3x-w = WWW

Social Media. Beyond Revolutions.

2011-06-08T23:10:00.001+03:00

A week ago, Ashraf Abu Maraq invited me to give a talk as a guest speaker of Amideast Cisco Institution Program in Palestine. I talked yesterday about how startups and small businesses are leveraging social media to promote their businesses. I highly recommend you checkout their website and read about the different modules they offer.

My presentation took a lot of time to show traditional media versus the new media and how the first one is in decline. This part had a great interest from the participants in the program and almost everyone agreed that in the past 5 years there were huge shift of how we consume media, comparing 5 hours daily 5 years ago to 4 hours a year (!) of TV consumption nowadays! (Of course these are not official stats, these are just my own personal consumption, and kinda relate to others).

I've tried to give examples on how businesses, communities and politicians succeeded through the help of the new communication channels of Social media. One example was Aramex and how active they are on Twitter, turning people's complains into satisfaction. It's brilliant.

Other interesting examples that I've went over were Qatar Bid for hosting World Cup 2022 and how the social media was a key criteria in determining the community support for the bid when Qatar bid had half a million supporters on social media while all others had 200,000 combined!

I've also talked about Zappos, a shoe-sopping ecommerce website that was acquired by Amazon in 2009 and how its employees all are on twitter and use it to promote bits of Zappos culture. One of the employees have 1.7 Million follower tweeted before he went on stage to give a talk on a conference: "Spilled Coke on left leg of jeans, so poured some water on right leg so looks like the denim fade".

We also talked about how companies like Jawwal and Sbitany are using social media extensively and what importance does it play in branding and following up with customers.

We also discussed how a small budget with creative thinking would help promoting a business leveraging simple social media characteristics and played a video that shows how Axe used the Relationship Status function of Facebook to promote the Axe Effect for Tunisian Men. Check it out!

Of course we also talked about TEDxRamallah and the amount of exposure it got when it trended on Twitter along with 9 speakers that also trended globally! That was amazing.

I am no social media expert, but I've been working on multiple things and getting deeply involved with Social media, from an enduser point, developing social media strategies and promoting businesses, companies and projects like TABO Palestine (Twitter) and MENA Geothermal (Twitter). I've also built A Facebook Application along with Morad Taleeb that will be used by one of the biggest Palestinian companies that are socialmedia active as part of our work with Bazinga! and promoting new technologies and techniques to promote businesses! As well as actually developing and building Picatweet, a Twitter-like web app for sharing photos streams and seeing what is happening around the world, which twitter recently decided to do.

Recently, 2 young people joined Bazinga! Social, Farah and Tareq. I am also talking to interesting social media oriented people and we might start hosting workshops around the different topics.

How are you using Social Media and for what causes? Would you be interested in attending Workshops around Social Media? What topics you would like to hear about?

Set Challenges not Goals - Challenge Accepted!

2011-06-05T01:34:00.001+03:00

How many times you have set a goal for yourself and never got the chance to accomplish it or stopped in the middle of the way. Whether it is losing 15 pounds or writing a novel or learning a new skill.

Recently I have been following Matt Cutts blog, a software engineer at Google. And admiring his 30-days challenges that he set for himself and then publish the results of the challenge. And I learned a lot.

The first thing I learned is that it’s not the destination, but the journey that is worth it. It’s not about publishing the novel rather than the challenges and the troubles that you had to go through to get there. It’s not about launching a startup rather than the learning experience that you go through while working with people.

The second thing I learned was not to overwhelm yourself with too many challenges at one time, try breaking it down, if you wanna write a novel in English, maybe you should first read some great novels that people wrote and maybe learn some more English vocabulary and so on.

The third thing I learnt is what I put in the title of this post, to set challenges not goals. Don’t put a goal to lose 15 pound, rather set a challenge that you will practice daily, or eat healthy and so on. Don’t set a goal to launch your startup in 3 months, rather set challenges to write 50 lines of code a day or devote 2 hours to writing code each day.

To me, the problem of setting goals is that they are over-glorified, and if someone felt that they are not going to accomplish the goal by the end of the deadline they set themselves, people tend to lose passion and the drive to get to that goal. On the other hand, by setting smaller challenges, I get great chunk of driver each time I finish a challenge. If I didn’t get to finish a challenge, however, I might want to take it a bit further down and make it a smaller challenge next time. This way I make sure I’ll have the fuel that I need for the journey.

If you think of the last one, you would realize that this is the main reason we continue playing video games. Some games are goal-less, yet we are addicted to playing it, because it gives us a challenge each time and rewards us each time we finish that challenge.

So, following on Matt series, I am starting my own, and calling it Challenge Accepted (because I love Barney Stensen and How I Met Your Mother series.) . I am going to challenge myself into doing something monthly and will report back at the 5th of each month and start a new challenge.

My challenge for this month is to write a blog post on Sunday and Wednesday of each week. This challenge include cross-posts on Bazinga! Blog. And today being Sunday, I am already making progress! Wohooo! You still owe me a blog post on Wednesday, let me know what you’d like to hear about ;-).

P.S. Don't miss Fadi Ghandour visit, we are hosting him for a discussion with Palestinian Entrepreneurs.

Just thought this post could use a picture :-), here it is. Checkout Bazinga! superheroes here.

@TEDxRamallah is happening on April 16, 2011. Ready. Aim. Inspire!

2010-12-08T13:52:00.003+02:00

TEDxRamallah is a great initiative that is being organized by individuals from Palestine and the Arab world, lead by Ramzi Jaber. I've been helping out with the content management on the website.

TEDxRamallah is a platform to spread the amazing ideas and work that have been done by inspiring people in Palestine and around the world. Make sure to register to attend. And visit their English or Arabic website for more information.

You can also participate in the Open Blog they have and spreading inspiring stories you know of. Checkout the following video that was made by Mona Abdallah.

Join in, Volunteer and Get Involved, Nominate a speaker, and spread the world. Embed the video on your site, blog or share it with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.
To embed this video use the following code:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="545" height="478" id="viddler_722dc3ae"><param name="movie" value="http://www.viddler.com/player/722dc3ae/" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.viddler.com/player/722dc3ae/" width="545" height="478" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" name="viddler_722dc3ae"></embed></object>

Introducing Bazinga! The yet-to-be-launched Technology Hub

2010-10-31T23:09:00.001+02:00

Remember the project that I was working with couple of my friends. I've wrote about how hard is being an entrepreneur before. So here it is. The project I am working on with (@RashaRasem, @MoradTaleeb, @Qarout88) and Wasel Ghanem is called Bazinga! (And no, I am not going into what does it mean)

We're were inspired by the different models around the world like TechHub, Shelter and The Hub. And we're bringing it to Ramallah for the Palestinians Entrepreneurs, Startups, Geeks and High-tech people. This place will also be where you go looking for startups you would like to invest in. We've tons of ideas for the place and we're pretty sure you would love being part of it!

People are already giving us great feedback about this and they liked it! Thank you so much for the feedback, we are so thrilled and glad you liked it.

Today we launched Bazinga! Arabic and English Blogs, Podcast and Comics. Here's a part of the official press release for launching these 3 platforms.

Greetings,

Tonight, the 31 October 2010, we’re launching different platforms that we hope to be of a use for Palestinians and Arab Entrepreneurs and Startups, either by getting to know the latest technological events, products, startups or technologies through our Arabic and English blogs, or by learning how things are done and watching interviews with entrepreneurs in the region through our Podcasts, or by just enjoying a laugh with friends through our biweekly released sketchy comics that is inspired by the daily life of Palestinian Entrepreneurs.

The web interfaces are in their very alpha edition, so bare with us and please report any feedback you have, we would love to hear from you. We’ve tried to make the websites as social as possible so you can share things you like on the website with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Bazinga! will soon open in Ramallah. A physical space where geeks, high-tech, developers, entrepreneurs, startups, freelancers, and businessmen will gather through regular conferences and events scheduled as well as causual meetings and gatherings aiming to develop and mature the entrepreneurial thinking around Palestine.

Bazinga will provide physical coworking space as well as dedicated desks for members to get work done on their own startups. Members will have access to facilities, services, tools and mentors during their stay at Bazinga.

This isn’t a new model, we’ve seen different models around the world, likeTechHub in London, Shelter in Dubai and The Hub around the world. These are some examples. We studied them carefully and we came up with Bazinga in Palestine, combining different features and tweaking others and coming up with innovative solutions for the region.

If you like Bazinga! and want to follow up with the updates, make sure to Like our page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Make sure also to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We will be constantly bringing you fresh content. And in less than a month, you will be invited to visit our physical location.

Please spread the word, tell your friends about Bazinga! and start coming up with ideas, lots of them, because once Bazinga! launch, be sure that those ideas will come to life and you may have your own startup.

And here's Bazinga's first comics, if you're a Palestinian, then you sure have had it with Jawwal's latest campaign "La Lelmostaheel!". We had it too!

We've also starting publishing blog posts, so far we have 2 blog posts, one talking about "Internet Shopping in Palestine" and the other about "MIT Arab Business Plan Competition". Of course, we made them available in Arabic as well.

So, what do you think? Would you like to be a member of such great initiative? A place where you can meet great people just like you to work with on your startups. A place for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.

We can't wait until we got the place ready for you to come over and work there. Until then stay tuned with the blogs, podcasts and comics.

Make sure to like our page on Facebook and follow us on twitter.

#Palestine is preparing the 7th #Expotech in multiple locations including #Ramallah and #Gaza

2010-10-29T11:36:00.000+02:00

So it's time again. The largest Annual ICT event in Palestine is to be held in 2nd-6th of November 2010. This time it is happening in multiple places in Parallel:

Ramallah having the recently opened hotel The Movenpick. As well as the Best Eastern Hotel and Birzeit Center for Continuous Education.
Al Quds University in Abu Dees
Bethlehem University in Bethlehem
The Arab American University in Jenin
Polytechnic University in Hebron
Rashad Al-Shawwa Halls in Gaza

This is a huge step back from last year. Which I think is good and bad. The problem is they advertise this event as a Technology week. Which if you looked at the Westbank Part it is just 3 days, while Gaza is having the whole week. The bad thing that is people most likely won't be able to attend to multiple sessions especially in Ramallah as lots of sessions are jammed there! I would have loved to see these distributed in 5 days instead of 3.

This is a video from Last year expotech.

I am just pissed off because I am going to miss lots of sessions that otherwise I would love to attend to.

Expotech has made a bit of this jump last year, when they moved from just an Exhibition of companies products and services to a Conference and on-site sessions. That's when the Expotech seemed more interesting. This year, they're taking it to the extreme, there will be NO exhibition, at least in Ramallah. They're keeping the one in Gaza.

I am not sure why they did this, but there have been problems of people mis-interpreting the exhibition to mostly do marketing, and big companies (like *cough* Jawwal *cough*) obsessed about distributing gifts and stuff at the exhibition that you would find them taking the biggest booth and all people are gathering there getting their gifts, in an unprofessional way.

Giving gifts is great, but not all small companies get to give away gifts, so it ended up by the big eating the small. Which wasn't the spirit of the Expotech. Although that might be a reason why they canceled the exhibition this year, but again, why they kept it in Gaza. Most likely the same will happen there.

One of the things that expotech is missing is the hype and buzz around the social media world. I haven't seen an official event for it on expotech, and the tech community is asking about the official hash which apparently the organizers didn't give any attention.

Last year I've attended to the ICT Conference during the Expotech, and it was amazing that I am not planning to miss it this year. So yes, I will be attending the 2 days conference. Which brings us to what I see they missed there. They missed the Youth.

