Watch solar eclipse here

OK, the connection is working. I will have to increase intervals between updates screenshots from 5 sec to 30 sec for some technical problems.
Check the link:

It should start working normally at 11am Cairo Local Time and testing at 9am:

Cairo:
http://ximo.cjb.net:12000
[update]8.30
(should be working now)


For total Solar Eclipse at Salloum, check that website:
I wish i was there.

Salloum:
http://eclipse.span.ch/eclipsewebcam.htm

Webcam Test successful: Solar Eclipse in Action Tomorrow

Here are the the shots I took with the webcam. Right now its cloudy and the sun is trying to break out. I will post today the link to my webcam. The sun will be in the middle of this image so hopefully tomorrow will be a good viewing day of an once in a lifetime event. 85% of the sun will disappear in this picture. Come back later for a view tomorrow at the exactly same time, 11am Cairo time, 9am GMT.

Egypt Solar eclipse live streaming preparations

I managed to get a laptop and a camera with a clips as my intel camera cannot be fixed in the balcony. I will do a test tomorrow of the setup and will post the image here. I don't think the laptop owner will not disagree installing apache on the laptop and the auto capture tool which by the way i got from the XP power tools when i was trying to use my webcam as a surveillance camera.

PS. Come back on Wednesday 8 am GMT10am CET, BST Cairo Local time - 3am EST 12pm Dubai Time for the streaming. I will link to my streaming here on this blog and through msn for those who know me.

However I some problems. To improve the image, it woudl be better to use some kind of an optical filter on the camera and ofcourse i won't find any that fits in it. I had a link to an article that explains how to change a normal webcam into an IR webcam but this would involve diassembling the camera and messing with the lens and circuit which i should have done before. I am also not getting comments on my posts as I still have very light traffic on this blog so I will not get help from that. I will try using wara2 zebda from or old copybooks covers. I think a better idea is to get one of these cheap children plastic eyeglasses that sell for 5 LE and try to fit the lense on it.

I welcome any quick solutions.

[update] 9.13 am March 28

There is no sun till now and the balcony is still wet because of yesterday's rain. There might be a small problem that the sun may be over the building during the peak of the eclipse which is a minor problem. I will ivestigate about that later on this noon (should have done that on saturday) but I can get over the roof and try it out. I think my D link router signal will be able to reach the roof if it reaches the street 21 m below it. I wonder how much will the cement slabs block the signal and the building owners told me there is also insulation in the roof. One of my friends is considering the use of a repeater for his apartment because of the thickness of the walls which results in signal being lost after less than 5 metres which is a real problem for him.

Solar Eclipse in Cairo Egypt Live stream

There will be a partial solar eclipse in cairo Egypt where upto 85% of the sun will be covered by the moon. The heavenly show will start in Cairo around 10.30am and peak at 12.30pm.

This is my second solar eclipse to watch. First one was in august 1999 when about 30% of the sun was blocked by the moon. I remember it darkened a bit. This time it should get dark enough to enable pictures to be taken by the camera.

I will try to provide a live video streaming of the event, well, i will set the camera to take snapshots and update them every 2 sec or so. Everything is ready except that I won't be at home and I need a 5 metres USB cable. Most probably I will go back home during the first phase of the eclipse. Check this post or a separate for updates.

There is a 61% chance of seeing a clear eclipse according to this website Here.

Check this image

DSL Customer support...Internet in Egypt sucks

What the hell is wrong with dsl service in Egypt? I found out its not only me with LinkDotNet, or my friends who I referred them to LinkDotnet as well. Its also other fellows with TEData and Raya. A friend of mine has a lot of problems with TEData on the Heliopolis exchange. Another friend in Mohandessin has a lot of problems with Raya.

Anyways, the last three months with LinkDotNet saw the first two customer personnel visiting us at home. This time we(my family and I) were not complaining of the speed, but of the line itself. The DSL line itself is getting disconnected a lot of times.

Here is a a typical conversation other the phone:
Me: My internet is down
He: Please Switch off your modem for 10 sec and switch it on again.

Me: I did that already and the line is still down.
He: OK, restart your computer and press F8 and go into safe mode with networking.

