mehdi's posterous

28 Jan 2011

Internet Traffic In Egypt

via mashable.com

27 Jan 2011

Infographics overdose.

Is it me, or everybody is making infographics for everything, everyday?

Did writers lose their flow? Or are designers over confident?

I'm kind of tired of it...

27 Jan 2011

Car of the day? Cc: @jerated

26 Jan 2011

in the leap.

via whereisthecool.com

wanting to make that my official avatar.
This is what it feels like to start a company.

21 Jan 2011

Thoughts on pinterest

I like to browse through beautiful things on the net.

I never really knew i needed to collect them but I actually do need to collect for future reference, for inspiration, etc...

Well, pinterest, is solving a problem i didn't know i had. I can't wait to see more people on it and start discovering stuffs there.

I got more invites available, if anybody wants to try it out.

follow me at http://pinterest.com/mehdi

20 Jan 2011

github-gmail mashup for easily searchable changeset

The other big advantage of git is obviously github.

I set up a service hook on github for my repo: Email (probably the simplest).

Basically, every time that a developer pushes code, I receive an email through an alias.

Since, my email comes to Google App Gmail, that basically means that i can use the power of the Google search to look for changes.

simple & awesome, simply awesome.

19 Jan 2011

Living the dream

Day 3 of the "new adventure":

Cranking out some code.
Avoiding obvious mistake.
Probably falling into the the non-obvious one.
Discussing product.
Having more ideas.
iterating on design suggestions.

Loving it!

14 Jan 2011

Leaving YouSendIt

So. There we are, almost 5 years and I'm leaving YouSendIt.

Bittersweet feeling:

I feel like I joined YSI as a teenager, and it helped me grow into what I am now.
I love the team.
I love the product, even more what's coming in the next couple of months.
I learnt a lot, technically and about growing a company in the silicon valley.

But i'm onto a new adventure : building something from scratch : team, product. It will take me a couple of months to figure it out and I'll let you all know about it as soon as possible.

Credits : Sasha Wolff

13 Jan 2011

The new Zodiac

Early this week, I started seeing a little traffic to a post I wrote way back in March of 1999 called The new Zodiac.

An interesting calendrical tidbit: the Zodiac that everyone is familiar with today is actually based upon the movement of the sun through the constellations of 2500 years ago. Today, due to shifts in the earth's rotation and orbit, the sun moves through 13 constellations, not just 12.

The thirteen constellation is called Ophiuchus. As I'm writing, Ophiuchus is the #1 trending topic on Twitter right now and there are dozens of news articles on the topic in outlets like Time, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post. Patient Zero of this most recent round of new Zodiac reporting is this January 9 Minneapolis Star-Tribune article in which the updated Zodiac is listed as:

Capricorn: Jan 20 - Feb 16
Aquarius: Feb 16 - Mar 11
Pisces: Mar 11 - Apr 18
Aries: Apr 18 - May 13
Taurus: May 13 - Jun 21
Gemini: Jun 21 - Jul 20
Cancer: Jul 20 - Aug 10
Leo: Aug 10 - Sept 16
Virgo: Sept 16 - Oct 30
Libra: Oct 30 - Nov 23
Scorpio: Nov 23 - Nov 29
Ophiuchus: Nov 29 - Dec 17
Sagittarius: Dec 17 - Jan 20

Wikipedia has a slightly different calendar for 2011:

Aries: Apr 19 - May 14
Taurus: May 14 - Jun 21
Gemini: Jun 21 - Jul 21
Cancer: Jul 21 - Aug 11
Leo: Aug 11 - Sept 17
Virgo: Sept 17 - Oct 31
Libra: Oct 31 - Nov 21
Scorpio: Nov 21 - Nov 30
Ophiuchus: Nov 30 - Dec 18
Sagittarius: Dec 18 - Jan 21
Capricorn: Jan 21 - Feb 17
Aquarius: Feb 17 - Mar 12
Pisces: Mar 12 - Apr 19

Which calendar to believe? Who knows, but one thing is for sure: astrology remains a steaming pile of horseshit.

By Jason Kottke • Jan 13, 2011 at 04:28 pm • astrology astronomy

via kottke.org

I would like to emphasis the last sentence.

8 Jan 2011

Finally getting into git

After few weeks, I'm finally completely sold on GIT. Coming from the subversion world, i agree that I'm like 3 years late to the party, but my focus has been on other things.

For now, the 2 main features that are making it a deal breaker:

It's a distributed system: this adds a lot more flexibility, and if you really want you can still use it as a client/server system.
the staging area allows to work on a single context (branch) for different phases. No need for tmp files (which i use to do quite often with SVN).

Can't wait to use it more and discover more stuffs.