Yup, I’m back again to the old days of setting all day/night here reading blogs, books and coding. I really missed these things. after a 22 month serving in the army, I don’t feel that I was not connected to this world. actually every vacation, I kept reading the dozens of blog posts collected by my RSS reader (Google Reader) and followed my friends on FaceBook to keep up about their news. maybe my only problem now is with updating my list of programs and tools to continue what I started before.

I have installed the latest version of Subversion, and I had a problem with making my svn repository work on a virtual host I created before on my Apache web server 2.2.11 . the svn book wasn’t really helpful with this problem and I had to find a solution. also, updated my PHP installation to v5.3 . I really like the new improvements to the language, but I don’t really know the reason of adding the GoTo operator, maybe I missed something in the last months, and this feature is helpful someway or another. but I still don’t remember that somebody was in need for this functionality before.

thanks Xkcd.com 

anyway, I still have to update to MySQL 5.4 and to explore what’s new in python 3.0 . and about .Net, I will keep it a way at least to the end of this month till I finish the revision of php and python.

I had that idea of getting back again to contributing to open source projects. my last experience as a contributor to ZendFramework was really great. it gave me challenges I didn’t face before and was a great chance to get in touch and work with number of the most recognized PHP developers in the world and the developers of the core of the php language. I’m still searching for the right project to contribute to. let me know If you have a challenging and interesting one.

This is all what I have for this post. you are welcome to contact me if you need something or if you just want to say hi. you can follow me on Twitter or on FaceBook or you can follow my shared items on Google reader .

I really miss how I used to blog here before joining the army. every vacation I come and find that allot of things changed, people got married, or traveled to another country. new technologies and buzz words appear and others disappear. this makes me feel like I'm living in a cave far away. anyway, there still just another 6 months till I finish my military service, I wish they will go fast and harmless.

the most annoying thing is the time it takes to travel from Alexandria to El-Salloum, it takes from 14 to18 hours using the military train and military buses. this is enough to make anybody hate the idea of going home that way, especially if that person is living in one of uper egypt's cities, it will take him 2 days to reach home.

Anyway, I always try to spend my vacation in useful things like reading technical blog posts, reading news and maybe attending offline technical events if possible. In a previouse vacation I was able to attend DotNetWork.org's 7th event in Cairo.

this days you will find me moving from website to another. the unclosable tabs in my browser are Gmail , Google reader and Facebook. myabe this vacation I got more interest in StackOverflow.com because of its high quality. I like how this website is self managed by its users. the idea it self is so old and there is allot of websites provide the same service, but this didn't stop the creators of the website from building the same idea again but with new features and concepts. that made this website better than the other old ones.

This made me think about focusing more on the old websites that we got used to, and find these websites weaknesses that can help in creating other better websites that serves the new needs of the users.  Innovation isn't always about building new things, it can also be about looking at the old things from another way and trying to make it better for people.

Most of the big websites now are alternatives for an old websites that provided the same service, but for some reason it lost its shine. websites like facebook , flickr and Gmail are all not new ideas, but just a cleaned and improved versions of old websites.

From my first days as a computer user, I always had the dream of building a user centric website. I wish someday -isA- I will start my own company that builds websites for the normal users. I don't have interset in the creation of business centrec software, I know how profitable it is, but this isn't the thing that I will love to spend the rest of my live time doing. maybe I did it and I will do it as an emplyee in software companies, but this will be for gaining experience and saving money for my own future projects - isA-.

Do you remember me?I

Actually it's not my fault. they give me short vacation for each month or more I spend in the desert. put yourself in my shoes, when you live in a far isolated place where you don't have time to watch the news or have any way to know what happens in the world, what will you be able to blog about. I have nothing to say as I know nothing.

I just wanted to say hi again and tell you that I'm still a life. It's good that facebook, twitter, Google reader help me know what happened to my friends and what's the new technologies.

