Amr Awadallah Blog

Can’t wait, can’t wait …

I was looking at the query logs for my blog and saw a lot of queries coming in with the query string “how to block Meebo?”, they were hitting a previous blog posting of mine.

Its rather simple to block Meebo, first note that unlike other messenger tools, Meebo does not use a specific port, rather Meebo works over the HTTP port just like any other web page.

So to block Meebo, you simply need to add the “meebo.com” domain to your banned domains list, and that’s it, no more Meebo in your corp network/school.

— amr

A couple of friends of mine from yahoo, and two x-yahoo’s, started their own blogs, I think you might find them interesting too:

• MandelBlog: David Mandelbrot spent many years at yahoo (eight I think), he left yahoo about 6 months ago and he is slacking ever since (he claims its to spend time with the family 🙂 ). However, I respect David alot for his gadget and electronic purchases, he does a ton of research and makes very good recommendations. He started a blog focused around that theme.
• Abe Taha’s Blog: Abe is an Egyptian like me, we spent kindergarten, elementary, middle, high, and under-grad in the same schools. We split up when we came to the US, he went to UIUC, while I came to Stanford. About four years ago I convinced Abe to come over and work at Yahoo. He now leads an engineering group at Yahoo that builds infrastructure technologies for scalable tagging. I am not sure that there is a unifying theme to his blog, but he tends to be funny.
• Gerster’s Blog: David Gerster became a Yahoo around April 2003, that’s when I first met him. We have two things in common (probably more), we share a strong passion for gaming (specially Halo), and our wives are significantly shorter than us :). David left Yahoo April 2004 to work for Xoom, he then joined Yahoo again later. His postings tend to me more on the life side (as opposed to work), with lots of media content (images and videos).
• DShen’s Musings: David Shen is one of the early Yahoo employees, he designed the original yahoo logos, and he pioneered many of the yahoo interactive advertising designs. He left yahoo about two years ago, took some time off to rest, and now started a VC fund. He does not post a lot to his blog, but when he does, its fun stuff.

I am sure there are many other Yahoo’s/X-Yahoo’s out there with new blogs, if you are one of those folks and I forgot to mention you here, then I apologize, and please make sure to add your blog link to the comments section and I will definitely approve it.

Cheers,

— amr