Monthly Archives: July 2010

Jul 19 2010

Bombproof bins

The rubbish bins in a Jerusalem street are bomb proof.  From normal perspective, they look like normal bins with a stronger steel base.   When I was walking by, there was a truck come to empty them with a special crane attachment, you notice the chamber inside is about 2.5 metres long which is hidden underground.  Next to the man in the florescent jacket you can see a bin the same already sitting in the ground, with the long chamber below the street.

Seems pretty good.  Wonder if we could get such a thing around military bases in higher risk parts of the UK.

Jul 18 2010

Driving on highways through the West Bank

On the way back from Beit Shemesh after seeing the kids at the summer camp school, we had to take a road which goes through the Palestinian territories.

This journey is not a currently hugely risky one, but incidents do sometimes happen on rare occasions.  So roads are designed to cope with potential sources of terrorist threats.

These blocks are there, so if you hear gunfire, you stop your car in behind the concrete blocks.

Here this wall with canopy is there as motorists often face stones being thrown at their vehicles.

The roads that interconnect with Jerusalem have a few tunnels due to large number of mountains meaning roads in this country are rarely in a straight linear direction.

Of course going in and out of these parts means going through border controls, coming out of Jerusalem is simple, coming out of part of the West Bank means usually just driving up to a solider at a kiosk and a few questions are asked, I think people in vans are more likely to searched or have more questions asked.  Cars with green licence plates (Palestinian authority)  are not allowed out of the West Bank.

If this sounds like a hugely scary experience, its important to realise attacks on motorists are rare and you are only really likely to encounter hostile encounters in risky places like Hebron or Ramallah.  This road is major route and I have been through these roads quite a few times now.  More concern for safety for motorists is from accidents as the standard of driving is worse than a western country.

Jul 15 2010

Riding to work – commuting Jerusalem style Part 2

first bit –  second section –  Third and final

…continued

Get to these nice modern flats with neat gardens, turn right..

Nice long downhill ride, not much effort here!  turn right at the end of here and go past some shops.

Turn left here by these lights.  You can see the walls of the old city ahead and the towers of a Greek church.

These derelict railway station looks sad.   Not sure why there are no trains any more in central town.  You can see where the windows are there was a fire at some point.  Oddly enough on the right looks like a car covered with a tarpaulin, it actually is some kind of modern art exhibit with a big solid fibre glass cover over it.  Someone’s nicked the plaque on it, so I don’t know who designed it or whether it was a bizarre punishment for someone parking illegally. 🙂

There are nice parks either side of this main road as I ride uphill.  There is also a nice fountain on the right and this place is often a choice for weddings for people to have their pictures down, especially with Arab and Ethiopian people.

Also on the right not visible is the windmill from the old district of Yemen Moshe.

This is the outside of the world famous King David hotel, and on the right, directly opposite side of the right is the YMCA.  Youth hostels are usually thought of as simple affairs for casual travellers on a budget, but this one is huge and is impressive as the hotel it faces.

This is the King David’s rival, no not Goliath, but certainly Goliath in size.  The Citadel seems to be the main choice for foreign heads of state to come and stay, but also I sometimes see poster outside advertising a forthcoming boy’s Bar Mitzvah, a birthday or some other type of big party.

Mamila shopping centre.  Looks super modern from outside but has several buildings inside that have been removed from elsewhere and carefully dismantled with numbers written on the bricks and then reassembled carefully again.

Another hill upwards.  Sheesh, I don’t think anyone in the bible ever got fat.  Going anywhere is up and down hills all the time, this road joins onto Jaffa Street.

first bit –  second section –  Third and final

Jul 15 2010

Beit Shemesh summer camp

Today is a special day!  I have been volunteering for Bridges for Peace for one year!  (ok have been out of the country a couple of times on a break)

I got a chance to escape the office and head of in a car with some other staff to the small town of Beit Shemesh.  Here is a map.

Here we got to see some kids at a summer camp at a school.  Here a lot of these kids come from poor background and Bridges for Peace provides them with lunches and books when they are at school, so its nice to see the people we are directly helping especially for people like me who are admin staff and are not dealing face to face with needy Israeli families.

After some fiddling to get the projector working, this child did a presentation on the big bang and how the planets are formed, I think he is one of the most clever kids there and also seems pretty confident to do this talk himself.  Its good that unlike my home country in the UK political correctness forces educational places to only talk about evolution rather than creation.

Got to join in with drawing and painting

We were trying to draw this view out of the school building, but I just stuck to the green hills and small number of buildings 🙂

This community has a lot of African Jews from Ethiopia as children Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (Middle Eastern/Asian) backgrounds, you see a big mixture of skin colours here.

