Blue Chi’s

The new iPhone OS came out a couple of days ago, and for some reason, most people are talking about the really boring copy-and-paste feature which barely anybody ever uses on the go. For me personally the most significant feature of this new OS is the official support for Arabic. Not only can the iPhone now read and write Arabic text, but you can set the whole OS to use Arabic as the system language.

I use the iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPod Touch. The only major difference between the iPhone and the iPod Touch is the iPhone has a sim card and a built-in camera while the iPod Touch does not.

In order to set the system language to Arabic you have to go through Settings>General>International and from there pick Arabic as the language of the system. You can use an Arabic Keyboard without changing the system language by going through Setting>General>Keyboard Layout and check Arabic. That would let you switch the keyboard to Arabic at any time.

Once you set the Language ot Arabic the system will restart into Arabic. All the default applications, except Safari and Mail, use Arabic names:

I don’t have access to a wifi network when I was writing this, so I can’t show you how the browser works in Arabic, but I have a random Arabic email in my inbox from a random stupid girl who spams me with forwards sent to an account I use for sending website newsletters. Anyway, you can see Arabic in mail here:

(Of course I did not forward the stupid message, I’d rather go to hell).

The Arabic keyboard is very similar to the PC layout with some changes in the lower row to fit all the letters:

The coolest thing though, in my opinion, is how the music library uses the Arabic alphabet to sort the music and then follows it with English. I rewrote the name of a single song in Arabic to see how it looks like:

All the song meta data appears in Arabic during playback.

And what’s even cooler is that you can have the lyrics in Arabic as well!! Of course you would have to add these manually one by one. There are programs to do this automatically for English songs, but the program will obviously not work for Arabic songs.

Finally, you can also see Arabic meta data on Cover Flow as well:

The other significant additions in OS 3.0 for me were the landscape mode typing for all applications and spot light search everything. I found the shake to shuffle feature annoying as the songs started shuffling randomly as I walked around with my iPod in my back pocket.

I don’t write much in Arabic, but I would certainly like to read Arabic on the thing even if I don’t necessarily write much. I don’t have many Arabic songs on my iPod, but I would also like to have the meta data for these in Arabic just for the fun of it!

As blasphemous as it might sound, in reality, a great number of people already extensively use English letters to communicate in Arabic through IM, email, SMS, Facebook, twitter, you name it. The voices that do not exist in Arabic such as 3ain and 9ad are replaced by letters and it is almost understood universally now by Arabic speakers that these numbers represent the voices they are meant to replace.

The crazy thing is that this idea was suggested more than 60 years ago by a Lebanese Poet called Saeed Aqil to have Arabic written in the Latin alphabet. Aqil argued that this change would make Arabic accessibile to those who can read the letters. Aqil was also in support of having accents such as Lebanese become regarded as independent languages which are taught in the same exact way they are spoken as it made no sense to him to teach classical Arabic that nobody used in real life.

In a similar fashion to Turkish, Aqil created new Latin letters shapes to write down new voices:

The majority of Arabic speakers are Muslims and would reject any suggestion to play around with Arabic as it is hte language in which the Quran would written, but as one article suggests, affecting the script in which the language is written would not necessarily affect the way Quran is actually written. In fact, the purpose of the new language is to make Arabic be read exactly the way it sounds, but with Latin letters. It should also be remembered that Arabic was not written in the same exact way we do now when the prophet Mohammed lived and major new concepts such as tanqeet were only added years after the death of the prophet.

I read an article that was in support of Akil’s Arabic and which claimed that Arabic letters are ugly and unbalanced, unlike the Latin alphabet i which each letter could be contained within a defined box. I don’t agree with that, I think Arabic calligraphy is beautiful, and even if it was harder to decipher due to the transformation of the shape of the letter depending on its location in the word, that adds to the sophistication of the language.

It should be remembered that Aqil’s suggestion was made in an era were Arabic there were great disputes as to how digitalization of the Arabic language could be achieved.

It is funny though that some books were actually printed in the 60s and 70s using Aqil’s Arabic in Latin alphabet. It sounds bizarre, the comparable concept in English would be writing a whole book in TXT speech.

I just thought this topic amusing, especially because in reality many people type all of their Arabic in Latin letters.

Those who know me personally know that I do not practice any sort of sports activity at all. I’m as skinny as a stick and it is so unhealthy I think I’m going to die real soon.

Anyway, I recently started jogging. It might sound like something insignificant, but this is the most active thing I’ve done in years. I also recently started using the Nike+ iPod gadget to track my performance! It is the coolest thing EVER. For people who don’t know what this is, it is a small piece you put in your shoe and which an iPod nano or an iPod Touch can sync with to track the performance of your exercise. 

There are loads of gadgets that probably do a similar thing, but the really cool thing about this is that you can then sync your running data to the NikePlus website to see graphs indicating how well you do and compare it with other people around the world. You can also set goals which you try to achieve or follow training exercises suggested by the website.