Me: By the way, This is my 10th call this week, and I already tried that with another operating system called Linux.
He: Well, we are checking what's wrong from our side, are you in yet?
Me: Yes!!
He: OK, now go and start a download
Me: From which site?
He: go to yahoo.com and choose games

Me: ....
He: Are you there?
Me: No, the page hasn't loaded yet
He: OK, i will be back shortly

then I listen to some darn music
5 minutes later after I start downloading at 0.5KB/sec

Me: I started downloading and the speed is horrible
He: Start another download

Me: it will take a lot of time to go to the other page.
2 mins later
Me: The speed now is 0.1KB/sec
then the DSL line gets disconnected and reconnects

He: OK, I will send you someone to check on the cables on your side
Me: But already someguy visited us last week and told me that you have a problem
He: No, we have to check your side again!!

---------------------------------------------------------
When the guy came, he checked the splitter, connected his modem and said that everything is perfect on our side. He tried to download and the speed this time was about 15kb/sec , 30% of what shoul be my speed. They will try to fix the connection from their side.
---------------------------------------------------------

But I thought the problem was with LinkDotNet only, however, when I asked my friends, nearly all ISPs are having problems with speed or line consistency. Yesterday, EgyNet which provides its services through SofiCom during working hours. EgyNet is rumored to be looking for an investor to buy it, possibly an international partner. If you are are intrested contact NTC, National Telecommunications Corporations.

TEData, is supposed to have less problems in the near future as they have upgraded their international bandwidth to 3 Gbps as announced on their website 6 weeks ago. This move will relief the customers' woes and improve speed.

Easy Come Easy Go: Investing in the market

I am too excited about the crash because i predicted it a couple of months ago after people rallied behind Telecom Egypt. I am copying this market report from Hermes Brokerage Company. This is well phrased, Easy come easy go. I do not believe in conspiracy thiories. This is the market. Ups and downs. And for every action there is a reaction.

News

Egypt Market
Review-Tuesday (14 Mar. 2006)
A black Tuesday with the market following the
“Easy come easy go” principle after a rally that took most stocks to record
P/E’s, yet the effect of the correction was magnified by panicking small
investors that rushed out of the market trying to lock in profits or avoid
losses. In an attempt to cushion the free fall exhibited across the
board,
CASE stopped trading for half an hour easing out the tension
which turned out as a remedy for few small caps that managed to flip direction
and end on the green side. The HCMI lost 4.52% to close at 364.90 points.
The market turnover on Tuesday was EGP820.03 million (USD143.04 million) for
equities and EGP767.17 million (USD133.82 million) for bonds.
Few stocks
managed to move against the flow with some seizing the opportunity of reaching
their reasonable prices; EFIC surged 8.82% to close at EGP94.31/share which
positioned it as the market's top performing stock on Tuesday, with trading
worth EGP13.71 million. (Re; EFIC, Fertile Ground, Feb 26th
,2006)
Eastern Tobacco advanced 7.96% to close at EGP343.40/share made
it CASE's second top performer, with trading worth EGP40.86 million. (Re; EC,
Smoke Addiction, Feb 12th , 2006).
EIPICO gained 6.75% to close at
EGP24.98/share which ranked it as CASE's third top performing stock on Tuesday,
with EGP13.93 million worth of trade. Olympic Group gained 3.71% to close at
EGP43.89/share which made it the day's fourth top performer for the day with
EGP22.51 million worth of trade.
Telecom sector had mixed performance; On the
positive side backed by strong fundamentals;Vodafone Egypt gained 2.05% to close
at EGP97.40/share which ranked it as CASE's fifth top performing stock on
Tuesday's trading session, with EGP54.69 million worth of trade.
MobiNil had
a turnover of EGP69.53 million, rising 0.75% to close at EGP168.56/share. On the
other hand; TE has hit its all time low losing -4.81% to close at
EGP15.44/share, brushing briefly below the EGP13.0 intra-session, along with
trading worth EGP118.04 million. Surprisingly, the stock couldn’t resist the
fall, OT's turnover of EGP178.88 million has made it the market's second most
active stock for the day, yet dropping 4.04 to close at
EGP303.22/share.
Elsewhere, the damage was incurable to market movers; OCI
had a turnover of EGP215.88 million,which ranked it as CASE's most active stock
yet suffering 5.69% to close at EGP207.87/share. OHD had a turnover of
EGP48.30 million, losing 9.15% to close at EGP33.06/share. CIB was the
third most active stock on Tuesday, with a turnover of EGP133.19 million, also
dipping 4.15% to close at EGP67.17/share.
Oriental Weavers
had a turnover of EGP46.58 million, slipping 3.32% to close at
EGP75.04/share.Previous stars lost their shine with gravity overtaking their
fictitious appeal, EFG-
Hermes Holding plunged 23.57% to close at
EGP35.61/share, which ranked it as CASE's worst performing stock on Tuesday's
trading session, with trading worth EGP6.19 million.
Arab Cotton
Ginning slipped 21.11% to close at EGP11.55/share, which ranked it as
CASE's second worst performing stock on Tuesday's trading session, with trading
worth EGP0.47 million.
Cairo Housing dropped 20.80% to close at
EGP8.15/share, which ranked it as CASE's third worst performing stock on
Tuesday's trading session, with trading worth EGP0.44 million. United
Housing fell 20.70% to close at EGP13.06/share, which ranked it as CASE's
fourth worst performing stock on Tuesday's trading session, with trading worth
EGP0.08 million.
Arab Polvara dropped 20.20% to close at
EGP6.24/share, which ranked it as CASE's fifth worst performing stock on
Tuesday's trading session,with trading worth EGP0.50 million.Source: HC
Brokerage

