A man will die, but not his ideas.

SMS Delivery Reports

2009-12-01T00:21:00.002+02:00

I found this post very useful. It works on non-iPhones as well. All you need to do is add a certain network-dependent prefix to the message body. The prefix will not be seen by the recipient. Once the SMS message has been delivered you will get a text message back saying:

Message for +(number) has been delivered on (date and time).

The prefix for Fido is *!# and for Vodafone Egypt it is *VF#.

Give Us A Reasonable Reason

2009-06-23T06:41:00.004+03:00

Ok, I agree that the media attack on the Egyptian national team, such as the one by Amr Adeeb in Orbit's show Cairo Today, was very harsh. And I find some of the words used in these attacks inappropriate. Especially since there's no clear evidence that some of the players did accompany some girls with them to their rooms. But forget about the media and what was published and said. Just give us a reasonable and convincing answer, what happened to the team during that match?! I mean all what the US was hoping for in this game was to show a good performance regardless of the outcome. And the entire world was expecting that Egypt would beat the US easily, especially after their lousy performance in the first two matches in the competition.

And what's this tone all the players are repeating: "so what if we lost a game!" What?! Are you serious?! A team that plays without the spirit of winning will always be a loser and should not play as a national team in the first place. And besides, you weren't even fighting for the game. Losing 1-0 or even 2-0 would've been accepted if the game was two sided. But what we saw was a great puzzle. Both the defence and offence were non-existent. The players were not concentrating and there were a lot of missed passes. In addition, they didn't even want to run for any ball. If I didn't watch Brazil's game, I would've sweared that the team I saw in the US match was a totally different team with different players.

And don't give me that crap that the players were suffering from fatigue because of the two previous games and that you were playing three matches within six days. The US, Brazilian, and Italian players were playing under the same conditions and none of them complained of fatigue. So, such a complaint is an indication of a problem in the players themselves and not an excuse.

I respect and appreciate Abou Trika's position and his colleagues positions as well. But give us a reason for this unreasonable and humiliating defeat.

Fixing Some of Guest OS Issues with VMWare Workstation on Linux

2009-06-02T06:05:00.007+03:00

When the virtual machine image is stored on an NTFS partition, NTFS-3G hogs the CPU and freezes the machine very frequently leading to very slow performance of the virtual machine and possibly preventing you from using files on that partition during the freeze periods. The reasone is a bit complicated, but a temporary solution is mentioned here. Just add the following line to the .vmx file of the virtual machine.

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

Cannot connect to sound card because it is busy. Make sure knotify and Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD) are not running. Kill those two processes (if they are active) and restart the vmware service just to make sure.
On Linux, VMWare frequently stopped my Shift/Ctrl/Alt keys from working when going back from the guest OS (was XP in my case) to Linux. A solution to this problem would be to use the setxkbmap command to reset the keyboard layout.
The arrow keys and other special keys are not functioning properly or not functioning at all. Create a config file in ~/.vmware directory and add this the following to the file then restart the vmware service.

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Removing .svn files manually from a managed directory..

2009-05-17T07:48:00.002+03:00

I made a copy of an Eclipse project I was working on because I wanted to experiment with some things and didn't want to affect the original code. However, that project was managed by SVN and consequently all of the subdirectories of resulting copy also had the .svn subdirectories in them. I wanted to quickly delete all these subdirectories manually from the command-line. Here is what I did.

Use find to locate all the subdirectories having the given name within the desired directory. For example, for locating subdirectories with the name .svn within the current directory, use the following:

find . -name .svn

Now we pipe the results to xargs and use the rm -r as the command of choice for xargs. xargs will execute the given command on all the results obtained from the find command.

find . -name .svn | xargs rm -r

Note:
Because Unix filenames can contain blanks and newlines, please read the man pages for xargs for information regarding using xargs with such files.

EARTH HOUR - Saturday, March 28th (8:30-9:30 PM)

2009-03-26T11:01:00.005+02:00

This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

In 2009, Earth Hour is being taken to the next level, with the goal of 1 billion people switching off their lights as part of a global vote. Unlike any election in history, it is not about what country you’re from, but instead, what planet you’re from. VOTE EARTH is a global call to action for every individual, every business, and every community. A call to stand up and take control over the future of our planet. Over 74 countries and territories have pledged their support to VOTE EARTH during Earth Hour 2009, and this number is growing everyday.

We all have a vote, and every single vote counts. Together we can take control of the future of our planet, for future generations.

VOTE EARTH by simply switching off your lights for one hour, and join the world for Earth Hour.

Saturday, March 28, 8:30-9:30pm.

Proper User Policy

2009-03-04T14:41:00.001+02:00

Venus on a date with the Moon

2009-02-27T23:27:00.001+02:00

While walking back home today, the sky was finally clear after a rainy morning. Looking up at the sky, I saw a breathtaking sight. It was Venus on a date with the Moon. Unfortunately, I did not have a suitable camera with me. But I did find many photos of the event online. Below is a clear one from Vancouver which can be found here.

In the Mood for a Tune

2009-02-22T12:03:00.005+02:00

When You Walk in the Room
Agnetha Fältskog

Applications for All Muslims

2009-02-16T04:05:00.002+02:00

Here is a list of wonderful and useful applications and Web sites for all Muslims (especially those living in countries where Islam is not the first religion):

QuranExplorer Website
Minbar Prayer Times (Open Source for Linux)
Praytime.info Website
eQibla Website
Pray Times! FireFox Add-on

May Allah bless those who worked on bringing this wonderful material to the light.

Note:
To install Minbar from Fedora, you can use yum (yum install minbar).

A new year, a new chapter, a new beginning...

2009-01-01T09:40:00.017+02:00

It only seems like yesterday. Six months ago, I was celebrating the completion of my thesis defence. Today, it's a new year, bringing with it a new journey, a new life, new experiences, and many challenges.

I arrived at Vancouver a few days ago while a snow storm that the city has not seen for a number of years was still active. And after an hour of hovering around the airport waiting for permission to land, we were finally on the ground. It was my first snow encounter, but it was beautiful.

Sunrise in the sky between Cairo and Frankfurt

I may have been hesitated at first. But until now, Simon Fraser University (SFU) still hasn't disappointed me. The campus at Burnaby is magnificent but I still haven't got in contact with many people because of the Christmas break. I also haven't seen Surrey's campus yet. Vancouver is really a beautiful city, and I'm not sure whether the snow is currently covering some of its beauty or adding to it. However, the snow itself has its own beauty (if you've tried walking on the soft snow, you'll know what I mean), and the city will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The Burnaby, Vancouver, and Surrey campuses of SFU

What I really like over here is that everything is ordered and has its own process (it is enough to take a Translink bus or SkyTrain to see that). The malls are absolutely magnificent and contain everything a person can imagine (forget about Carrefour and the likes). I haven't even been to Metropolis at Metrotown yet, which is the second biggest mall in Canada, but one visit to Coquitlam Centre Mall where I got my laptop was enough to amaze me.

2008-05-04T18:45:00.002+03:00

At last, I finally completed my M.Sc. thesis defense. Thank you Allah for all your blessings, and for a family that nothing in the world compares to.

Fedora 7 on HP Compaq tc4400 - Part 1

2007-08-07T22:34:00.001+03:00

Again, I've been very busy with too many things at once. Attempting to finish my thesis, instructing the summer training sessions at college, supervising two graduation projects for this year, completing an advanced digital design course, and taking a RHCE course. So, as you can see, no time to blog once again.

Between this and that, I tried to find some time to play around with the HP Compaq tc4400 Tablet PCs that came as part of a research grant to our department: 21 tablets along with external DVD-CD/RW optical drives, an HP all-in-one InkJet printer, a 5 MP HP digital camera, a wireless access point, a data show projector, and an educational laptop cart. These little tc4400s are equipped with everything (except a built-in Webcam): bluetooth, WiFi, IrDA, finger print reader, etc.

But since the tc4400 comes with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition installed and since I haven't tried installing a Linux distro on a laptop before, I decided to try to prove to a keen Microsoft colleague of mine that Linux can do whatever the Tablet PC Edition can and a lot more. So, I downloaded the latest Fedora release, Fedora 7, and started an exploratory journey accompanied by Linux and the tc4400.

The tc4400 doesn't come with an internal DVD/CD drive. And although the research grant comes with external drives, it is enough that I managed to get the tablet home with me. So, how in the world will I install Fedora 7 without a drive? Well, the beauty of Linux, as I have mentioned in previous posts, is that it is all about choice. Fedora can be installed from a DVD/CD, over the network, or even from an ISO image that resides locally on an attached hard disk drive. OK, but how will I boot the installer? As it turns out, I can place a boot image on a USB stick and use that stick to boot anaconda, Fedora's installer.

First, I downloaded diskboot.img from the Fedora Project main download server (you can use any other mirror). I then needed to get that image on my old 256 MB USB stick. This is usually achieved using the dd command from any machine having a Linux distro on it. But since currently I only had Windows, there had to be another way. Sure thing, there exists dd for Windows and RawWrite Studio. I used the former to write the diskboot.img to my USB stick after formatting it using HP's DiskFormat tool.

After setting the machine's BIOS to boot from USB, I was now standing at the boot menu for the installer. So now I needed a partition with a file system that Linux can read without problems to put the ISO image on. This turned out to be another challenge since the tc4400 came pre-partitioned into 2 partitions: one NTFS and the other FAT32. Fortunately, my dear friend Blade has brought me an 80 GB external Toshiba hard disk drive that attaches via USB as a gift. I can't thank you enough man. I never liked NTFS. And every time I partition a hard disk, I always use FAT32. And that's what I did with the external hard disk. I created a folder on one of the drive's patitions and placed the DVD ISO image in it.

When faced with the installer menu, I pressed ESC to get to the boot prompt and typed linux askmethod to inform the installer that I want to be asked about the location from which I will install Fedora. From the list of options, I chose Local Hard Drive and selected the partition and folder where the image resides. Presto, the installation was quickly up and running, simple as that. The installation process was straight forward and did not take much time (this depends on the number of packages being installed), nor did require many reboots (only one in fact, compare that to a famous OS we know).