~5 months left since I joined the army. what changed?? I feel somewhat more athletic and gained experience in working with a wide range of personality types .. from the smartest to the dumbest. my average number of sleeping hours is 6 to 7 hours in the normal days. it can be 4 to 5 hours only if I have to do night guarding service. I learned to do every thing by myself without help from others. the lack for tools doesn't allow us to not finish the work. living in a tough environment is very hard, but the results of this experience makes you better. I still have 15 months coming before I finish my mandatory military service and I hope that I 'll keep surviving.

On the other hand, my social life is collapsing. whenever I come for vacation, I spend that time home without going out. I don't know the news of my friends. maybe the only thing that keeps me updated about what happens in the outside world whenever I return is my RSS reader, twitter ,and FaceBook. in the army, I like the fact that I'm working on a very expensive and powerful machine, but it's not a computer. I'm worried about how low my programming experience and level 'll go down after a year from now. all what I'm able to do now is taking programming books with me and coding on papers, and this is what I was doing through the previous months.

I 'll be here till friday, then I 'll go in a 12 hours travel again to the military base. so bad that I won't be able to attend the Agile Egypt day, but I hope that my next vacation timing 'll allow me to attend EDC 2008 (Egypt Developers Conference). Mohamed Meligy said that this year it will be in mid April.

this days I feel happy as I got some good news about some friends:
the 1st is that Mohamed Hossam's marriage is today.
the 2nd is that Mohamed Hossam 'll join the work force at Microsoft, he 'll join the live.com team.
the other thing is Tarik Ibrahim's post about the waited baby :)
I wanna congratulate them and wish them luck and happiness in their lives.

I know that some friends were waiting to catch me on msn messenger for a chat, but I'm sorry as I have problem with my windows OS that needs some time to investigate it. I didn't want to lose some of my precious vacation time, so I moved to my Ubuntu OS. if you want, you can catch me on twitter or facebook only as I don't like Pidgin that much, I just us it for IRC and Japper.

I know, it's a very late post. but I didn't have chance to write it earlier because of many reasons that you won't care to know about.
now, I want to remember what I did in 2007.

- contributed to ZendFramework (my 1st open source contribution) .
- joined another company .
- wrote a post about something stupid I found in careermideast.com , but I want to thank them now as they fixed this problem.
 (ps: days ago I saw the same problem with mazika.com , I wish they can fix it too ) .
- started being an active IRC user, specially on freenode.net  #phpc .
- joined the SK DemoDay 2
- become a 20 years old guy.
- joined the Egyptian Army to start my mandatory military service.

In 2008 I wish to (isA) :
- be a better programmer.
- start my CS studies.
- get back to playing soccer.
- gain more confidence and training to give public speeches better.
- restudy Deutsch

I'm online again. after spending 30 days in the army, I can see how I wasn't caring enough about time and how luxurious my life was. my family isn't that rich, but the fact that you can set on a chair and eat what you want whenever you want is a luxury by it self.

if I compare what I imagined about the life in the army and what I saw in these 30 days, I will say that the army isn't that frightening. its just a well organized place where every thing you do, have to be done perfectly and in time. you will life with your comrades 24/7, so you will know each other well. it's a good environment to find good friends.

I remember that I was planning to write about this experience, but they warned us allot about talking about the daily routine or whatever happens in the army. "what happens in the army, stays in the army". I didn't finish my 45 days yet. I still have another 2 to 3 weeks to spend in the training center. I came home 2 days ago and I will leave tomorrow -isA-.

it looks like many things happened on the internet in the last month. my mail box and feed reader are full of new items.

1. Flock - a new browser
I read about it on my twitter page. it looks like @ramsey , @CalEvans ,and many others left Firefox and moved to this new browser. I will quote Ben Ramsey here :

ramsey Flock left open all night with all my extensions enabled. No memory leaks or slow load times. Pages still load fast! Woo-hoo!

2. the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5
my knowledge about .Net will start going down so fast starting from this moment. maybe I will be back to .Net when they release v5.0 .