Once again, I see great people among the panelists, some I've worked for like Tareq Maayeh, and some I've known personally and some I hear of them first time. My problem here is that the panelists do not contain any Young people. By young I mean 20s and by people I mean entrepreneurs. This was one of the best things I liked about MENAICT Forum in Jordan 20 days ago, they have an amazing diverse of speakers, whether in fields, from where and age. Some people like, Mo Al Adham the founder of twitvid and a lot more. I think Expotech should extend youth participation in the conference.

To give you some tips on who you should invite next year to be part of this, you can checkout Yousef Ghandour, Ammar Ammar, Ramzi Jaber, Iyyad As'ad, Ahmad Ramahi and The Flotilla game 13 year-old developer. And you can try extending invitation to me as well ;-)

One last thing that I need to criticize :-). The Entrepreneurship Forum is only happening in Gaza as part of the Expotech while westbank is not getting one. One question, Why the hell not? I know Gaza has great entrepreneurial projects and startups, much more than westbank, but that doesn't mean ignoring the entrepreneurial efforts that is being done in Westbank. So I leave this to be answered.

Checkout the conference agenda here. For more information about Expotech, checkout their Website.

I'll be live tweeting from the Conference this year, follow me (@mkhatib7) or follow the hashtag (#xpotech). I will be also blogging about it afterward.

Will you be at Expotech? Let me know so we can meet and chat.

#MENAICT Forum in #Jordan was awesome! What went right and what went wrong?

2010-10-13T03:43:00.001+02:00

So after Rasha Hussein (@RashaRasem) and I (@mkhatib7) won a ticket to attend MENA ICT Forum (@menaict) that was hosted in Amman, Jordan in the new Business Park in Dabouq. We've left to Jordan on Saturday, 9th October 2010 to attend to it.

Got a quick lunch and each went back to the place where we stayed at. I stayed at a friend of my brother place. Then went to pick up our badges and bags from the Ministry of ICT which we were amazed of their building. It's great, and shiny :-). We got our badges, and we didn't get our Tshirts as they said they made limited number of TShirts, which I still don't understand why, and they've served them as first come first served.

Of course gone in a tour in two of the biggest malls in Amman, City Mall and Mecca Mall.

Next day was the #42day, 10/10/10. A great day for being at such forum. At the beginning it was like they prepared a small room (other than the main room) for people to sit at and watch the main room streaming on TV (Kinda of separation of social layers). Lots of people got upset about this and some have already left angry.

The guys there quickly allowed us to in and took us to the main hall. It was crowded. Kicking off with the Opening session featuring the great Werner Vogels (@werner), VP & CTO of Amazon.com, which everyone was excited to have at the forum. You can read more about the speakers and the sessions on MENA ICT forum website.

Long story short, maybe the event wasn't perfect, but it was amazing and maybe one of the best (if not the best) events I've ever attended to. It has amazing set of speakers, regional and global, great topics and discussions around, interacting with audience through voting questions (which everyone loved) and by opening the space for questions after the panelists speak. You can see what questions and what the people voted for in this blog post.

The most thing I loved and I believe that lead to such success to this event is the government dedication and involvement. I mean King Abdullah showed himself at the event and gave an amazing speech after hearing Int@j and MoICT Marwan Jum'a (@ICTMinJO). This dedication and support by the government will take ICT sector of Jordan to the next levels rapidly. I wonder when Palestine would get such support of its *cough* government *cough*.

Interesting facts and numbers were announced at the forum. ICT revenue in Jordan participates of 14.3% of the total, which is around 2.2 Billion Dollars.
One of the things that they got right is diversity, in everything, age, specialization, experience, you name it, they had it. They had panelists that are experienced, they had starting entrepreneurs, they had speakers in 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. They had speakers from Jordan, Suadi, Syria, India, US and so on (And unfortunately only few from Palestine, two or three). They had it all. And that amused me.
In the audience however the average age was maybe around 35. I am not sure and they told me they'll post statistics online, so that should confirm it. Will update this once the stats are out.
Let's see, what else they've got right. Oh yeah. They have created a mobile application (for Black Berry and Symbians) to guide you through the sessions, agenda and speakers. Although I was looking forward to a better mobile app that helps you manage your schedule for the day but that was nice to have.
They've also got some various sessions running in parallel that you can attend to that was lead by Amman Tech Tuesday (@AmmanTT). But I don't think that was clear enough, not for me at least, I've only known about these through twitter stream and it was a bit late to join them.
They managed as well to couple the event with some amazing announcements, Microsoft opening up their new office in the Business Park, OASIS 500 (@oasis_500) winning finalists and some others.
One of the problems that we had was socializing with the crowd. All people were in suites! (I've got Suitephobia :-( ) and I know none of them and no one there were to connect us. I know Tova (@tova_s) tried to connect us with someone from Wamda (@Wamda) there but I guess they got really busy and we couldn't meet them. Again it was too hard to find anyone in that big crowd. Thanks a lot Tova! If some more Palestinians were involved this might have been easier for us as they might be able to connect us with people.

Anyhow, I managed to meet some of the great people I know, Habib Haddad (@habibh) of YallaStartup (@YallaStartup) and Yamli (@Yamli), Mo Al Adham (@maladham) of Twitvid (He's on my right in the side picture), Ahmad Hamzawi and Wael Ghonim (of Google) and Al Masodi. And of course I've met some amazing entrepreneurs that is being hosted at Meydan. Too bad I couldn't make it to Meydan to meet up with them. My schedule was too tight, I didn't even get the chance to meet some friends in Amman. Sorry guys. Next time inshAllah ;-)
Another thing they've missed was in their survey system, they didn't have Palestine as one of the middle eastern choices to choose from, but again they've also dropped mistakenly IT as a profession (which is ironic), but I guess human errors happen. Someone replied to my tweet that Palestine is on the list of the stats and it will be published soon.
One of the thing that annoyed me is that no one mentioned or talked about censoring content on the web and web freedom (specially what happened lately with the arrests and investigations with Arab bloggers). I don't know how I missed this, but if it came to me I would've brought it up at the forum and discussed it. Unfortunately, angry people about this only started tweeting about it just after the event ended.
Another annoying thing to me and to lots of twitter followers was the extensive retweeting of repeated information. I mean, come on, some people retweeted that the forum is about to start in the second day!! Lots of the retweets were irrelevant and/or deprecated. I know lots of people who unfollowed those people who retweets for the #MENAICT Hash tag. This main problem was actually created by MENAICT staff themselves when they've announced that the one who retweet thier tweets the most will win an iPad, and people have gone mad retweeting WHATEVER they find out there, no matter how old the tweet is or how many times it has been retweeted already. People where shouting on twitter that they want original content not retweets. Luckily there were some people who are doing this including but not limited to YallaStartup (@YallaStartup), Sleepless In Amman or Lara A.Hadi (@larahadi), Yaman W.Saqqa (@abulyomon) and I, Mohammad Khatib (@mkhatib7), we even got special shoutout from MENA ICT twitter account. Well, I still hope I get the iPad anyway ;-) :D.

Sorry for the long post, there're lots of stuff to talk about and I've only tried to touch in general right and wrong that were executed in the forum. But as a summary, again it was an absolute success. I loved it. I am sure someone would make sense out of stuff I noted to and make the next event a perfect one.
I might write some more blog series about topics and sessions discussed in the forum, but that depends on how busy I get these days, which frankly looks very busy. Anyhow, stay tuned.
This post is already too long to add to it. So I'll just end this one with a funny banner on one of the shops downtown Amman ;-). Translation: "Love Birds for Fish decoration".

What did you think of MENA ICT Forum? Why didn't you attend? Comments? Would love to hear from you.

Update
Offical MENAICT Pictures stream here.
Some of my pictures I've taken here. (will update them once I got the rest from Rasha Hussein)
As promised, videos will be uploaded here.

Attending #MENAICTForum #101010 in #Jordan #Amman

2010-09-24T17:26:00.000+02:00

In 10/10/10, MENA ICT Forum will be hosted in Jordan Amman with a theme of "Yesterday's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities".

MENA ICT Forum is now a regionally comprehensive assembly which showcases the MENA region’s ICT success stories and addresses industry trends, opportunities, and future outlook. The Forum, which will be held on October 10-11, 2010, also presents a unique opportunity for stakeholders to network, capitalize on existing prospects, and strategize for future growth and expansion of the ICT industry on a regional level.

This is an amazing opportunity to hear from the best people in this industry, focusing in EMEA region. One of the most cool things I've noticed is there will be lots of amazing speakers with various ages and backgrounds! Some of the faces that I could recognize are:

Mo Al Adham (@maladham) Founder of TwitVid the video sharing service for twitter.
Fadi Ghandour (@fadig) Founder and CEO of ARAMEX.
Wael Ghonim (@ghonim) Driving Google's B2C growth strategy in EMEA region.
Habib Haddad (@habibh) Founder and CEO of Yamli and YallaStartup.

There're yet many many more. And those are the short listed of people that I either have communicated/interact with or just quickly recognized them by skimming the list. Hopefully I'll be able to meet as many of them as time permits.

In order for me to get invited to MENA ICT Forum, I've created a video to get in the OASIS500 competition to get a free pass to the forum. Help me get it by viewing the video and sharing it with your friends.

Attending MENA ICT Forum? Let me know in the comments.

Assembling #Palestinian Group to Participate in @YallaStartup @StartupWeekend in #Lebanon

2010-09-21T13:01:00.004+02:00

Update:
Muath Just told me he got a response from Habib Haddad, they're excited about having us that they have issued special 20% discount for the Palestinian group! How awesome is that!

Yesterday, I've shared a link to a YallaStartup blog post about the forthcoming Startup Weekend to be hosted in Lebanon. I got contacted by a friend, Muath Badawi (@mrbadaw), telling me he's interested in going if a group of Palestinians are going.

For Palestinians that would like to get involved in amazingly fun weekend, coding, hacking and networking. This is the place to be. It's happening from 12th to 14th November in Beirut.

We're now collecting interested people to see how many people would like to participate, Muath already contacted the coordinators of the event to see how they can help. Meanwhile, if you would like to participate drop a comment on this post and checkout the website for more information. Also checkout this funny video they made for promoting the event:

YallaStartup Weekend 2010 - Lebanon from YallaStartup on Vimeo.

The ticket cost is $50 for students, $100 for Professionals. And they're having $25 discount for early birds registrants. Anyone would like to sponsor the Palestinian Group? Any information about how easy/hard Palestinians can travel to Lebanon, how long does a visa take to be issued?

Let me know if you're interested.

12 Technology Summer Camps around #Palestine to teach Kids about #OpenSource and #Scratch

2010-09-12T02:58:00.003+02:00

On Mid June, a Technology Summer Camp started throughout 12 camps around the westbank. These camps focused on teaching the kids about: Scratch Programming Language, Ubuntu OS, Introduction about Computer Networks and Disassembling and Assembling a PC learning about the different parts of the PC.

July 22, 2010 was the most exciting day in the Technology Summer Camp that has been going for a month, it was the final ceremony for the , or was it!?

Kids were excited, jumping around, competing and looking forward to winning. Some of the excitment was shown with their words: "I am totally gonna win this!", "Miss, I hope we at least get third place!", "We've been working day and night, some girls were staying till 1:00am in the morning working on the game".

I've accompanied the trainers while they were talking to their students, and have seen how frustrating was to hear these words from them as they just heard that there will be NO competition and NO prizes! They were like "How am I suppose to tell these kids about it!", "They are truly excited about it and I won't be the one to kill that buzz".

Gone to the closing ceremony with the excited kids and the disappointed trainers. Started with long repeated words from different people. And without offending anyone, I think one short word would have been enough and more complening.