What is even cooler is the new Flash widgets released by Nike which you can display on your blog. It might sound like a silly idea, BUT I LOVE IT. You can create an avatar, customize it, and then display it on your blog or Facebook wall. It displays your most recent data, the total number of kilometers you ran and the total number of workouts you had. There are some accessories which you can dress up your avatar with and you can get more of these the more you exercise.

I placed my widget on the sidebar of the blog. Check it out!

I want to go run out now just to update my widget! LOL, I guess it’s working!

I ordered my Macbook on Friday as you guys know cause my HP laptop started tripping.

Hours ago at WWDC, Apple announced new 13″ Macbook Pros to replace the aluminum 13″ Macbooks with better specs and at a lower price!!!

The ironic thing is that a friend of mine was thinking of buying an iPod touch and I told him to wait for WWDC because Apple might introduce a new iPhone (and consequently maybe a new iPod touch, but the former happened and not the latter), but for some reason I didn’t think about WWDC when I purchased my own laptop.

While WWDC was running, the Apple Store was down for the update, so I couldn’t check the status of my order and I knew if it went out I won’t be able to return it or replace it because it was a custom configuration. It was nerve wrecking. 

I instantly checked the store right after WWDC finished and found that I still had the option to cancel my order, so I instantly did! AND IT GOT CANCELED.

I guess just I got lucky.

It will take about a week for them to refund me my money back, but I already ordered my new Macbook Pro this time. My original order was now at a lower price and had more features, so I thought I’ll upgrade the harddisk with a bit more space as well.

It will still take about ten days for it to be delivered to me. I think I will be able to survive.

I updated my HP’s BIOS firmware today, and my laptop somehow seems a bit better, but the problem is still there. The feedback I received from HP suggests that it is a problem that will require servicing the laptop. I will deal with that once I get my new one.

(Pic Credits: Niklas)

Something weird has happened to my HP laptop, out of the blue the screen flickered, got some pixel noise and then it froze. I tried restarting, into Windows Vista, the pixel noise is everywhere and it freezes before even showing the login screen. I booted into Windows 7 and the same exact thing happened. Somehow though Safe Mode works, and occassionaly the noise would be gone from the boot menu and I can login to Windows before the screen randomly freaks out and it freezes. It feels like a hardware error because of the randomness of it and the fact that it affects both of my operating systems.

I’m happy this thing didn’t happen last week during my exam period, I don’t know what would’ve done. Luckily I’m taking this week off and just not doing anything, but I need to start working on my dissertation soon.

Heard from Diablo that the same thing happened to his HP machine and his only solution was to replace the motherboard of his computer. I emailed HP and their instructions indicate that I need to ’service’ my system because the problem seem to effect everything even the BIOS menu.

I am going to email HP again to see how the “service” process takes place and how much it will cost me to replace a part such as the motherboard. I can’t believe this happened just two months after the warranty expired. Well, at least it didn’t happen exactly the day after it expired.

I think fixing this is going to take a while, and I’m not sure I can trust it with my work now that I have to start writing my dissertation. I thought I’ll just buy a new computer. I thought I’ll go for a Macbook this time, I have some Windows applications which I paid for, but I can install Windows 7 on the Mac as well, so I guess I can still have Windows as my primary OS and try the Mac OS X from there.

I just ordered the aluminum Macbook online, got a student discount for it as well, but they expect to have it delivered in ten days or so. I might send my HP laptop for service once I get that one so that I don’t remain stuck without a computer during the transition.

Finished reading this book a couple of days ago, it is a 200-page translated story by Japanese author Murakami. I don’t recall ever reading an English translated novel before, I thought that this sounded very natural at most times, except at some rare extreme situations like calling an LCD a “liquid crystal monitor” multiple times.

The book tells the story of a single night in which a teenage girl spends the ‘after dark’ hours in the city and the incidents and people she meet there. The story slowly turns into a story about two sisters who lived all their lives together, yet somehow have completely different lives.

I really liked the book, the author has a very unique way for story telling, the narrator in the book is almost like an unknown being who is trying to understand what is happening as it tells the story, but the narrator is not actually a character, so I don’t know how to explain it.

The book sort of reminded me of the Persona games in terms of atmosphere, even though this book had nothing to do with supernatural powers really.

I thought this was a refreshing read, I might read something else by Murakami in the future, I like his books cause they are short and nice!

3.5/5

I finished my exams last Friday, I just had two exams, my other two modules are assessed on essays only. The only remaining part of my degree is the dissertation, my topic is going to be on the impact of DRM on natural uses of copyright.

I do not have any major plans for summer, but I’m not going back home either. I will try to finish my disseration ASAP to go back home for good around the end of July/start of August. My leave from MOLA ends on the first of October, so hopefully I can spend August and September at home with my family if everything goes according to plan.

I am not doing any work at all this week though, just trying to enjoy the weather, go to the park, lay on the grass and read some fiction without worrying about anything happening the world.

I haven’t made a diary-like blog post for a very very very long time, probably because, like all other Omani English language bloggers, I’m posting all my daily updates on Twitter. I do have my twitter feed displayed on the right side of the my blog index page. Maybe I should make that larger and more emphasized the next time I update the theme of this blog.

