Tony Abou-Assaleh

This year was the first time I participated in Earth Day. From 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM Atlantic Time, all the lights in my house were off. My family and I enjoyed a romantic dinner lit by numerous candles.

We had a few objectives in doing this. First, to participate in a growing international movement and save power consumption during this special hour. Second, to remind oursevles of the importance to conserve energy usage and pledge not to be wasteful. Third, to enjoy an evening with candle lights, something that we rarely do.

GenieKnows.com relaunched their site with a new image and a new functionality – it is now the home of version 2.0 of their local search platform. This new release brings user-contributed reviews of local businesses along with user-contributed photos. Other notable features include a cleaner interface and improved functionality.

With this move, GenieKnows positions itself as a serious player in the local search market going head-to-head against the big boys as well as the newer smaller players.

I’ve been trying to upgrade to the latest WordPress (version 2.7.1) for a while without success. Every time I initiate the upgrade, whether through WordPress’ built-in automatic upgrade feature or using the automatic upgrade plugin, the process stalls when it reaches the step of downloading the latest zip file. After checking the the compatibility matrix I discovered that my hosting provider, 1and1, runs PHP4 by default, which incompatible with the upgrade script. This problem can be easily fixed by forcing PHP5. This can be achieved by adding the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Apparently there is an unofficial contest in the SEO world that started earlier this month to rank number one on Google for “”the Coolest Guy on the Internet”. The contest runs until the end of February and the winner gets one year of bragging rights. I decided to participate in this contest as an interactive audience by voting for my friend Andrew to be the Coolest Guy on the Internet. I invite you to participate as well, either as a contestant or an active spectator and vote for your favourite SEO guy.

You can monitor the contest in near-real time by searching for the phrase on Google. The current leader in the contest is Mr. Brad Fallon, and it looks like he’s taking it pretty seriously.

The django official tutorial consists of 4 parts, unnecessarily long, mixes commands with text, and omit some important details. Here is an attempt at providing a more complete and more condensed version of the tutorial.
Continue reading ‘Stripped-down Django Tutorial’

After almost two years in the making, and with the assistance of the fine people on the bug-grep mailing list, I have made an official release of GNU grep 2.5.4. This is my first significant contribution to Free Software and the Open Source world. Now I can say with pride and confidence that I am an active member of the GNU project and the maintainer of GNU grep. The official announcement follows.
Continue reading ‘GNU grep 2.5.4 released’

This article is in-progress.

I am compiling a list of notable sites (i.e., sites with consistent traffic, traffic growth, or sites that people talk about elsewhere) that are focused on aggregating content from other sites, primarily through RSS feeds.
Continue reading ‘Online RSS Aggregation Sites’

Drinking my medium roast coffee with sugar and cream and eating my uber expensive organic (or not?) blueberry muffin at Just Us Cafe on Barrinton Street. Editing my paper for a big conference, minding my own business, not bothering anyone.

- Tony?

I think I just heard someone calling my name. Maybe I imagined it.

- Are you Tony?

- Yes .. ?

- Hi. I’m Craig. Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you too.

The man goes to put some sugar and cream in his coffee. I’m puzzled. Sure I’m bad with names. Sure I’m bad with faces. Sure I met him somewhere, he remembed me, I didn’t remember him. But, what was that “nice to meet you” business all about?

Continue reading ‘Wrong place, wrong time, right name’

The second heavy snowfall of the week on Friday night, November 21, 2008, as well as the following Saturday resulted in 25 to 35cm of snow on the ground. Some areas were hit harder than others. Add to that the drifting snow effect that resulted from strong winds blowing countless tiny snow flakes from one side of the street to the other, and you end up with differences in snow hight in excess of 10cm between houses on one side of a street an another.

Guess on which side of the street was my house?

Continue reading ‘Snow in Timberlea, Nova Scotia’

This is a live blog of the Dalhousie CS seminar by Dr. Colin Cherry of Microsoft Research, Natural Language Processing Group entitles “Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation”
Continue reading ‘Live Blog: Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation’