Mody Al-Khalaf wrote a good column at Arab News. A long column, but good indeed. Here are my favourite parts.

When our religion is not clear on certain issues, we take a stance or a position and vehemently defend it, to the point of declaring others un-Islamic if they do not follow what we believe is right. In our Islamic state, for instance, it seems not to matter that three of four prominent Islamic scholars point out that a woman’s hijab does not entail covering her face. Nonetheless, we insist that every woman cover her face, wear a black abaya and even direct how it should be worn. And we employ men as religious police whose job is to go after women in the street or in any public place and force them to adhere to our version of Islamic hijab. No matter if they are of a different sect or even religion.

In our customized Islamic state, we make our own laws and simply do not enforce those with which we happen to disagree. The best example of this is that woman are prevented from driving. We conveniently overlook that there is no Islamic law stating that woman may not drive. Recently we went one step further: we now forbid Saudi travel agencies from issuing international driver’s licenses to Saudi women. We did that just to make sure that Saudi women cannot legally get behind the wheel of a car anywhere in the world. We are amazingly efficient in closing loopholes when we want to close them, aren’t we?

I put these parts of the article because I think some of you will be too lazy to click the link and read the whole column ;-)

Some people will do anything in order to get a Gmail account form Google. Using the “Next Blog” button in the Blogger Navbar, I ran across many blogs that have only one post about getting Gmail.

Here’s a boy from China who wants a Gmail, and in the same time he is praying to God to save him! Another example is Brokeman, who started more than three blogs hoping to get one.

OK, Gmail is great, but can’t these people wait for a few months to get it easily and for free?

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(via Choire Sicha)

From Rebecca’s Pocket:

I am very pleased that so many people voted in this election, although I am very disappointed in the results. (…) Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy four years.

From Left Coast:

I would just like to thank the half of America that voted for George Bush. You have f**ked things up for all of us. Thanks!

Wired magazine is giving away a Wired CD produced under a Creative Commons license with their November issue. The CD is featuring The Bastie Boys, who appear on the cover of the magazine, among others include Gilberto Gil and David Byrne.

I’m only afraid that the CD may not be available with the magazine here in Saudi Arabia. The magazine usually arrives lately and it won’t be surprising to see some pages ripped off by the censorship devils of the Ministry of Disinformation.

I knew there was some Arabic blogs out there, but I wasn’t paying much attention because programmers and designers, who did not have much to say to the world, made most of them. They were trying to play with Movable Type and other things. That’s all.

This is not changing. It’s just that one of them called Pixelog.net, linked to my blog and wrote it is worth reading. For my surprise, the guy titled the link with “The Saudi Greeks Are Coming“! I think he meant “Geeks” but, am I a geek? Please, tell me I’m not!

Regarding my post about feeds readers, I received an email from Nick Denton, Kinja’s president, who was surprised to know that Kinja could not read some feeds, asking me to give him some examples.

Therefore, I decided to re-log in to my account at Kinja, and give it another try. I discovered that I made some mistakes when I used it for the first time few months ago. Nevertheless, Kinja was functioning properly this time.

However, I still cannot understand the technology behind Kinja. During my email conversation with Mr. Denton, he told me that Kinja could read all blogs “whether they have RSS or not.” “We parse the HTML, looking for patterns in the code,” he added. So, according to his email “RSS is nice, but not essential.”

Kinja asks you to enter the URL in the “example.com” form. This sounds interesting and easy-to-use. However, this will not work unless you enter a famous blog (i.e. Kottke.org). When you try to do the same with some relatively unknown blogs (i.e. Mahmood’s Den), this method will not work. In this case, you should enter the URL of the feed itself, instead of the generic blog URL, and then everything will go smoothly.

I may forgive Kinja for such a thing because they are still in Beta. But I think they should work on it to improve their product. I like Kinja because they have a clean neat beautiful design, and it is really easy to add/delete any feed. Moreover, I like the way Kinja use to show the latest post from any of your feeds on top, just like a blog.

I’ve been using Bloglines for couple of days now, and it looks faster than Kinja in aggregating the feeds. Something I hate about Kinja is the delay in adding new feeds. However, I prefer it over Bloglines because the latter use frames. I hate frames.

Kinja is good, but it is far from being perfect. There is much to do and work on before release of Kinja 1.0, and I think they can do it.