The ceremony should have included presentations for the best chosen games, presented by the trainer and the kids who developed the game. Only 2 had the chance to present their work, the others were ignored and cut-out due to tight time of ministers and other officials attending the event. This event was supposed to be about kids and what they've accomplished rather than official speeches that barely kids could understand. TV and Press was here until the officials have left! What the hack? I mean shouldn't you document what the kids have done! Instead of just documenting what officials have said with the same words we hear all the time.

Anyway, I promised myself that the kids and the trainers work won't be gone waste. So I recorded all the Scratch Games presentations done by these kids and will be uploading them to YouTube and putting them in this blog. While holding my camera, I've been amazed with what the kids have done and the way they think. The most amazing one to me was a little kid from Hebron who developed an amazing game inspired by the latest events of the Flotilla Freedom Ship to that was heading to Gaza before the Israeli Army attacks it and stops it. I've already blogged about this in the "13 year old #Palestinian kid develop a game for #Gaza #Flotilla" post.

Other games ranged from a simple pacman to a complex ones. The first game presented by a girl from Qalqilya, Ein Safoot summer camp was titled Save Jolieat. "It's a game inspired by the famous Shekespear story Romio and Jolieat" the girl said. Checkout the video.

Another game that was developed by one of the Ramallah summer camps is inspired by Sponge Bob Square Pants, Graveyard Mario. Checkout the video.

Another one was developed around a ping pong game that hits bricks, this was developed by Jericho Summer Camp. Checkout the video.

One cool group from Nablus developed a cool game that basically a maze with questions in the way. "The girls worked so hard on this game day and night, some of them stayed till 1am and their parents came and too them at that time." the trainer of that summer camp said. Chechout their video.

One cool game I really liked it idea was developed by a girl for girls. It's a dancing game where you suppose to move the character to the music and with some arrows guidlines. Although the game isn't designed well, I think the idea is great. (Video is coming soon...)

Another bricks ping pong with interleaving Mathamtical, Chemical, Islamic and other fields questions that requires the user to answer correctly in order to move on to the next level. (Video is coming soon...)

The following game was developed by Salfeet summer camp which is simply in instrumental music mixer, a set of drums, pre-recorded guitar music and piano that can be played on keyboard. (Video is coming soon...)

Another one was the classical find the differences between two pictures, developed by Hebron summer camp. (Video is coming soon...)

And of course it wouldn't be so perfect if no one made a better version of the classical pacman. The game progeress and different mazes each level has with increasing number of enemies that eats the pacman! Check it out. (Video is coming soon...)

This bring us to the summary. I really think this was a great success although gone unappriciated through the speeches of officials. I hope next time people responsible about this would be wanting the real development of the kids rather than just something they just did and they want to advertise!

For more information and pictures please visit the official website for the camps. Also visit Rasha album for the Final Ceremony, and another for Training of Trainers. Also checkout my album for the final ceremony.

Mobile Monday Palestine - Projects Showcasing

2010-09-10T22:26:00.003+02:00

(For pictures, see this and this. Thanks Rasha Hussein for uploading the pics)

On 6th September, the second MoMoPal meetup was held at Ankars Suites. The meetup was at the Iftar time around 6pm (+2GMT) where we had a nice quiet meal and then socialized a bit. Then started the presentations. Around 60 people attended and 4 applications where presented.

The apps that were presented (as in MoMoPal website):

SouqTel: mating jobs and job seekers through SMS.
Mobile Multi-player Game using Blue-tooth (Tarneeb)
DoitThere: GPS based reminder using IPhone
Mobile ATM: mobile based banking

The app that we presented was DOitTHERE. The whole experience was good. Although the applications presented weren't (in my opinion) that strong. Souqtel and Mobile ATM were focusing too much on SMS rather taking leverage of the new technologies available for people. Souqtel provides a way for people to get jobs matching through creating an account through SMS. Frankly, I don't see why anyone would need to receive SMS about a job advertisement. I mean it's not like the job is going to fly away in a minute or two. Email or a web portal should be enough to seek for jobs. SMS is an extreme. For Souqtel I would say it's better if you moved on with the project and provide consider the latest technologies around rather than just sticking to SMS.

MobileATM is a great idea and it would be great if it would actually come to life. It is simply paying using your mobile rather than cash. So I can just send "Pay 50 NIS to Checkers" and so on. However, the presentation wasn't good enough the web backend for the project didn't work at that time and they got tough audiences shooting questions and concerns about security. It simply was weakly presented. I really would encourage MobileATM team to keep working on the project and try to bring this to life. I am sure it is gonna be revolutionary.

Tarneeb Mobile Multi-player game using Bluetooth is a game based on sharing 4 players a game and playing by turns. The idea itself is great, however the Tarneeb didn't make much sense to the jury as Dr. Wasel commented "I could bring real physical cards and get the full experience. Why I would bother playing on the mobile". My advice for that team was to think about porting this into a development framework where developers can use it to develop multiplayer games through bluetooth.

This brings us to DOitTHERE. And I love the name, it simply have emphasize on two things "Doing" and "Location". It's a cross-platform mobile application that helps users get their tasks done by adding a new dimension to the tasks, geolocation. The user would be reminded to do that task whenever they're around that location. Based on Location not Time.

I presented the general idea and some snapshots of the app, followed by George Khadder explaining the financial and marketing that will be done to get the app out there. Followed by Ayman Qarout demoing the app to the audience through the iPhone Simulator.

We are working on two parallel versions, one for the Android and one for the iOS4. Further development is needed to get the best user experience through a simple GUI. I've been working on developing the iPhone app, Rasha Hussein will be working on developing the Android App and Morad Taleeb will be working on developing the backend web services to synch the tasks to the different platforms and plugins. George and Ayman are working on the business model and others.

We knew we got the jury attention as well as the audience themselves. They simply said Congratulations after we finished. It was a bit obvious that we won. And there we are, the results were announced and we won first place!

The winner of this showcase get the chance to go to the Mobile Monday Global Summit that is being hosted in Finland, Helsinki at 26th September, and present their project there. I was chosen to present DOitTHERE. So now it is a matter of getting a Visa. Hopefully, we would be able to get the visa on time.

A lot of people asked me for the presentation we did, I will try to upload it along with the videos of the presentations soon that Rasha took, will update the post when I get them.

The event has been covered on the MoMoPal official website as well as on Ma'an News agency (Arabic).

Are you attending Mobile Monday Global Summit? What do you think of the Apps presented? Why this event didn't get the attention of a lot of Mobile developers/companies around Ramallah and Palestine? Was it badly marketed? Late announced? What do you think of DOitTHERE and how do you think we could enhance it even further? Let me know what do you think in the comments.

13 year old #Palestinian kid develop a game for #Gaza #Flotilla

2010-09-03T20:34:00.001+02:00

Recently I've read two posts one talking about a 16-years old millionaire and a 14-years old Kuwaiti iPhone developer. This reminded me of something I promised to blog about but I seem to have forgotten for awhile.

In the final ceremoney of the Technology Summer Camp that the Excellence Center in Birzeit University arranged, the kids got the chance to present their Scratch developed games.

The most amazing one to me was a 13 years old kid who developed a game using Scratch Programming Language inspired by the latest events of the Flotilla freedom ship that was heading to Gaza before the Israeli Army attacks it and stops it.

The game tells the story perfectly. The main character of the game was a well-known guy in Palestine, Raed Salah. The gamer will try to move Raed and make sure none of the Soldiers that come on the ship with their guns stays on the ship. He has a wooden stick which he used to hit the soldiers and drop them from the ship.

I truely was amazed (You could hear me whistling and mumbling "that's amazing" in the video above). So I did a small interview with the kid to see why he did it and what he thinks about it. Here's the video interview with the little kid.

Finding out that we have an amazing minds and promising kids. I wonder if anyone would actually take this any further and invest in such kids development or would they will go unappriciated and unnoticed. That's one of the reasons I blogged about this. And that's one of the reasons you will share this with your friends and contacts.

P.S. I will be posting a longer post about all the Summer camp and all the participating kids.

Being an entrepreneur ain't easy!

2010-09-01T03:04:00.000+02:00

After quitting Exalt Technologies to leave to Google. Few problems regarding visa to Switzerland or UK managed to keep me for few more couple of months in Palestine before going to the US. So long I've waited to try and jump off and just try entrepreneurship.

While I am still having troubles pronouncing the word. I am trying to learn what does it mean by doing. One thing I've learned that it ain't easy!

I've been working for more than 6 weeks now on a new business idea with 4 of my friends. We're pretty excited about it and working very hard to get it to real life. I will be blogging more about it later.

One thing I also learned that an entrepreneur needs an inspiration, a model, another entrepreneur to look up to. My inspiration was Yousef Ghandour. The only Palestinian guy that I know with 2 kids and a wife and still have the guts to jump off and take the risk while working on his project Timevel. Each time I fail at finishing a stage I just say to myself, "If Ghandour can do it, hell I can!". That was enough to boost me off.

Besides Yousef, I got my inspiration from talks and articles. One of them being Wael Fakharani (Of Google) talk at TEDxCairo "The Discomfort Of Our Comfort Zone". Video embedded below (will try to find/write the English translation later). This is just amuses me. And I always keep reminding myself that I can just go and be in my comfort zone at home with my Family, sleeping most of the day. But I CHOOSE and I WANT to be in my discomfort zone. This also reminds me of a quote of one anonymous entrepreneur who said: "Being in your comfort zone wouldn’t ever benefit you. Get out of it, face the real world."

Two more videos that gave me a boost are the following:

and

and fo course I won't be forgetting the most amazing speech I've ever heard. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement. Which I keep watching from time to time.

I just hope one day we would be one of these who give you a boost to dare and do something and stop hiding in your comfort zone.

You have your own inspirational people, talks or quotes? Share them with us.

Google D3vF3st 2010

2010-06-30T13:49:00.002+03:00

For the Pictures here's 173 Pictures taken with my Evo, and here's another 251 taken by @rasharasem Camera.
As early as it gets, my roommate woke me up at 5:30am. Carelessly without even opening my eyes, I started calling my friends to make sure they’re all awake. Done so, hit the shower, wore my Nexus One TShirt that I got from GTUG Palestine Android Hackathon event, and headed out at 6:10am.

Meeting @moonitta at Abu Jassar square, waiting for 20+ minutes with no cars having five empty spots (We were going to pick up @hammamsamara, @rasharasem and Reham on our way). That was it to decide to go separate. Got to Ramallah around 6:40 a 7-passenger van left to Qalandiya while I await the rest of the guys, once we got everyone, we headed to Qalandiya, got there around 7:00am.

Shocked by being shocked with a Typical snapshot of Qalandiya Israeli Checkpoint. Busy as hell! over 150 people (including some of us) where still outside the first entrance door. Great enough this didn’t take as much time as we thought it would. 30 minutes later we were inside the checkpoint (some took even more as they came a bit late).

Tried waiting for @zafersh for sometime, but he was stuck inside the business of the checkpoint. Had to leave without him.

@Tova_s from Mercycorps had already arranged the transportation for all of us with 2 vans waiting behind the checkpoint. That was a great help, so thank you @Tova_s.

While on the way, and at another Israeli checkpoint, called in Hebrew Moda’een, they told us to get off the vans and get inside to get rechecked all over again. This time was even terrible than the first time. Especially that I foolishly took my packbag with me carrying the laptop around. They spent like more than 20 minutes just inspecting my MacBook Pro! I mean what’s their to inspect! They kept flipping it around, hitting it around, putting it in differnet pauses. And I was dying inside seeing my full-month-payment-interning-in-Google Macbook get smacked out each time they get it back and forth inside the XRay Machine! It’s just a laptop for God sake! They even asked me to remove the battery and I was like “uh.. no can’t do! Battery is built in.”.

Anyhow, one more check on the IDs and Permits and we were out. This one was exhausting and kinda depressing, but once we were out the guys got their shiny smiles back and ready to Go Google.