Cuppycake

2007-06-10T19:54:00.000+03:00

You're my Honeybunch, Sugarplum
Pumpy-umpy-umpkin, You're my Sweetie Pie
You're my Cuppycake, Gumdrop
Snoogums-Boogums, You're the Apple of my Eye
And I love you so and I want you to know
That I'll always be right here
And I love to sing sweet songs to you
Because you are so dear

I guess no one can resist this song. I got hooked to it too. It also reminds me of someone dear to me who loves it.

Little Amy Castle

Amy Today

The Smart Egyptian Police

2007-01-25T02:19:00.000+02:00

I'm posting this not because I enjoy seeing the poor guy confused, but because I'm really sad about the level of ignorance that some parts of our society has reached.

MDC 2007 Open for Registration

2007-01-13T20:02:00.000+02:00

OK, it's official. Microsoft Middle-East Developers Conference (MDC) 2007 is open for registration. It will, again, be held at the Cairo International Conference Center from the 4th to the 7th of February. And just as I expected, the attendance fee has been raised this year to 100 L.E. (i.e. double last year's fee). Well, at this rate, I might feel comfortable saying that this year might be the final year I attend this conference. That is, if I did manage to attend this year. And , as usual, it seems that Microsoft insists on making whatever they do incompatible with anything else not Microsoft. I'm not sure though, haven't tried Internet Explorer yet. But I have a feeling there something wrong when browsing the site using FireFox. Anyhow, there's a separate site for registration and details this year. The real joke is, they copied and pasted the paragraph they had for last year's conference (even with the same dates). It can be found at: http://www.mdc2007.com/. See you there...

Update: They eventually fixed it...

Dying Stars

2007-01-10T00:13:00.000+02:00

Source: NASA - 01-08-2007

My Little JMF Adventure

2007-01-05T18:53:00.000+02:00

About ten days ago, I was assigned the task of implementing an application that required the ability to capture, play, and stream audio/video. Yes, it is the task that I've mentioned in previous posts which made me re-install Windows and caused a lot of GRUB problems. Anyway, since I'm pretty much busy this month, I decided I'd go the easy way, try what .NET has to offer, and use Visual Studio.NET 2005. Little did I know that I was probably making a bad decision.

After a few days of frustration and sinking in the pond of DirectShow(.NET), COM, COM Interop, C, C++, wrapper classes, delegates, and the likes, it was obvious that there had to be a better way. So, being the Java fan that I am, I decided to give the Java Media Framework (JMF) a try. I recall hearing about JMF back in 2002 when some elder students used it in their graduation project but I never really got the chance to look into it. And since I was sick and wanted to relax for a few days, it was a good chance to learn something new and test drive NetBeans 5.5 which I had already downloaded and installed on both Linux and Windows.

I installed JMF 2.1.1e (also on both Linux and Windows) and started Googling around and reading the JMF 2.0 API guide. I was really fascinated by the architecture and it had almost everything I needed. I'm really surprised why Sun has not made any attempts to further improve the framework and add more functionalities to it since 2004 or so. JMF even comes with a ready made application (with source code) called JMStudio that you could use as a player/streamer or to test JMF capabilities. In addition, I found some excellent sample code available on Sun's Web site. So, I launched NetBeans on Windows and started coding away. I first wanted to see whether I could capture the video stream from my Webcam since JMStudio was able to do so. I coded a simple application that performs the task. But when I launched the app, nothing appeared on the JPanel. I looked around for errors and searched online for answers but with no luck.

Finally, I noticed in some example an invocation to the pack() method of the JFrame. So, after everything else failed, I tried doing the same. Magically, after launching the application again, the captured video stream appeared on the JPanel. I don't know the reason yet, but I will check what the magical pack() method does. OK, that looks promising. Now for the real challenge. Let's try it on Linux. Ubuntu detects my Philips Webcam with no problems. So, first I wanted to double check using JMStudio. However, attempting to launch JMStudio failed with a NullPointerException. Now what?!

Looking around at Sun's forums, I found many posts recommending to make sure that the CLASSPATH and other related system variables are properly set. Some even went to say that Java 5.0 doesn't work with JMF. I discovered that this wasn't ture, since I was using the 5.0 version of the SDK. The solution to this exception is to set the AWT Toolkit to the Motif toolkit via the awt.toolkit JRE property when launching the application (java -Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.motif.MToolkit JMStudio). JMStudio was up and running, and able to capture live video stream from my Webcam. Now to test my application.

Hmmm, there seems to be a problem (an obvious one I might say). In my application I created a MediaLocator using the "vfw://0" URI. But what should the URI be in Linux. After all, "vfw" stands for "Video For Windows". Amazingly, I discovered there was something called "v4l" (video4linux) on Linux. Refer to Capture Requirements sections in the JMF 2.1.1 - SW/HW Requirements. Some links to resources related to video4linux can be found here. The URI used for the MediaLocator will basically the same except that the "w" should become an "l". This even shows up if we launch the JMFRegistery application which comes with JMF alongside the JMStudio. Now, references to objects belonging to the com.sun.media.protocol.vfw package should be replaced to similar objects in the com.sun.media.protocol.v4l package. So far, so good. I got it working on Linux without any hassle.

Did I say having the camera working on Linux was a real challenge?! I was definitely wrong (although it took a while to figure out). The real challenge is using RTP to stream the captured video and receiving it on another side. This basically took most of my time to get right. What really saved the day was the excellent JMF 2.1.1 Solutions found at the Sun Developer Network (SDN). For your information, JMF also supports RTSP. So, ironically, in the end, it seems that the solution I was trying to avoid in order to save time turned out to be the most effective. I managed to finish the task in just 3 days and had a wonderful (sometimes difficult) experience with JMF.

Update:
According to the JavaDoc of the Window class, here is what pack() does:

"Causes this Window to be sized to fit the preferred size and layouts of its subcomponents. If the window and/or its owner are not yet displayable, both are made displayable before calculating the preferred size. The Window will be validated after the preferredSize is calculated."

After reading this, I'm not quite sure calling pack() is the right solution to the problem. But, at least it is working.

And here they are folks...

The Camera Server

The Monitoring (Client) Application

Notes:
When attempting streaming, especially on Windows XP systems, avoid obtaining the local IP of the machine using the getLocalHost() method of the InetAddress class because there might be many interfaces connected to the PC and the return value of the method will most likely be unpredictable. And even if there was only one network interface connected, Microsoft has a very stupid virtual connection entitled "Microsoft TV/Video Connection" that appears suddenly on Windows XP machines when a Web-cam or a TV/video card gets connected or starts functioning. And by the way, don't bother disabling it, simply because it won't allow you. The only solution Microsoft has to offer regarding this is to "restart the computer"! As it is explained in their knowledge base, "This behavior is by design"!!! I don't know why I suddenly recall Stephanie Tanner from Full House saying: "How ruuuuuude!!"

Reminders to Self

2006-12-29T02:57:00.000+02:00

Reminder to self.

HowTo: Print to PDF using cups-pdf

Download the cups-pdf package:
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
(or via Synaptic)

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

"In order to ensure CUPS-PDF is running with the required root privileges you have to make ‘root’ the owner of the cups-pdf backend and set the file permissions of the backend to 0700 (root only)."

In Gnome:
System > Administration > Printing
New Printer
Local Printer & Use A Detected Printer click on PDF Printer
Choose “Generic” as the manufacturer
Choose “postscript color printer rev3b”
Leave the driver set to “Standard (suggested)”

Note:
Printed documents are stored at ~/PDF

HowTo: Write Arabic in Ubuntu

HowTo: Verify Checksum of Downloaded Files

md5sum filename

Then compare resulting checksum with the one provided in the ".MD5" file. If they match, then the file has most probably been downloaded correctly with no errors.

Auto-Mounting Windows Shares in Ubuntu 6.10

2006-12-27T15:13:00.000+02:00

OK, I finally managed to have Ubuntu running on my PC. And just so that no body jumps to conclusions, the issue was not resolved. I downloaded Edgy Eft Desktop CD and re-installed Ubuntu. Of course, I had to start configuring everything back the way it was. I have two NICs and share my Internet connection with my brother's PC via Firestarter. And among the things that I needed to configure was accessing the shared folders on his PC which was running Windows only. In order to not forget the process once again, and help others who might be looking for how to perform this, I'm listing the process here.

First, we need to install the smbfs package via apt-get or Synaptic. By the way, smbfs is not smbclient. Then we should create a file containing necessary credentials for accessing the shared folder. You could name the file anything you like (e.g. cred, smbcred, or sambapass). The file should contain the following fields:

username = windowsuser
password = windowspassword
domain   = WINDOWSDOMAIN

You can use gEdit for editing the file. And by the way, in my case, I left the password and domain fields empty since they are not applicable.

Next, decide where you would like the shared folders to be mounted. I created a folder named "mounts" in my home directory and created a sub-directory for each shared drive on my brothers PC. Finally, we need to edit /etc/fstab so that we don't have to perform the mounting process every time we boot the machine. Before doing so, it is advisable that you create a backup copy of the file just in case.

In order to edit the file, you need to have root privileges. Thus, you could for example run gEdit via gksudo and provide the password. After that, you could open the fstab file from within gEdit and be able to edit its contents. What you need to add is a line for each shared drive/folder specifying were it should be mounted, file system type, what credentials are necessary for accessing the share, and setting the owner and group for all files in the share. For example:

//10.0.0.2/c /home/informer2000/mounts/sliders-2_c smbfs credentials=/home/informer2000/sambapass,uid=informer2000,gid=informer2000 0 0

Please note that there should be no line breaks in the line (i.e. all the above should be in one line). Now, all you have to do is save the fstab file, open the terminal and type sudo mount -a and if everything went well you should be able to access the shares from the directories at which they are mounted. In addition, the mounting command is not required after that because they will be mounted automatically when Ubuntu starts.

A Frustrating Weekend - Part 2

2006-12-26T15:42:00.000+02:00

OK, where was I?! Yes, I was sitting with frustration in front of a PC that continuously reboots...

