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 .

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-.

check xkcd.com & geekculture.com for more.

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

In the last days, I had the chance to play with the SDK of AIR beta (Adobe Integrated Runtime). on Adobe's website they introduce it as :


AIR is still in beta and till now it only supports the following operating systems

• Windows XP SP2
• Windows Vista Home Ultimate Edition
  
• Mac OS 10.4.8 and 10.4.9 (Intel and PowerPC)

* they will start working on supporting linux after the 1.0 release.

AIR mainly targets web developers. it allows you to develop desktop applications using your web development skills. you can develop AIR applications using HTML, JavaScript and Flash. you are not forced to use flash. you can only use HTML and JavaScript if you want.

not like the normal web development, in your AIR apps you won't need to check for the type of the user's browser . AIR uses the open source WebKit browser engine that's used by known web browsers like KHTML on KDE and Safari.

as I didn't work with Flash before, I chose the option of developing using HTML and JavaScript only. the nice thing is that I still have full control as I can access the AIR, Flash player and ActionScript APIs from my JavaScript code. this will allow me to do things I'm not allowed to do in a normal web application.

AIR comes with

• embedded SQLite database
• native windowing API
• file IO API
• application update API
• full control over your application's chrome
• online/offline API
  
• drag and drop support
  - Between operating system and Adobe AIR applications
  - Between Adobe AIR applications
  - Between native applications and Adobe AIR applications
• native icons
• standard installer
  

you can see that not like the normal web applications, the AIR applications have access to your file system and this will make you think about security. so like any normal desktop app, you have to use trusted applications only.

What not to expect from AIR?
AIR won't replace the normal desktop applications. Kevin Hoyt explains this here. AIR aims to get the web to the desktop (not vice versa).

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

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.

-------
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 :) .

Zend Webinar Wednesday
June 20, 2007

"Zend Framework 1.0 - An Overview"

Event address for attendees:
https://zend.webex.com/zend/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=574412187

Date and Time: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 9:00 am Pacific Daylight Time
(GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

Duration: 45 minutes, including Q&A

Description: Presenter: Bill Karwin, Zend Solutions Consultant
Target audience: PHP Developers

Event password: 123456

The Zend Framework is emerging as the preferred PHP programmer's toolkit for designing Web applications with best practices. In the month's prior to the 1.0 release, Zend Framework had over 1 million downloads and multiple commercial products are already being developed with Zend Framework. In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more.

Tune in to learn more about the value Zend Framework can offer your web
project. You will leave having learned:

* Three ways you can use Zend Framework to make your applications more secure
* Four ways Zend Framework promotes software development best practices
* Five ways Zend Framework can free you from reinventing the wheel - so you can focus on your area of innovation

Mohammed Hossam (a.k.a. Bashmohandes) wrote in his blog about an interesting test for programmers that tells you what type of programmer you are. I took the test and the result looks nearly like what I think of myself.

here is my results:

PHTB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.


You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

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.

Thomas Weidner, the leader of ZF's i18n (internationalization) team did a presentation about the i18n components provided by ZF and how to use them with examples.