A bit of traffic jams and we were at the Avenue! Awesome!

Getting inside, registering our names and getting our badges printed out, to find out that there’s amazing amout of desert and light breakfast. And the first thing caught @rasharasem eyes were the Google IO Cupcakes! “Yay they’re here, we wanted some since the IO!”. And what caught @HammamSamara eyes was the free chips at the GTUG Booth. (And He actually spent most of his time there).

One of the most enjoyable thing we found, at least me (@mkhatib7) and @rasharasem was what I like to call “Binary Hunting”. They had these binary strings printed all over the posters and on the badge. I was kinda hoping it would be something like Google IO QR Codes Treasures, but they were binary strings that translates to some stuff like: “Welcome to Devfest”, “Have a great Day”, “Session Room”, “Agenda”, “Hacker Launge”, “My Name is”...etc

At 10:00am the keynotes started out, starting with Tal as MC and a small speech Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience. Followed her Brian Rakowski Product Manager of Chrome.

After the keynotes, we took a 10 minute break, and the parallel sessions started. There were two tracks one for Webmasters (Web) and one for Developers (Dev). We were so excited about the Chrome Web Store and Extensions, unfortunately we were out of the session in the first 5 minutes as the speaker was speaking in Hebrow rather than English. Luckily enough, the next two sessions were in English. Chrome Developer Tools and HTML5. After which was the dinner. Unfortunately most of us didn’t like the dinner and barely ate something. The food didn’t taste as good as it looks.

After the lunch, it was time to do some hacking. The session were already started, but we found some spots to sit down on the lovely beanbags. I personally liked the hackathon, the bad thing was as @rasharasem puts it “it wasn’t challenging” hence most of the guys left a bit early and maybe didn’t even hack around with the code. But we kept coding, and we loved it, and didn’t leave until we got it working.

We’ve met some cool guys there, @aloncarmel and @amir_harel enjoyed talking to both of you and hope to meet sometime soon again.

At the end, we picked up our Chrome TShirts and headed to Jerusalem. The guys were too excited to visit the Dom of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque. Unfortunatelly not all of us made it there as at our way back the second van was returned and they had to even go to Ramallah rather than Jerusalem.

The 6 guys who made it to Jerusalem including me, went for a quick tour in Jerusalem, visited Al Aqsa and Dom of the Rock. And had a Kabab and Falafel Sandwishes while going home to Ramallah.

Thanks everyone who made this possible. And hope all enjoyed their time as much as I did. Now I leave you with my Awesome Google Cupcake along with my Super Cool Nexus One Loading TShirt! And my amazing Android-powered HTC Evo 4G mobile.

Android Hackathon - Live Wave #gtugpal

2010-06-21T13:35:00.000+03:00

Long time no see!

2010-05-01T03:33:00.000+03:00

It's not that there's nothing interesting going around or I don't have something to blog about. On the contrary the past few months were the busiest yet most active months I've ever been (Except for blogging ... and studying. I guess). I've been active on Buzz, Twitter and FB. So if you've been following my updates, the following news might bore you.

Anyhow, I've been working with Palexo, trying to give the children a chance to learn better with their XOs they got. I think we did pretty good job, and we still planning on doing more. Visited around 8 Schools and will be moving to the rest. Got my infamous 5 minutes interview on radio Angham talking about Palexo.

Things being said, we just met Nicholas Negroponte the Founder of OLPC and his team Santa Barbara and Robert Fadel yesterday. And it was amazing.

If you live in Palestine, we do need more dedicated volunteers, who would love to help. Lots of us are leaving for either higher studies or work. Tamer Alkhouly is getting married in May (Congratulations dude!) and starting his Masters degree in Germany on June, while I will be rejoining the Webmasters team at Google, Switzerland in Augest. Yay me!

I've also been working with Hamza Abu Salah and group of students in Birzeit University on GeekMesh. Things have been slow the past month due to Strikes in the Universities! But we are coming back soon enough.

Peeks is another community I am involved in. Although I haven't been active lately.

I have been planning on making my first visit to US on May, I have my Visa interview on Monday, and will be going to attend Google IO 2010. Thanks to Gisel Hiscock and Google for sponsoring my trip. Have been excited for this for too long and can't wait till the 18th. Plus, I am getting a Google Nexus One Phone. Isn't that awesome or what! Can't wait to trash my old cranky Nokia mobile.

Been working with Exalt Technologies since December last year on a Part time basis. Personally loved working there, the guys there are really great and dare I to say they got the smartest developers. Will be working there for awhile to transfer knowledge before leaving to Google.

Moving on to Birzeit University, we had recently ITExpo 2010, had our graduation project (Bluetooth Controlled Robot) and a course project (Air Pointing Device) showcased. And I didn't make it to the third place, not even once. Was lots of fun though.

Haven't paid much attention to school. But things will be going great. This is my last month in BZU. Having my Graduation Seminar on 15th May.

The hardest thing was dropping my MacBook Pro and breaking its HDD. I felt useless for awhile and couldn't do anything without it. I sent it to get repair, hopefully I could get it soon.

Got a new cat and manage to lose it in 2 weeks! All I can say that it wasn't my fault. Leads point that my neighbors stole it! I am still investigating that.

Avoiding anymore laptop accidents I should really hit the bed.

How's that for a short update? What you were up to these days?

Arrouby - The Transliteration Robot

2009-12-12T23:50:00.004+02:00

Great news! Arrouby, my first Google Wave Robot, is now ready for a test drive! Just watch the video:

More information here.

Here's a public wave where you can try it out:
On Wave Preview.
On Wave Sandbox.

Source Code available at Google Wave Samples Gallery Page.

Ideas? Suggestions? Let me know.

Acknowledgement: This robot uses Google Transliterator Python API written by Raj.

The Fight for Open Internet is ON

2009-11-07T03:07:00.000+02:00

After the TShirt campaign and the Groups and fan pages created on Facebook, it was essence to move to the next level. On last Wednesday, Ala' Hawwash, Hasan Salameh, Tony Diek, Walid Abu Salah, Mohammad Amarneh and I (Mohammad Khatib), gathered for a tea party at my place around 7:30PM. We had a brainstorming session for ideas on how to enlighten people about the new Internet quota that is not being given enough attention and being covered with doubling the speed of the ADSL Lines, which we think was a mean trick to distract people attention from saying no to Internet quota.

After lots of ideas, we thought calculating the time people can spend on popular website and calculating how long the average user would consume the 10GB on internet would be a good idea to let people understand what is the internet quota means!

After around 6 hours we finally got something concrete. We wrote the following paper:

Along with Anas Abdel Razeq, Hanna Krietem and Maysara Abdelhaq we printed 2700 copy of the paper above and distributed around 2000 for Birzeit University students. Our next stop was the Expotech exhibition in Ramallah. So we took two Taxis and went there. Once we got there we started giving away some papers to people in the entrance, however, security came took all the papers and prohibited us from distributing the papers, we were pissed off, so we asked for explanation and after lots of arguments with the security guys, they kicked us out, checked our bags and at the beginning they refused to keep our papers and giving them back to us when leaving.

Hanna had a session about Open Source in the Expotech that day, once we got in they didn't allow him to speak in that session because they were afraid that he would mention the Internet Quota!

After all, the feedback of students who read the document was expected after knowing what the Internet Quota means and how it is being covered, they were upset about it, and they don't want the quota.

Next we've created an online petition to be signed by Palestinians who don't want the Internet Quota. Till now 293 person signed it, and we will be collecting more signatures tomorrow in the University so if you passed by us, please stop by and sign the petition. Please feel free to share the petition as well.

Here are some pictures of Tony and Amarneh distributing some pictures in the University.

Tony Explaining The Internet Quota for Students entering the University

Mohammad Amarneh Distributing papers for students (not shown)
Behind him Anas Abdel Razeq

Suggestions? Comments? Ideas? Let us know.

Follow up with the TShirts Campaigns

2009-11-06T02:19:00.001+02:00

Well, the last TShirt campaign wasn't really a big success, few people ordered or requested a free TShirt, and some troubles printing them faced me. However, I think people still don't trust what they read online regarding ordering or requesting something. Anyhow, to summarize the results, only 12 Tees were ordered, and another 12 were given away. Would like to thanks everyone who ordered a TShirt and special thanks to Hanna Kreitem for his continuous support for this campaign and for providing 4 Tees, Thanks a lot.

Unfortunately, the reactions from students wasn't as much as I expected, at least not until I got the Tees printed and they really saw them! Until then, I guess people didn't trust what I am saying or was too lazy to fill a one-minute form to order or request a TShirt for Free! I still don't know the reasons why people didn't react the way I had expected, but I am on my way to finding out and will tell you when I do know!

I woke up 2nd Nov. Monday at 8:00AM in hope to get the Tees and then go to The Technology Conference in Grandpark. Once I got there, I met Gisel Hiscock, the magnificent (as I like to call her), and my coworker back in Google Zurich, Mary Himinkool, along with Debu Purkayastha. I talked with Mary about the Internet quota that the Palestinian Telecommunication is introducing and I showed her the Tees. I gave her and Gisel a TShirt and one for Ibrahim Jabour to deliver it to him in Gaza. Gisel didn't like what they're trying to do, so she tried to talk to some employees from Hadara and Paltel.

They didn't allow us to ask questions about the Internet Quota issue, Gisel tried her best to push them to talk about it and open a discussion about it, however, Paltel (or Hadara) CEO came for 5 minutes announced the service and just got out without taking questions or giving any chance for opening a discussion. I was really pissed off with them, however, I've managed to go around it and asked a question that is somehow close. Gisel told me that she and Anthony Vonsee (of CISCO) talked and told Hadara's CEO that limiting the internet quota is wrong and they should be looking for a smarter solution and that they will lose there customers!

I (Mohammad Khatib) and one of my classmates stayed till the last minute of the conference (9:00AM - 6:30PM) , honestly except they didn't allow questions to be asked about the quota, I really loved the conference and I never knew we could have done a fantastic conference. Saw Gisel, Mary and Debu before they prepare themselves to go to Gaza. (Unfortunately, they staid three days trying to enter Gaza with a previously approved permit, however the Israeli forces didn't allow them to enter! Gaza people were looking forward to meet them! I am really sorry!)

Here a video on Al Watan TV shows the opening of the Technology Conference, you can see me at 1:00 with my MacBook Pro! Gisel Hiscock is speaking at 1:50. Check the video out.

Hamza Abu Salah and Anas Abdel Razeq two colleagues of mine were the first to show up wearing the TShirt in the Expotech, going with a group of students in a bus organized by the CSE Club on Tuesday. As I were told, they've talked with some people from Hadara and discussed the new Internet quota, but of course with no use, the guys out there are a marketing people that have been told what to say and keep repeating it again!

Following their leads, I (Mohammad Khatib) and my friend Walid Abu Salah, went to the expotech wearing them. We explored the exhibition, wasn't very pleasant except for knowing about new ISPs in the market such as GlobalCom and Yalla Wireless Internet services, the good news that they're not limited and does not follow the quota model, the bad news is they only covered 30% Ramallah (as per the statistics they provided me) and Yalla covers 90% of Nablus. This is good and introduce new Palestinian ISP alternatives for people to choose from, they told us in 2 months Ramallah should be covered fully, however, I am not sure that will happen, we'll see.

One thing we did is going to Hadara/Ittesalat Booth and presented them with a TShirt and told them this is to tell you that we DON'T like what you're doing with the Internet! We had a half-hour intense discussion and neither of us were convinced of the others point of view!

Anyhow, the fight for open internet is still on, and we're doing our best to show people what is going on and what the Internet Quota does mean! Lots of people does not understand what is going to happen! I will be writing another blog post on a continuous effort we've started today by distributing 2500 paper to enlighten people!

