Shref in Life: Tech news

SK Demo Day 2

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:53:09 GMT

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 :) .

iT Plus magazine

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:33:18 GMT

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.

Safari for Windows

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:16:05 GMT

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.

Google acquired FeedBurner

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:55:42 GMT

It's official now. Google acquired FeedBurner.

Yahoo! Pipes

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:41:34 GMT

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 ( ).

ZF: Preview Release 0.2.0

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:14:23 GMT

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

also realeased the Zend GData Client Library Preview 0.2.0 .

quoted from the realease notes:

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.

Let's make it a geeky Happy feast

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:26:23 GMT

I wish you all muslims a happy eftar feast :-).

don't worry, I'm not planning to make it a long heavy post ( this is the feast people ). just keep reading and stop eating cookies and biscuits.

The first thing in this post is about women !!

Manual Lemos the founder and manager of phpclasses.org posted in his blog about a group of women working to united all the women participating in the PHP world in one user group called PHPWomen .

I like the idea. maybe this will encourge more women to get in the PHP world. I can imagine myself working in a company and all my colleagues in the room are young pretty women know the difference between web cookies and biscuits. lol

also there is comunity for women who like Linux called LinuxChix . ( any body intersted in creating any geeky comunity for men ?!! ).

okay, the next thing is about the PHP Security Consortium. Ed Finkler is leading a project called PHPSecInfo. the aim of the project is providing the developers with something like phpinfo() which generates security reports about their PHP environment with suggestions to get that PHP environment more secure.

I read a little in the API but maybe I will check it later for more details. I have added that to my To-Do List . maybe I will write a full post about it after that -- in shaa ALLAH.

where are you going?! I didn't finish this post.

here is some funny geeky comics from The Joy of tech website

happy feast and coding.

اخبار جوجل - بالعربى

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:16:32 GMT

مصادفة انهاردة كنت عايز اشوف الأخبار فى google news و كنت متوقع انها انجليزى كالعادة, لكن ظهرلى منها نسخة عربى على عكس المتوقع.
كان احتمال ان الخدمة دى تقدم باللغة العربية ضعيف على حسب حساباتى فى وقت سابق و دة ليه اسباب :

قلة المواقع الأخبارية العربية "الحقيقية" نسبيا
إذا دخلت وشفت النسخة الأنجليزى او الصينية حتى , حتلاقى انهم بيعتمدوا على عدد كبير جدا من مصادر الأخبار يفوق العدد الى بيعتمدوا
عليه فى النسخة العربية بمراحل.
خدمات الـ RSS Feeds و الـ web services فى المواقع الى موجودة شبه معدومة.
لمة بتدخل على المواقع الأخبارية العربية قليلا لمة بتلاقى الخدمات دى موجودة , و انا من شهرين تقريبا كنت شغال فى حاجة ليها نفس فكرة
google news و كانت المشكلة فى المصادر بتاعة الأخبار و ازاى حتجيب الأخبار منها ,
بعد البحث وصلت لبعض المواقع الى بتقدم RSS Feeds و كلها مواقع اخبارية اجنبية بس بتقدم خدمة الأخبار بالعربى بالأضافة لموقع قناة
العربية, على العكس ان فى حالة google تلاقى انهم بيجيبوا اخبار من مواقع مش بتقدم اى من الخدمات المذكورة .
احتمال اعتماد google على الـ spiders بتاعتها فى انها بتعمل جرد للمواقع الأخبارية دى و بعد كدة بتعمل إن صح التعبير قص لجسم الخبر
وبياناته و بعد كدة بتستخدمه - اعتقد انه احتمال شبه منعدم لآن google مش حتخاطر بأن فى يوم من الأيام الموقع الى بيخدوا منه الخبر يغير
هيكلية عرضه للصفحات .
الأحتمال التانى و اعتقد انه الأقرب للصحة هو ان المواقع الأخبارية دى جالها عرض من google نفسها بحيث ان المواقع دى توفر لـ google
بوسيلة او بأخرى بيانات عن اخر الأخبار الموجودة عندهم [ حتى لو الخدمات دى مش متوفرة للزائر العادى ] و اكيد عدم توفير حاجة زى كدة
للمستخدم العادى ليها سبب عند مديرى المواقع دى , و انا كنت سمعت مجموعة من الأراء عن ليه فى ناس مش عايزة تقدم الخدمات دى رغم انى
مش مقتنع بيها و غالبا بتكون المشكلة مش فى مطورى الموقع على قد مهى ضغوط اخرى !!.

على فكرة المشروع الى كنت شغال عليه دة وقف فى نصه تقريبا , و السبب هو ان كل الملفات راحت لمة مجموعة من الظرفاء عملوا format للهارد
و صديقنا احمد كيلانى كان موجود و هم بيفرمتوا الجهاز المسكين و وقف يراقب الجريمة فى صمت.
مش حنسهالك يا ابو حميد , ليك شبكة واقعة عندى إن شاء الله , lol

سلام

Oracle Magazine

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:49:10 GMT

It was 11:15 am when I was sleeping and the new ( July - August 2006 ) issue of the Oracle Magazine arrived to my home. I can guess that I have subscriped to get the printed edition in the end of the last year, as I saw the name of my last company writen with my detailes on the invoice.

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