Keeping up with every year’s tradition on this blog, I am doing a preliminary translation of the 2021 world predictions by Michel Hayek.

Disclaimer:

If you can understand Lebanese Arabic, I have edited and cleaned the TV interview with Michel and made it available here:

Per Michel, this year’s predictions has no title, hence the “Untitled” title, because there are so many predictions all mixed up together.

USA

Lebanon

Syria

Continue reading “2021 World Predictions by Michel Hayek – the “Untitled Predictions””

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When I was just a lad of ten, my father said to me, “Come here and take a lesson from the lovely lemon tree.” “Don’t put your faith in love, my boy”, my father said to me, “I fear you’ll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree.”

Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat. Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

One day beneath the lemon tree, my love and I did lie A girl so sweet that when she smiled the stars rose in the sky. We passed that summer lost in love beneath the lemon tree The music of her laughter hid my father’s words from me:

Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat. Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

One day she left without a word. She took away the sun. And in the dark she left behind, I knew what she had done. She’d left me for another, it’s a common tale but true. A sadder man but wiser now I sing these words to you:

Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat. Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

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The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine about the Z3 theorem solver and he mentioned the inverted Pyramid puzzle. I told him: “I think this can be solved with Z3” and hence this blog post.

So what’s the inverted pyramid puzzle?

Imagine the following pyramid with 4 rows:

 10   9   8   7    6   5   4      3   2        1

The numbers in that triangle are just placeholders for the sake of explanation.
The goal of the puzzle is to find the right order for those numbers in the triangle in such a way that:

For the 4th row, we must have whatever is at the position denoted with [number] subtracted from its neighbor equals the value of the next row’s value beneath the top 2 numbers (note: we take the absolute value of the subtraction). So:

|[10] - [9]| == [6]|[9] - [8] | == [5]|[8] - [7] | == [4]

And for the 3rd row, we must have:

|[6] - [5]| == [3]|[5] - [4]| == [2]

And for the 2nd row, we must have:

|[3] - [2]| == [1]

Of course, we stop at the first row.

For now, here’s a solution for the inverted pyramid with 4 rows:

 8 10  3  9  2  7  6   5  1    4

The numbers configuration from above satisfies the conditions explained above.

Please note that the only numbers accepted in the pyramid are [1..Sigma(rows)]. Sigma denotes the sum of the arithmetic series going from 1 to rows. Continue reading “The inverted pyramid puzzle”

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Keeping up with every year’s tradition on this blog, I am doing a preliminary translation of the 2020 world predictions by Michel Hayek.

Disclaimer:

If you can understand Lebanese Arabic, I have edited and cleaned the TV interview with Michel and made it available here:

Unfortunately, this year his predictions were rushed and cut off due to time limitations and bad management from the MTV network.

In the book The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, Gibran Khalil Gibran, the famed Lebanese writer, philosopher and artist wrote:

You have your Lebanon and I have mine. You have your Lebanon with her problems, and I have my Lebanon with her beauty. You have your Lebanon with all her prejudices and struggles, and I have my Lebanon with all her dreams and securities. Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a place of conflict and deception. My Lebanon, is a place of beauty and dreams of enchanting valleys and splendid mountains. Your Lebanon is inhabited by functionaries, officers, politicians, committees, and factions. My Lebanon is for peasants, shepherds, young boys and girls, parents and poets. Your Lebanon is empty and fleeting, whereas My Lebanon will endure forever.

It is with the phrase “You have your Lebanon and I have mine” that Michel Hayek chose to start the predictions for the year 2020.

USA

Lebanon

Lebanon of tomorrow won’t look the same anymore like the Lebanon of yesterday. A new, rich, unique and interesting experiment will be created in and by Lebanon.
Lebanon will not be really divided but there will be different parts of Lebanon having their own characteristics and rules, for example:

They said that the 2019 Lebanese revolution is a she. That’s true and that she will give birth to many different revolutions.
I see two “explosions” happening, one is symbolic with respect to leadership and major decisions and the other is a real one.

The revolutions will have so many results and there might even be female martyrs or bloodshed (not just male bloodshed). The revolution will be a long-term project that will yield change very slowly.

Continue reading “2020 World Predictions by Michel Hayek – You have your Lebanon and I have mine”

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In this blog post, I will show you how to deobfuscated a ConfuserEx protected .NET application.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of videos on YouTube about how to deobfuscate such programs but these videos are so complicated and the instructions are either convoluted or do not yield a good result.

Let’s get started.

Step 1 – Inspecting the binary

You will need to get the dnSpy tool from here: https://github.com/0xd4d/dnSpy/releases

Open the program with dnSpy (or drag and drop it):

At first inspection, we can tell there’s obfuscation due to the name of the entrypoint at line 4 (being so cryptic). Additionally, if you click on the “ConfusedTest.exe” node, you will see more attributes and the obfuscator name (ConfuserEx v1.0.0-4-g3fd0d55):

Continue reading “A walkthrough to deobfuscating a ConfuserEx v1.0.0-4 g3fd0d55 protected .NET application”

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Going to doctors in the US yields a prescription drug per visit. If you dare to mention a given pain, then you walk out with a pain killer. You mention a stomach ailment, you walk out with another weird prescription drug.

If you undertake a surgical operation, you get to collect a bouquet of pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs.

You can tell already that I am not a big fan of medications. Have you ever tried to read the side-effects of the prescription drugs?

Imagine how many toxins the drugs release in your system. Imagine how much damage they incur while they help you with a given problem. What’s the risk of addiction when you take certain pain medications?

Have you tried mentioning alternative medicine or herbs to your doctor? They ridicule you and shun the whole alternative medicine approach.

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Can we learn to live outside this trio? Everything in moderation and we can make it.

A life where we try to serve others while sustaining ourselves is a good life. A life where we only take what we need is a fair one. If we use sex of reproduction and to cherish our partner, we won’t have a degenerate society and unwanted babies and hence the murders through abortion, etc.

Power? What about empowerment? Empowerment sounds more noble and better than “power”. To empower others by teaching them and educating them is a very noble thing. Power alone is selfish, but power for the sake of sharing is good and noble.

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Are you looking to switch away from Google Chrome because of privacy concerns?

In this blog post, I list a bunch of alternative browsers. Some you might have heard of, and some maybe you never heard of. Let’s get started!

Continue reading “Google Chrome alternative browsers?”

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Chain emails sometimes bring more than entertainment, sometimes they bring wisdom. Enjoy:

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I bought myself the noise masking sleepbuds from BOSE to combat loisy upstairs neighbors who stomp all the time at night and early morning:

I tried them for two nights and I like the technology, unfortunately, I did not keep them because they were not comfortable for side sleepers.

The sleepbuds fit well in the ear and produce soothing music (you have a big selection from the phone app), however I found that any external speakers that can generate white noise can do the same effect.

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