Mr. Aziz

Checkershadow Illusion

The two squares A and B have different levels of gray, right? Not so fast. They both have the same exact level of gray - their colors are identical. I didn’t really believe that when I first saw it, but now I do.

To prove that to you, here is a little test:

Look at the bar and compare it to A and then to B, convinced yet? If not, go ahead and open the first picture in paint, and draw the bar yourself.

Still not convinced? Try this.

Link: Checkershadow Illusion

Posted in Interesting | No Comments »

New Veyron in Kuwait

A new pearl white/light gold Bugatti Veyron has arrived to Kuwait on Tuesday, 25th of Dec., 2007.

This beast can do 0-60 in 2.5 secs, produces 1001HP and has a top speed of 408.47 km/h (253.81 mph).

Links: [Part #1][Part #2]

Posted in Autos, Kuwait | No Comments »

Hitman

I have been waiting for Hitman for quite a long time. It’s finally out (21st of Nov.), around two more weeks until it’s released in Kuwait though. Of course, it must go through all the stupid censoring they have in mind, it’s almost impossible to watch a movie in our theatres anymore.

You can watch the trailer here, there is a bunch of other videos on IGN.com including a scene from the movie (download the 39.6MB version, the larger one is a QuickTime file and it doesn’t play properly).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Kuwait, Movies | No Comments »

PlanetWhois

Can’t get a simple, fast and “clean” domain names’ whois website when too many domain tasters are around; you search for a domain, it’s available, the next minute it’s not! Never happened to me but I know it did happen to a lot of people.

PlanetWhois doesn’t like those kind of domainers apparently. Why am I so sure? Well, the owner is a friend and basically because I never found any of the gazillion available domain names I whoised there registered after a short period of time. It works with a domain name (obviously), IPv4 or IPv6 numbers, NIC-Handle or ASN. The best thing is you don’t need to enter the website to do a whois, just add it directly to the url (e.g. http://www.PlanetWhois.com/domain.com). Fast, simple, searches for 18 different extensions of your name and most importantly, doesn’t register your available name.

Posted in Domains, Reviews, Websites | No Comments »

Adam’s Blog: It’s Always the Quiet Ones

Adam published an interesting post about one of the most quiet and successful domainers in the industry, Thunayan K. Al-Ghanim aka Elequa. Of course the first question that arises is how big is his portfolio; well, let’s just say its more than 120,000.

Link: Adam’s Blog

Posted in Domains | No Comments »

Number Converter

I wrote this program which converts any number from any base to any other base. You just enter the radices and the actual value and boof, you got some number. Nothing really new in here, but I might need this in the future.

View here.

Please report any possible bugs to aziz [@#!at*(&] mraziz.com.

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Compete.com

I came across Compete.com a couple of months ago and I have to say it turned to work better than I expected. I have never trusted the estimates of it’s rivals - Alexa, comScore, etc. However, Compete seems to be the closest to the real stats. Anyway, they are all estimates and can never be accurate, so the key is to get the estimates as close as possible to the real statistics.

According to their FAQ, they rely on their toolbar users and information from ISPs (not sure how), all count up to 2,000,000 users. Whatever method they’re using, they are doing a nice job.

That’s an example of their Site Analytics for google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, microsoft.com and cnn.com.

Posted in Reviews, Websites | No Comments »

Domain Focus: London

I attended the Domain Focus conference in London which was supposed to be held at the Savoy Hotel but had a last minute cancellation for unknown reasons. It then was moved to the Strand Palace Hotel across the street. There’s really nothing much to say, I shouldn’t even say that I attended since the conference hall was full and a handful number of attendees were standing outside including myself. I skipped the second day since I didn’t feel like standing on my feet again nor did I enjoy the first day.

The whole event to be honest was less than average, however I did enjoy the pre-event party held by Sedo, it was nice meeting all of the guys there. The auction (held by Sedo) went somehow good I’d say, the completed auctions summed a total of around $350,000 USD. 

I stayed at Elequa’s house in London who was sponsoring the event, this man knows London streets more than the Queen herself. I also met some great people during my stay including Andrew Bennett of Whois-Search.com, Ammar Kubba of TrafficZ - a great guy and I really enjoyed talking to him, Sevan Derderian of TrafficZ who I emailed a few times earlier but never met in person until now, Matt Bentley of Sedo - a great guy with so many ideas for the domain names industry. Matt at one point seemed to have interest for the arabic IDNs and the arabic domain names industry in general - which to be honest I think hasn’t matured yet.

The whole stay was quite entertaining, special thanks to Elequa.

Posted in Domains, Personal | 2 Comments »

Ferrari 430 Scuderia

The new 430 Scuderia just makes the brilliant F430 more brilliant! An amazing car, now with plastic windows, 20 more hp, 100 less kg. Less luxury (if any), more performance, this can’t get any better.

Posted in Autos, Ferrari | 3 Comments »

KEMS vs. United Networks

After experiencing a whole year of bad service & lack of quality from United Networks, I chose KEMS on my endless journey to find a decent Kuwaiti ISP.

KEMS is amazing service-wise, it’s amazingly stable. I subscribed for a 512kbps DSL connection and I got ~600kbps+ of download bandwidth and 512kbps of upload bandwidth. When I had the united networks connection, initially both my download and upload bandwidths were 512kbps if I remember correctly. However, after a couple of months they changed the download to ~600kbps and upload down to 256kbps without even asking my permission. KEMS suffers no lag at all. On the contrary, United Networks is the definition of ‘lag’. Price wise, both KEMS and United Networks are kind of equal; which is to Kuwait standards a cheap price, but compared to the international standards its a complete RIP OFF. 8mbps for 20 or 25 pounds in my house in Scotland, while 2mbps is now around 900kd/year or $3,000/year (was ~3000kd/year or $10,000/year a few months back).

One problem with KEMS though, I’ve heard their customer support is helpful and actually does help you. Well, it didn’t really amuse me. Actually, it turned me down. I’ve been calling them daily asking for a solution for Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) not working - everything else worked just fine. I just hate it when they say things they just don’t understand. I’ve triple checked my router settings which are fine. I’ve tried Windows Live Messenger Troubleshooter which showed that my connection is fine. So what was wrong? Basically there was one little command I should’ve executed and that’s it, problem solved. Of course the customer support guy asked what OS do I have (Windows Vista) and my router (LinkSys WAG200G Version 1.00.09) but that’s as far as he went. He and all his other colleagues kept claiming that the problem is with my computer and I should reinstall Windows Live Messenger and it should be fine - basically they were blubbering just so that they don’t look like they know nothing about my situation. They should’ve tried to find a solution and helped me instead of throwing me into a loop. I found the solution to my problem after googling for a while, here. Basically, run cmd.exe as an administrator and type this command:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

then restart your computer.

Overall, KEMS wins over United Networks easily. UN’s customer support wasn’t that good anyway.

Note: while writing this post, my KEMS connection disconnected - first time since I subscribed two weeks ago.

Posted in Kuwait, Tech | 2 Comments »