I just came across a website called Academic Earth which offers free video courses from top tier universities in various subjects. They offer 17 courses in computer science, and some of them are more than 20 lectures. The Computer Science courses are from MIT, Stanford, Berkley, and Harvard.

Click Here to view the subjects offered.

One of my favorite games of all time was Bioshock. A few months ago 2K Games announced that the release date for Bioshock 2 is September 09. A few days ago they release a game play video, and it looks amazing. So check it out.

can’t wait to get back to rapture city…

First of all, I went back to my previous theme, cause many of you thought the new one sucked. I loved it, but since you are the viewers I decided to change it back…

For this post I wanted to write about the first 100 domains to be registered on the internet, way back in the 80s. So here are some of them, for the complete First 100 list click here.

1- symbolics.com 03/15/85
2- bbn.com 04/24/85
3- think.com 05/24/85
4- mcc.com 07/11/85
5- dec.com 09/30/85
6- northrop.com 11/07/85
7- xerox.com 01/09/86
8- sri.com 01/17/86
9- hp.com 03/03/86
10- bellcore.com 03/05/86
11- ibm.com 03/19/86
12- sun.com 03/19/86
13- intel.com 03/25/86
14- ti.com 03/25/86
15- att.com 04/25/86

If you were to go back for a day in 1985 to register a domain, what would that domain be? I would probably go for http://bmw.com, because if I were to ask for lets say http://microsoft.com they would obviously say no and take it away from me. But with bmw, they can’t because I would be able to make something up for it like “I am making a business website called Brokers Money World” and I would have a small forum on there, and this way I would have every right to keep the domain.

And don’t say that you would register google, yahoo, or ebay. Because if those domains weren’t available they would have chosen to name their sites differently, like google might have been flickr….

I had a friend named Fawaz that once told me to never design a website for free. Not for charity, not for a friend, not for anyone else.

So I asked him, “What if a friend asks me to help him with a website, I can’t ask him for money“. He then replied “charge them, and after you finish, give them their money back“.

Well, I never took his advice. I have done many websites for friends and family, and I have never charged anyone. I recently understood what Fawaz was talking about, the following story happened to me more than once.

I not only designed a website for someone close, but I also payed for the domain and hosting plan for more than a year. After I gave them the site, they asked why it was “empty”, so I showed them how to add content. A few weeks later I find out that they went and payed someone else to design a complete website for them on a different domain!

Not only did they not use what I did for them, but I ended up with a domain and a hosting plan which I didn’t need.

The moral of the story is that you should always charge, and if you feel like doing it for free, give them back the money afterward.

PS If you are a friend of mine which I happened to design a website for, and you used the website I designed for you for at least a month, then I assure you I am not talking about you.

Just changed the theme of my blog, let me know if there are any problems…

Notice that the post titles are images that were generated using the GD Library.

Update: I got a few questions on where to find the archives, and the answer is that they are in the sidebar. To open that click on Expand Sidebar to see it.

I just got an email form a friend of mine asking me to visit a site to vote on whether I support Palestine or Israel…

I knew the moment I got the email, that it was just another guy trying to make money off of the war. I visited the site and saw about 12 ads on the front page alone. Then after you vote you are taken to another that asks you to type a captcha, then a third page asking if you had a comment. Each one of these pages had so many ads.

The number of votes was about 825000, so if only 10% clicked on one of his ads, that would mean that he got about 80000 clicks on his ads. If he gets 3 cents per click, that would mean he made he just made about 2400 Dollars.

I tried to see the whois of the domain, but unfortunately it was locked. The guy also has three other sites:

- Tibet vs China
- Russia vs Ukraine
- Russia vs Georgia

All I am saying is that when you get a similar email, just know that it could be a guy trying to make easy money…

While I am at it, here are a few ideas for money making sites:
- Will Obama be a good president?
- Was Bush the worst president?
- Do you like Pepsi or Coka Cola?
the list goes on…

Tristan da Cunha is a remote volcanic group of islands in the south Atlantic Ocean. It is virtually nowhere, and yet it inhabits about 300 British citizens.

Capital: Edinburgh of the Seven Seas
Language: English, Population - barely 300 people.
Religions: Christianity (Anglican and Roman Catholic)
Monetary Unit: Pound Sterling (GBP)

To get a idea on how far away it is from everything zoom out the following map…

View Larger Map

I came to Saudi after my finals, and my father suggested we visit some of our relatives in Qassim, and on the way we could stop by some of the lakes swamps. It was really amazing, not because the swaps were soo huge, but because they were in the middle of the desert.

I took some pictures and uploaded them to my flickr, but here are some.

This guy loved apple so much he decided to put stickers on apples in a farm, and this was the result

source

The winner of Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2008 is “The Retail DNA Test”. There is a company named 23 and me. They analyze your DNA and send you the information they get from it. This information includes more than 90 traits and conditions which include:

- Where you come from. I registered to get access to their demo, and it turns out they show you where your ancestors lived 500 years ago.
- What your food preferences are. Like what you can’t taste.
- Your athletic ability.
- Compare yourself to any of your friends and find out if you are related. I wonder if that is how they found out Chaney and Obama are cousins?
- What your personal characteristics are.
- Health status, they have a page were they show you your Disease Risks. They also tell you how resistant you are to AIDS, or Malaria.

The Way this works is that they will send you a packet with a tube that you have to fill with saliva. After that you send them back the package and wait for your username and password in the mail. Then after you login you get to see your test results, and believe me they are really long.

This is just amazing Technology, and 23andme have been around for a while, but they used to charge 1000 Dollars and now they only charge $399.

This is a video given at Google explaining the whole concept. BTW the Co-founder of 23andme is the wife of Google’s co-founder Sergey.