Shreef

Yup, I’m back again to the old days of setting all day/night here reading blogs, books and coding. I really missed these things. after a 22 month serving in the army, I don’t feel that I was not connected to this world. actually every vacation, I kept reading the dozens of blog posts collected by my RSS reader (Google Reader) and followed my friends on FaceBook to keep up about their news. maybe my only problem now is with updating my list of programs and tools to continue what I started before.

I have installed the latest version of Subversion, and I had a problem with making my svn repository work on a virtual host I created before on my Apache web server 2.2.11 . the svn book wasn’t really helpful with this problem and I had to find a solution. also, updated my PHP installation to v5.3 . I really like the new improvements to the language, but I don’t really know the reason of adding the GoTo operator, maybe I missed something in the last months, and this feature is helpful someway or another. but I still don’t remember that somebody was in need for this functionality before.

thanks Xkcd.com 

anyway, I still have to update to MySQL 5.4 and to explore what’s new in python 3.0 . and about .Net, I will keep it a way at least to the end of this month till I finish the revision of php and python.

I had that idea of getting back again to contributing to open source projects. my last experience as a contributor to ZendFramework was really great. it gave me challenges I didn’t face before and was a great chance to get in touch and work with number of the most recognized PHP developers in the world and the developers of the core of the php language. I’m still searching for the right project to contribute to. let me know If you have a challenging and interesting one.

This is all what I have for this post. you are welcome to contact me if you need something or if you just want to say hi. you can follow me on Twitter or on FaceBook or you can follow my shared items on Google reader .

Do you remember me?I

Actually it’s not my fault. they give me short vacation for each month or more I spend in the desert. put yourself in my shoes, when you live in a far isolated place where you don’t have time to watch the news or have any way to know what happens in the world, what will you be able to blog about. I have nothing to say as I know nothing.

I just wanted to say hi again and tell you that I’m still a life. It’s good that facebook, twitter, Google reader help me know what happened to my friends and what’s the new technologies.

~5 months left since I joined the army. what changed?? I feel somewhat more athletic and gained experience in working with a wide range of personality types .. from the smartest to the dumbest. my average number of sleeping hours is 6 to 7 hours in the normal days. it can be 4 to 5 hours only if I have to do night guarding service. I learned to do every thing by myself without help from others. the lack for tools doesn’t allow us to not finish the work. living in a tough environment is very hard, but the results of this experience makes you better. I still have 15 months coming before I finish my mandatory military service and I hope that I ‘ll keep surviving.

On the other hand, my social life is collapsing. whenever I come for vacation, I spend that time home without going out. I don’t know the news of my friends. maybe the only thing that keeps me updated about what happens in the outside world whenever I return is my RSS reader, twitter ,and FaceBook. in the army, I like the fact that I’m working on a very expensive and powerful machine, but it’s not a computer. I’m worried about how low my programming experience and level ‘ll go down after a year from now. all what I’m able to do now is taking programming books with me and coding on papers, and this is what I was doing through the previous months.

I ‘ll be here till friday, then I ‘ll go in a 12 hours travel again to the military base. so bad that I won’t be able to attend the Agile Egypt day, but I hope that my next vacation timing ‘ll allow me to attend EDC 2008 (Egypt Developers Conference). Mohamed Meligy said that this year it will be in mid April.

this days I feel happy as I got some good news about some friends:
the 1st is that Mohamed Hossam‘s marriage is today.
the 2nd is that Mohamed Hossam ‘ll join the work force at Microsoft, he ‘ll join the live.com team.
the other thing is Tarik Ibrahim‘s post about the waited baby :)
I wanna congratulate them and wish them luck and happiness in their lives.

I know that some friends were waiting to catch me on msn messenger for a chat, but I’m sorry as I have problem with my windows OS that needs some time to investigate it. I didn’t want to lose some of my precious vacation time, so I moved to my Ubuntu OS. if you want, you can catch me on twitter or facebook only as I don’t like Pidgin that much, I just us it for IRC and Japper.

I’m online again. after spending 30 days in the army, I can see how I wasn’t caring enough about time and how luxurious my life was. my family isn’t that rich, but the fact that you can set on a chair and eat what you want whenever you want is a luxury by it self.

if I compare what I imagined about the life in the army and what I saw in these 30 days, I will say that the army isn’t that frightening. its just a well organized place where every thing you do, have to be done perfectly and in time. you will life with your comrades 24/7, so you will know each other well. it’s a good environment to find good friends.

I remember that I was planning to write about this experience, but they warned us allot about talking about the daily routine or whatever happens in the army. “what happens in the army, stays in the army“. I didn’t finish my 45 days yet. I still have another 2 to 3 weeks to spend in the training center. I came home 2 days ago and I will leave tomorrow -isA-.

it looks like many things happened on the internet in the last month. my mail box and feed reader are full of new items.

1. Flock – a new browser
I read about it on my twitter page. it looks like @ramsey , @CalEvans ,and many others left Firefox and moved to this new browser. I will quote Ben Ramsey here :

ramsey Flock left open all night with all my extensions enabled. No memory leaks or slow load times. Pages still load fast! Woo-hoo!

2. the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5
my knowledge about .Net will start going down so fast starting from this moment. maybe I will be back to .Net when they release v5.0 .

3.  iPod touch.
I ‘ll love to buy an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, but I will wait till steve jobs increases the storage or lowers the price.

4. Kindle – Amazon’s e-book reader
I need to read more about this thing. till now I don’t know if I will be able to read my old PDF books on it or not ?? another thing, the price is high.

what else happened in the last 30 days ?! if you know something else, just tell me please.

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