Have you heard about the Lebanese man who named his first son Google? The baby has a website, too.

Nadine al-Bedair writes something (Arabic) that Fouad al-Farhan, even when he agrees with most of what she wrote, could not believe that the censorship system did not rip it off, and he wonders if such freedom is for liberals only. I agree with all the points she made in that column. Maybe the difference between al-Farhan’s favorite writers and those he call “liberals” is that those so-called liberals writes what they believe in without thinking of censorship. It is a real problem when the censorship comet to live in the head of the writer instead of the offices of the government.

Meg Hourihan has written a letter to application developers and designers about using email to create an account or recall a password. I completely agree with her. If you are going to send the email, send it right away.

What is a superhero? Where did the idea of superhero come from? Who was the first super hero? Read about these interesting questions, and more at Kottke‘s.

I was surprised when I heard MBC were bringing The Simpsons to the Arab World, and did not think that would work out. According to WSJ, it did not. If you d it like me, you may enjoy this list of made-up words and expressions from the original show on Wikipedia.

Here is a list of the 100 best English language novels from 1932 to present by Time magazine.

Microsoft is working on a new user interface system for the next Microsoft Office, code-named Office 12. The new system is supposed to reverse the well-known WYSIWYG style that dominated the UI for the last twenty-five years. This new generation is called the results-oriented user interface, and it will help the users to benefit from the thousands of buried features in software like Word and Excel. Apple was behind the rise of WYSIWYG, but the question is: can Microsoft outperform Apple when it comes to design?

This could be a big thing for software development, because according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, “users often demand that other user interfaces work like Office.” However, David Galbraith disagrees with Nielsen, because “Microsoft has a terrible record at UI which is results oriented.” He thinks that Office biggest problem is that it was designed to deal a type of documents that belongs to past, and not with this new era of “email and weblogs, websites, shared web updatable financial data and multimedia mashups.”