Well seems like its been years since I posted. Things have changed: I am a married man working with ARA Systems who are basically contractors for Saudi Aramco. ARA Systems sells Network Appliance storage to aramco and I am one of their support engineers.

Since network appliance is completely proprietary I would not be able to talk much about it over here. I have recently passed their first level of certification known as NACA(NetApp Certified Storage Associate).The good part is that I get to play with real huge data centers with all kind of refrigerator look alike machines. Their network is huge running on ethernet,atm and fiber. I do get to play with all kind of operating systems as well because the machines accessing these storage run on different operating systems.

Linux as usuall is and inshAllah will always be my favourite operating system. They do have it here(Red Hat mostly) but its not really used as a desktop operating system. Micorsoft has a very strong influence here. Just today there was an announcement saying mozilla firefox would be removed from all desktops since its not their standard and has security flaws. Sounded a bit weird to me.

At last I read about open source on an islamic website. It is a book review done by an Egyptian journalist. I have been thinking if open source can be explored from an islamic point of view. I do know that khilafat people claim that patents are totally non islamic. Maybe if I get some time I can try and write something on it.