So, now the assigned task that I re-installed Windows XP for was complete. But Ubuntu, which I use for working on my thesis, doesn't want to boot. I do have backups for my work, but I would like to gain back my system as it was. Ignoring this for a moment in order to not waste time, I decided I'll stick with Windows for a while for my work and ask around for a solution to my problem. Unfortunately, I did not get any successful answer even after posting the issue in the Ubuntu Forums. Everyone just keeps telling me to do things I already did (and mentioned in my previous post in the blog). And they keep insisting that I should install Windows first then Ubuntu. This is very impractical since, as we all know, Windows keeps crashing and continuously needs re-installation.

I found a very useful tool called Ext2 Installable File System (Ext2 IFS) for Windows which provides full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access) from within Windows. So, I copied my Eclipse workspace and since I already had a copy of Eclipse present on my HDD from the previous Windows installation I only had to install the Java 2 SDK. Usually that wouldn't be a problem. However, since this was a very frustrating weekend, I was unable to find a copy of the 1.5 SDK in my CD collection! Imagine, me the Java fan not having a version of the SDK!!! I guess I must have erased the copy I had lying around on my HDD due to lack of storage space and forgot that I didn't put it on a CD. What made things worse is that, since the Internet connection was not working properly, it took a long time to download it and I wasted the day.

Well, I don't remember if that was the end of my problems during that weekend or not. But to make a long story short, I decided I should download Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and install it after backing up my data and configurations on my USB HDD, which a dear friend of mine has brought me as a gift. And in order not to make the same mistake twice, this time I'll make a separate partition for "/home" in case something like this ever happens again. I just hope that installing Edgy would solve the problem.

In the mean time, during my search to resolve the problem, I landed on the following very useful guide titled "How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!" by Simon Gray which I think might be very useful for new comers. By the way, later, I might consider moving to a KDE environment and switch to Kubuntu or Fedora Core just to make sure I'm not limiting myself to a single environment. But I guess that will happen when I find some time.

Play the Web with Songbird

2006-12-23T15:19:00.000+02:00

I'm in a hurry and may edit this post later. But check this out. Now you can also listen to the songbird and not just talk to it like Oasis did.

Lower quality version of the screencast could be found on Google Video and Youtube. Here is the Youtube version:

...three, four
Talkin to the songbird yesterday
Flew me to a place not far away
She's a little pilot in my mind
Singin songs of love to pass the time
Gonna write a song so she can see
Give her all the love she gives to me
Talk of better days that have yet to come
Never felt this love from anyone

She's not anyone
She's not anyone
She's not anyone

A man can never dream these kind of things
Especially when she came and spread her wings
Whisper in my ear the things I'd like
Then she flew away into the night
Gonna write a song so she can see
Give her all the love she gives to me
Talk of better days that have yet to come
Never felt this love from anyone

She's not anyone
She's not anyone
She's not anyone

BTW, for all Oasis fans, the official Web site for the band can be found here, as if you didn't know already!

A Frustrating Weekend

2006-12-22T20:42:00.000+02:00

This weekend turned out to be the most frustrating weekend I've had during the past year. It started with my Internet connection which, as usual every now and then, had technical and non-technical difficulties. Next, I was made responsible for completing a task which required installing Visual Studio.NET 2005. And since I wasn't satisfied with Windows XP's performance (which I stopped using a some months ago), I decided I'll install a fresh copy. I can't say I didn't know that this is going to get me into trouble. But I thought I'll get things corrected quickly. Little did I know what was to come.

As I expected, Windows overwrote the MBR of the hard disk, erasing GRUB. OK, so how to recover from this and GRUB back in place?! I googled around and came up with the solution. I first had to boot from a LiveCD to access a Linux shell. I had an old copy of Knoppix 4.0 lying around, so I used that. Afterwards, I mounted my root partition to a directory which I created at "/mnt". Then changed root via "chroot" to the mount point. After that, I had two choices to restore GRUB: use "grub-install" or the GRUB shell.

The first option resulted in the "The file /boot/grub/stage1 cannot be read correctly." message. I later discovered I had to explicitly specify where the configuration files exist. Anyway, I read somewhere about the SystemRescueCD which contains many useful utilities for fixing problems if something went wrong with your disto. So, I downloaded the ISO image and since I didn't want to waste a blank CD for 100 MB, I decided I'll use my USB stick. So, I copied the necessary files and used syslinux to make the USB stick bootable and configured my BIOS to boot from it.

Everything went smooth and I got a shell from which I proceeded as before except that this time I used the GRUB shell option. First I set the root partition using "root (hd0,x)", where x is the partition number. Then I used "setup (hd0)" to setup GRUB in the MBR. The output indicated that the operation was successful so I rebooted. I was happy to see GRUB loading the stage1 and attempting to load stage1.5 when all the sudden, BOOM, the machine restarted automatically. This went on in a continuous loop.

To be continued...

Celebrating J2SE 6 in Egypt with the 1st JDC

2006-12-17T21:14:00.000+02:00

Sun Microsystems finally announced the release of Java SE 6 (aka Mustang). I'm not sure if it was meant to be or just a coincidence. But the Egyptian Java User Group (EGJUG) is jointly organizing, along with the Egyptian Software Engineers Association (ESEA), the first Java Developers Conference (JDC) in Egypt, an event that I've long been waiting to see take place over here. It will be held in Cairo at Saraya Hall in Intercontinental City Stars Cairo on the 20th of January 2007. I will do my best and try not to miss the event. And if you are a Java developer in Egypt, I suggest you do the same. Register online:

AJAX Invasion!!!

2006-11-25T20:44:00.000+02:00

Since I first heard about it and understood how it works and what it is capable of doing, I was amazed. How couldn't I?! A simple, yet very powerful, idea that will really bring the Web to our desktops and bridge the gap between "desktop" applications and "Web" applications. But I never imagined that how fast AJAX (shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is spreading. Just look at how many AJAX frameworks are available today (and for different programming languages too). And it's not just about Google and its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) anymore.

There's even an AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) project at Eclipse.org which provides and extensible framework and exemplary tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX runtime offerings (Dojo, Zimbra, Rico, etc) in the market. And of course, as always, Java has a nice share in all of this. One of the great AJAX Java frameworks I've seen (and I haven't seen them all) is Echo2 from NextApp. I won't talk about it. I'll just leave with a link to an Echo2 demo application. And for all you Java developers (like me) out there, here's a nice AJAX FAQ at java.net.

I guess Web 2.0 is really closer than we think. But before you jump into using AJAX, it is recommended that you read this post in Alex Bosworth's Weblog first.

Power to the Developers

2006-11-15T21:28:00.000+02:00

Well, what can I say?! It's like a dream come true. Yesterday, I got an e-mail from my dear friend and colleague, Shiro. The contents of the e-mail are what I've anxiously been waiting to hear for quite a while now. And the subject contained only three words: "It is true!". Ladies and gentlemen, Sun has finally did it! The Java platform's implementation is now officially open source under the GPL v2 license plus the ClassPath Exception.

Hilarious

2006-11-04T00:43:00.000+02:00

Man, I just couldn't stop laughing at this one.

To Lebanon With Love (More Time To Bomb)

2006-08-19T15:49:00.000+03:00

Yet The West Keeps Denying the Truth

2006-08-15T02:56:00.000+03:00

Israel Attacks- Lebanon Burns

Israel Destroynig Lebanon , the world is watching

Israeli Terrorism

Israeli War Crimes

Death in Lebanon

Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See

Mad World a video cry for help

List of Favourable Books in Computer Science and Engineering

2006-08-14T22:57:00.000+03:00

Programming Language Pragmatics, Michael Scott, 2nd Edition
Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, Roger Pressman, 6th Edition
Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg, 4th Edition
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Intelligent Systems, Michael Negnevitsky, 2nd Edition
The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs, Clive "Max" Maxfield
Java Number Cruncher: The Java Programmer's Guide to Numerical Computing, Ronald Mak
Fundamentals of Probability and Statistics for Engineers, T. T. Soong
Practical C++ Programming, Steve Oualline, 2nd Edition
C++ Common Knowledge: Essential Intermediate Programming, Stephen Dewhurst

More to be added as time progresses...

Qana Massacre II (30-7-2006)

2006-07-30T14:08:00.000+03:00

And their media says they don't want to show these to their citizens because they don't want to hurt their feelings and because they respect the dead. No, see God damn it. See what the barbaric and terrorist army of your beloved Israel is doing. Open your eyes and see. For it might somehow awaken the conscious that you have buried a long time ago.

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All I can say is: burn in hell Israel, burn in hell US government, and burn in hell UN.

Remembering the First Qana Massacre

2006-07-30T13:34:00.000+03:00

The Terrorists

2006-07-17T23:59:00.000+03:00

The terrorist government of Israel has did it again and added another massacre to its endless list. I think the following photos from southern Lebanon need no commenting from my side. And again, the U.N. peacekeepers did not lift a finger. In fact, they indirectly participated in this massacre by refusing to allow the villagers to take shelter in their building. Israel, as usual, is waging a dirty war. And don't you go on telling me that Hizbollah started it first. This was already well planned from the Israeli side a long time before the incident of the two soldiers, No rational human being on earth could justify putting a whole country under seige and bombing and killing its innocent civilians.

But what is the world doing about it? Nothing. The dumbest and most narrow minded person on earth (whose initials are G. W. B.) appears on TV and says "Israel has the right to defend itself". What the ... ?! Against what? Helpless children? Because that's what Israel is attacking. Just look at the photos. Hizbollah attacks military locations and Israel keeps on bombing homes and killing civilians, even after they force them to leave their homes. After all this, I won't be surprised if Hizbollah starts attacking civilian locations in Israel. But what won't surprise me even more is that as soon as this happens and there are casualties from the Israeli side, everyone is going to talk about how brutal Hizbollah is.

What can I say?! They world and the UN have watched Qana before, and now its Marwaheen. Let the world know who the real terrorists and the real racists are. R.I.P. human conscious. R.I.P. UN.

Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position firing into civilians inside Lebanon

Message Recieved

The Final Red Card

2006-07-09T23:54:00.000+03:00

Even though what Zizou did was wrong, Materazzi really deserved it. He kept insulting Zidane on and on again. Farewell to one of the best players who ever stepped foot on the pitch. Goodbye to the emperor.