Once we had finished we got to chance to grab some take out coffee from a mall down the road and head back to the office.

Beit Shemesh

Jul 12 2010

Riding to work – commuting Jerusalem style Part 1

first bit –  second section –  Third and final

I thought I would mention a bit about my commute to work.

My house is in East Talpiyot, is 6km (4 miles) from work, I got a bike not long after my return from the UK in March.

I have had to commute distances before in previous jobs, when I started working for the Southampton NHS trust (for non-UK people, a hospital authority) to start with, the drive of about 26 miles was hell, due to heavy traffic and the maddeningly complex lane system around Southampton.  After getting a Tomtom unit and planning a different route and fair bit of practice, this journey got easier, after a couple weeks I really started to enjoy this job, and my boss gave me some assignments to do in other parts of the city (there were about 100 different buildings to be visited between a team of about 8 of us)   I think this was God telling me to be more persistent with things.   Plus after a couple of months of this role all the roadworks was complete, giving me more time to get in.

Here though, I am on two wheels which might seem dangerous given the more er, ‘energetic’ Israeli style of driving here, but in general riding around isn’t too much problem as I use the pavement and just keep an eye out for pedestrians. Right: Out of my flat

This junction here doesn’t look much, but I actually have a archaeological site 100 yards from my house. The Talpiyot tomb. I have looked around and I can’t actually see this place, I have a feeling its probably hidden one of those electricity type shed things to the left.   There are steep steps down from this junction, so it could be under the road.
Up a hill, then down.   Then up.   A sneaky short cut up this hill to the right.

Good morning UN!   The United Nations building used to the headquarters of the British Mandate of Palestine (pre 1948)  Apparently looking at this location on a map, shows this place during biblical times was called the ‘Den of evil council’ (!)
I then cut to the right where this white car is:

The promenade!!  You get some amazing views from this place!!   Today it was a bit misty though, I am not sure how you get fog in a dry desert country but visibility in mornings is often like this.

Ride along this path.

Another sneaky shortcut, to the right takes a few minutes off…

first bit –  second section –  Third and final

Jul 8 2010

“Never be silent” – the modern day Watchmen of Jerusalem

Last sunday morning I went on a prayer walk on the walls of the old city.

Bart and Joan Repko have been doing this walk 6 days a week (except Shabbat) for some years now, alternating between each half of the edges of the wall, as you can start from either side of the Jaffa gate and finish just behind the Al Asqa Mosque.  You can get a ticket for 16 Shekels and its valid for two days so you can do the other half the next day, just need to start just inside the Jaffa gate.

The aim is to pray over this city and for the frequently volatile atmosphere here.   Often when we are here we can hear the sound of the minarets (Islamic prayer towers) boom out loud voices from different parts of the city.

These steps are quite hard work especially with the fierce midday heat here and it is quite easy to slip as they have hundreds of years of wear…

My friend Marcel is often on this tour.   Check his blog here.

Stunning views into and out of the old city are guaranteed….

Its quite amazing doing this walk as you get to see over into yards, gardens and roofs of all kinds of places.  People in both Arab and Jewish cultures use their roofs as yards, and usually characterised with satellite dishes, old sofas, solar panels (used to run hot water tanks) and various junk.

Gardens are quite popular, whether its a handful of hanging baskets or something quite a bit ambitious, here this person has their own vineyard, think it belongs to an Arab Christian.  I often see orange and lemon trees too.

The group’s name ‘Never be silent’ is taken from Isaiah 62 : 1 “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch.”

See more about the Never be silent old city prayer tour walks here: www.neverbesilent.org/en/

Jul 7 2010

Firefox 4 first impressions / fix your old extensions to work on newer Firefox

Skip downwards if you don’t want to read geek stuff 🙂

I found out the beta of Firefox 4 came out today so I thought I would try it.

Where as Google’s Chrome is getting more and more popular, Firefox is stil popular choice for domestic web browsing, and contrary to stuffy IT managers I have seen that force everyone to stick to IE6 because of compatibility concerns, despite being dangerously flawed could be negligent to their customer’s data, it can be configured for performance, security and compatibility for any business.  Awkward web based apps that rely on Internet Explorer can be run using the IE Tab extension which makes setting up scripts for just those troublesome sites a breeze.  Generally users take to it and the user interface is close enough to IE for the adapt without too much trouble.  Sometimes I have to explain to users how tabs work but they are normally pretty happy.   The other reason for me why Firefox is king is how the Windows, Linux and Mac versions are similar enough to provide consistency in use and many of the extension work on all three environments, add to that this application is available in numerous languages, and you have a really stellar example how open source software can give you the freedom to make applications work the way you want.