3.  iPod touch.
I 'll love to buy an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, but I will wait till steve jobs increases the storage or lowers the price.

4. Kindle - Amazon's e-book reader
I need to read more about this thing. till now I don't know if I will be able to read my old PDF books on it or not ?? another thing, the price is high.



what else happened in the last 30 days ?! if you know something else, just tell me please.

After 1 hour (at 1:00 am), I will be heading to the training center in Cairo. they call it the "HiKeyStep". this morning, they told me that I will be serving in the "Leadership organs - اجهزة القيادة". I don't know what I will be doing there, but I like the name ... yeah, "Leadership" .. sounds cool.

I have to be in the training center at 7:00 am. I'm getting my bag ready for the travel,  they told us not to get any foods or mobiles.

so, I will see you all after 45 days -en sha2 Allah- .

bye

It's long time since my last post here. I don't know the reason, but maybe it's because I was tired, depressed or had nothing to say. many things happened in the last 6 weeks that kept me overwhelmed.

The biggest thing was my struggle to finish my military service papers. I'm now considered to be a soldier in the army starting from 23-10-2007. it will start with living for 45 days in the Army's training center. there is where they change us from normal citizens to army soldiers. every one I met that been in the army before said that these 45 days are the worst days for every soldier. it's not about the heavy training, but it's about the brainwashing.

Anyway, I'm trying to keep my self thinking about how interesting is learning new things and living in a tough environment. ok, it's not that interesting, but I will keep pretending that its the coolest thing ever since the 4-wheel bike.

Other thing, I now own the domain shreef.com . I will keep it forwarding to here till I get some time to work on the new website. this will depend on how the things will go in the army -isA-. I don't know where I will be serving yet.

I'm not available on any IM service now. I just keep updating my twitter and facebook . I was thinking about blogging my experience after coming back from the 45 training days in the army, but Korayem remembered me about the fact that at this time, I mostly won't be able to remember what blogging is. :) lol

It was a nice day. the sessions were great and meeting people like Mohammed Hossam, Amr Sobhy, Mohamed Tanna and Mohamed Meligy is more than great. I didn't have the chance of attending Mohammed Hossam's SOA session from the beginning (read the previous post). Amr was there from the beginning and he said that it was very good and that he liked how M.Hossam presented it.

the 2nd session I attended was about SilverLight . it was a beginners introduction of what you can do using this new technology . it left me hungry for more information ...

the 3rd one was about SEO by M.Meligy. the contents were great like expected . mostly, I get bored so fast , but how Meligy moves and talks on the stage succeeded to keep my eyes opened till the end of the session.


the 4th one was "CLR by XAML" by Hossam Zain. It was great and added  more to what we saw in the SilverLight session. Amr didn't attend this session, he went to the "LINQ for XML" one by Mai Soliman. we wondered if this was her first public talk (I know this feeling).

the 5th was "IronPython and C# 3.0, a dialog" by Mohamad Tayseer and Mohammed Hossam. it was one of the best sessions I attended in this day.

the 6th was the open mic session. all of the attendees were allowed to talk. SK guys managed the talk to the way of why some people use .net while others use Java and others like me use php for web development. then it went to be about why most of software and websites innovations were born in the open source community, taking sample like how FaceBook uses php (why they chose it?). then Dudy tried to change the direction of the conversation to be about which is the most important from your perspective? innovation, idea, technology or what ?