JavaOne 2006 Takes-Off

2006-05-17T23:21:00.000+03:00

The biggest annual event for Java developers is taking place nowadays in San Francisco. The JavaOne conference for 2006 took-off yesterday (16 May, 2006). I got an official invitation from Sun ten days ago. Oh, how I wish I could attend this conference. Anyway, it seems Sun is providing Webcasts from the event online. You can check out the schedule over here. It seems this year the company is under pressure to open-source Java. And I think eventually it will. Perhaps it just wants to make sure that this happens in an organized manner.

Rovers' Cameras Capture Marvin on Mars

2006-05-17T21:09:00.000+03:00

Performance of Java vs. C++

2006-04-17T01:00:00.000+02:00

Performance of Java versus C++

J.P.Lewis and Ulrich Neumann
Computer Graphics and Immersive Technology Lab
University of Southern California

The American Style of Democracy

2006-04-14T14:28:00.000+02:00

Democracy. A word that holds great meanings, but only in its definition and in dictionaries. Lately, some countries have found another use for the word. It has been discovered that this powerful word is a great weapon that should be added to any arsenal as a weapon of persuation and deception. And there's no greater evidence on this than how the US government uses the word as an excuse for any action it takes, whether or not this action is right and justified. For the Iraq war, the US government turned to this weapon to justify what they did over there and the whole stupid war and the inhuman behaviour of its soldiers over there after the big fat lie of weapons of mass distruction failed.

You always hear American leaders talk about freedom and democracy and all these shiny words. But in reality, the definition of democracy in the US government's dictionary has a great property. It is polymorphic to serve the goals of those in charge. For while they give speeches about how bad dictatorship is and how the people should be in charge and have the freedom of choosing their governments, at the same time they are punishing the Palestinians for practicing their rights and choosing the government that they see fit to represent them. Why? Well, because their style of democracy dictates that yes the people are free to choose, but in the end they must choose what they (the leaders of the American government) want. Democracy, the American style. If our friends at Israel don't like it, then we don't. And if we don't, then it is not democracy. And so, the Palestinians should suffer. As if their everyday suffering weren't enough!

And the game of double standards continues. India should be allowed to have nuclear technology. The same goes to Pakistan, but not like India of course. However, Iran has no right at all in such a technology. Iran is bad, India is good, Israel is great. Who's the judge? The US government. Why? Because good and bad in its opinion is tied to who's with its policy and who's against. Democracy?! R.I.P. democracy.

Seven Days with Ubuntu

2006-04-05T19:54:00.000+02:00

It has been a week now since I managed to install Ubuntu Breezy Badger on my machine. And what can I say? Thanks Shiro for suggesting Ubuntu. And Tarek, thanks for the tip. Seven days and already I can't imagine how I managed to live with something like Windows. I feel sorry for all the wasted time during which I hesitated to make this shift.

I'm still not sure whether the IT8212 IDE RAID controller problem has been solved or not since I did not move my HDD to the RAID controller after compiling the 2.6.14 Vanilla Kernel with the performance patchset by Kon Colivas (thanks to this HowTo). But hopefully I won't need to since the controller successfully identified my Sony CD-RW drive.

The only thing that is bugging me currently is the Real Media format. For some reason, the whenever I try to play files in that format using Real Player 10, there is no sound. And if I try MPlayer, both video and audio are choppy. Other than that everything is working wonderfully. I'm sharing my Internet connection with my brother's PC (he is still using Windows for stupid reasons) and am able to access and mount all his shares (thanks to Samba). Eclipse is running brilliantly and I got many counterparts of the tools I was using on Windows installed. Check the following table that shows what I was using then and what I'm using now (might help new or wanna be migrators):

What	Then	Now
Playing MP3	Sonique	XMMS
Playing Various Media	Media Player Classic, VLC	MPlayer, VLC
Java Development	Eclipse/Sun JDK	Eclipse/Sun JDK
Web Browsing	Firefox	Firefox
E-Mail Client	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
Anti-Virus	McAfee VirusScan	none (for now)
Firewall	McAfee Personal Firewall	Firestarter
Download Manager	FlashGet	Download 4 X
BitTorrent Client	Azureus, uTorrent	Azureus
eDonkey 2000 Client	eMule	aMule
IM	MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger	Gaim
Microsoft HTML Help (chm)	N/A	CHM Viewer, gnoCHM
Office Applications	MS Office, OpenOffice	OpenOffice
Text Editor	TextPad, jEdit	gedit, jEdit
FTP Client	WS_FTP Pro	gFTP
Web Server	IIS, Apache	Apache
Burn CD/DVD	Nero Burning ROM, Sonic Record Now	GnomeBaker, K3b

A screenshot of my current desktop

Update:
To save many people the trouble of figuring out what replaces what, in addition to the table above, check out this transition guide from PC Mechanic.

Forget Debian, they are everywhere...

2006-03-30T17:44:00.000+02:00

Women nowadays are entering the world of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). With groups for contributing to many available projects and Linux distributions. There's the Debian Women Project I mentioned earlier, the Ubuntu Women group, the GNOME Women group, the Apache Women mailing list, the KDE Women site, and the LinuxChix community. In addition, a HowTo Encourage Women in Linux can be found here.

Debian for all the ladies in the house...

2006-03-30T16:16:00.000+02:00

I love Google. You discover new things just by loading its main page (or directly using the built-in capability of Firefox) and searching for a word or two. Today I discovered there was a Debian Women Project that seeks encouraging interested women to become more involved with Debian. Don't think I'll find any Egyptian ladies participating, although I'd love to see that happen. Check out the profiles.

Eclipse on Ubuntu

2006-03-28T21:37:00.000+02:00

Still haven't fixed the IT8212 IDE RAID controller's problem with Ubuntu on my machine until now. However, today I managed to install Eclipse 3.1 on Ubuntu Breezy Badger on a dual-booting machine I've set up at the college's lab. It took some time since I'm still novice with Linux and did not have any idea about its packages and the many administration utilities it has. But in the end, I did it. Thanks to the nice guide at Ubuntu's wiki titled EclipseIDE, "How to install Eclipse in Ubuntu" by Ivar Abrahamsen, and the "Java Development on Ubuntu" series of posts on David Coldrick's Weblog.

Of course, I had to download all necessary files and packages on my home PC and then copy, install, and configure them on the lab's machine since there was no Internet connection over there. Thus, I did not use apt-get in the installation process. The packages I needed were available at Debian's packages site in the utils section of the stable distribution (fakeroot 1.2.10), the misc section in the unstable distibution (java-package 0.27) and the utils section of the unstable distribution (fakeroot 1.5.8). Only downloaded the ".deb" files. One package upon which the java-package depends was available with Ubuntu and did not need to download it, just used Synaptic.

Finally, you have configure Sun's JRE to be the default because somehow the GCJ runtime conflicts with it. This can be done by executing the following command which will ask you about the one you'd like to be the default:
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Alternatively, use Synaptic to remove the java-gcj-compat package and everything should be OK.

Update:
Discovered that all necessary packages could be obtained from Ubuntu's packages site. Duh!!!

US Mistakes in Iraq: Deja Vu

2006-03-28T21:26:00.000+02:00

Top Ten Mistakes the Bush Administration Is Repeating from Vietnam

Source: The Independent Institute
March 27, 2006

The future is 3D, and it is now!

2006-03-07T01:25:00.000+02:00

I guess we all dreamed of it. After watching many science fiction movies and reading Sci-Fi stories, we all wondered when we will be able to interact with devices, especially computers, via a 3D interface. Well, the dream is not very far away. In fact, it is starting to become a reality right now. 3D desktop environments are starting to appear on most of the platforms that we know. And let me tell you, it really looks promising. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here are some examples.

On top of the list comes Project Looking Glass from Sun Microsystems, an open platform to explore innovative 3D user interface. And since it is based on the Java technology which has a great reputation when it comes to image processing and rendering capabilities, it truely is a wonderful experience. A video of a demonstration of the project can be found on Google Video over here. An many screenshots exist on the project's home page.

Next comes Linux and an OpenGL program that switches virtual desktops in a seamless 3-dimensional manner. The program is called, naturally, 3D-Desktop. And even though it doesn't give you a true 3D environment, it looks cool and is really nice if you want to impress the ones you know.

And then of course there is XGL, the X server architecture layered on top of OpenGL. Which, when combined with Compiz, will change the way you think about your Linux desktop. A video demo of XGL can be found here.

Finally, we turn our attention to Windows. Now, Windows Vista and its Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) API promises to enable a new look and feel of the operating system that many of us are familiar with. However, if you can't wait, why not try SphereXP, a 3D desktop replacement for Microsoft Windows taking the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level. There even exists SphereXPlorer, a three-dimensional Web browser.

Whatever way you look at it, the future seems to be 3D. And even though you should not expect a replacement of the 2D screen you are used to with holographic images or 3D VR glasses in the very near future, who knows what the not so near future will bring.

Synergy Magic

2006-03-06T17:00:00.000+02:00

It seems that sooner or later I had to do it. Since drives connected to my motherboard's built-in ITE IT8212 (GigaRAID) controller are not detected normally in Ubuntu Linux, I have to recompile and patch the kernel (a process which I had never tried before). Anyway, this post is not about this process. However, planning for the future, I was trying to figure out how will I be able to share the Internet connection on my PC if I successfully migrated to Linux. I'm currently performing this on WinXP via a proxy server.

Searching for this on Google yielded a post by a British blogger who was looking at the same thing. He goes on further to search for a way to share the keyboard and mouse. The result is Synergy, an open-source application that has Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X binaries. It's function, as mentioned on the main page of the Web site, is "it lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware." What's more, it even merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Now that's magic...

Even the Israeli press got interested

2006-03-06T03:06:00.000+02:00

Girls at The Cairo National Stadium on Google Video

And the world talks about human rights

2006-03-04T22:01:00.000+02:00

And it boots...

2006-03-03T02:01:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking about it for quite a while now. Finally, I decided to go ahead and give it a try. Worked like a charm. Ladies and gentlemen, I can now officially declare floppy disk drives obsolete. After all, who needs a bootable floppy or even a bootable CD when you can now boot from your USB flash drive!

