I will be leaving to Italy in few days to continue my work on an interesting project I'm about to finalize this month. A friend came up with a crazy idea to imeplement a cheap, but higher quality entertainment system for private Yachts. It turned out to be so much more challenging than I thought it would be. The system is entirely built using Apple technologies. I will be writing more about it in the near future once I finalize the entire setup.
Today we [soft] launched the alpha [and buggy] version of Sharekna.com, The free online Video and Photo sharing for the Arab world.
From a technical point of view, the site was built using CodeIgniter as an underlying framework, I had to modify some parts of the core to ease parts of handling Arabic and to have nice Arabic URLs ala Wikipedia style. CodeIgniter is not the greatest framework, but I would really recommend it for the first MVC encounter, especially if you have less experienced developers working on a project. The way it separates M from V from C is nice and easy to grasp even if the developer has no OOP experience. The thing that we did to a great degree is completely re sturcture the way CodeIgniter handles views. I hate how that was handled, and changed it to a more component/block based templating that proved to be a great time savior for our CSS/(x)HTML dude. The 2 other things I really hate about CodeIgniter are the way (GET & POST) are handled and the freakin disgusting DB layer that comes with it.
Another interesting thing we used was eZ Components (EZC), which to me is cleanest/most stable PHP code I have seen to date. EZC was integrated in CodeIgniter as a helper and it became very easy to load (autoload) EZC from within CodeIgniter. EZC was mainly used for image manipulation, and I'm very satisfied with the results.
Growing up in Jordan teaches you to be tough, and sharpens the art of hiding your emotions. As a male you are supposed to be mtamse7 (). I'm not ashamed to show my emotions once a while (whenever my Jordanian pride lets me). Yesterday, while checking out YouTube, I found a video that received over 20 million views! I thought I should check it out. It happens to be an audition for Britain Got Talent, which - not surprisingly - is the counterpart of America Got Talent. I thought this would entertain me for few minutes. So, I played the video and to my surprise it let my eyes drop few tears. I'm sure it would be very hard to understand as there's nothing emotional about it. But, to me it is. I'll let you watch the video below, then read what I have to see below.
There you see, a sub ordinary human, not very young, who most of us would never be interested in from the way he looks. He's modest to a degree I can't comprehend. He shows up on stage, with obvious lack of confidence and a rusty suit. Then he completely leaves you in shock! It's very hard to believe. The words are failing to describe my interest in this situation, I wish I was a better writer.
Then, you get to see that because there was a platform, this very ordinary man will become the next Pavarotti. Oh how I wish we could have a platform one day for someone to solve the humanitarian issue in Palestine. How I would love to see some ordinary man revolt, overnight, and solve our misery. We need Paul Potts, we need a hero.
Life has a weird way of balancing things out. I'm a very scientific person that loves technology to the max, and I spend all my day interacting with advanced technology. Even when I run, I have sensors, remotes and hi tech crap over my body to tune and benchmark my runs. You would expect me to trust science when it comes to my health, not that I don't, but I love organic things. I happen to hate medicine a lot, on average I take 4 Panadol pills a year, and that is it. I clearly remember a few years when I didn't take any medicine at all. I'm sort of an old 7ajjeh (old woman) when I have a flu; I keep myself warm, relax, and drink lots of orange juice. Never medicine.
Even when it comes to food, I like healthy food, not because I'm on diet (god forbid), but it's actually tastier. I find processed food usually disgusting, I grew up in a healthy family. I would assume that my family are helth freaks, we're thin it's not a joke. I don't even like sugar that much, which is a weird for half a Nabulsi.
I just wonder for how long can I keep my hatred to medicine before I have those bags of medicine all around me.
It's not a joke, I'm as scared as you are. I will be running a marathon in 10 days! It may surprise those who know my bad habits of smoking, partying like there's no tomorrow, and lack of physical activity. Fortunately, I quit smoking almost 3 months ago, and decided to become a healthier creature. I've been practicing for some time now, and hopefully, my team will be able to finish the race.
Dead to Read (D2R) is an annual event for psychos, you get teams of 10 people to run 242KM from Dead Sea to Red Sea in under 24 hours. we start running at 3 PM Thursday Jan 31st, and finish (hopefully), by friday morning. I don't understand how I will be awake for 24 hours running. Let that not worry you, as I'm sure a lost hyena will find my sweaty meat tasty on the way down to Aqaba.
My team is a combination of not-bad-runners, horrible runners, ballroom dancer, gimp and a friend's wife. Since the friend's wife is the only woman on the team, we decided to call our team "Sarah and the Sausage Factory". I already heard the not-so-funny jokes of "small sausage, and 4 inch sausage factory". The bad news is that if we win, we won't get any press coverage, I'm sure any editor who grow up in a nasty family would understand the nasty name.
BEIJING (Reuters) - A 19-year-old Chinese student recorded the killing
and dismembering of her married lover by her boyfriend, local media
said on Friday.
I'm currently in Italy, in a quiet industrial town called Ancona. I will be heading to Rome in few hours, hopefully I will get to see the Colosseum. The thing I'm loving about Italy is food, it's so freakin' good. Gotta run, will write more when I can.
I would like to share a story that just took place.
I developed a habit of working from a nice coffee place called Gloria
Jeans (Especially that I don't like Starbucks). The place happens to
have a free WIFI for the customers. As I walked in, I saw a young lady
and a young man setting up their new MacBook. I introduced myself and
welcomed them to the Mac world and helped them setup a few things, as
they had just started their Mac for the first time. They were so
excited and in love with their machine. I also told them about our Mac Users Group, and they said they will join and spread the word.
It would be great if we can get more & more users to this group to share our thoughts, and hopefully learn. Please, all Mac users out there, help us create a decent community.
I'm always angry when someone mentions RoR, it's like teaching a new dog new tricks, when the old dog knows it all.
For the love of god, stop migrating to RoR just because it's cool. No one ever said RoR sucks, it's just that there's SO much pre-exisitng PHP code that you would never find in any other language. 40% of the top 100 sites are PHP, and PHP is the most used language on the Internet. What else do you want to know?
One of the reasons I love Ramadan is that I become productive in a crazy way. I can't get myself to sleep before my stomache is full. I end up working until the last minute. I finish a huge bulk of my daily work before Iftar. I usually end up having a nap after Iftar (beauty sleep). After the nap I start hacking & experimenting with different stuff. Don't think of hacking the wrong way.
So what have I been up to recently? Mostly hacking Apple related products; the two most enjoyable toys were the iPhone and Apple TV. If time permits I'm going to start blogging more about that.
Once upon a time
there was a young man who wanted to become a great writer. "I want to
write things the whole world will read," he declared. "Stuff that will
elicit strong emotions from people in every walk of life. I want my
writing to make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger."
He now lives happily ever after in Redmond, Washington, writing error messages for Microsoft.
