Ammar Ibrahim's blog

I couldn't blog the past two weeks, I was exteremly busy finishing projects. Now, after the hard work is semi-over, I'm really happy and satisfied. There were days were i worked over 20 hours. and stayed awake for 30 hours straight!

I got an afro now oh yeah beenie mon! Jamaica mon!

I'll be writing more often!

Cheerz

I went yesterday with my friends to "Sheherazade". It took place at the Citadel, the setting was GREAT. It started at 9:00 pm, it was supposed to start at 8:30. But hey welcome to Jordan I wouldn't have felt home if they started on time.

The play started with the great "Naseer Shamma" entering with his Oud. He played for something like 10-15 minutes. This guy is amazing. The way he plays Oud is so different. He walked out and the Musical play started. It's a ballet Kinda thing. It was exciting the first 30 minutes, then it became boring. We were waiting all the time for Naseer Shamma to come back. We waited for an hour and a half, he came back them played for 2 minutes and then the thing ended. Hehe.

I got a call from Ma'en. And I decided to go to Shehrezad one thousand and one nights. The really thing is that Naseer Shamma, Iraqi musician and Oud Player is part of it. The thing starts after one hour, so I better go and get ready

And the other events I'm looking forward to go to are:

• Tango Flamenco: Those who know me, know how much I'm obsessed with Flamenco and Spanish Culture. This is te reason that got me to learn Spanish!


• Fire of Anatolia: I was watching the TV yesterday(Yes3ed saba7ak) and they played parts of it, It looks amazing!

I'll keep ya posted

You might be wondering, how on earth can Programming and a Musical Legend be related.

Well, I'm listening to a song called "I did it my way". It just triggered so many things. Look at how many software products do the same thing. But then when you ask the programmer, he'd reply:"Mine is different, I did it my way".

I always look at programming as a culture & way of life. It's not simply "Programming". Those who program just to earn a living will never change the world, they'll remain ordinary people.

Programming is so influenced by every science. To your surprise, a new Programming methedology, A very popular one infact was inspired by an "Architect & Urban planner". A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) is a book discusses the creation of a pattern language to have formal well tested methods to solve problems. And this led to the existance of "Design patterns" in computer science.

I'm one of those people who like to read original texts, and enhance my theoritical understanding of things. I always try to relate other sciences to computer science. I have my own theory about poetry & Programming.

I always feel when I write a program that I'm writing a poem. And computer sceince should be taught the way poetry is taught. Students should look at many programs, critique them and analyze them. We never did that at the university. We barely study a 50 lines of code, if not less. What students need is to feel the art behind application design, feel the code, and enjoy the beauty of well written applications.

How many times have you encountered the following problem? You issue a SQL query using 'mysql' Command line client and you get something like this.


well, guess what. Ammar comes to the rescue you can display your records Vertically. After you write the SQL statement write '\\\\G' instead of ';' or '\\\\g'. E.g: SELECT * FROM users \\\\G

This is what you get

Tonight at 8pm, Jordan Will play against Iran. It's probably the game of the year. We have been waiting for this game for months.

Jordan has 9 points & Iran 6 points. If Jordan wins ( Inshalla ), most probably it'll qualify to the next round. We're going like a big group to watch the game in books@cafe! Everybody got their Jordan T-shirts & Flags. If Jordan wins, god only knows what will happen, I'm sure it's going to be a huge mess.

Good Luck Jordan!

5 more invitations. Just leave a comment.

Well, before you continue reading, you must know that I have been writing code for almost 11 hours, since midnight. Is it a bug? strange operator precedence rules? or probably i'm too sleepy?.

First of all, I have a function array2url(array $array) . It's a simple function that I wrote to serialize arrays to be passed into URLs. writes the array as "&key=value" it also encodes the values to be passed correctly in the URL.

Now Look at this example.

[php]
$passVars = array( 'page_id' => 532);
echo 'delete.php?delete=1' . array2url($passVars);
[/php]

what i get is

&page_id=532delete.php?delete=1

Instead of

delete.php?delete=1&page_id=532

Could anybody please explain this?

UPDATE 7th Sep.

I found the problem, I was sleepy and i was echoing the output inside the function. Which is not the right thing to do. so i modified it to return the output.

Not even the current situations held Iraqi's and The free minds to organize a Linux Install fest.

Read the details on Linux Journal

I can invite up to 3 people to Gmail. If you want to receive an invitation just leave a comment .

Well, Recently whenever I develop a website. I take a look at the requirements, and I browse PEAR's packages.

PEAR: PHP Extension and Application Repository.

PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.

A project i'm currently working on should be able to process Credit Cards. There are many ways to do that. I hate the way many sites have a different page to process your order information. It makes the user think twice before buying, and really doesn't look professional. this is called SIM( Simple Integration Method) according to Authorize.net.

I'm more into AIM( Advanced Integration Methods). You develop your own forms, payment processor and everything, then you send the payment information to the payment gateway, and it tells you if the transaction should be approved or not.

One very useful package I found from PEAR is Payment_Process. It even supports payments using e-checks. Be warned this package is still in beta.

Normally I would write wrappers around packages to make my job eaiser, because i'm gonna call the payment processor from many different locations. I try to make the wrapper a one function only. and of course my wrappers are not re-usable. They would be very specific to the project.

Now I'm looking at some really good frameworks to have a unified coding standards and rules. And of course all the good reasons to use a framework, which I will not dicuss in this post. Good candidates are ez, Xaraya and InterJinn.

Chris Shiflett released a PHP security paper (pdf). I read the 55 page pdf. And I must say it's good.

I'm aware of most of the things I read about. I have been reading alot about PHP application security. The really interesting part is the part about sessions. I will try to add those tips he provided in my future session implementations.

But there's one thing I want to add. When I work with session based logins, I always store the IP of the user. And If it changed, I automatically logout both users. Basicly this is a trivial session Hijacking defense. It makes the attacker's mission a little bit harder. He needs to steal the session ID, and spoof with the same IP Address.

Last week Ahmad Humeid wrote "Catching the text thieves!". I'd like to make a quick note that there's a new tool designed for this purpose, Copy Scape. Copy Scape, still in Beta right now.

Copy Scape runs over google's technology. It utalizes the smart google API.