I have to admit, it wasn't that much a surprise. But seeing it in action and booting my system to the command prompt was really a nice experience. There is nothing new about it. All you need is a motherboard with a BIOS capable of booting from a USB device, a bootable CD, and a utility for manipulating partitions (fdisk will do). I followed the steps found here and voila, I was able to boot my PC using my 256 MB USB flash drive to a DOS prompt.

After the successful boot I wanted to check that everything was OK and the stick could be identified normally within Windows XP. After XP started everything seemed to be going well until I opened My Computer. What?! The USB device appears in the task bar, but where in the world is the drive? After some thinking and a couple of Googling, it hit me. Could it be related to the mapped network drives from my brother's PC? Well, sure thing, after disconnecting the first network drive my flash drive appeared in its place. According to this Microsoft article, the reason is this:

"When you install a new device or volume, Mount Manager, which assigns drive letters to volumes, does not recognize the mapped network drive and assigns the next available drive letter to the new device or volume. This causes a collision with the existing mapped network drive."

Oh well, let's re-map all those partitions again. Now all that remains is to add an autoexec.bat and a config.sys with some real-mode CD-ROM drivers (and maybe some other utilities like Norton Commander and Partition Magic) to the USB stick and I would have a USB flash drive the can be used to diagnose and troubleshoot problems on modern PCs. You can even install Windows XP on it. Man, technology bites...

What? You hate anything that has to do with Microsoft. Me too. No problem, check this out or use a small disro like Damn Small Linux (DSL).

Today's Quote

2006-03-02T01:31:00.000+02:00

"In the United States, anyone can try to sue anyone for anything."
Christopher Negus - Linux Bible

Who Ever Said It Was Difficult ?!

2006-03-01T18:48:00.000+02:00

More Evidence of Double Standards

2006-02-20T21:58:00.000+02:00

British historian sentenced to 3 years in prison for denying the Holocaust
Source: CBC News
February 20, 2006

The Need for Communication

2006-02-18T23:09:00.000+02:00

After the recent events, there seems to be a persisting need now, more than ever before, to communicate with each other and open channels for dialogue. I get reluctant to use the term "the other" because it sounds as if we are talking about some kind of aliens or another strange kind of energy (if you saw the movie "The Others", you'll know what I'm talking about). One organization that I think could play a role in this is the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures. I really hope we could join hands instead of fighting and argueing and start understanding and respecting other.

Tell me it is not double standards...

2006-02-18T21:43:00.000+02:00

Danish paper rejected Jesus cartoons
Source: The Guardian (Digital Edition)
Monday February 6, 2006

Thanks Simon Pole for bringing this to mind.

The Incorrect Image of Islam in the Western Media

2006-02-14T21:13:00.000+02:00

Islamic images and terminology used in the Western media

Shattering Illusions: Western Conceptions of Muslim Women

Jihad: Ignorance and the Distorted Image of Islam

Stereotypes & Misconceptions: Islam And The Western Media

The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media

Africa Cup of Nations 2006 Champions

2006-02-10T22:00:00.000+02:00

EGYPT

And I'm Back From MDC 2006

2006-02-10T00:09:00.000+02:00

A couple (or triple) of entries ago I said that "MDC Is Back ..." Well, now I'm back. This year I really enjoyed the event. And I think it was better organized than before. Most of the gang was there: Stephen Forte, Malek Kemmou, Patrick Hynds, and Rafal Lukawiecki. In addition, a new member joined the club. Clemens Vasters, who has recently joined Microsoft, made three great sessions on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), codenamed Indigo. Perhaps one of the great experiences in the conference was watching the semi-finals match between Egypt and Senegal in the African Cup of Nations 2006 (Egypt 2 - Senegal 1) with all the attendees on a wide screen in one of the big theatres in the Cairo International Conference Center. You could feel the emotions flowing in the air.

All in all the conference was great. There were four wonderful sessions by Stephen Forte, as is the case with all his sessions. For me, perhaps the most interesting of the four was Writing Secure Code with ASP.NET, because the others I've already attended in last years conference. Another interesting session was the one about BizTalk Server 2006 by Malek Kemmou. Patrick Hynds also gave an informative session titled Passwords: Keys to the Kingdom. The only thing I missed in this year's conference was the closing session because I catched a cold on the final day and got really sick. There's a rumor that I won a prize in the draw that was held in that session but I'm not so sure about that since my luck was never that good in such matters.

One event that occured in the conference which really made me feel proud was that last years graduation project that I supervised came second amongst the final three projects in the .NET University Program Competition 2004/2005. I applauded real hard when the graduates were on the stand receiving their award. Good work guys...

More thoughts on the Danish newspaper incident...

2006-02-09T22:36:00.000+02:00

Dear Annamarie, I thank you for your nice feelings and nice words. I don't think you need to apologize for something you haven't committed. And I really feel sorry for those who don't have the courage to admit that they did wrong. I thank you and Simon for being open-minded and understanding (I'm sure that many ignorants will laugh at this and say that being open-minded is the other way around).

Following are some other thoughts regarding this matter:

What the Prophet (PBUH) would have done? (from Words .. only words)

Hatred in The Air (from Aqua Cool)

Work Diaries (28): The Danish Cartoonist! (from Aqua Cool)

These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten it (by Simon Jenkins)

Move on,will ya? (from Arabesque Rhapsody)

Not-So-Hidden Inconsistincies in the Danish Cartoons Story (from Earth to Omar)

Appeal to Bloggers: Help Diffuse Volatile Situation Caused by Danish Cartoon (from verbena-19)

As I mentioned in a previous comment, to those who don't know anything about the prophet they offended and to those who want to know more about prophet Muhammad's life, I recommend watching the following 2002 PBS documentary:

Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet
Directed by Omar Al-Qattan and Michael Schwarz

Freedom of Speech. Is It?

2006-02-02T22:28:00.000+02:00

I'm really fed up with how the western culture keeps taking the phrase "freedom of speech" as an excuse for harassing and insulting others. It is as if freedom of speech is a luxurious right that only they can enjoy. And if someone else as much as imply something they do not like, freedom of speech is thrown out the window.

Of course, anyone reading this will most probably know what I am talking about. Yes, it is the recent incident of the Danish newspaper and their insulting cartoons. Again, the excuse is "freedom of speech". Those people don't even know what the phrase stands for. Since when did freedom of speech mean you can make fun of or insult someone?! What would they say if, God forbid, it was the other way around and a newspaper in any of the Islamic countries published cartoons about Jesus - peace be upon him - (which no Muslim would dare do because Allah, i.e. God, ordered us to believe in and respect all his prophets)? Will it be freedom of speech? I don't think so. George W. Bush would probably get on the stand and say: "Let's bomb that country." What if some newspaper in the west published something against the Jews? Freedom of speech? Anti-Semitism is more likely. Well let me tell you that this Danish newspaper's act is an anti-Semitism act. Because, in case you didn't know, Arabs are considered Semites.

It would seem that the west is losing more and more ethical values by the day. And that this is the expense of scientific leadership. Hey, we don't have to get very far. Just look at what they are saying about Clinton after a statement he made at an economic conference in Qatar. OK, I'm not saying the man is great and wonderful. But he spoke very rationally. If only those who attacked him in the media or from the public on the Internet were just as rational and thought about what he said. Anyway, if it is their right to say whatever they wish, it is ours to react, object, and defend our prophet (whether they aplogized, half-apologized or not). Boycotting will continue until they realize how far astray they went. And this will be the case with any other country that walks on their footsteps. And in the future they should think twice before insulting others.

GMail Goes Mobile

2006-01-22T13:43:00.000+02:00

It seems Google won't stop until it gets enough (which doesn't look soon). The company decided to enter the mobile users' community by making their popular e-mail service, GMail, accessable from mobile phones' Web browsers. Everyone wants to get into the act. It would appear that very soon we are going to forget about all those wires that keeps us around the devices attached to them. Hey, you won't find me complaining, feeling free to go is a wonderful thing. So, if you have a GMail account and a GPRS-enabled (even plain GSM connections will work) mobile phone, check it out by pointing your mobile phone's browser to (http://m.gmail.com). Be warned though, costs of connection differ from country to country and from one provider to the other (Google is not charging anything, at least not yet). If you encounter problems, check the troubleshooting guide.

A Tune to Remember

2006-01-22T08:57:00.000+02:00

Sandra:
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
Everlasting love I'm longing for
I need you by my side
Dazzling moments roaming more and more
Every day and every night

Sandra:
You are my everything, my shining star
My heart is in your hands

Bobo:
Show me where's the way to paradise
The way to reach your heart

Sandra:
Love is a passion and love will light a fire
Trust your emotions believe in your dreams
Trapped in a mystery you are my desire
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
The secrets of love

Sandra:
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
You're my guiding light in any place
Your love is all around
Oh I close my eyes I see your face
Don't let the sun go down

Sandra:
My love is here to stay you're not alone
There's nothing more we need

Bobo:
I'm in heaven when you're close to me
You're the colour of my life

Sandra:
Love is a passion and love will light a fire
Trust your emotions believe in your dreams
Trapped in a mystery you are my desire
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
The secrets of love

Sandra:
The secrets of love
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
Life's so empty without you

Sandra:
Without you

Bobo:
There is something about you

Voice:
What do I do

Bobo:
Hear the angel in heaven crying
Let me hold you
With you I'm flying

Sandra:
I am flying
Love is a passion and love will light a fire
Trust your emotions believe in your dreams

Choir:
Believe in your dreams

Sandra:
Trapped in a mystery you are my desire
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
The secrets of love

Sandra:
The secrets of love

Choir:
Believe in your dreams

Sandra:
Show me the secrets of love

Bobo:
The secrets of love

P.S.
Colorful video and a melody that is a mix between the past and the present.

Africa Unite

2006-01-20T13:15:00.000+02:00

OK, ladies and gentlemen it's finally here: The 2006 Africa Cup of Nations. Today at 17:30 Cairo time (15:30 GMT) the opening ceremony will be held at the Cairo International Stadium. The take-off match between Egypt and Libya will follow the ceremony at 17:00 GMT. I really wish all the contenders the best of luck. And I hope that this will be the best Cup of Nations ever. Best wishes to our national team. And like Marley said, let "Africa Unite".