Palestinian "No Internet Quota" Campaigns

2009-10-31T05:08:00.005+02:00

Update: I've sent the TShirts to be printed, they will be ready Monday morning, so if you want some please let me know. Each TShirt costs 25 Shekel. (You can also Download the TShirts Designs). If you're in Gaza and wants a TShirt, please let me know, I might be able to send them.

Update 2: Ways to protest against the Internet Quota limitation,

- Buy the TShirt (or request one for free) and wear it in Expotech.
- Join the Fan Page and the Group on Facebook.
- Change your Status on Facebook and Tweet about it. Use the #saveinternet hash.(have ideas of what to tweet?)
- Change your Profile Image to one of these Images.

Well, the news spread out, Palestinians are really angry on what Hadara (The main ISP in Palestine) is going to do by limiting the download quota!

People started creating groups, pages, fan pages on facebook with their slogan being "No to internet quota!", others are creating a demonstration tent on 3rd November, the first day of the Expotech exhibition - The largest Technology event in Palestine.

As for me, I thought since Hadara (Paltel) is going to announce the quota limitation on internet during the Expotech event (as an advantage for the users!), it would be nice to show up wearing a custom printed TShirt for saying no for internet quota to show them how much people are really refusing this limitation!

I've mocked up couple of designs for the TShirt. I will be printing 10 TShirts for me and some friends, I don't have the budget to print it for more people (I wish I had), however, I will make the designs available for you to download and print out. If you want to support this campaign and want some TShirts, please use this form to request some TShirts. One TShirt price is approximated for 20 Shekel (~6$).

The plan is to go to the Expotech opening day (and following days if possible) wearing this TShirt.

I'll leave you with the sketches (these are "very" low quality, I will be preparing the high quality designs and upload them so you can get a copy).

Have some more ideas? You think you can help me with this campaign? Do you know where best to print the TShirts? Do you own a printing company and you think you can give us a good deal on printing the TShirts? You Can't live with the Internet limitation? Leave me a comment, PM me, or get the designs and print some TShirts and distribute them to your family and friends.

Internet in Palestine - It just keep getting worse!

2009-10-29T01:13:00.001+02:00

It turned out that the rumors are true! Hadara (Paltel) the Palestinian main Internet Service Provider (ISP) is trying their best to make their internet suck more and more. It's already expensive, slow and now the biggest surprise it is limited!
Yes you now will have a monthly limit on your Downloads! If you have 512KB ADSL connection, you will have 10GB download limitation per month. Once you've exceeded the 10GB, your connection will turn into a 64KB connection till the end of the month! The user then can buy extra up to 6 GB (by a package 2, 4 or 6 GB) for 12NIS (about 3.5$) for each 2GB!

This campaign has been applied in Egypt as well, however, rapidly people started complaining about this new limitation and threaten not to pay their internet bills! They've used Facebook and other tools on internet to create groups for refusing such decision. Moreover, more than 500 went into a demonstration to show their objections on the limited internet.

As I understood, what Hadara (And the other ISPs) are trying to do is to give users a better internet quality. Since the old unlimited internet connection was a shared internet connection and users might not get what they've really subscribed to (1MB is not always 1MB) . So by this limitation on the quota Hadara should promise the 1MB always 1MB! This is what I think they mean by "Fair Usage Policy". Hence introducing limitation on downloading!

However, since we're all used to the unlimited download quota the first impression is to refuse such limitation. This is basically because a 10GB is what people download in a week these days!

I can't stop wondering whether this will work out for Hadara! Will people just sit back and accept this!

What do you think? Will you switch your Provider if they introduced these limitations? Or do you think this is fair?

Update: Faiz A.H has already created a group on Facebook "No to Internet Quota in Palestine !". If you're a supporter, join it.

Check out the following scanned fax! (Click to maximize)

ImHalal.com - Are Girls More Haram than Boys!?

2009-09-30T02:10:00.001+02:00

CAUTION: Please do NOT try the keywords provided for statistics, unless you're sure you are safe! Some results might be offensive!

While there's no reasoning behind writing such a post, however, I found it fun trying couple of search queries and see how the new ImHalal.com Search Engine categories them. And The results were... Let's say "a bit discriminating".

So basically, ImHalal.com should allow Muslims to search the web safely and Halal. Which means any search query that might have Haram results would give a warning before displaying the results and some results won't display it at all.

These decisions are based on 3 levels that classify how Haram the results would be. Level 1 is the lowest Haram level, and level 3 is the highest one. If the result contains a content of Level 3, you won't be able to see the results. While level 1 and 2 give you the option to risk it and show the results!

I find this idea is kind of nice, and might also helps to be used with even non-Muslim Kids since the children safety issue on the internet is increasingly having people attention.

I gave the Engine a test drive. I used it as a measuring tool for how Haram something could be, and I found some funny results, here are some statistics (CAUTION: please do NOT use these keywords to search, unless you're sure you are safe! Some results might be offensive!)

Are Girls more Haram than Boys?!

Searching for Girls give Level 1, while Searching for Boys didn't give any warning (not Haram).

Does Language affect the Haram Level of "Something"?

Searching for Pork in English gave level 1, while the Arabic translation give no Haram indication.
Searching for "Kill" gives Level 2, while "قتل" didn't give any Haram level.
Also, Searching for "Porn" give level 3, while "أفلام إباحية" (The Arabic Translation of Porn) gave Level 2.
Another query, "Sex" gave Level 2, while "جنس" gave Level 3.

Does Homosexuality Haram Level differs based on sex?

Searching for "Lesbians" gives Level 2, while "Gays" gave Level 3.

Do stars mean bad now?

We are used to give a Star for "good" things. When bookmarking a nice page, we click the star. When rating a video, we give it as much stars as it deserves. We call someone a star if he is doing great job (or not?). We draw stars on kids faces/hands when they do something good. However, the website used the Star to refer for a Bad thing (Haram)! 3 Stars means the worst result! Bad Visualization!

Opinions

Great Idea
Liked how they give the final decision for the user. After all if the user didn't use it for Halal searching then there's no reasoning for not allowing them!
Needs lots of enhancing!

Queries should be checked as a combination of words and levels should be accumulated.
Some queries shouldn't be flagged as Haram, e.g. "Girls". I see no reason for marking this as Haram.
Language Syncing.
Use meaningful and in place Visual items! (an X instead of a Star)

Liked the distinguish between The Arabic queries that might mean different things. Example: Searching for "جنس" which usually refer to the act of having sex, returns a level of 3. While searching for "الجنس" which usually used to mean Gender or other meanings.

I know what you're thinking, this Engine was made for people that don't want to see Haram stuff, so most probably they won't try to search for most of the stuff I just tried. But as they always teach us in Development "It's the worst case that counts...".

As always, welcoming any comments or inputs from you.

Update: I've just added this post as an idea on the website, vote for it if you see it will help the engine get better. Here's the URL:
http://getsatisfaction.com/imhalalcom/topics/http_3x_w_blogspot_com_2009_09_imhalalcom_are_girls_more_haram_than_html

Disclaimer: I am not very experienced in religious stuff. This is only my own opinion.

Making Ritaj Suck Less - "Making Ritaj a Better Place Competition"

2009-09-08T01:16:00.001+02:00

In the last few days I wrote a post about how Ritaj the e-portal for Birzeit University Sucks. However, it didn't stop there, I've created a small that creates RSS feeds and a Google Gadget so you can read Ritaj Public Board on your Gmail or iGoogle Page.

Fortunately, the post reached the Computer Center guys at BZU, Hanna Kreitem told me that they're really interested in hearing the problems students face on Ritaj and want to hold a session to discuss some of ideas and problems the students commented on my post.

So, as a second step I am announcing a Competition where students, graduates, teachers and employees send the problems that they have faced while dealing with Ritaj or suggestions to make Ritaj a better portal.

So without any further delays here is the information of the competition and how you can participate.

Here's what you will win, one of three Google Brainy People TShirt and some Cool Gmail Keyboard Stickers, Thanks to Asim Janjua, my teammate here at Google who supplied me with these cool prizes:

More information about the Competition go to this link.
Frequently asked questions at this link.

Submit your suggestions go to this Link.

As usual, happy to hear about your Ideas, suggestions and comments.

Disclaimer: I am personally fully responsible about this competition. Google and/or Ritaj has nothing to do with it. It just happened that the prizes are Google Printed TShirts, and the ideas will be presented to Computer Center in hope to make Ritaj a better place.

Making Ritaj Suck Less - Ritaj Public Board Everywhere!

2009-09-05T14:20:00.016+02:00

The last two posts (Part 1, Part 2) where about how Birzeit University electronic portal sucks in a lot of things. One of small thing was getting RSS feed for the public board, or getting them into your email.

I spent this afternoon playing around with Google AppEngine, Google Gadgets API and Ritaj, to start the process of making Ritaj sucks less by creating a Gadget and an RSS feed for the public board!

Cut to the point, here's the use cases I could think about:

Add to Google Reader
Click the picture to enlarge

Add to iGoogle Page
Click the picture to enlarge

Add to Your Site or Blog
Click the picture to enlarge

Add to Gmail!
Click the picture to enlarge

Student at Birzeit University? Want some of this? Here you go:

RSS Feed:

iGoogle Gadget:
http://givemerss.appspot.com/rss?url=https://ritaj.birzeit.edu/bzu-msgs/boards&t=gadget

Have a question? Got an idea? Comment? Let me know in the comments.

10 Things Birzeit University e-portal "Ritaj" Sucks about!- Part 2

2009-09-05T10:05:00.015+02:00

Read "Why my University e-portal "Ritaj" Sucks! - Part 1" here.

UPDATE - 1:
I can't believe I forgot to mention that Ritaj doesn't allow users to retrieve their passwords in case they've forgotten them! And the worst part is that you have to pay 5$ to manually reset your password! This is soooo Lame! Thanks Ra'fat for reminding me about this!

5 Usability
Ritaj can be a real pain to get something done, or to get something out of it. For example, Ritaj contains a section where it shows each course, if you clicked on a course link, it takes you to a page where it shows you some information about it and some links that is by all means Useless. The most used one is the Course Board, where you can read and post to the class you are enrolled in. So in order a student to check the board, he has to click to the board, then click on the board though the Course page is useless and can be eliminated and you can use the board page to show the information of the course.

It doesnt' stop here. One other problem students facing all the time is when they want to send a post for a teacher of the course, they end up sending the message to all the class! (most of the time this would be a homework!). This happens because there's no clear distinguish between them.

Recently, they added a page that appears when you log in, showing when the last time and from where you logged in (inside/outside the University) plus how many times you tried to log in with wrong trials! So whenever you want to access your Ritaj, you need to log in then you need to click on go to Main page in this page! This information in that page can be included somewhere else! There's one hell of white space in the dashboard, put it there! (User interface)

Plus, if you stay away from Ritaj for more than 5 minutes (or so) it will log you out automatically! This is really annoying!

Tips

Don't just stuff the website with pages, remove things that students don't need. Plus provide a clear way to distinguish between two different things like posting to the class or the teacher. And for God Sake don't log me out!

6 User Interface
I just want to quickly touch the main page page UI. The bad thing about it is the column in the middle, it contains 3 sections "Notifications" and "Ritaj Messaging System Beta" and "Search".

The problem is that Notifications section is useless unless there's, of course, a notification! It just sets there without any information most of the time! The second thing is there's one hell of a white space below the Search box. I don't know why they're keeping it.

Tips

Don't show the Notifications box unless there is a notification to show!
Use the White space to show the annoying warning that shows each time you log into Ritaj, this will save a click from students! Or you can embed the University Calendar there or an Agenda of upcoming events, this would be awesome!

