Q8Ba7th Official Blog » Government

Ministry of Education Released Electronic Course Material Version

Q8Ba7th — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:00:30 +0000

The Ministry of Education in Kuwait have released electronic versions of the Kuwait public school course materials and made available for download from their website as PDF files.

I’m not sure if this includes all of the material, as I saw some First Episode books without the second, but it’s still a very good move for both students and teachers, to gain easy and quick access to the material, even if it’s late on print (like always!).

Now the real bad thing about it is how they decided to split it into chapters, and you will have to download each chapter separately.

I wonder why, as the size is really just a few MBs and bandwidth is less of an issue now. Worst case is allow for chapter or full book download. So if you really want it as a single document, follow the two simple steps:

Download all PDF files manually, or I suggest you use DownThemAll add-on for Firefox to retrieve all the relevant PDF files. Put them all in one directory.
Use MergePDF.net or else the steps described here to merge all the files in one. Make sure to keep them in the right order though.

Tip: Search Kuwaiti sites using Q8Ba7th.com

PIFSS.GOV.KW Online Services Review

Q8Ba7th — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:03:59 +0000

Site: PIFSS.GOV.KW

Name: The Public Institution for Social Security

Name (Arabic): المؤسسة العامة للتأمينات الاجتماعية

Type: Government

Brief: PIFSS have started providing it’s online services as part of the e-government project a while ago, giving it’s users access to loads of information about their social security status and numbers, as well as allowing them to submit certain certificate requests.

Review:

Registration:

Sadly, for registration, PIFSS have decided to go with their own online user credentials, thus taking a step away from a unified government identity. Perhaps the reason for this is the slow progress of the unified identity, who knows. To start the registration anyhow, you first click the Electronic services link at the top left of the screen.

From there, click on New User? (مستخدم جديد؟), fill in your civil ID number and click submit. After that, you will have to complete a certain form with some personal information, secret question and such. Once you submit the form, you will have to wait for few days, after which they will notify you of the time to come and collect the password with an email like this:

Sadly, this is an after two weeks kind of period, which is too long just to create the account and deliver a password. Hopefully with time this process will get faster. You can go on the specified date or later, and you collect the password from the main branch, car parking building, Floor # 2. It was quite empty when I went there. You need to go in person and have the Civil ID with you, sign few papers and you’re done.

After that, just open the envelop to get your password and login. First thing I suggest is change your password to something you can remember, rather than rely on the numeral one given to you. If you forget the password, you can reset it online by answering the secret question, no more trips to Kuwait City.

Online Services:

The online service portal design is quite neat, pretty fast to load, and very easy to follow, renders on different browsers and operating systems properly apparently, as I was using Firefox on Mac with no issues. This is the main page with your personal information.

And from the side menu, you can access loads of information and certificate request forms, such as the allowance info, registration periods, retirement salary calculation if applicable, and your current salary and cut amount.

Summary:

PIFSS online service I believe is an ideal of how online services should be. Quite informative, neat and clean design, easy to read and follow, and quite fast as well. Ofcourse, other e-Government services are bound to have more interactive features, like paying the bills and such. For PIFSS, I’m sure there is also a long way to go, but this is quite a good start. My only concern beside the long time for password delivery is how each entity is delivering with it’s own user credentials, which will complicate unifying the user identities later on across all the government. But again, maybe they couldn’t spare to wait for Civil Service Commission to get ready, or maybe the latter was making it too complicated. Who knows.

Go ahead and try it I say. You will get quick access to your info, and be able to support further enhancements in the e-Government.

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Kuwait Fire Stats Online

Q8Ba7th — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:44:36 +0000

I was just listening today to Deera Chat podcast about information accessibility, and how we lack such kind of information, and what we lose from missing those information. So I thought it’s the right time to write about what I saw at the Kuwait Firefighters site. Something that is really special about this site, and I thank them for it, is the updated online stats of fires in Kuwait since 2003. Every month, up till September so far, they post monthly reports on the fires in Kuwait. Detailed ones with such kind of information:

Fires categorized per area
Fires handled by which Fire Station
Type of fire (residential, non-residential)
Cause of fire. Mostly Electricity good to know.
Percentage of false calls, reportedly increasing
Death and injuries stats.