Just finished reading “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, I picked it solely on Amazon recommendations based on my previous book purchases.

The bok tells the story of a father and son as they travel across American in a post-apocalypse world. This book is so not my type, it is a bit too descriptive of the scenary, but I supposed it is necessary for this book because it is tells  the story of a world different from what we live in.

There is something weird about the way McCarthy writes, he doesn’t seem to believe in the invention of quotation marks, and misses way too many apostrophes.

The book barely has any events other than a description of the random incidents that happen to the father and son on the road. I felt at many times that I can skip 10 or 20 pages without missing anything of the ’story’ because there wasn’t really much of it except the ‘experience’ of living in this destroyed world. (but I didn’t skip any pages even though I was tempted to do so a lot through the first half of the book).

Somehow though, the book grew on me eventually and I started to ‘care’ about what will happens at the end to these two people. There are a couple of images which I got from the book that I thought were memorable.

I felt for some reason that this would be the perfect book to read in highschool for an English class, not sure exactly why I think so, it could be the extreme level of detail which might be fun to discuss in a class, or just the utopian and dystopian themes of the book.

The book apparently got loads of awards and positive feedback from all sorts of people, but I thought it was just very average.

2.5/5

I just learnt that they actually made a movie for this book and it is expected to come out late this summer! The movie looks very nice. You can check the HD trailer at YouTube here.

I just finished reading Watchmen, the graphic novel on which the recent Watchmen movie was based. I did not watch the movie when it was out in the cinema a short while ago, but I’ve been wanting to read a comic or a manga book which was a self-contained novel and not something episodical which I would have to carry on reading for months and months. Watchmen was exactly what I wanted because it is a 12-issue collection of the entire story.

Watchmen tells the story about costumed vigilantes who were once active in fighting crime before the government passed a law prohibiting their activity. The story starts with the sudden murder or one of the Watchmen which led to fear of a conspiracy to eliminate all costumed crime fighters. 

I don’t think I ever read a graphic novel since I was a child, and I really liked this one. It was really artistic and smart, especially the way two scenes would be told simultaneously to indicate irony (part where the kid is reading the novel on the street and other events happening). 

I usually read in bed at night before going to sleep, but I found it hard to do that because, unlike pure text novels, you have to focus on each picture and analyse all the contents of the frame, which is mentally exhausting.

Now that I missed the movie in the cinema, I will make sure I get the DVD when it comes out.

My next book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Blogger Ahmed Al Mueini published a news article stating that the Cultural Club announced a national program to support the publication of new books in the country in hope of publishing a 100 new books a year. The program will be funded by the Cultural Club and other private and public bodies. It will be headed by a committee made up of representatives from the Cultural Club, SQU, Scientific Research Council, the Authors Association, and others.

The initiative is a result of one of the recommendations made during the period national discussion meeting of the Cultural Club. Other recommendations include:

• Requesting the Ministry of Information to update the Publication Law, which is according to the news report, a barrier for the proliferation of book publication in the country.
• Requesting the authorities to establish and support  more public libraries.
• Requesting the authorities to support publications houses by assigning more publication works to them (How else was the government publishing its books? Duh.)
• Preparing a nation report on “book problems”.  The preparation of this report will be carried over three phases is aimed to conclude with solutions for short and long term goals.

The meeting concluded that Omani authors are faced with many obstacles such as the lack of financing, the strictness of the old Publications Law, the lack of decent publication houses, and distributions and marketing difficulties.

A more “interesting obstacle” stated by the Club is the lack of “appreciation, criticism and reward” for authors in Oman. 

The press release made mentions in what is almost a footnote, the ‘emergence’ of a problem in ‘readership’  - as reading is not a daily activity for people in the Arab world and has become sort of an “activity for the affluent”.

———–

I guess it is nice that Omani authors will have some support to write and publish their books. Not sure if this will have any impact on readership though, publishing books (which have no contraversial content) is a relatively easy process in Oman, it is relatively very cheap to independently publish small books and novels, but distributing them is very difficult.

Making money from your book is even much much more harder, especially due to the low price at which Arabic books sell.You can buy an Arabic novel for something as low as 700 baisa (About $2) with expensive novels going for Ro1.5 (Less than $4). 

Due to the very small demand for books, the dominating publishers in the local market are stationers who sell books as a secondary product to their “papers and pens”. A book author who manages to convince this sort of  ”publisher” to publish his work will provide the script and the publisher takes care of printing and distributing on a share of profit basis – which usually goes on at 50-50. Usually 500 prints are made in each release, this number could go up to a 1000 copies in certain circumstances. The most oft hese copies are sold at the annual book exhibition.

This means if an author manages to sell every single copy (1000) of his book that costs RO 1.5, he would make: RO 750. This number is subject to reduction relating to printing costs, design costs, registrations costs, and just everything else that has to be done through the process, from writing and typing, to driving up and down to get your book out.

You can add to this the lack of respect for copyright by people, including school teachers and university lecturers, which could mean that your book will be copied like hell without you being able to do anything about it. 

The business of writing in Arabic for a living is just not a viable business in Oman.