7 User Data
Ritaj keep records of the Academic credits, courses and grades. However, sometimes students use Ritaj as a communication channel to send memos to each other. Students have no options to download their data, or export them into any format. The hard part is, once the course ends, all the data is Gone! The student has no access to previous messages he sent or received in earlier courses!

Tips

If you are not going to keep the user data, please give a warning for the students that they will lose any stored data on Ritaj! Give them a way to migrate or export their data to a document or something!

8 Integration & Tools
Recently Ritaj integrated their system with the School Library so students can check what books and when should they get back to the Library, that was cool, but not enough.

Ritaj once provided the students with Google Apps accounts for the domain (@ritaj.ps) it was great except no one is using it (as far as I know). In order to push the students to use it, a proper integration with Ritaj should be done. For example, a good integration would be using Google Calendar to track the deadlines of projects/homeworks and the exams schedule. This will help the student be updated and receive customized notifications and reminders!

Another good Integration with Google Apps is Google Docs. The teachers always complained about students not working collaboratively, by enabling Google Docs integration teachers can now track which student did what! The students can work on writing the document (or building the presentation) together, once they're done they can add the teacher to check out their assignment, the teacher would comment on some lines and the students will fix it. And to the hell with attachments!

9 Information

"Does anybody know which buildin is DSC? ... this is the 1st time I've ever heard of it." - Facebook status of one of my colleagues.

A lot of information is not really available for students to get when they need it. There's no map of the campus where students can see the building name the floors or rooms numbers. Also, teachers are not using the Published Grades section in Ritaj, hence students don't have access for their marks in First, Second, Midterm exams or projects and assignments.

One important (and easy to do) thing that Ritaj doesn't provide RSS feeds for there public board! This is really annoys me.

Tips

Update the website with the content that students need. And Please provide an RSS feed!

10 Seeking Help
There's no official mailing lists in the University for announcements or discussions. It would be nice if there was a mailing list to ask about an event, or to get information about some kind of activity in the University or even asking where to go for the weekend and whether someone is interested to play a football game this afternoon and having fun.

This will help students be more active in the activities and other events. Most teachers complain about that, but they forgot that most students didn't hear about that or this event!

Have any comments, other things that Ritaj Sucks about, or a tip for making Ritaj suck less? Please let me hear about it in the comments

10 Things Birzeit University e-portal "Ritaj" Sucks about!- Part 1

2009-09-05T02:25:00.018+02:00

Ritaj is Birzeit University electronic portal where students, teachers, directors and all other people interact online. Students can register their courses online, communicate through memos as private or a class message, they can get access to their academic records, keep tracks of their financial records and debts (if any) and lots other stuff. Unfortunately I don't know much about the teachers and other roles sides! But I am guessing it is much more complicated. So I am going to critisis on the things I am used to as a student and not going to touch the other roles (though even teachers complaining from the system!)

1 Availability

I don't think the guys who are maintaining the system really cares about Ritaj being available all of the time for the students. And I totally understand, since the system only serving around 8000 Students, it shouldn't be a big deal if it's not available for 1, 2 or 5 days!

Tips

It would be super cool if they let the students know when a planned outage is going to happen, and a sorry note explaining why the system was down!

2 Scalability

"When will they 'fix' Ritaj so it can 'handle' a larger number of requests... I hate when I get that Server busy crap." - One students complaining about Ritaj being down in a rush hour!

Unfortunately, Ritaj is mostly down whenever mostly needed! When Marks is available on Ritaj students open their Ritaj accounts simultaneously to check how they did (or how other people did!), when Registration is open it's like a race to the classes before it's all sold out. In such moments, Ritaj Dies!

In past Ritaj really died in such times. These days, they are limiting the amount of students that can access Ritaj at a time. Of course a message will appear on your browser saying something like: "Too many students already logged into the system, please try later!" (How lame is that!)

Tips

Get new Servers! Load Balance Better! Host it where it will scale (Try Google AppEngine!). Don't limit the number that's lame!

3 Realtime

"I hate when Ritaj shows the messages late..."

Ritaj has no sense of realtime, perhaps because it is not as critical as in other applications. But it would be really nice if someone could read a board message before its deadline!!! Yes, some messages show up after it is posted by days or weeks, by then the scholarship deadline would be already gone!

Tips

Think of not making the users refresh the page 10 times a second! This will help your servers not to go down at least!

4 Speed and Loading Time
I guess by now you will know how fast Ritaj can load!
Running Google Speed analysis on Ritaj home page (after logging in) it provides you with these tips shown in the image.

Computer Center, You've got some work to do ;-)

Can Save 81.8KB out of 137.7KB for all the resources! That means you will be able to serve one and a half more requests for each old request!!

Have any comments, other things that Ritaj Sucks about, or a tip for making Ritaj suck less? Please let me hear about it in the comments

... Read Part 2 of this post here ...

Recover your file after OpenOffice.org Crashes on Mac

2009-09-04T00:40:00.006+03:00

Two days ago I spent 5 hours preparing a presentation, usually I use Google Docs to do so, however, in this case I preferred to use an application because the presentation would have a massive number of pictures, and I didn't want to keep doing Browse and stuff. Instead I prefer using Drag and Drop to put all the images (or group of them) at the same time and then playing around with them. The Only option I had at the time is OpenOffice.Org

So, after finishing working on the presentation (at 2:00 am) OpenOffice crashed! Bingo! I thought it's okay if I just relaunched it, it should recover it. However, that wasn't the case. It brings the recovery window but hang there saying "Recovering Started!". When I couldn't get it back after few trials, it was 2:20 am, I had to present at 9:30am, I am really tired and it would take another 3:00 hours to redo it again! I knew then that this is a good time to Freak out!

Luckily my colleague Tamer AlKhuly was there to the rescue! And after some searching and stuff, we found the place where OpenOffice store the recovery (backup) files. Once you know this directory, then it should be easy to grab the file and just opening it.

To check where your OpenOffice stores these files, go to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Paths .

There you should see a Backups path, this is where you can go and see your backup file. By Default for OpenOffice.org 3 on Mac it would be:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/OpenOffice.org/3/user/backup
Hope this will save three hours for someone as it did to me.

Lesson Learned: Google Docs Rocks!
Don't believe me, check how it helps you get a girl goes out with you ;-)

Firefox Tip - As new!

2009-09-04T00:09:00.004+03:00

As I wrote in my last post, the more you use Firefox the more it gets slower and slower. The reason behind this drop in performance is that Firefox is keeping more history and hence the Database becomes larger and larger.

However, MozillaLinks Suggested a defragmentation of the Firefox SQLite database would boost the speed of Firefox. I've tried it and it really does improve Firefox speed by a considerable amount! You can do that by executing a command:

Go to Tools
Click Error Console
Copy and Paste the following command in the Code field and then Click Evaluate

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

Note that Firefox might freeze for couple of seconds.

MozillaLinks also points out to an experimental extension that will do this automatically called Vacuum Places, you can try installing it here.

Firefox is getting older - But still my favorite

2009-09-03T23:46:00.007+03:00

Firefox has been my favorite browser, but the more I use it it seems it gets older and older. It takes a lot of time to start Firefox, and when it starts it fills up the memory! In addition to the slow performance (for Firefox and the Computer) when you open lots of tabs at the same time, Firefox freezes (for couple of minutes if you're lucky!)

These days I've Firefox, Safari and Camino on my Mac. I use all of them (at the same time sometimes!)

In these times I was opening more than 60 .html pages at the same time, when I did it first was with Firefox 3.5.2 (Default Browser) and it took around 20 Seconds to load them all, and sometimes it crashes. Then I tried open them with Safari 4.0.2 , which was amazing with handling the pages. It loaded them in 3-5 seconds!

After this experiment, I've been using Safari for doing the heavy duties like opening lots of pages together. However, Firefox is still my choice.

Translating from the Command Line - Update 1

2009-08-24T23:50:00.004+03:00

Updates about Translating from the Command Line:

Fixed the problem with Translating Huge amount of text.

The script handle this easily by making multiple requests to Google Translate. So, instead of sending all the text, the script make slices of the text and send requests.

Writing to Files directly from the script without using I/O redirection

Using --write file_name parameter, you now can write to file/s.

Translate one text to Multiple languages.

Ever wondered how to write your name in all Languages, or how to say Good Morning?! Now you can run the script on one language and get back the result of as many languages as you want!

Check this out:

$ gt --to "ar es fr de ja ru hi zh cs fa el ko it" Mohammad

Translation in ar is محمد
Translation in es is Mohammad
Translation in fr is Mohammad
Translation in de is Mohammad
Translation in ja is モハマド
Translation in ru is Мохаммад
Translation in hi is मोहम्मद
Translation in zh is 穆罕默德
Translation in cs is Mohammad
Translation in fa is محمد
Translation in el is Mohammad
Translation in ko is 모하마드
Translation in it is Mohammad

To translate a file to many languages and write the results to files:

$ gt --to "ar es fr de ja ru hi zh cs fa el ko it" --write article.txt --file article-jp.txt

this will write the output to files like ar_article.txt, es_article.txt ...etc besides it will output the translation to the screen.

Sorry, the code is still a mess, I will try to comment it and write some documentation for it.

Ideas:

Update Twitter/Facebook Status in Many Languages.
Recognize Multiple Languages inside the text and translate it to one language
Build the script to be used as a library in other scripts/programs.
Show Language Full name instead of language code

Have other ideas? Let me know or try implementing one of the above Ideas.

Download new Version here.

Translating From the Command Line

2009-08-20T22:41:00.006+03:00

Today I read an article about using Google Translate API to translate sentences from the command line. I liked the idea, so I started tweaking it around, and added some features to it:

The Ability to detect the language of the text you want to translate (so you only have to supply the language you want to translate into) (There's a separate script that you can use just for detecting the language if that's all what you want)
The Ability to translate files (and output them to other files if you want)

Known issues:

Won't be able to translate big files. (Will be fixed next time)
Some languages are not available for use in the API (Can't do anything about it, this is a Google Translate API support issue)

Please note that these were written quickly, and the code might seem somehow freak (or even broken!)

TODO:

Cleaning the code
Better Modularity
Extending Functionality (e.g. Translating Huge amount of text)
Documentation
Multiple locales translation at the same time (e.g. gt "en ja ar es" " Hello World")

Download the script here, when extracting the files run:

$ chmod +x gt gd.py
$ sudo mv gt /bin/
$ sudo mv gd.py /bin/

Here is some stuff you can do with the scripts:

$ gt ar Hello, How Are you?
$ gt en --file article-ja.txt
$ gt en --file article-ja.txt > article-en.txt
$ gd.py --file article-unknown.txt
$ gd.py Hola, cómo estás?

This should work on Mac or Linux (Python should be installed by default)

Let me know if you would like to help or if you have any ideas.

Update 1: Translating From Command Line - Update 1

Ref: Ubuntu Forum

Google Palestinian Day - Videos And Presentations

2009-06-17T23:57:00.004+03:00

Google Palestinian Day videos and Presentations are now available online, so you can watch all the sessions and codelabs. You can also look at the presentations and read them.

To get the videos and presentation, please visit the GPals Day 2009 website here (http://sites.google.com/site/gpalsday/Home).

First Day at Google!

2009-06-15T10:15:00.003+03:00

Well, I always thought that I should blog about my first day at Google! And Walaa, it's Today!!
To be honost, I didn't think that I will write my post from the Airport! Yes! I am now at the Royal Jordanian Airport waiting my flight to Zurich at 11:15 am that arrives at 2:35 pm!

God! I was really excited about my first day there! Unfortunatelly, things didn't work out. What happened that I couldn't be there? Well here we go...