I promise you can also find and make a lot more from those information. And yes guys, we need more and more of those information accessible online. I always recall a bit old but very informative book from Bill Gates: Business @ The Speed of Thought, if you are interested. It talks about how you should digitize all your information, make it accessible to all online easily, and tie all the different information together. It speaks about what he calls the Digital Nervous System, and I’m still grateful to my friend who suggested it.

Click Image For Sample Report:

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

Kuwait Schools Phone Numbers and Sites

Q8Ba7th — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:37:56 +0000

We spoke earlier about new Phone Search service that was added to Q8Ba7th to allow you to search for phone numbers in Kuwait more quickly and easily. So far I’ve been hearing some positive feedback, and some points on why some information is missing. One of the items that are missing is as I mentioned earlier, dynamically generated data. In human words, those are pages that are only generated when you submit certain forms for example. A very useful link I wanted to have is the Ministry of Education full schools phone directory, categorized by region and level. just select the region you want, level, and search. It’s quite easy, and hopefully up to date. Not many schools would change their phone number there, I can’t think of a reason why they would.

Those information are not reachable by Q8Ba7th, which is powered by Google, or most regular search engines. The reason is that as you see, the page is empty unless you fill in some filter and search data. So a search engine wouldn’t know how to fill it. The Ministry phone numbers it self however is searchable, because as you see from the link, it opens the phones page directly without having to fill any data to get it. So Search Engines are able to see it.

Enough technical now. Another listing that may be of interest, though usually not rich in value, is the Schools site listing. The ministry has made it easy for schools to host their site on the MOE subpages. So if you go to this link, you will see list of schools and can pick yours if it exist. Non of my previous schools are listed however .

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

Information on the Kuwait e-Government Site

Q8Ba7th — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:53:45 +0000

While it doesn’t have the best of design that suits a governmental site, and even though the site does not have any special online services of its own, going today through Kuwait e.Government site I managed to find lots of information and useful links that might come in handy when you need them. From the main page, you get to browse list of government, foundations, institutions and other online Kuwait site with direct link to some of their information and useful services.

Go through them and see what you may find of interest. It won’t harm to know what’s available for you online, even if some links are broken or some data is outdated. It’s still better than nothing. After that, you can click on the Public Information link to go to list of sites and phone numbers that might really come in handy. Phone number of embassies, police stations, fire stations, schools, co-cops and others. I can’t go and call every number to verify its up to date, but those general numbers don’t change so often, and when you need one, well just give it a try and see. If you ever tried it and some sleepy angry man shouted back at you be sure to let me know so I correct this .

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

MOC Online 101 Service

Q8Ba7th — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:08:38 +0000

This service has been there for a time, but I used to get Errors when I try to open it. MOC is making all public citizen phone numbers available online through simple name query. This could be really helpful, and harmful in the wrong hand. I wouldn’t feel like listing my number there, and I was not able to find it actually. Probably perhaps I requested it to be private. I was able to find my relatives numbers and also their registered corporate numbers. So here is how you use the service. First, go to the MOC site, then from the left side menu go to Services -> Phone Directory 101 as shown below.

You will then see the below screen where you simply put the name, and family name if you want. Take care of different name writing in Arabic. Start by your name, if it’s something like mohammad or Fatmah, then save your breath and add middle or last names as well. Their last name seems to be something different however I was not able to find certain numbers counting on that. So instead, write your first, second name in first field and see where you go from there.

Tip: Q8Ba7th.com – The Search Site For Kuwait

Q8Ba7th Official Blog » Government

Ministry of Education Released Electronic Course Material Version

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