P.S.
Despite the many opinions about the Cairo International Stadium after the reworks, I think the stadium looks very nice. So what if the tracks are in blue? It's definitely not the only stadium in the world that has tracks in that color (not to mention, blue is my favourite color). I guess we are just no used to change. I mean, get serious. Which of the following do you prefer?

MDC Is Back...

2006-01-15T21:30:00.000+02:00

Just when I was wondering why nothing has been announced until now, I received an e-mail today from Microsoft Middle East inviting me to attend the Microsoft Middle East Developers Conference (MDC) 2006. Looks like the conference was delayed this year until college students finish their exams. It is going to be held at the Cairo International Conference Center from the 5th to the 8th of February. As usual, you have to register online in order to attend. But the locatio is not the only change this year. Another, somewhat expected, change is that Microsoft is now charging an attendance fee of 50 Egyptian pounds paid on the first day. Oh well, it is 4 days of non-stop, except for lunch, sessions after all.

OK, I admit I'm not a Microsoft fan. But as I always say, you should always try to keep an eye on what the other side is doing and where he stands. So, hopefully, I'll attend the conference. Just hope they don't repeat the same mistake again and dedicate a session on how to migrate from Java to .NET. Last time that happened, things got really messy and the endless conflict between the Java camp (my camp) and Microsoft's camp arose to the surface. I also hope they don't forget to send me the confirmation e-mail like they did last year.

Now, if I could only figure out where to stay...

Eid Mubarak

2006-01-10T02:59:00.000+02:00

Oops! M$ did it again...

2006-01-04T03:02:00.000+02:00

Happy New Year. And how better can a new year start than with Microsoft's return with, yet, another flaw in its operating system (a.k.a. Windows) . The WMF (Windows Meta File) flaw has been exploited extensively during the past few days and spawned dozens of attacks, as explained here. And just what is Microsoft doing about it? Well, they do not see a reason to hurry up their monthly security update on the 10th of this month because, get this, their intelligence sources indicate that the scope of the attacks are not widespread.

Hehe. Looks like Microsoft, just like G. W. Bush, bases its decisions on misleading intelligence information. Typical...

Play It Safe

2005-12-22T23:13:00.000+02:00

Whether you go online via a 24/7 connection (e.g. ADSL, DSL, cable modem, etc.) or throgh dial-up, one thing is for sure: you have to take certain measures to ensure the safety of you system and the data on it. Otherwise, you might find yourself crying over what you've lost due to a foolish click with your mouse. Personally, I faced this situation once. But even if it wasn't that serious, you might get stuck in a situation where you find your head wanting to explode out of frustration because you can't go online for no obvious reason!

Well, after facing many nights of frustration, here is my advice. First of all, stop using the most buggiest operating system on the planet (a.k.a. Windows) unless you truely can't help it. Install a respected anti-virus software (e.g. McAfee VirusScan or Symantec's Norton AntiVirus) and, most importantly, make sure you have the latest virus definition file for that tool. Install an Adware/Spyware removal utility (e.g. Lavasoft's AdAware) with the latest update. Use a more secure browser to surf the Web (my choice is Mozilla's FireFox) and a safer e-mail client (e.g. Thunderbird). Don't download any files from untrustful sites and don't open any attachments in e-mail from unknown sources (and even if you know the source, it won't hurt to double check by sending him/her an e-mail asking whether indeed this was sent by him/her).

You should also install a firewall software (e.g. ZoneAlarm or McAfee's Personal Firewall) to prevent any unintended traffic from accessing or leaving your machine. Finally, if for some reason (a virus/trojan/spyware) you can't go online, scan your system and remove the cause then run a WinSock fixing utility (you can download one over here and here, and another solution can be found here). Damn, I've really got to hurry up the transition process to Unix/Linux. If only I could enable those two RAID IDE channels on my 945G motherboard. :$

More information and safe computing tips can be found on this link (Safe Hex). And links to useful tools can be found here.

It is all about choice...

2005-12-10T02:39:00.000+02:00

Oh boy, when it comes to the world of Linux and Unix, it really is all about choice! I've been reviewing various distibutions and my head just can't stop spinning from all what I saw. It is an ocean out there. I saw Live CD distributions, installable distributions, and even very very tiny distributions bootable from your 128 MB USB flash memory drive.

The question right now is: what will I settle on? I'm still putting some hopes on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, and I'm really glad that Sun decided to open-source the Java Desktop System (JDS). However, I really liked Ubuntu and it's features. And while Damn Small Linux (DSL) and similar micro-distibutions, such as SchilliX and BeleniX, are not in the picture when it comes to installing an OS on my PC, they are really a very good choice for an on-the-go OS. In fact, I might consider burning a Live CD for BeleniX just to have a feel of Solaris if a full installation is not successful.

For dual booting, I'll probably use GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) , I just hope Windows doesn't complain :$ . One last thought, I'd really love to see Project Looking Glass taking its way into such a world of choices. But while I'm waiting, I'll keep looking at the screenshots found over here and dream of what is to come.

My New PC

2005-12-09T04:46:00.000+02:00

I'm now officially using my new PC, at last (thank God). And, man, what a difference! However, I'm also convinced that AMD's new 64-bit processors are a lot better and more stable. Sounds like it is true, Intel is scared of AMD.

Here is what I'm on right now:

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.00 GHz 630 (2MB cache) LGA (Hyper-Threading)
Memory: SpecTek 512 MB DDRAM2 533
Motherboard: Gigabyte 945G (Built-In: Intel GMA 950 "128 MB", Realteck ALC 882 CODEC for sound "8 audio channels", Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet)
HDD: 2 x Western Digital Caviar 80 GB
CD-ROM: Asus 52x
CD-R/RW: Sony CRX230E10 52x/32x/52x
Monitor: BenQ FP71E 17" LCD

I guess there's only one final touch left. Namely, getting rid of Windows. I really want to try Solaris 10. However, after two unsuccessful attempts to install the OS, if the third attempt failed, I think I'll settle down for Ubuntu Linux. Either way, I guess I'll have to dual boot because my brother can't just let "Need for Speed Underground 2" go. :)

Farewell Ramadan...

2005-10-30T22:04:00.000+02:00

A whole month has past since my last post on this blog, a whole holy month. What can one say, Ramadan just slips away. Funny, it seems like it was just yesterday that we were expecting it with all the happiness in the world. Now, we are saying goodbye while our hearts are filled with sorrow. But that's the way life goes. It is all part of our very short lives that our creator has granted us with on this planet. Days go by, months go by, and years pass away. And with them, the train that leads us to our final resort. Farewell dear Ramadan and we ask Allah to grant us the privilege of seeing you again and again in the years to come.

25 years ago...

2005-09-21T00:43:00.000+03:00

25 years ago, dBase II, a database software package, was developed by Wayne Ratliff. Ashton-Tate acquired dBase from Ratliff when dBase was at its peak (dBase III). dBASE was the first widely used database management system or DBMS for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. I was lucky to complete my first computer-related course on the dBase IV (along with MS-DOS 3.3) at the time I was in the intermediate-level at school. To my surprise now, I discovered that this particular version of dBase was the cause for its collapse due to the many bugs it had. dBASE was sold to Borland in 1991, which sold the rights to the product line in 1999 to the newly-formed dBASE Inc.

25 years ago, the HP-85 personal computer was released. It was based on an 8-bit microprocessor and combined an alphanumeric keyboard, CRT screen, thermal printer tape drive unit, user read/write memory and a ROM operating system in one portable package. It had 32K ROM and 16K RAM. It was HP's first entry into the personal computer marketplace.

HP-85

25 years ago, the prototype of the IBM PC was being designed by a team of twelve people at IBM managed by Donald Estridge. At the same time, IBM constructed the first 1 Gigabyte Harddisk. Its size was as big as a large refrigerator, and it weighed 150 kilo's and its cost was 40.000 USD.

25 years ago, Seagate Technology introduced the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. It was a full height (twice as high as most current 5 1/4" drives) 5 1/4" drive, with a stepper motor. This first born could store 5 Mb. The access time was low: 180 - 240 milliseconds.

Seagate ST-412. An enlarged 10 MB two-platter ST-506

25 years ago, Ronald Reagan and John Anderson were running for presidency against Jimmy Carter, the US president back then. Here in Egypt president Sadat was still alive and walking amongst his citizens. Two-thirds of Sinai had been transferred back to Egypt, but Sadat halted further talks with Israel in Aug. 1980 because of ontinued Israeli settlement of the West Bank.

25 years ago, the First Persian Gulf War, which was between Iraq and Iran, broke out. A war that lasted for nearly 8 years and ended when Iran accepted United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 598, leading to a 20 August 1988 cease-fire.

Iranian Soldiers in the battle-field

25 years ago, the Voyager 1 space probe reached the ringed planet, Saturn, after a 3 years journey and sent back the first vivid photographs of the planet. It was just 12 miles (19 km) off course after its epic journey.

Saturn and its magnificent rings

25 years ago, my eyes first saw the light...

Correcting the Wrong In Our Higher-Education System

2005-09-18T16:04:00.000+03:00

Previously, I've posted a comment on the ESEA (Egyptian Software Engineers Association) Yahoo! group. The comment was on a message posted by Mohamed Meshref concerning his thoughts about what is required to improve the quality of the educational process in the faculties of computer science in Egypt. The issue popped up again while posting a comment on Mohammed_g's blog. So, I thought of including parts of the previous post over here.

" You share the same vision I have regarding what is required to elevate the level of our higher education system in the field of computer science, technology, and engineering for a better, brighter future of our country. And although you were talking about faculties of computer science, the problems you mentioned are actually present in the department of computers and systems of many engineering faculties. Believe me I should know, because I've been there both as a student and as an instructor.

The way I see it, there are three main reasons for the situation we are in nowadays: there is no good scientific planning, there's no honesty and devotion while working to achieve planned goals, and there's no motivation. Who's responsible? Both sides, the teaching staff as well as the students. We are moving in an endless ring. From one side, existing staff doesn't bother to improve the educational process, even though it may be in their hands. And on the other side, the students (from which some become a teaching staff) are not motivated and the only goal they have in mind is to finish their undergraduate years, if possible, and start earning some money. That's why they only attempt to consume, actually memorize, what is required to pass the finals and don't bother with any other useful knowledge. The result, is a nation with a huge number of, so called, college graduates who are supposed to be the youths of the future generation. While in reality, they don't even care if their country rises or falls. What else would you expect from someone who doesn't want to learn science for the knowledge and in order to build a better future for his people.