My flight was yesterday at 3:50 pm that goes from Amman to Zurich via Vienna! Yes this is exactly the problem, Vienna! At the airport we were surprised that our Visaes didn't have a Schengen Transit on it, which prohibeted us from traveling a transit to Vienna! I was traveling with another Intern from Jordan (Max Al Shawabkeh) at the same flight, again, he had the same problem as mine.

So we went back to Jordan with his Father car, and went to the traveling office. There were couple of flights available the next day! Max booked the one that arrives earlier at 9:45 am(via Turkish airline). The problem here is that we weren't sure that I can travel a transit through Turkish airline (I am traveling using my Palestinian Passport), so I prefered not taking any more risks to delay it more and I booked a direct flight with the Royal Jordanian Airline.

The last thing I am still hoping for is that I could catch up the last hour from the day lol. Trying to make my first impression there :-)

Wohooo! How exciting your first day was!? Let me know if it was more exciting than mine lol!

Scratch Day In Palestine

2009-04-16T17:40:00.004+03:00

What is Scratch?
Scratch is a visual programming language developed by MIT, Scratch makes it easy for children to learn programming in a visual way by Drag-and-drop techniques. Children are capable of creating very nice multimedia animations, quizes, stories and programs. Children can then upload their works to a website where people around the world see, comment on and share them.

What is Scratch Day?
Scratch day is an event where all Scratchers gather in each country into groups to play with Scratch and create some programs and upload them on the internet.

Raed Yacoub is organizing the Scratch Day in Palestine, it will be on May 16, 2009, In Ramallah. So for those interested in joining Palestinian Kids, or can train some kids using Scratch or perhaps your little brother would like to join them, please contact Raed Yacoub, he would be glad to hear from you.

For more information, visit MIT Scratch official Site here

If you really joined them and made something out of scratch, I would like to see them, waiting to hear from you.

I also was thinking of letting children that will get the XO Laptops in Palestinians Schools to participate in this day and have fun playing around with Scratch on the XO.

Wanna play out with Scratch? Download it from here for Mac OS or for Windows.
Also, if you want to try it on OLPC XO Laptop, download it here.

ITU World Telecommunication Policy Forum 2009

2009-04-09T10:04:00.006+03:00

A month ago, ITU announced a video competition that promotes ICT and its theme was 'Future of ICT', the winners would get to join ITU into the WTPF 2009 in Lisbon, Purtogal.

There were 30 Participantes in this competition, and I am one of them. My video was about how to Balance ICT in the developing countries, and helping the developed countries to reduce the industrial wastes caused from the disposal of old computers and devices.

Here is my video:

5 winner entries has been announced, and my video is NOT among them :-).

To see more information on the winner entries and all the submitted entries, please visit the competition web page: http://www.itu.int/osg/csd/wtpf/wtpf2009/contest.html

Google Palestinian Day - Developer Day

2009-03-24T19:35:00.002+02:00

Wow! I am still excited :D. The Event has ended couple of hours ago. It was full of surprises and each session was more exciting the earlier one.

Ali Salhi, a colleague of mine in Birzeit University, picked me up in Ramallah about 8:35 AM. We headed to Grand Park Hotel, there, we meet other Collegues that looked really excited to start the events, they kept asking hey, shouldn't the registration began before 10 minutes ago! and that kind of questions. Soon, we started around 9:10 AM, we entered the events room, registered our names and got the gadget, when we sat down we got Google Notebook and Google Pen, and a new Google Lighty Cloth Stickie.

Before they start the event, I saw Gisel Hiscock, she waved me so I went right there to her, she introduced me to the other Googlers, Mohammad, Ahmad, Chewy, and Adam. I introduced her to my classmates and colleagues.

The Event was started around 9:45, Gisel first told us that she is going to talk about how this whole event first started. Amazingly, she show a slide that shows a picture of a guy that has started with him by sending them email. Surprisingly! The Next Slide Showed My Picture! Wow! I really was shocked! Gisel said that I inspired her and her team when she first saw me in Google Developer day At Tel Avev! So She decided to raise funds and come here to Palestine to organize these Events! (Isn't She Amazing!!), after that another picture of me with the Google Party Cake showed on the slide, and she told the people that I got an Internship with Google in Zurich. I am still shocked! What she was thinking of! This is Amazing, I was really embarresed somehow! But At the same time I felt really proud! Did I really Inspired her to come here! I never thought of it at that way, but really Gisel opened my mind to lots and lots of things, she made me think in a very different way!

Next, Ahmad (From Eygpt) gave us a general introduction (In Arabic) to the event, and his speech was priceless, I really liked him, he was amazing. Things that he highlighted in his introduction, he talked about Bill Gates Story and How people had lots of barriers and now the world is open to us! He told us about the 10,000 Hours of Experience! And it was inspiring! He also highlighted that Change will come from Cloud Computing and User Generated Contents.

The Sessions generally covered the following topics:

Content Creation
Google APIs - Including Some YouTube Examples, AJAX API...etc
OpenSocial
AppEngine
Hackathoon - Focused on OpenSocial.

The sessions was amazing and the Hackathoon was lots of fun, though I was setting on far table that I couldn't see the slides very well. Two of my classmates won a prize :-).

Thanks Google, Thanks Gisel, Thanks everyone made this possible!

Nanotechnology Buzz in Birzeit University!

2008-10-30T13:08:00.004+02:00

Lately, lots of interests in Nanotechnology have been showed up in Birzeit University. Teachers, Students and researchers became more interested in Nanotechnology topics. I remember the first time I heard about Nanotechnology here in Birzeit was from the exciting talks that Dr. Wasel Ghanem was giving in some of his lectures. I then became interested in Nanotechnology topics, I stared reading and exploring the web about this and I found it AMAZING!

Lately, on the Office of Dean of Information Technology board, an announcement with a title "Student Participation in Nanotechnology Conference - Jordan, Amman" attracted me. There's an opportunity that 5 Students from the university. However, I was excited, so I did applied to it. Unfortunately, I wasn't selected among those who will go to the conference. However, I know two people that are going, one of them my classmate Mu'ath Al-Badawi, and the other is Muhannad. I will ask Mu'ath to try to video taping the conference so I can watch it when he comes back, however, I already asked Muhannad to do the same :-).

Today, an hour ago, I read an announcement about a Nanotechnology lecture that is given in the Chemistry Department, I went there, and it was nice, but it was more specific on Nanotechnology Chemistry and the experiment that the presenter (I don't really know his name :-) ) and his team on cleaning polluted water using Nano Iron particles (nFE).

Moreover, Dr. Wasel is now thinking of involving the Nanotechnology as a new Course in BZU. I hope he will success in doing this, and maybe those who are attending the conference could give him new ideas for this course.

Finally, It's amazing to see how Birzeit Teachers and Students are interested in this field, and I hope Palestine will get involved more and more in such advanced technologies.

Changin XO Sugar Interface to Arabic

2008-09-26T03:54:00.003+02:00

Since while, I was trying to make XO fully support Arabic, I've wrote a post on how to write in Arabic in Sugar, and Now I am writing on how to change the Sugar User Interface to Arabic.

7.60-8.20
If you are running Build 7.60 (8.20), then it's your lucky day, you can simply roll over your oX in the center of the circle, and Choose Control Panel (As in the Picture). Then go to Languages and choose Arabic. That's All! You need to restart your XO to apply these settings.

After Rebooting you will notice that it is translated in Arabic as in the Following Image:

Older Versions than 7.60-8.20
If you have older version (Normal Case) then you won't find the Control Panel under the main list of your XO. But, you still can use some commands to do the job. So, Open a Terminal Activity, and type:

# sugar-control-panel -s language Arabic/Lebanon
# reboot

This will change your interface language and will restart your XO.

P.S.
To see a list of available languages, type:

# sugar-control-panel -h language

How to Get XO OS Running On your XP PC!

2008-09-22T00:38:00.004+02:00

For those who want to test XO Sugar Operating System, and they don't have an XO laptop, you can use some visualization techniques to run the OS inside XP or Linux (I will post the one about linux later). To Run it under XP, it's very strait forward, the easiest way to do so, is to download an already packed folder that includes the Emulater (Called Qemu), the Accelerator(KQemu) and the Image of the OS (Sugar). This package can be downloaded from here. Once you get it downloaded Just Unzip it and wait Sugar till it boot.

To get your mouse out of the Virtual OS, you need to press Ctrl+Alt.

If you need another image build you can follow up with a detailed post on the OLPC Wiki.

Enjoy!

Upgrading XO Operating System to 8.20

2008-09-20T22:00:00.007+02:00

Sugar is now in the process of development of Build 8.20, and believe or not, you'll be amazed, it's nice and powerful. For those who want to test this build now, you can backup your XO OS, so you don't have to worry if you mess up. You can return to your current version whenever you want.

So Let's begin. First, we will need to backup your data, for this you will need a 1 GB USB so you can store the backup on it:

First of all, to do this you will need to get a developer key, you can get one by typing into a Browser Activity file:///home/.devkey.html

After getting your developer key, save it into your usb in folder called security

Plug your USB into XO and Boot it.
Press Escape (the x key on the top left of the keyboard)
This will give you an OK prompt.
Now to backup you need to type:

save-nand u:\backup.img

This will take some time. Just leave it till it says Ok again.

Now Move your Backup from your USB to another Computer

You need now to put the 8.2 image build into the USB, you need to get the following two files (Please rename these files to something small, like restore.img, and restore.crc):

.img file

.crc file

So, now you should have on USB the following files:

restore.img
restore.crc
security/develop.sig

Now, turn off your XO, Plug the USB, and Turn it back on Pressing ESC (x).

Again The Ok Prompt shows up, now type:

copy-nand u:\restore.img

This will bring a screen with little squares on it. And Saying Erasing. Wait until the Ok prompt shows again.

Turn off, and turn on your XO. Woo-hoo It's booting into the new system.

Here's some screenshots of my new XO Operating System:

Playing Around with My XO Laptop!

2008-09-16T22:48:00.006+02:00

Since OLPC gave us the XO laptop as a gift, I am really happy with it :-). I use it everyday regularly for trying new things on it. We are now trying to write Arabic Language (Palestinian Native Language) on XO. After following a guide written on the OLPC wiki, I got it working (but not fully functional yet!).

Here's How I got it working (It's basicalley cut out from the wiki article, Just for Arabic Language, you can return to the original wiki post anytime you want at this link).

First of all you have to be a root to use 'yum' package manager, so follow these commands:

$ su
# yum update
# yum install fonts-arabic
....
# yum install scim scim-gtk
...
# yum install scim-m17n scim-tables
~~# yum install scim-tables-additional scim-tables-arabic~~

UPDATE:

Instead of installing the above package, install this one (which solve many problems, as indicated below!):

# yum install m17n-db-arabic.noarch

After doing this, you need now to activate scim at the start of Sugar (the interface of XO laptop), to do so you need to copy this file ~olpc/.xsession-example to ~olpc/.xsession and then configuring it to add some line of code as following:

# cp ~olpc/.xsession-example ~olpc/.xsession
# vi ~olpc/.xsession

Then add the following lines to the file:

export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export USE_XOPENIM=t
scim -d

Now you need to reboot you XO laptop, just type:

# reboot

After booting, Open Browse Activity put the cursor on the text field then hit the HOT KEY for SCIM which is (CTRL+SPACE) a little pop-up window on the right bottom of the screen will show, just change the language to Arabic and start typing, Wohoo, it's writing Arabic characters.

Three main Problems I am still facing typing in Arabic are:

~~I managed to write Arabic on the Browse activity, But still I couldn't write in Arabic in the Write activity. Strange! (Even if I choosed an Arabic font)~~

~~Arabic Layout is different from the normal Keyboard layout. Means, that if you want to type N character in Arabic, you normally hit the K key. But here you have to hit N key.~~

~~Not all the characters do print, one character that I missed from my Name is the Arabic Ha' letter.~~

One new problem is that there's some letters don't come in the right format, for example if you typed "m" Arabic letter followed by "n" Arabic Letter, it won't append them to each other, instead they will be like separated letters! (See Picture)

This is a good start in Arabizing OLPC. However it still needs a lot of work.

