Shreef

After 1 hour (at 1:00 am), I will be heading to the training center in Cairo. they call it the “HiKeyStep”. this morning, they told me that I will be serving in the “Leadership organs – اجهزة القيادة”. I don’t know what I will be doing there, but I like the name … yeah, “Leadership” .. sounds cool.

I have to be in the training center at 7:00 am. I’m getting my bag ready for the travel,  they told us not to get any foods or mobiles.

so, I will see you all after 45 days -en sha2 Allah- .

bye

It’s long time since my last post here. I don’t know the reason, but maybe it’s because I was tired, depressed or had nothing to say. many things happened in the last 6 weeks that kept me overwhelmed.

The biggest thing was my struggle to finish my military service papers. I’m now considered to be a soldier in the army starting from 23-10-2007. it will start with living for 45 days in the Army’s training center. there is where they change us from normal citizens to army soldiers. every one I met that been in the army before said that these 45 days are the worst days for every soldier. it’s not about the heavy training, but it’s about the brainwashing.

Anyway, I’m trying to keep my self thinking about how interesting is learning new things and living in a tough environment. ok, it’s not that interesting, but I will keep pretending that its the coolest thing ever since the 4-wheel bike.

Other thing, I now own the domain shreef.com . I will keep it forwarding to here till I get some time to work on the new website. this will depend on how the things will go in the army -isA-. I don’t know where I will be serving yet.

I’m not available on any IM service now. I just keep updating my twitter and facebook . I was thinking about blogging my experience after coming back from the 45 training days in the army, but Korayem remembered me about the fact that at this time, I mostly won’t be able to remember what blogging is. :) lol

In the last days, I had the chance to play with the SDK of AIR beta (Adobe Integrated Runtime). on Adobe’s website they introduce it as :

AIR is still in beta and till now it only supports the following operating systems

• Windows XP SP2
• Windows Vista Home Ultimate Edition
• Mac OS 10.4.8 and 10.4.9 (Intel and PowerPC)

* they will start working on supporting linux after the 1.0 release.

AIR mainly targets web developers. it allows you to develop desktop applications using your web development skills. you can develop AIR applications using HTML, JavaScript and Flash. you are not forced to use flash. you can only use HTML and JavaScript if you want.

not like the normal web development, in your AIR apps you won’t need to check for the type of the user’s browser . AIR uses the open source WebKit browser engine that’s used by known web browsers like KHTML on KDE and Safari.

as I didn’t work with Flash before, I chose the option of developing using HTML and JavaScript only. the nice thing is that I still have full control as I can access the AIR, Flash player and ActionScript APIs from my JavaScript code. this will allow me to do things I’m not allowed to do in a normal web application.

AIR comes with

• embedded SQLite database
• native windowing API
• file IO API
• application update API
• full control over your application’s chrome
• online/offline API
• drag and drop support
  - Between operating system and Adobe AIR applications
  - Between Adobe AIR applications
  - Between native applications and Adobe AIR applications
• native icons
• standard installer

you can see that not like the normal web applications, the AIR applications have access to your file system and this will make you think about security. so like any normal desktop app, you have to use trusted applications only.

What not to expect from AIR?
AIR won’t replace the normal desktop applications. Kevin Hoyt explains this here. AIR aims to get the web to the desktop (not vice versa).

It was a nice day. the sessions were great and meeting people like Mohammed Hossam, Amr Sobhy, Mohamed Tanna and Mohamed Meligy is more than great. I didn’t have the chance of attending Mohammed Hossam’s SOA session from the beginning (read the previous post). Amr was there from the beginning and he said that it was very good and that he liked how M.Hossam presented it.

the 2nd session I attended was about SilverLight . it was a beginners introduction of what you can do using this new technology . it left me hungry for more information …

the 3rd one was about SEO by M.Meligy. the contents were great like expected . mostly, I get bored so fast , but how Meligy moves and talks on the stage succeeded to keep my eyes opened till the end of the session.

the 4th one was “CLR by XAML” by Hossam Zain. It was great and added  more to what we saw in the SilverLight session. Amr didn’t attend this session, he went to the “LINQ for XML” one by Mai Soliman. we wondered if this was her first public talk (I know this feeling).

the 5th was “IronPython and C# 3.0, a dialog” by Mohamad Tayseer and Mohammed Hossam. it was one of the best sessions I attended in this day.

the 6th was the open mic session. all of the attendees were allowed to talk. SK guys managed the talk to the way of why some people use .net while others use Java and others like me use php for web development. then it went to be about why most of software and websites innovations were born in the open source community, taking sample like how FaceBook uses php (why they chose it?). then Dudy tried to change the direction of the conversation to be about which is the most important from your perspective? innovation, idea, technology or what ?

the first guy to talk from the attendees started by defending .net against Java and talking about how every thing he wants is already in .net, while he believes that some other people will like to use Java to save some money and he didn’t see this as a bad thing.
some other guy took the mic and started to talk about that we shouldn’t be depending on one platform as we don’t know what the companies will like to use more in the future, so we have to be ready for a day like that.
then Mohammed Hossam started to narrow the scope of the conversation to make the talk about web development specially. why there is php, python, .net and java? why some people choose one over another. some ex-php developers who moved to .net started to talk about how rich and powerful is the .net platform than php.
at this time I got the courage to talk. I went to the stage and took the mic and looked at the attendees, and Bang!!, I forgot the points I was going to talk about and what the previous guy said. I had to make up something to talk about in less than 3 seconds so I can look less stupid. I quoted something that I don’t really remember who said it, maybe Wez Furlong. I said “in php, the community creates what’s needed, we innovate by our selves. the .net guys, will wait till Microsoft innovates”.
I went back to my seat and tried to remember what I was going really  to talk about and didn’t give very good attention to what the others said after that.

at the end of the session, I remembered the stupid points again but there were no time. anyway, the points were:

- ask the attendees: how many web developers here?
# main point: the difference between how most of the ASP.net and PHP developers think.
- ask the attendees: who uses JS tools like YUI, JQuery, Prototype?
- ask the attendees: who uses or cares about
    – web usability?
    – web pages accessibility? (who knows what’s the accessibility here and who cares about that?)
    – web standards?
- who knows what’s microformats?
# main point : why open source community innovates while .net isn’t?
- the open source community cares about more low level details.
- we know the ins and outs of our tools
- we created it
- we know why it was created
- we share ideas

I learned that a pin and paper should be always my friends, specially in situations like that. so learn from my fault and write what you are going to talk about on some paper before asking for the mic. I saw other people in the session who forgot every thing after taking the mic.

the next session is “In-depth JavaScript” by M.Meligy. he talked about JavaScript and Managed JavaScript. I title it as one of the best too.

I rate all the day: Very Good. I will be willing to attend the next Demo Day -en sha2 Allah- :-)