Yes, many undergraduate courses (and post-graduate) need to be reconsidered. It should be considered with sciences and the theories behind the technologies, not the technologies themselves. For example, we should concentrate on the concepts of programming languages first before we concentrate on a certain language. In fact, the whole higher-education process needs reconsideration. New, well-planned, and strict rules need to be enforced to eliminate many mistakes present today. And on top of the list of corrections, many of the present doctors need to retire. I mean they should be honest with theirselves. Like you said, if you can't update your knowledge constantly, leave room for those who can (with all due respect). But come on, what are you saying? Retire and leave the position they are in!!! Even if it was for the good of the country, to hell with the country for all they care. As I said, it is an endless ring. And we are only kidding ourselves with the current process, which will lead us nowhere. The problem is who would listen, and who would care. We try to do whatever is in our hands. But facing the many constraints and without a shared dream, correcting what is wrong will be very difficult. Or who knows. "

Things I've Seen and Heared Lately

2005-09-15T20:34:00.000+03:00

Last week I saw Serendipity. I know, I am very old (it is from way back in 2001). But that's the way life goes. I never had the chance to watch it until last week. Anyway, I got hooked to it from the beginning. It is a really charming romantic comedy. I loved the performances of both John Cusack and the lovely Kate Beckinsale. And even though it can be classified as a fantasy movie, I find that the story could happen in real life. After watching it, I had no choice but to add it to my list of favourite movies. By the way, the definition of the word "serendipity" can be found here. And, ironically, I discovered that there is an open-source PHP Weblog/Blog System called Serendipity, check it out.

On the other hand, I deeply hated Closer, a more recent movie (in 2004). Even though this movie is a lot more realistic than Serendipity, I found myself really disgusted from it. I mean, they are like pigs unsatisfied with what they have. I'm surprised that Julia Roberts accepted to be part of this. So, all in all, even though both movies had actors from both the US and the UK, one was really nice and the other was really terrible (wouldn't advise anyone to watch it).

Coming to what I recently heared and enjoyed, I would say The Carpenters' song that Blue has generously shared in her blog, titled "Top of the World" from their 1972 album "A Song for You". Lovely lyrics and a wonderful song. I just can't get over it. Thanks Blue.

Moralityware: Doing More Good Than Harm

2005-09-09T23:43:00.000+03:00

I stepped across this in various sites. It seems that anything that it is related to Islam in any way nowadays is news in the western media. But anyway, here's the story. A new trojan is out ladies and gentlemen. But this trojan is classified by the media as a kind of "Moralityware". The trojan, named "Yusufali", first appeared in Iran and is not considered to be that dangerous. In fact, it is doing more good than harm. All it does actually is monitor the sites the user is visiting by checking the words in the title bar for anything related to pornographic material. Once such a word is detected, the window is minimized and verses from the Holy Quran are displayed in a number of languages. Now that's what I call a nice trojan. Following are a couple of snapshots of the trojan in action. More can be found here and here.

Delicious fried eggs on AMD AthlonXP

2005-09-08T17:12:00.000+03:00

Now this "is" funny. Have you ever thought of other usages for your PC's processor other than performing complicated calculations and being the brain that lies within your case. Well, how about using it for making fried eggs! Check this out, wonderful yummy fried eggs straight from the "processor" to your table. I just added the photos found at the link here in case it gets broken some day. Refer to the link for the complete recipe. Enjoy your meal.

Warning:
========
This can be dangerous to both the PC and yourself. So, my advice to you is not to try this at home, or at least not on the PC you are using. ;)

Note:
====
This is not meant to be a public attack against AMD processors. Intel processors can be used as well (and I'd bet they'll fry the egg even faster).

Islam: The Right Way

2005-08-25T16:18:00.000+03:00

You scored as Islam. Your beliefs are most similar to those of Islam. Do more research on Islam and possibly consider taking the shahadah and officially becoming a Muslim, if you aren't already.

Despite the actions of some - who go against the teachings of Islam - Islam is a religion of peace; the word "islam" means "peace through submission to God." "Muslim" means "one who submits to God." Islam is the third of the three Abrahamic faiths, and it shares much with Judaism and Christianity; its differences are the acceptance of Muhammad as the last and final prophet, and the oneness of God - in other words, that Jesus, though he was a revered prophet, was not in fact God, and only one God exists. Apparently the Taliban could not read (though their name means "students"), because the Qur'an states that men and women are equal as believers, and that all believers should be educated and seek knowledge. Modesty in dress and behavior is required in Islam for both men and women to preserve the values of society and move the emphasis from superificial appearance to intelligence, knowledge, and God.

Islam

100%

Buddhism

71%

Judaism

58%

Paganism

46%

Hinduism

42%

Christianity

29%

Satanism

21%

agnosticism

13%

atheism

Which religion is the right one for you? (new version)
created with QuizFarm.com

Note:
Regardless of the results of this quiz, I do believe in my religion, Islam, and am deeply convinced it is the right way and that its teachings are for the good of humanity.

No One to Blame But Ourselves

2005-08-25T12:44:00.000+03:00

Since I first had access to the Internet back in 1999, my main interests were to sites related to science and technology. By nature, I'm not a person who spends most of his time chatting and talking to others online. Recently, while surfing the Web and visiting forums and sites concerned with various topics and events we see daily in the news and affects how the world changes around us, I realized how very far away and how unaware I was of what is going on elsewhere. Yes, I knew that during the past 5 years or so a very bad, and fake, image of Islam and Muslims was painted in the minds of many westerners. But I never realized it reached this extent. Everywhere you go online you'll find people attacking Islam with many hard and mean words and wanting to through Muslims in the sea and things like that! What has become of the world today?! What's really sad is that these people are doing so blindly without even knowing anything about Islam, or just knowing a thing or two which they got from an untrustful source.

The worst phrase I've read was "It is true that not all Muslims are terrorists. However, all terrorists are Muslims". What a big, fat, deceptive lie. Terrorism was there long before the late events that fired a massive propaganda from the media which managed to capture the minds of many Americans and Europeans. And those terrorists were not related to Islam in anyway. Some were Christians, some were Jews, some were unblievers, etc. In every religion you'll find those who are on the right path and those who have deviated. And terrorism has neither a nationality nor a religion.

In my opinion, one cause that helped paint this illusive picture of Islam is that the western society is too lazy to search for the truth on its own. People there just sit back in their seats and deliver their minds to whatever kind of media they prefer to be brainwashed and filled with whatever it sees fit. Be it the TV or the Internet or a newspaper, it is all the same. They just hear/read it, and believe it. I really thought they would be more intellectual than that. But it seems they've created and watched too many fictuous movies, until they've reached a point where they started to believe in everything they see/hear without considering whether it was true or false. Has anyone of them tried to read any book about Islam written by a respectful and well-known Islamic thinker? (Not just any book that talks about Islam they find in their libraries, which might be filled with corrupted ideas not relating to Islam by any chance) Instead of having a constructive debate and trying to reach for the other side and understand it more, they start to attack it on basis they have no proof of.

However, I don't completely blame them. You know why? Because during the past years, Muslims have always stood aside and watched. They just closed a shell they built around themselves and never tried effectively to reach for the western society and educate it about the true meaning of Islam and all what it stands for. They should know that Islam does not permit killing innocent people even during wars (history proves this too). They should know that blowing yourself up in the face of civillians from the other side does not mean in Islam that you will go to heaven. Doing this when you have no weapon to fight your enemy with and in the face of the enemy's armed forces can be justified. But against innocent civillians, it is never justified. And they should also know that all Allah's orders and the teachings of his prophet are only for the good of the human race. And that we are tought and ordered to respect even those who are non-Muslims and respond with kindness to those who might treat us in a different manner. This, however, does not mean that we won't fight for our rights if someone took them away from us. Even tolerance has its limits.

This brings me to another subject that has been publicized heavily in the news lately. Namely, Israel's pullout from Gaza. I can't believe how many people in the western society feel really sad for the Israili settlers who are being evacuated! Come on people! And what about all the Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes and roam the world as refugees since 1948, even though they were the original inhabitants and owners of the land? It's even clear from the description of those Israelis, settlers. Why weren't you sorry for those Palestinians?! It is very sad to see such double-sided judgment and treatment. And what's worse, they have the gutts to call them terrorists. So, fighting for your freedom and for your rights is terrorism nowadays?! If someone took over your home and, out of generousity (oh, how generous), wants to give you a room in your own home, would you just stand and watch? My God, how they got everything so confused.

Here's a joke that gets repeated everytime you get into a debate with someone who is taking Israel's side without thinking: "Israel is the only democratic country in the region". Do they really believe that? And the number of times I've heard this phrase proves that these people are not even trying to think. They just follow those great, shiny words that get thrown every now and then like "democracy" and "freedom" and "human rights". While in reality, some of their countries are destroying every meaning of these words everyday. These words have become camoflages, something to hide the governments' dirty work behind. Look at how African Jews and Arab Israelis are treated in Israel. They are 3rd class citizens overthere.

However, feeling sad for what the westerners think or what they say or do and feeling sad for where we stand today will not solve anything. I think the time has come to take actions and start opening conversational channels with whom we ignored for a long time. They should know the real truth about us. And they should know that we are not terrorists. They must remove this image from their minds. It is very unjust to judge a whole nation by the acts of a few that has gone astray.

August 2005: Truely A Very Sad Month

2005-08-24T19:05:00.000+03:00

August 2005 is coming to end. Sitting back and remembering some of the events that occured during this month, I came to realize how sad it was for me. In this month, the Islamic nation has lost two of its greatest idols: King Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz, who passed away on the beginning of the month at the age of 84, and Shaikh Ahmed Deedat, who passed away one week later at the age of 87 in Durban. Both figures were well-known and respected all over the world.