the first guy to talk from the attendees started by defending .net against Java and talking about how every thing he wants is already in .net, while he believes that some other people will like to use Java to save some money and he didn't see this as a bad thing.
some other guy took the mic and started to talk about that we shouldn't be depending on one platform as we don't know what the companies will like to use more in the future, so we have to be ready for a day like that.
then Mohammed Hossam started to narrow the scope of the conversation to make the talk about web development specially. why there is php, python, .net and java? why some people choose one over another. some ex-php developers who moved to .net started to talk about how rich and powerful is the .net platform than php.
at this time I got the courage to talk. I went to the stage and took the mic and looked at the attendees, and Bang!!, I forgot the points I was going to talk about and what the previous guy said. I had to make up something to talk about in less than 3 seconds so I can look less stupid. I quoted something that I don't really remember who said it, maybe Wez Furlong. I said "in php, the community creates what's needed, we innovate by our selves. the .net guys, will wait till Microsoft innovates".
I went back to my seat and tried to remember what I was going really  to talk about and didn't give very good attention to what the others said after that.

at the end of the session, I remembered the stupid points again but there were no time. anyway, the points were:

- ask the attendees: how many web developers here?
# main point: the difference between how most of the ASP.net and PHP developers think.
- ask the attendees: who uses JS tools like YUI, JQuery, Prototype?
- ask the attendees: who uses or cares about
    - web usability?
    - web pages accessibility? (who knows what's the accessibility here and who cares about that?)
    - web standards?
- who knows what's microformats?
# main point : why open source community innovates while .net isn't?
- the open source community cares about more low level details.
- we know the ins and outs of our tools
- we created it
- we know why it was created
- we share ideas

I learned that a pin and paper should be always my friends, specially in situations like that. so learn from my fault and write what you are going to talk about on some paper before asking for the mic. I saw other people in the session who forgot every thing after taking the mic.

the next session is "In-depth JavaScript" by M.Meligy. he talked about JavaScript and Managed JavaScript. I title it as one of the best too.

I rate all the day: Very Good. I will be willing to attend the next Demo Day -en sha2 Allah- :-)

There is no available seats in tomorrow's Cairo 6:10 am train. I 'll have to travel in the 7:00 am train -en sha2 Allah-, which expected to arrive to Cairo at 10:00 am (when the first session starts).

if you love me, get yourself the first seat and reserve me the seat next to you :-).

first, I'm sorry if you couldn't IM me in the last week. I was working most of the time and had no time to chat.

I told you in the last post about that I will be in Cairo for the DemoDay. after reading the updated DD agenda, I had to decide which sessions to attend.

That's my plan for that day -en sha2 Allah- :

06:10 take the train from sedi-gaber station
09:00 arrive to Cairo
09:45 arrive to the conference center

10:00 session: opening session
10:20 session: SOA by WCF
11:30 session: Silverlight fundamentals
12:20 session: Programmers approach to Search Engine Optimization
13:30 session: CLR by XAML
14:20 session: Iron python and C# 3.0, a dialog
15:30 session: open mic sessions
16:15 session: In-depth JavaScript: a master class

22:00 head back to Alexandria

Hours ago, I got email from careermideast.com about some new features they added to the website. I didn't feel interested, but thought that taking a look won't be a bad idea.

I got what you see in this image:


at this time, I was using FireFox as I had to finish some work on Ubuntu Linux.
I thought that this was just a recommendation and then I will be forwarded to navigate the website normally, but this didn't happen.

whenever I try to change the URL, I get forwarded to this stupid page again.

It's clear that Link.net says "IF you want to see this website, you should use IE".

I believe that there is allot of smart developers working in Link.net, but it looks like that there is more stupids there than smart developers.

they were trying to make it Web2.0-ish, but they missed it. Web2.0 isn't just css styling and Ajaxy things. it's about making the users in control and giving 'em a new experience. it should be a better experience, not just another nightmare.

I remember that I hadn't any problem before with accessing this website using FF. but now !! they are going through the wrong way.

I'm waiting the day when a really smart and innovative company come to take the lead from link.net .

I'm feeling bored. I'm working on fixing another spaghetti coded  project and my boss wants it finished soon. maybe you don't know that I'm working now in a software company here in Alexandria. It's a good company. the programmers there most of them are Asp.net-ers. they look cool but I didn't talk with them for more than a total of five minutes till now. you know, this "good morning" and this type of words.