Egypt Stock Market Crash and rebirth

yippeeee!!!

Egypt stock market crashed. This is not a real crash. This is a correction movement. After months of unjustified appreciation in prices, everything is going back to normal. This shoud have happened long ago. Thousands of dumb egyptians went in the stock market after the frenzy of the Telecom Egypt IPO. They took the decision to venture into the stockmarket with no previous study or anything. The egyptian stockmarket is a big myth.

This is the right time to buy shares in many companies. I also have faith in the economic policy of the government and I predict a growth in the next 2 years. This is the perfect to go to the stockmarket.

MSDN website with firefox and Internet Explorer

I am not sure about that. But when accessing the MSDN website with Internet Explorer, IE6, the browser freezes and sometimes crashes. This happened to me many times. Before the SP2, SP1 and on both the Windows XP home edition and Windows XP pro. I only tested that on about 4 computers only but at different times.

take the following link for example.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/GetStart_g/hh/GetStart_g/gs_devspc_785f1d34-1ca4-44a6-b492-a78789298847.xml.asp

After firefox was released, I started visiting the same page in the new browser. Surprisingly, I had no problems at all. Moreover, When the page successfully loads in Internet Explorer, it always contains a couple of errors, while in Firefox, it just loads with no errors at all.

Last time I accessed an MSDN page on IE and it freezed, I left it for a while. It went back to normal after about 10 min.

Don't accuse me of consuming up my memory, There were only 2 windows opened at that time, the google page and the MSDN page and normal start up programs. I noticed that this problem happens a lot with MSDN website.

Egyptian Cabinet: names of ministers in Egypt

Well, i am tracking the visitors to my website and 70% of them are from Egypt. Most of these visits are refered to me from search results from google. One of my favourite quotes is "Google is my friend". I am active blogger and I usually post every 2-4 weeks. However, I got about 3 visitors looking for names of ministers in Egypt. I felt that I have to help them. I started to list those whom I know and I got stuck at the translation of Awqaf أوقاف . At that moment, I remembered that we are living in the era of the electronic government and I went to the Egyptian government portal @ www.egypt.gov.eg and i found the official website of the Egyptian Cabinet. Let me write it in a bigger font.

http://www.egyptiancabinet.gov.eg/

Here are the names anyways for those lazy asses but I rephrased the ministry names because I just want to do so.

Prime Minister: Dr. Ahmed Nazif
Foreign Minister: Mr. Ahmed Abou EL Gheit
Minister of Interior(police): Gen. Habib El 3Adly
Minister of Information: Mr. Anas Al Feqy
Minister of Defence: Field Marshal Hussein Tantawy
Minister of Military Production: Dr. Sayed Mesh3al
Minister of Culture: Mr. Farouk Hosny
Minister of Finance: Dr. Youssef Ghaly
Minister of Petroleum: Eng. Sameh Fahmy
Minister of Communication and Information Technology: Dr. Tarek Kamel *
Minister of Investment: Dr. Mahmoud Mohie EL Din
Minister of Transport: Mr. Mohamed Mansour
Minister of Housing: Mr. Ahmed Al Maghraby
Minister of Tourism: Mr. Zoheir Garana
Minister of Agriculture: Mr. Amin Abaza
Minister of Social Affairs: Dr. Ali Mesilhy
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs: Dr. Mofid Shehab
Minister of Workforce(employment): Ms. Aisha Abdel Hady**
Minister of Irrigation: Dr. Mahmoud Abou Zeid
Minister of Endownment: Dr. Hamdy Zaqz