Since the day he was announced king, King Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz has taken over his shoulders many responsibilities. Some towards his people and others towards the Arabian and Islamic nations. But perhaps the most important was the responsibility towards the visitors the two Holy Cities of Makkah and Madinah and the visitors and pilgrims of the houses of Allah in them. And from his humbleness, he wasn't keen of the title "His Royal Highness" and preferred to be referred to as "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" instead. During the period in which he was monarch, he reshaped and improved the image Saudi Arabia and lives of its citizens. Many great advances have been made during this period in various fields, such as education, infrastructure, healthcare, economy, foreign diplomacy, and social development. His support for the Palestinean rights and for all Islamic affairs will remain unforgotten.

Shaikh Ahmed Deedat, a renowned Islamic scholar, author, and lecturer who dedicated almost all of his life to da`wah (teaching Islam), published over 20 books and distributed millions of copies of pamphlets for free, many of which had been translated into various languages. Deedat has delivered thousands of lectures and participated in numerous public debates globally. He is known for his work in comparative religions. And many of his books were about comparisons between Islam and other religions, particularly Christianity. His career in comparative religion involved him in dialogues with the heads of the Protestant church in America and the late Pop John Paul II. He wrote about topics such as the role of Jesus - peace be upon him - in Islam and how Muhammad - peace be upon him - was prophecised in the Bible, with many of the prophecies which Christians believe deal with Jesus actually deal with Muhammad. Some lectures and debates by him can be found at Aswat Al-Islam (Sounds of Islam) website, or directly over here. He established the first Islamic religious institution in South Africa to train preachers at the Assalaam Institute in Braemar and was the president of the Islamic Propagation Centre International (IPCI), an organization which he helped found until he suffered from a stroke in 1996 which left him paralyzed.

May Allah's peace and blessings be upon King Fahd and Shaikh Ahmed Deedat, two great idols that deserve our respect and our prayers.

The tax of being in a developing country...

2005-08-20T21:22:00.000+03:00

OK, I've always heard that most of the technology-related stuff, like computer hardware, sold for developing countries such as Egypt are of less quality levels than those sold in the EU and the US. However, I never thought the gap between the two would be so wide! Today, while surfing the Web, I reached a site dedicated to selling computer-related equipment and software (http://www.newegg.com). It is like an online computer mall. Looking at some of the hardware components listed in the site, I really wanted to break down and cry. Man, the components we find in our market (which, sadly, are almost all "Made in China") and the hardware that we use are like toys compared to them. Too depressed to continue, see for yourselves.

Western Digital Dual-option Combo WDXUB1600BBNN 160GB
7200 RPM 2MB Cache USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

ASPIRE X-CRUISE -BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower
Computer Case Fan Speed Indicator

intel BOXD915GAVL Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 915G ATX Intel Motherboard

TR2TT TR2 M1 80mm Ball Multi-Color LED Light Cooling Fan/Heatsink

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

ASPIRE X-CRUISE -BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

ASPIRE ATX-AS520W SILVER ATX 520W Power Supply 103-132VAC or
206-264VAC RMS switch selectable CB IEC 950/ TUV EN 60950/ UL 1950/ CSA 950

GIGABYTE GA-7VT600P-RZ Socket A (Socket 462) VIA KT600 ATX AMD Motherboard

How do you compare?

2005-08-20T19:41:00.000+03:00

High-Level Computer Geek. All of those below you are envious of you! (...Well perhaps not the cool people)

15% scored higher (more computer geeky),
0% scored the same, and
85% scored lower (less geeky).

An Islamic History of Europe

2005-08-18T23:58:00.000+03:00

Recently, I watched a three part documentary on the BBC Four titled "An Islamic History of Europe". This documentary tells the tale of an era in Europe's history that I'm sure most modern Europeans are unaware of, and a golden era I must say. In addition, it really goes to show those who know nothing about Islam (except perhaps the claim that it is the religion of terrorists) that a religion that produced a culture that is so rich, so constructive, and so tolerant during the days when a continent that is as great as Europe was still suffering from the dark ages cannot, by any chance, be accused of being supportive to terrorism or leading to it.

The western society nowadays has many misconceptions about Islam. I've seen various evidence of that in many online forums that I participate in. For instance many believe that Islam has many types and "different flavours" (e.g. Sunni's and Shi'ites). They don't know that all these really pour into a single unified concept: there's only one creator for this universe we live in, that is Allah, and that Mohammed -peace be upon him- is both one of his servants, just like all of the human race, and his final messenger to humanity. This is the main truth that all the so called dialects agree on. Any differences between these types are minor and are related to some believes that arose after the prophets death. However, the single main truth mentioned earlier remains the same, otherwise this won't relate to Islam in any way.

Another misconception I've noticed is that some think that the Arabian people before Islam were most educated and are the ones responsible for all the great discoveries and achievements in sciences such as algebra, astronomy, medicine, etc. The truth is, Arabs before Islam were very lost, deviated, and highly uneducated. All the knowledge and richness that the Arabian culture (like some westerners call it) has given to humanity should correctly be referenced to the Islamic culture. It was the Muslims (Arabs and otherwise) who were responsible for all such achievements. History proves and agrees to that also. For instance many bad habits were spread amongst Arabs before Islam. And when Islam came, it eliminated all these habits and elevated their way of thinking and their way of life.

For those interested to know more about Islam and what it is all about. I've added a link in the side bar to a brief guide about it in English. It is in PDF format but you can also browse it online at (http://www.islam-guide.com).

From AI to DP: Interesting Readings

2005-08-18T21:57:00.000+03:00

I'm still alive and kicking, thank God. I've been away for a few days so I hadn't a chance to post anything. Anyway, yesterday I started reading an interesting book about design patterns from the Head First series. The book's title was "Head First Design Patterns" and I've immediately fallen in love with it from the first few pages (even before I read the first chapter). This is my first experience with the series and I've always wanted to know about design patterns so I guess I got lucky this time. The book is really interesting, informative, and fun. Hopefully I'll be able to take one chapter per day and finish the book in two weeks or so. But I won't count on that.

Another book that I've read many parts from, and enjoyed doing so, lately is Michael Negnevitsky's "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Intelligent Systems". I really wonder why this book wasn't given as reference to us in our undergraduate courses. It is absolutely wonderful, simple, clear, and easy to understand. The author organized the contents of the books chapters as a series of questions and their answers which really helped in understanding the whats, whys, and hows of the discussed topics. The book discusses topics like: expert systems, artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and hybrid intelligent systems. The second edition is out but I don't think much has changed since the first, at least that's the impression I got from the publisher's web site.

Guess what? I am an OS X too...

2005-08-13T17:25:00.000+03:00

Wow, I am an OS X, even though I never really used a Mac. I admire the operating system though. And I think it might actually reflect my personality.

Which OS are You?

Her favourites, and mine too...

2005-08-12T19:15:00.000+03:00

Have been listening to the album "My Faourites" by "my favourite" female artist, Sandra, recently. This 2-CD album contains a wonderful compilation of her songs, some in the original version and others as remixes. All in all, listening to the tracks of the album takes you into a different world. It really is a fantastic experience, and Sandra still sounds as great as ever. Her performance in songs like "Way to India", "Celebrate Your Life", "Around My Heart", "Steady Me", "No Taboo", and all the other classics like "Johnny Wanna Live" and "Mirrored in Your Eyes" is a living proof on that. Thanks for all the great songs you presented to us, Sandra. You are a true artist.

I'm PG rated, I scored -50 points!

2005-08-12T18:31:00.000+03:00

The movie of my life has been rated:

See what your rating is!
Created by bart666

PG stands for 'Parental Guidence', meaning that this film may not be suitable for small children, due to either a little violence or some mild harsh language, but nothing earth-shattering. Plots may have twists and turns, and there may even be real-life situations.

Examples: Bill & Ted, The Fifth Element

Being ABLE and Abeille

2005-08-12T02:51:00.000+03:00

After quite a period of frustration, I finally managed to create a simple frame with Swing that would be my main agent's interface. I had to resort to a nice and small open-sourced GUI builder called "Abeille Forms Designer" (see image below). It is really cute, and I must say looks really nice. It took me a while to understand and get used to, though. This is because it is based on a popular, open source layout manager for Java called the "JGoodies FormLayout" system. Anyway, it did the job and I successfully created the Bayesian learning agent that uses the genetic search implementation in WEKA to learn the Bayesian network structure from datasets spread over a variety of hosts.

The only problem I'm facing now is displaying the resulting network using the GraphVisualizer that comes with WEKA. Everytime I try to create a frame containing the GraphVisualizer from within the Tahiti server I get a strange NullPointerException. After searching the Web for quite a while, I found a post on the WEKA mailing list mentioning the same problem. It is suggested by the poster that the JVM's version might be the problem. However, I'm not quite sure about that because when I attempt to open the GraphVisualizer from the command line it works fine! Guess I have to go back to WEKA's source code and search for the cause.

One thing that I discovered while surfing the Web is a framework created by IBM for building intelligent agents using machine learning and reasoning called "ABLE" (Agent Building and Learning Environment). I discovered it very late though and I decided to continue on the same track and use WEKA. However, even though mobile agents where never mentioned in ABLE's site at alphaWorks, I wonder if it would be possible to use this framework to build intelligent mobile agents that learn and reason. In the mean time, here is how the main agent's frame finally looks like.

Love the GUI, hate the GUI

2005-08-10T03:24:00.000+03:00

I've always been fascinated by Java's look and feels. And I think the developers of both AWT and Swing did a wonderful job in making the GUI of Java applications look simple but highly attractive. I've been working on a small intelligent mobile agent application lately. And while attempting to create a GUI for the agent, I faced many difficulities in laying out the components on the form.

I guess what made things really difficult is that I was trying to lay the components on the form from A to Z by coding. It is really a frustrating task but I had no other choice since my 450 MHz Pentium III won't be able to handle any of the available IDEs that have a GUI editor. But I think this would give me a tighter grasp on building GUIs in Java.

One really annoying issue is having some component appear behind others (see image). Hopefully I'd be able to solve this soon. Because I know more difficulities will arise when I start developing the agent itself.

Welcome to My World...

2005-08-09T22:45:00.000+03:00

As this is my first post, don't expect much. I'm a bit new to the blogging community. But I really like the idea of being able to express myself and my thoughts on the WWW. Hopefully, this blog will introduce me and my personality to the outer world and all those reading it. Oh well, stay tuned for more to come...