 I'm the 2nd programmer to be hired in my department. it's a new department in the company called "the open-source department". yea, it's a very general name.also, I got this "Senior open-source developer" title. I like this "Senior" word, but placing "PHP" instead of "open-source" will be better I think. I don't like hearing people say "hay, open-source guy". this is stupid and very general. I'm a web developer who's using some open-source tools no more.

if they call me the open-source guy, so the Asp.net guys should be called "the closed-source guys". this doesn't make sense at all. if I'm an open-source guy, so should I only use open-source tools always?! what if we want to use Oracle or maybe MS SQL server ?
and if they are the closed-source guys, so should they only use this closed source tools?! I'm sure that they are using one open-source tool or another in their work. there is allot of open-source tools built for them.

that was my opinion about the name of my department.

PS: I was writing a very long blog post, but I thought that a little number of words can be more effective and also less boring. maybe from now on, I will write about only one topic in each post.

I was working the last night and someone was watching T.V in the other room. they were interviewing a wise and a very respected man from El-Azhar's University . he said something that I liked and I think what he said supports the meaning of what I wrote in a last post ( working with user groups ). this wise man said that his father told him when he was a kid ..

7 days without internet connection is totally enough to drive me crazy. but hay, you won't believe it .. I'm back with an ALMOST 40% functioning brain. this is great.

look at the bright side. I still can tell you the result of ( 5 × 2 ).

it's ( 9 )  .. right ?!!

I'm thinking again about this crazy ideas about regathering the - LOST - PHP Alexandria User Group. there is allot of PUGs (PHP User Group)s around the world and most of this groups are working well. creating a user group isn't that very big thing. most of the successful  PUGs members are just meeting each other one day a month at a coffee shop or something like that. they did it the simple way and it worked.

here in Alexandria we are trying to find the interested people. if we can just find 3 real enthusiasts, this will be great. I can't believe that we can't find these people in a city like Alexandria. you know, my records says that we have around 10 members in PHP Alexandria. 2 years ago [when we started the group], we were these enthusiasts who said that they want to do something big . yea, that big project that will make us more .. bla bla bla..  .  we said that every thing should be perfect . a big web server, subversion, sponsor ..etc, but we couldn't get any of these things at this time. so we did nothing. as our ideas were totally wrong at this time.

now [after 2 years of the beginning] we are trying to get the group active again. we got a website, but what's the value of the website without the members. let's get real, after 2 years of starting the group, allot of things were changed. even the way how every body thinks is changed. most of the members were hobbyists who weren't welling to go deeply in working with PHP. so it's normal that they are not interested now in this group and all the thing. so that we are searching for new members to give the group that fresh blood.

regarding to Hans Zaunere here,

yea, what we need is the participation of some professionals. this doesn't mean that the others can't participate in the group too. it's open for every body interested, but the professionals and every body that wants to be professional will take the real benefit.  it's will be nice if we can share ideas and do tech talk sessions about the cutting edge technologies and tools.

I remember that I had meetings before with guys from Alexandria who are members of ArabTeam2000. It was nice also to meet Tarik Ibrahim many times. also working with Ahmed Kelany was a mix of fun and increasing knowledge. the Visual Studio 2005 launch day in Cairo was a nice day too, meeting and talking with these smart guys is something that I will love to do again. meeting Hani Gamal when he came to Alexandria, gave me ideas about other things that I didn't ever think about before.

every one that we meet or work with, will learn us something new. working alone or only depending on one source of information or one way of thinking won't drive us to the success that we want. so here comes the benefit of the groups. even a meeting of 2 persons only, will be good.

Again, Again, Again .. back to work again. I don't know if this is normal or not, but I used to feel lazy after the end of each holiday. I'm setting here since the start of the day trying to do what I used to do before the start of the holiday, but just did around 50% of what should be done.

another annoying thing is getting the flu again for the 2nd time in less than a month. I don't know why the scientists  can't find a solution for something like that.