viewed on Ubuntu it might not display correctly. One method to solve this problem, is to use the fonts from your Windows partition within Ubuntu.

First create a new directory within Ubuntu under the system’s truetype fonts path, for your Win fonts:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/mywinfonts

Then copy the fonts from your windows partition into your newly created folder “mywinfonts”:

sudo cp /media/system/WINDOWS/Fonts/* /usr/share/fonts/truetype/mywinfonts/

Now you need to reload the font cache for the new fonts to be available immediately:

fc-cache -f -v

When you upload your images to be viewed on the web, its best to reduce the size of the image to fit into a normal browser window and more importantly so that web site is quick and responsive to viewers. If you are working with a lot of images at once, such as for photo album, doing a manual resize for every image can be a hassle. Therefore you need look for a tool that can do batch resizing of your images at once.

I used to use IrfaanView to do batch resize. Now that I’ve completely moved my personal stuff off of Windows, I need a tool that can do the same but on Ubuntu. … In comes Mogrify. Mogrify can do many things on multiple files concurrently. All I care about doing here is resizing my photos, though.

To install mogrify, you need to install imagemagick suite, which mogrify is part of:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

To resize an image, do:

mogrify -resize 640×640 MyPhoto.jpg

Keep in mind that this command will whipe out the old file a replace it with the new modify image. So make sure you are working on duplicate copies of the images.

You can also the resize in terms of percentage:

mogrify -resize 50% MyPhoto.jpg

To do a batch resize on on all the images in the directory, do:

mogrify -resize 640×640 *.jpg

Once again, use with caution or on duplicates, as the original image is lost.

My old hosting environment stopped working and with it so did my on-line web-album.

I’ve been meaning to rebuild web-album since I moved my blog to new hosting. But I keep putting  it off. I tried using the a web album, simply called Gallery, offered by my new hosting. But seemed complicated at the time and I never got it up and running.

During my recent vacation I had some time to play around and I tried the other two web-albums/photo gallery software that was provided by my hosting provider, which were Coppermine and 4images-something… Both seemed a bit unfriendly and not feature rich. So I decided to try Gallery again. It turned out easier that I originally thought.

I’ve uploaded two albums so far to try out. So far so good. So I will be uploading the others soon.

Please take a look here and send me your comments:

http://fakebucket.com/photos/ or

http://dosary.net/photos/