IT & computers

This actually happened a minute ago, I was chatting with a friend:

Friend: so what is your work
Ammar"I'm a web Developer/Consultant, and I do some Voice Over IP Solutions
Friend:oh cool
Friend:aall tech stuff eh
Ammar:now, yeah all tech
Friend:voice over? wow u must have a nice voice
Ammar: Looooooooooooool, It's Voice Over IP, communication technology kinda thing

OK it's official now. I'm going to Muscat-Oman in May (inshalla) to give a presentation in a conference about online gaming. I'll be talking on may 3rd 14:15-15:15.

I'll be running a one hour interactive workshop about online gaming. I'll be representing Albawaba in this conference/workshop.

The interesting part is that there are alot of kickass companies participating in it; SUN, Nokia, Sony & Others.

Oman babes, here I come

Tommorrow at 8 PM i'll be leaving to Syria to attend & Speak @ FOSS 2005. Almost 20 people are going from Jordan to attend this conference, 3 are going to be speakers. All Jordanian speakers will speak on the 3rd day of the conference.

I'm really excited that I'm gonna be speaking in this conference, I'll be giving a presentation on building Web applications using Open source technologies( PHP ).

Hope to see you there guys

Today I got Netgear Wirless Router MR814. Now I can have a wireless connection at home since I got a laptop with WiFi. I like the idea of staying at bed, in your underwear while developing websites and browsing the internet probably this idea will get me more clients.

I bought a laptop yesterday. If you know me really well you'd know how much I hate laptops, but this was a good deal, and this laptop is basicly Kick Ass; Toshiba Tecra M1, 1.6 Centrino, 512MB Ram, 60GB harddrive, firewire, infrared, WiFi, Digital Video Card, Combo DVD/CD-RW And some more features. But the looks are yucky, Maybe i'll mod it to look like iMac or something

The reason why I hate laptops, they keyboard is silly, I can't even write my name on it. Beleive it or not I also hate LCDs, bigtime I'm planning to buy a dock station to solve these issues.

I'm planning to install Windows XP & Debian( Or Ubuntu ) on it.

But this would be good to present some stuff for my clients. carry my work around, spend my free time hacking when i'm not home.

After two weeks of hard work, we managed to completely move all the servers of Albawaba.com to a new hosting company. Now We have more servers, better hardware, optimized many things and better everything

Yesterday was the biggest operation, 17 hours non stop, 6pm-11am. It was PERFECT!

One new service has been added.

There are many things to improve. I'm not satisfied with the main website, as I haven't started working on it yet. We're working very hard to improve it.

Feedback Please

The PHP Security Consortium has officially launched. The following is the
press release:

--

Leading PHP Experts Join Forces to Establish the PHP Security Consortium

NEW YORK, NY - January 31, 2005 - An international group of PHP experts
today announced the official launch of the PHP Security Consortium
(PHPSC), a group whose mission is to promote secure programming practices
within the PHP community through education and exposition while
maintaining high ethical standards.

"As PHP has transitioned from personal projects to enterprise application
development, the need to educate the community about secure programming
practices has risen," said Chris Shiflett, the group's founder.

The PHPSC web site (http://phpsec.org/) provides a variety of security
resources for PHP developers, including the group's flagship project, the
PHP Security Guide.

"PHP application security is a topic of growing importance," said Andi
Gutmans, one of the group's charter members. "The launch of the PHP
Security Consortium is a landmark event for the PHP community, and because
most web development technologies face similar security concerns, we
believe that developers using other solutions can also benefit from our
efforts."

About the PHP Security Consortium

Founded in January 2005, the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC) is an
international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure
programming practices within the PHP community. Members of the PHPSC seek
to educate PHP developers about security through a variety of resources,
including documentation, tools, and standards.

In addition to their educational efforts, the PHPSC engages in exploratory
and experimental research in order to develop and promote standards of
best practice for PHP application development.

Isam Bayazidi Posted about FOSS Syria 2005.

I'm sooo excited for this event, and going for sure. The big surprise is that richard stallman is among the speakers there! I can't beleive it, hes the father, philosopher And inventor of the whole free software concept.

The List of speakers is exciting, Isam is going to be a speaker also. I can't beleive the Syrian guys, they are doing such a great job.

Last year it was one of the best conferences/workshops I've ever been to. Many useful sessions, interesting speakers & great food.

So Far I think 10 people from Jordan are coming.

• An APPLICATION was for employment.


• A PROGRAMME was a television show.


• WINDOWS were something you hated to clean.


• A KEYBOARD was a piano.


• MEMORY was something you lost with age.


• A CD was a bank account.


• COMPRESS was something you did to garbage.


• LOG ON was adding wood to a fire.


• A HARD DRIVE was a long trip on the road.


• A MOUSE PAD was where a mouse lived.


• And a BACKUP happened to your toilet.


• CUT you did with scissors.


• PASTE you did with glue.


• A WEB was a spider's home.


• And a VIRUS was a flu

Yahoo to release a windows desktop search software.

VIA: The Register

Seemes Like Yahoo wanna fight for a bigger share in the search market.

http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html

Voting is over, tararara, the package was accepted! NET_DNSBL made it to be an official PEAR package! We got +7, two marks higher than was needed.

Well, If you don't know what PEAR is, let me explain.

If you know NOTHING about programming, imagine you're a musician, and a peice of music you composed was accepted to be national anthem for your country hehe, something like that! If you're a designer, imagine working with the best artists from around the world, and then they accept your work as a master peice of something. I really can't explain how great this is.

To the computer GURUs, simply PEAR is the OFFICIAL PHP classes repository. When you download PHP, you will have the PEAR installer installed most likely. So it's top quality community accepted PHP code. The goal is to create generic reusable PHP packages. Think of it as the 'official' classes that come with Java, but not the JVM.

FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products." (quoted in [1])

This term is popular in the open source community. Anyway, Michi Ramsay is shooting a movie about open source, entitled FUD.

Download the trailer: FUD Trailer (6.3 MB) AVI

Open Usability - Mission Statement

OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together.

The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who want to contribute to software projects. And there are many developers who want to make their software more usable, and - as a consequence - more successful.

Isn't that interesting, it's about time to have more usable open source software!

Interesting article Via InfoWorld.

My favorites are:

2. Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it

11. Developing Web apps for IE only

18. Underestimating PHP

IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages -- particularly PHP