Ammar Ibrahim's blog

Note: This was supposed to be blogged two days ago, but I couldn't because I was gonna miss the train to the airport, I'm already in Germany now.

I just got to Oslo all the way from Skien. I'm sitting at a friends office, Kaarel from Estonia. We spent the last few minutes here hacking. I'm gonna be heading to the airport in few minutes...

Some photos for the late night hacking session

The office

me hackin away on my laptop

Kaarel & his laptop

Less than an hour ago the PHP Vikinger 2006 unconference started. So far we've been dicussing what topics we're going discuss during today and tomorrow. Zak organized the event.

What's really amazing is that I'm sorrounded by really smart people; Rasmus Lerdorf the inventor of PHP is also attending.

Update( 1:30 PM ): The first discussion revolved around scalability and scalable architecture. The main point that Rasmus mentioned is to 'partition' your application. His example was Yahoo's mail; basicly every component of the service is split on a seperate server farm. e.g. address book component is quite seperate from sending mail. and it actually sits on a different server farm. He also mentioned that Yahoo has 110,000 servers!!!!!

Update( 2:45 PM ): Marcus Boerger gave an introduction to the reflection API. I'm bored of doing the updates... So I think I'll stop now

In few hours I will be heading to the airport to fly to Norway. I'm going to spend 7 days in Norway to participate in a conference & an unconference later on. 

Almost everything is ready, I really need to double check. Got lots of stuff to carry, big ass bag, back pack, laptop carrying case & a sleeping bag!

Today was really terrible, I will write the details later...

Everytime I get on a plane I can't but listen to "Leaving on a jet plane" by Frank Sinatra.

Would you trade freedom for stability?

I was listening to "Wish you were here" by Pink Floyd and one
verse made me think about who I really am, and the "branching" of my
life( Taking a decision, and choosing which path to discover ). And as the song
repeated over and over, I realized many lines question the idea of trading your
freedom, innovation, and challenge for stability, position & bureaucracy.

I'm a risk taker; in fact risk really turns me on. It's the sexiest motive
that drives me. Challenge is another big factor. Once I feel I'm a donkey, I
really stop functioning properly, there has to be something new to discover,
learn & disassemble. Once you master it, there has to be space for me to
build on top of it, and come up with something unique & new on top of it. What's more? Like
Frank Sinatra sings, "I did it my way"; and that is what really
counts.

Back to the song, "Did you exchange your walk-on part of the war for
a lead role in a cage", is the best line in the song. It tells you
exactly how I think of people who trade following paths with higher values for
things that are less important. It’s about being a less important person in a
path of innovation, and taking risk in big things, instead of playing a big
role in a narrow path with no real significance.

"Cold comfort for change" when we enjoy comfort, and don't
value change we truly become comfortably numb. In other words it's about being
passive Vs active, I can't explain in any known human language (natural
language) how much I hate to deal with passive passengers of life.

It's those who took the risk & the extra Kilometer were the ones to
change the world.