I have to say, the Mozilla do tend to market Firefox like a bunch of hippies in a VW van selling organic soup or something, great but the stuffy IT managers of big businesses are not going to be convinced by it.  They really need an extra separate marketing campaign to get ordinary businesses using it for general browsing, and highlight the dangers of Internet Explorer’s dangerously flawed ActiveX system where uninvited nasties are free to get on a PC even if the user doesn’t have administrator rights nor are on web sites over a dubious nature.  Where as techs like me are always having to reimage PCs messed up by viruses and malware from an outdated browser.

So far I have only had about 2 hours worth of time to test drive Firefox 4, because it is a Beta, a mostly complete prototype not ready for primetime, you will find none of your extensions will work.  If you are a developer or just plain impatient, heres some tricks for you to get up and running.

New features on FF4 (I am doing this without cheating and looking on the web, just from obvious things I can see from the browser installing on my machine)
Aesthetics – the user interface has changed so the tabs are at the top, similar style to Chrome.  Gone are the odd shaped green circular back/forward buttons, and more neater buttons take their place.  Actually the newer animated clock things for waiting for a page to redraw look naff, please bring the 3.6 ones!!
Extensions/Add ons system appears to be completely revamped.
Inspect and Heads up display – seems to be diagnostic tools for developers to see the HTML code that makes up a web browser.
So far that is all I can see, but I expect there’s a lot of fine tuning for performance and stability below the skin.

Of course, as I am support and network administrator guy, I look at things from a different angle that my fellow IT peers who are web developers, so there is plenty of other features I am missing out here.

Running Firefox in commercial environment really is pretty simple and hassle free, security is good and users are warned if security certificates seem inconsistent.   As always I would refrain from rolling out the major updates, so not to break any extensions you may have, but when the browser updates itself from say, 3.6.4 to 3.6.6 as it did for my users, this is always done discretely in the background and doesn’t interfere with users work.  Compare that how horribly clumsy and awkward another application like Adobe Acrobat screams at you to do updates when you just want to view a darn PDF in a hurry.   I don’t know if Firefox can be forced out in a business environment using Active Directory type tools, this would be worth thinking about if anyone in Mozilla is reading this.

Some critics say Firefox is bloated and eats lots of memory, all I can say is that I have installed it on lots of different machines and rarely get into this problem.  Excessive memory consumption is likely to be down to lots of extensions loaded or stuck bits Java or flash residing in memory.  I would recommend you get the excellent free Ccleaner registry clean up tool and run it every now and then.  If your PC is never rebooted and runs 24/7 like a lot of other apps you will run out of memory every now and then.  Heck I was using an ancient 1999 model Toshiba Satellite 4090 laptop until 2007 running Firefox 2 on only 192Mb of RAM and with more than 3 tabs it would choke every now and then and wasn’t fast, but generally Firefox copes with elderly PCs quite well if the machine is properly configured.

Anyway my other talk here was I learnt from a while back how to trick Firefox into making your extensions work if they refused to load as they intended for an older version of Firefox, perhaps the main moan point for me, as third party developers are a bit slow in keeping up with the new versions for this browser.

These are my favourite extensions
IE Tab 2 – renders sites in Internet Explorer, great for poorly maintained web sites written for specific browsers
British English Dictionary – spell checker (works the same as MS Word) that underlines unrecognised words whilst you are writing text on a blog/twitter/facebook/forum or some kind.
Foxytunes – remote control to use iTunes/Windows Media Player/Youtube/VLC player at the bottom of your browser – Note I was surprised to have found out tonight Foxytunes is written by Israeli developers and now owned by Yahoo.
Resurrect pages – Finds cached copies of deleted web pages on a server.  Seen a blog with something interesting but controversial that got taken down?  Normally you can use this to find it again.

Warning, using Beta test software should not be done in a live commercial environment as the software is not fully tested.  Add on the fact I have interfered with the extensions to ‘force’ them to work, that is, remove a compatibility safety feature that will make the browser refuse to load on preventing a possible crash.   I am using standard old Windows XP SP3, but this should be the same for Windows or Linux users with equivalent tools.  Do this at your own risk.

1. Download the required extension you want, but you need to right click and choose ‘save as’ as we want to save it as a normal file with the extension XPI to change something.  Notice here this app is labelled as only compatible with upto version 3.6 of Firefox. (the most newest stable version today July 2010)

2. Once this is done, you then need to drag and drop the XPI file onto Winzip.   I am not a fan of Winzip as its bloated and awkward, but the equivalent apps don’t work so well for this type of job, Winzip isn’t free of course but the trial version is good enough for what we want to do.

