I knew about this event 2 days ago by coincidence. A group of programmers and software and knowledge freedom advocates are organizing an event in Alexandria University's Faculty of Engineering to educate people about some targeted topics from the 1st to 15th of September 2009.

from their sessions schedule. I can see that they concentrate on topics related to
- programming under Linux
- Open Solaris
- Security
- Wikipedia

I had an interest in attending this event as I didn't attend any offline event for a long time, maybe that last one I attended was .NetWork's 7th gathering. the fact that I'm a night programmer, makes trying to wake up early seem impossible. I go to bed every day at 7:00 am and I can't succeed to sleep before that time. but today I did it somehow and slept for 2 hours then went to the event.

The first session was a beginners level session about Linux Ubuntu and the presenter did well at introducing the audience to what is Linux, but the only thing I hated, is that way he described windows as evil or bad operating system compared to the great Linux system. he wasn't fair enough, but this is how most of the my operating system rocks people do (whatever if they are using Mac, Windows or Linux). in total, the session was good but I was seeking for a more advanced session, maybe I didn't have to attend that session .

The second session was about Wikipedia. a number of the Arabic Wikipedia contributors were there trying to get some of the audience into writing for Wikipedia or even contributing suggestions. between the sessions they held a workshop to educate the interested audience on how to add/edit pages on Wikipedia.

I noticed something interesting. The Wikipedia presenter in the second session had a notebook with Windows 7 installed. I thought that he will be using Linux but it seems like those Wikipedia guys/gals don't belong to the same geeky class as the other organizers of the event, but they share the same vision and target.

the day is rated good and I wish to attend the next sessions till the end of the event. if you are in or near Alexandria or passing by and interested,  join the sessions at lectures hall M3 in the preparatory building in faculty of Engineering Alexandria.

the next  2 sessions will be on 7-9-2009, these will be about security. check the the full events schedule and the Facebook event page .

Mohammed Hossam announced the registration opining for the SilverKey DD2 (Demo Day 2).

Date: July 7, 2007 <--(my blog's birthday)
City: Cairo, Egypt
Location: The conferences center, Mankaure hall .

free registration and full agenda on the SKDD website.

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I have already registered. I read about the first SKDD and it was nice to find it targeting developers and not just another marketing event. from the agenda, you can see that most of the talks are targeting .net developers (and I'm not one of them), but I still can go to collect some new ideas from them (yea, that's what I'm -> "ideas hunter"). also, attending some refreshing .net talks won't be that bad .

I'm interested in the following talks:

• Iron Python and C# 3.0, a dialog
• Silverlight Fundamentals
• CLR by XAML
• Service Oriented Architecture by WCF
  
• 3D Game programming in Windows Environment
  (I don't know any thing about this topic, but it sounds cool )
• In-depth JavaScript: A master class
  (I'm a web developer)
• LINQ for XML
• Open Source and Free Software Testing
• Programmer's approach to Search Engine Optimization
  (I know allot about this topic, but I think they have more to say)
• Demo Day Open Mic (Unconference session)
  (I always get afraid of this type of sessions, one PHP guy in a room full of .net developers won't be fair when they start throwing rocks in the 'I love my programming language' party)

so, If you are planning to attend this event, just contact me. I will enjoy traveling to Cairo with another geek from Alexandria -en sha2 Allah-. also, if you are living in Cairo, I will love to see you on Cairo's train station :) .

The company I'm working for, released 2 free issues of it's magazine called iT Plus . you can download PDF copies from iTPlusOnline.com. this magazine is targeting the IT communities .. specially the Egyptian one. btw, don't expect to see any code there. it got some interesting articles about computer networks related stuff and some technologies that I didn't hear about before. so if you like knowing about this things, so get a copy and enjoy.

I don't know if they are planning to start writing about more in-depth and programming related articles in the coming issues or what. anyway, they are waiting any feedback that helps get the magazine better for you. leave your comment on the magazines website if you have something to say.

I have downloaded Safari 3 for Windows. finally, I will see how my work look on that browser. I'm not sure if it will be exactly the same like a Safari for Mac, but it's better than nothing.

so .. finally I will be able to say "I tested it on Safari" :)

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Update: ok, it's a real beta thing. bugs everywhere.

It's official now. Google acquired FeedBurner.

Maybe you read about the new Yahoo! Pipes before. it's a new amazing service that allows you to mix whatever number of RSS feeds to create a new one. also, you can filter the contents of every feed. so you can create a totally customized new feed which only contains information that you are interested in. there is many other things that you should try yourself.

in the last company I worked for, they wanted to create a small news website. they wanted the posts to be added automatically to their  website. my idea was that we can read the news from other websites like BBC, CNN ..etc automatically. some of these websites were providing RSS feeds. my plan at this time was that we can build something similar to Yahoo! Pipes with a web scraper to manage all the feeds and the other news sources that don't provide any clean way to access its data.

now with Yahoo! Pipes, any one can do this simply in minutes. maybe the only thing that will limit the number of users of this service is that not everybody can understand the idea and the benefits of something like this.

PS: I remember that after finishing around 50% of this project, I had to stop working and had to study for the exams. when I came back to work at the company, I found that someone formated my computer without taking a backup of the files of the project ... Oops, not that smile, maybe this one (  ).

you can get the Zend Framework preview release 0.2.0 now. this preview release comes with some new components and enhancments.
let me quote from the realease note:

• new MVC implementation
• New HTTP request and response objects make it easy to automate unit testing for web apps without a web server, and also make it possible to use MVC for command-line and PHP-GTK application development
• Enhanced pure PHP Lucene-compatible search engine component
• New Mysqli DB adapter
• New JSON server
• New REST client and server
• New XmlRpc client and server
• New Acl component
• New Session component
• New Web Services clients for Delicious and Audioscrobbler
• New Registry component
• Significant improvements to many other components

 GData Client Library is a PHP 5 component that enables PHP applications to run queries and commands against Google GData web sevices. For examples, Google Base, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch.

This magazine is also available online and you can subscripe for the printed edition freely through this page .

First time when I saw the cover, I thought that's a comical magazine for kids :D.
Any way, now I'm not developing any application using any oracle product, but maybe a day I will have to do that, so I'm trying to be ready for that day (Inshaa ALLAH ).

It's 02:50 am , I want to try sleeping early.
c ya