Ammar Ibrahim's blog

I went along with Zaid & Isam to have coffee at Burgerking, since it's the only place that's open after 1am. As usual we start discussing issues related to Technology; especially OpenSource & Linux.

Zaid Left at probably 2:30, then, me & Isam took a walk in Al madeenah Al monawrah Street. Isam asked me about my current involvments in OpenSource Projects. And it turned into a really interesting discussion, Here's Why OpenSource really matters to ME, apart from the usual stuff you always read over the net.

I'm not a 9-6 programmer, no, programming, computers technolgy and all that are more of a lifestyle & a culture to me. When somebody nicknames me "Geek", I consider it as a compliment! I couldn't find Self Esteem & Challenge in any work developed for my clients. In a couple of minutes I could come out with a really good architecture, and develop a really complex site according to their standards. The clients I worked with are some really high profile clients in the region and abroad, even developing a complete online solution for a major VoIP company was no challenge at all.

I decided this should change, I'm not learning, I'm not satisfied. I started by dedicating my free time to work on opensource projects, state of the art technologies & academic research. OpenSource gave me the challenege I needed, I worked with the best PHP developers in the world. We shared experiences, I learned from them, I tought them, we were all working as a community.

Most OpenSource developers initiate projects to satisfy their needs, needs to be a better programmer, a perfictionest. What OpenSource taught me, would have taken me 10 years to learn.

Currently I'm working with the godfather of HTTP & PHP Security, Chris Shiflett on some research. Chris formed a group of 6 PHP programmers to study the security of web applications. We will be doing lots of experemints, it's really exciting, I always wanted to do research and come out with something useful for the commnity. I hope we will come out with exciting results for people to benefit from.

OpenSource gave me what no other thing was able to give; Self Esteem, satisfaction & great learning oppurtunity. By looking at a well developed opensource application in a couple of days, I learn what the 'darn' university I go to was unable to teach me in 4 years. For this, I will be ever greatful to this great community.

I'm really shocked, I was surfing some forums, and there are many techniques to make pages load much much faster in firefox! IT's amazing.

I'm using Firefox 1.0 and I have a 512 ADSL connection. If you have dialup, there are some better tips over here.

in the adress bar Type 'about:config'
Change the following proporties to these values:
1) network.http.pipelining
2) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
3) network.http.proxy.pipelining

1) set to true
2) set to 32
3) set to true

What happens is that you enable pipelining. which enables the browser to get the parts of the page at the same time( parallel ). I suppose it opens a thread for every request. Becuase loading an html page is not one request, it must have a seperate request for every object in the page( Image, imported CSS .. ).

The only problem I encountered so far, is that on some sites images appear to be broken.

No that's not Pepsi. That's My blog Hope you like the new theme!

It's much cleaner, more usable & better for reading.

The Open source community has been lacking a professional audio editing software, something like soundForge.

There's a new project, called Wired. Wired is a professional music editing software, that runs on Linux. Still in 0.1 version, but definitly something to keep your eye on

Isn't this really funny? Seems like Microsoft used an illegal copy of soundForge to edit some wav file, read the story on sladhdot

Ahmad's Story trigerred up something in my mind.
Not what you might expect, this is a funny Syrian Theme for Grendizer, I really like it.

Download the file( wma ).

Although I was born in the 80's, Grendizer is one of my favorite cartoons. Cartoons back in the 80's and early 90's were just great!

I stumbled across a problem with Wordpress's API, Seems like there is NO way to hook to the comments moderation cleanly. This has been fixed in wordpress 1.3, which is not stable yet.

I subscribed to the list and contacted some wordpress developers. I've been told that there are two 'hooks' one before the comment is being stored, and one right after an email has been sent. So basicly I have few but not really good choices.

1) Put the comment in moderation mode after the email has been sent( this will be misleading to the admin )
2) hack the file wp-comments-post.php, to modify the whole process
3) Write the plugin for wordpress 1.3

I'm not sure what I'm gonna do! I'll keep you posted.

Good news to wordpress users. I started writing a plugin that would almost eliminate spam I will have the first version out in a couple of days.

The concept:
There's a great service called SURBL, which provides a black list of all spammers domains. So I will let the script check the spammers url's, emails and whatever is there against SURBL.

The plugin is gonna be published under the GPL license. More details later...

If you think Photo blogs are the hottest thing now, it's tim you think again A great Video Blog is out there. It's some sort of production diary for Peter Jacksons new movie, King is Kong.

Well, this is the funniest female expression i've ever heard!

I was chatting with a friend, and she asked me, "Do you know il 3ummo illy be2asher ghanam?" If you don't understand arabic, it litrally means "Do you know the guy who peels sheep?".

She was referring to the butcher, and she was serious!

for the past 4 years I have been saying I really hate the administration but I don't hate the Americans. I sympathize with the people, they are friendly and all that crap.

Well, Now I have a reason to hate the MAJORITY( not everyone of course); they re-elected bush.

I just felt like sharing my ideas

A year ago I started wondering if I could make my car intelligent and It all started. Since then I became obsessed with the idea, I've done so much research, it's really doable, All I need is time & some money. Back then I had little time and no extra money, now I got the money but no time at all.

The idea is based on a computer embedded in the car. And this computer should be able to get commands from the driver by using voice tags, the driver would say 'Music On', the system would start to play songs, and so on.

I will try to use open source software as much as possible. The operating System of the computer should be Linux of course.

This is just the basic idea; I have lots of things I wanna add. If all goes well, this should help handicapped people driver cars.

I think developing the first prototype should take 2 months of hard work, if I managed to get all the equipment I need.

Where does the name 'Catrina' come from?
I'll save that for press releases when I become famous

Finally, I got debian up and running with 2.6 Kernel, KDE and almost everything I need. The remaining issues I need to fix, is to recompile the kernel when I have more time, because I got the precompiled one. Also check all the device drivers and everything.

Next thing I'm gonna work on is writing a Database Layer(Wrapper) for MySQL in C. This is part of project NOISA.

Thanks to Mousa Nassar for pointing out that SUN is developing a totally new and innovative desktop, the project is named Project Looking Glass.

Also don't forget to check the presentation.

I believe if SUN didn't adopy Linux, they wouldn't have been able to come out with such things. Now they can concentrate on developing value added features instead of reinventing the wheel. Open Source made it possible.