3. Drag out one of the files off Winzip which is embedded in the XPI file, one should be called ‘install.rdf’ save this somewhere safe.

4. Next, drag and drop this file into a text editor like Notepad.

5. This looks like a lot of meaningless script only understandable by a programmer, but where it says ‘max version’ and 3.6.* change this to 4.0.* and then save the file.

6. Put this file back in the Zip file.    This hack XPI extension can now be dragged over onto your Firefox browser main window, and restart the browser when prompted to.

If something goes wrong? Firefox not starting?   If Firefox then crashes, you will have to start it in safe mode [start > all programs > Mozilla Firefox > Firefox (safe mode)]  will get you out of trouble, then disable the last extension you installed.   So far, all of the above four extensions were hacked by me this way and all work fine.

If you are having some problems with a favourite Firefox extension and need some support, I will gladly offer some help and maybe adjust your extension for you, contact me on my normal contact form.   A small donation would appreciated as I am a volunteer IT tech just blogging on IT and places I see at a charity in Israel.

Jul 6 2010

Caesarea revisited

On the away trip with the staff of the charity I volunteer for, we first stopped off at Caesarea.

I have blogged on this place before but only very briefly, really only touching on the theatre which hosts live music and TV shows today, this time I got to see this place in a bit more detail.

The museum park is mostly outdoors and is a beautiful place to visit.  It is probably the most important piece of Roman history in the Middle East.

This sign shows how the harbour looked like:

Here you can see only a portion of the harbour is still here, the rest disappeared into the sea, although not so much through war, actually it happened by earthquake.


Today there is some flags out as a sign of countries in battle – this time the world cup football.

By the way the name ‘Palestine’ was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian long before any Arab people populated this land.  Caearea was built by Herod, but there are signs here showing it was inhabited by Greeks, Crusaders and Muslims.

Outside a cafe at this place I ordered a hot dog with some french fries and sat outside.  The elderly man who ran the cafe had a strong New York accent brought out some pizza to one of my friends at the table and I noticed a small green tattoo on the man’s arm, not a particularly interesting design but when I went up to get some mustard I saw it again, it was about six numbers.   This was the unmistakable sign the Nazis used on Jewish prisoners in the holocaust camps, where as most people were rapidly slaughtered in the gas chambers not long after they had arrived by train, the ones with the tattoos tended to be those that were younger that were deemed suitable for working in the camp in unspeakable conditions.   Still today there are people who try to revise history and say it never happened. I would imagine the man is probably Polish and moved to the US in late 1940s and came to Israel not so long ago.  On one of the other tables he got chatting to one of the other staff, I didn’t hear what was said apart from he said he was from New York.   Its a sobering thought that history has come full circle, as the Nazis closely modeled themselves on the Romans to some degree and now as this small fragment of the Middle East is now owned by Jews again and some of them have reminders of tragedies gone by.

There are two films that can be watched in separate screens that show how Caesarea was restored by archeologists as you can see today.  Some other people on our trip went to scuba diving as there are parts of the ruins that can only be seen underwater.

People fishing, although I think this sign probably says you aren’t supposed to.

It perhaps doesn’t ‘go’, but I really like this wooden Caribbean style bar :o)

Current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lived here in the town and so did Russian-Israeli Billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak who used to own football clubs in Jerusalem and Portsmouth UK, its incredible this location has changed hands through so many people.

This is an absolutely must see for any visitor to the holy land.

I will cover the Kibbutz where I stayed next…

Jul 6 2010

Hezbollah’s friends at CNN

More evidence that mainstream news sites aren’t always pleasant and fair to the peace process in the middle east.   Apparently one of the senior editors of CNN’s middle east department, wrote on twitter about a being a sad day about this week’s death of one of the founding fathers of of Hezbollah, Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Worrying stuff indeed.

Jul 5 2010

Journey to the Red Sea – part eight; Back to Eilat to see fishies

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8

After getting through the border back to Eilat, I walked – as I don’t tend to get buses in strange places as I always seem to end up going somewhere wrong – and got back towards the middle of town, quite a long walk of a about 3 miles, past the small airport and dumped most of my belongings back in the hostel, and ate some bread and chocolate spread and some other stuff to eat.

I saw an African family come into the hostel, they were poor and were asking for help as their young girl had not eaten that day, I gave them the other half of my bread and other people gave them something.   It turns out that this family are Sudanese, they are mostly Christians (but not Jewish) escaping persecution, living in Israel with a special visa from the government to stay here, there are quite a few Sudanese families in Eilat, it seems they have probably walked through the Egyptian Sinai to get there too!!    Work in Eilat is probably mostly seasonal as its a tourist place but I think there are labourer jobs in the number of construction projects (which are not so contested unlike Jerusalem and Judea & Samaria) down here.

I really wanted to see the aquarium, but I couldn’t find it as I assumed it was on the middle of the coast line somewhere.  Instead I found a strangely painted car I wrote about previously.  After asking in a tourist information office, it was on the west edge of the sea, heading on a road towards the Egyptian border.

Ok, I decided to walk and head southwards.  On the way there are military stations here, being at the top of the Red Sea it is important to keep this defended, there are shipping cranes here and I saw large numbers of new cars which I think had just come off a boat from Japan.


Its generally accepted that Egypt is the best place in the world to go Scuba diving, but as Eilat in Israel is next door, it probably comes a close second, I saw some specialist shops where you can buy or rental diving gear, as well as Caribbean style bars out the beach, one of the first tourist places I saw was a place which children can swim with dolphins, sounds pretty exciting but it is 300 shekels per child (that £50)  probably best left as a special birthday day out I think.

Eventually being only about a mile away from the Egyptian crossing, I came to the famous aquarium, this was a 90 shekel fee for basic entry but worth it, for a bit more you can have a ride in a boat with a glass bottom around the Red Sea.

The aquarium also some giant tortoises!


At the end of this unusual pier has the best part of this place – go up and you can see views over to FOUR countries, Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia….

Go down the bottom and you will see why there is so much fuss about the Red Sea, there are glass windows that show under the water, the fish here are absolutely amazing!!!

Where as its not so easy to get good shots through the glass, the water is beautifully clear, and when you see those little orange Clownfish now made famous by Disney, like to hide and poke their little noses through the coral, is so damn cute you will want to be sick!!  There are scores of every type of exotic fish of every colour and shape.   I even seen about a dozen stripey yellow fluorescent fish with another dozen purplely ones, it looked like a fishy football match going on.

After coming out of the aquarium, I decided to take a quick look at what was a mile down the road.  There were some Arab people having a party and barbeque on the beach with some tents but round the corner was a gateway to a new continent – Africa!

Beyond these lights on the left and the building I am standing (it was quite dark as you can see) is the border to Taba, in Egypt.  Quite tempting to go there, but Egypt is a massive country about 50 times bigger than Israel, and to see all the juicy stuff like Cairo, Alexandra, Valley of the Kings, and the Nile etc takes a 19 hours to get through the Sinai on a bus.   I did see lots of Nigerian Christians queuing up at the border.

On the way back in the middle of a roundabout was these funny looking models of a submarine and the tower at the pier at the aquarium.

Later on the hostel forgot to actually write my booking for a room down in the book, despite me booking it, and it was full!  Therefore I slept on a sofa on the outside lounge which was fine, people were not too noisy and the temperature outside was just right, this way cost me half price, although in the morning I had 3 large mosquito bites on my head.  The next day it was a time to chill out and chat to the other peeps at the hostel, then get back on an Egged bus back to Jerusalem.

Eilat is a very touristy place, there is no doubt about that, but its generally quite tasteful (the hotels are verging on trying to copy Vegas a bit though) and very safe, I like the good shopping malls, clean beaches with nice outdoor bars, and of course the aquarium.  Its also handy is a cross over point between Egypt and Jordan, although do you research on visa stuff before as you will get asked everything about where you have been, where you are going and who you are going to see.  I just wish it had a better road that connects it to the rest of the country, as its narrow single carriageway, and I am not sure if the tiny airport goes to any regular European airports.

Conclusions:-

For this reason the hostel gets a thumbs up for the really nice staff, location, the fact its staffed by Christians & Jewish believers, free tea and coffee, and has an optional free bible study, but not so great marks for forgetting my reservation and not having paper towels in the toilets, and could do with better sign posting of some sort, – still I will definitely be back there again, if I head that direction!! www.shelterhostel.com

Petra is best given at least two whole days to visit, there is so much to see there!!!

Wadi Rum was ok, but not a great tour due to staff not knowing an awful lot about the places there, having poorly maintained and dangerous looking vehicles, and asking some visitors like me to lie (!?) to the national park authorities.  All the Jordanians I met were very friendly though and not just for the purposes of expecting business.  Of course a lot of trips could be judged by how much you are happy to leave comforts from western country and rough it to some degree.

If you are bringing your iPod, I would highly recommend Chicane’s Behind the Sun album, a good selection of trance tracks that go well with the beach vibe that is Eilat, and of course I got the best of Indiana Jones soundtracks to play while I was around Petra 🙂

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8