P.S.
"yum install scim-tables-arabic" command installs a file "Arabic.bin", I believe this file which enabled me to write in Arabic, however I've tried to opened the file Arabic.bin with VI and I got this code which I googled about and found the same code in this website except for the last line I got a little bit different from the trash down there. I couldn't configure it and play with it because it's not very obviouse. However, I sent Mohammad Damt (the person who wrote Arabic.bin file) an email asking him for a little guidance. But he didn't response yet. I hope he will response soon.

Thanks Mohammad Damt for providing this file. And I hope we will get a fix very soon.

Sorry for the Long Post :-).

One Laptop Per Child Interviewing me!

2008-09-07T09:37:00.003+02:00

Back in ITU Youth Forum 2008, one of their sponsors is OLPC. OLPC is committed to spread laptops all over the world so all of the children can discover his/her God Given Power and Talents. OLPC presenter on behalf of Nicholas Negroponte surprised us by announcing that each of the youth forum fellows will get One Laptop.

Actually, there where a project in PALESTINE that intended to deliver these Laptops for Children Around Palestine by a Palestinian student from MIT, and we were suppose to help him in that. Unfortunately, there were government problems that they couldn't pay for these laptops. However, I am planning to re-opening the case around Palestine. Actually I started with my family, I showed the Laptop for them, and they liked it :-D. My Little Sisters was shouting "it's mine", "I will take it", "give it to me". I was surprised by there reactions. However, my asked me if I can buy 6 laptops for my little sisters. I am sure I can. So, From now on, I will be presenting OLPC laptop for my family, friends, and schools. I will ask Ammar (the MIT student) where he has stop, and I will continue on his footsteps.

Finally, I would like to mention that I was interviewed to talk about OLPC at Bangkok, and I have seen the video on ITU YouTube Chanel. Have a look ;-) That's me with the Black and White that represents Palestinian People.

ITU Youth Forum 2008 - Asia And Pasicfic Regions

2008-09-07T07:56:00.002+02:00

A month ago, I and Noura Salhi was selected on behalf of Palestine to participate in ITU Youth Forum 2008 Asia and Pacific Regions, Held in Bangkok the Capital of Thailand. On 26th of August I left Palestine to Jordan, the next day Noura Joined me. We have gone to the Thai Embassy in Amman (We had a hard time finding it LoL!) To creat a Visa to Thai. The Guys in the Embassy were helpful and they give us more 5 minutes to fill the application before they close. We came back after 2 hours at the same day, and we've got the visaes.

On 29th of Augest at 2:30 am, our plane has flought to Thai From Royal Jordainian Air port. The Flight took 9 hours before we arrived to Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok (The largest Airport on Asia. Well it was large for me since this is my first time in airport :-) ) You can see picture of the airport at your left of this paragraph.

When we arrived, Two Persons were wearing ITU T-Shirts and Holding a Paper that says "ITU 2008 Asia and Pacific". It was easy to find them. They took us around the airport to get our Bags. Then we met two new ITUs and they took us to the Passport Checking process and everything was prepared for ITU Fellows who arrive to Bangkok at Anytime. Later, Chang took us from the Airport to the TOT Academy (The place where we will be staying at). She was nice and she kept talking to us till we arrived to the Reciption section of the TOT Academy. We fill a form, get our rooms Keys and go up to our rooms.

I am not going to write my diary for these days here. However, Participating in ITU Forum was a great Experience and Knowledge, a lot of great people were there, we met them, talked to them, and take pictures with them.

I hope you all participate in the next Global event ITU Forum World 2009 which will be held in Jeneav. Hope I will see you there (Perhaps as Alumni :-)).

I've met great friends there, Omar AL-Hijazi from Jordan, Ayman & Asma from Yaman, and Ramia & Mohammad from Syria. There were great friends, Hope to see them ASAP.

I will be talking about ITU more in detials in another post, and I will be talking what events we participated in, and what ITU helps developing in you.

Finally, In this post I would like to thanks each person that helped making ITU Forum is possible. Special thanks goes to ITU and the People works in. And thanks to the sponsors of ITU Forum 2008. Thanks to OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) for the nice laptop they donnered to us :-). And Many Thanks to the people who we felt it was our family, all TOT employees that were their to help us whenever a help is needed. Thanks to them very much. Thanks for the Party :-).

So, Untill the other post, See you.

Firefox Extension - Better Gmail - Fire Up your Gmail!

2008-07-28T22:38:00.002+03:00

Better Gmail Firefox Extension offers a lot of Gmail Beautiful tricks. Such as To Add Helpful shortcuts, to hide some unnecessory elements, change the whole Gmail Skin, adding row Highlighting facility, attachment Icons, changing some defaults, HTML Signuture and Much More.

Here's some snapshots of my Gmail, using Better Gmail Firefox Extension.

Changing Gmail Skin!

You can change your gmail skin, and other gmail settings from "Tools -> Add-ons -> Option of Better Gmail -> Skins Tab". After Changing the settings of Better Gmail, you may need to reload the gmail page.

Macros and Shortcuts!
Pressing "?" will bring up the help menu. See the following snapshot:

There's much features for Better Gmail, so why you don't give it a try. To install Better Gmail Click Here!

Enjoy!

Make Money while you Search!

2008-07-28T21:16:00.004+03:00

Have you tired of searching in Google, then you don't find what you want exactly, then you go to Yahoo, then maybe to MSN, trying to find what you're searching about. Scour is here to help you to Search the three search engines on the same page. Scour Gives you the number of occurrence in Google, yahoo and MSN of the search query you're trying to find.

It has a very nice (Ajax-Based) system. Moreover, they are offering a Visa Cards Gift for those who accumulate at least 6500 Points. Points are calculated as the following:

Each Search Query is for 1 Point.

This means that you get 1 point each time you search for anything!

Each Voting is for 2 Points.
Each Comment is for 3 Points.

Scour limited the points to 4 points per search query, and to 500 points per day. This means, Each query can give you at most 4 points, and each day you can accumulate at most 500 points. So, I need 6500/500 = 13 days to get the Visa card. Well, that's true if you're working alone. Now you can invites your friends to join Scour, and of course you'll have a share from their points, Scour gives you 25% from their points.

So, Let's Calculate it again. Suppose you have invited 10 Friends, each friend earns 500 Points a day. so from each friend you will get 125 Points, multiply this by 10, then you'll get 1250 Points a day! (Only From your friends!) add your points to it, you'll get 1750 Points a day! Amazing, that means we need 4 days to get the Visa! WaW.

What's the catch? I am not sure if this is a scam or if it's for real. But I am pretty sure that I am not losing anything! On the contrary, I got the three most famous search engines Results in one beautiful page, So, You don't lose anything trying it out!

To Join Scour Click Here.

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday To Me :-)

2008-07-26T02:34:00.003+03:00

One Day, 2 Hours and 39 Minutes ago I became 21 :-).

Hope my 21 years would be full of Hard Working that leads to success :-)

My Little sister (6 years old) asked me what I wanted for my birthday as a present, so I told here that I want a MAC :D. She didn't understand at the moment, but when I told here I want a Laptop she got it :D, and she replied "aah feeh laptop lo3beh bjiblak iyah bs howa 25 shekel o ana ma ma3i o yemkin 5allas aslan!!" (in English: "yeah, there's a toy (fake) laptop I will buy it for you, but it costs 25 shekel and I don't have that amount of money, and I think it's out of the store!").

That was a funny said from a 6-years old girl, but smartly she said "5alas bajiblak 7abteen boza se3dan (ramzoon) o dabdob bshekel :D..." (in English: "But, I will buy you 2 Ice creams (each costs 0.5 shekel) and a little bear!"). And she bought me that :D. Of course, I was the one who gave here the money to buy me my gift :D.

Thanks Little sis. :-)

A video About Muslims In US!

2008-07-23T23:45:00.003+03:00

A very nice and lovely video about Muslims, I first saw it on Aicha Qandisha Blog and I loved it :-) , and I liked the song also :-) . So here's the video...

I hope you'll Enjoy it.

Nano Technology Wonders!

2008-07-23T21:38:00.002+03:00

Just Couple of weeks ago, I Opened youtube and typed down "Nanotechnology". Actually, what made me do this is that our teacher is always talking about the Nanotechnology and it's wonders, and that everything is turning into the Nano engineering, and as he always say "It's The Nano Age!". So, I really get excited to see some of the Nano technology "things". So, I jumped off the keyboard opened Firefox and typed youtube.com, you know the rest. What I've seen and heared really amazed me, so here's I am posting these amazing ideas and experemints:

The Nano Structered Glass!

Lotus Coating with Nano Glass

Nano Structured Glass Application - Heavy Shower Over a Car

How Nanotechnology Works!

Nano Toilet Paper! (This is good For recycling :P :P )

Invention Of Paper Battery (Amazing)

Battery Tuning!

The Rise of the Nanotechnology!

There are other great videos talking about the Nanotechnology and how it will revolutionize the Medicine Aspects and how we use surgeries to heal cancer and other disease. I didn't include these videos just because i don't want to make this post very large. So, If you're really interested just jump to youtube and search for Nanotechnology, you will find a ton of videos :-).

That's All for now, I hope you'll enjoy these Videos as much as I. Hope to see your comments on this new technology :-).

Google Code Jam! - Alien Number System!

2008-07-22T09:04:00.003+03:00

This was the first practice problem that I've read and solved. I used Java to write the code, and I will be posting it in here, the code doesn't need to be explained (it's well-commented code). The algorithm that I've used to solve the Alien Number System maybe not the best one. But fortunately, when I tried the large input at it, it didn't take anytime, it solved it by the fly and wrote the output file. So, I believe it's good and efficient.

To use (test) the code, first save it to a file named AlienNumber.java Compile it into AlienNumber.class file (using $ javac AlienNumber.java) and then run it using the following command:

$ java AlienNumber inputFile outputFile

Just note that inputFile must exist inside the folder, and outputFile will be created on the same folder.

So, Here's the code (Enjoy! :-

// Usage: java AlienNumber A-large.in A-large.out
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class AlienNumber
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
      if(args.length < 2)
      {
          System.out.println("Usage: java AlienNumber inputFile outputFile");
          System.exit(0);
      }
      // Declaring two Files, one is the input to read from and the other is an output to write to
      File inFile = null;
      File outFile = null;
      FileInputStream inFis = null;
      FileOutputStream outFos = null;
      BufferedInputStream inBis = null;
      BufferedOutputStream outBos = null;
      DataInputStream inDis = null;
      DataOutputStream outDos = null;
      try
      {
          // Opening the files
          inFile = new File(args[0]);
          outFile = new File(args[1]);
          inFis = new FileInputStream(inFile);
          outFos = new FileOutputStream(outFile);
          inBis = new BufferedInputStream(inFis);
          outBos = new BufferedOutputStream(outFos);
          inDis = new DataInputStream(inBis);
          outDos = new DataOutputStream(outBos);
          // Taking the number of cases from the first line
          int numOfRecords = Integer.parseInt(inDis.readLine());
          // Counter of the case number
          int caseNum=1;
          // While there's still data in input
          while(inDis.available() != 0)
          {
              // Take the three numbers (Number Base1 Base2)
              String line = inDis.readLine();
              // Split the line by space to get each number stand alone
              String[] nums = line.split(" ");
              // Store Numbers Bases .. The number base is how many digit it consist of
              // For example: if a numbering system contains those digits : 0123456789
              // Then its Base is ten (10). 
              int type1Base = nums[1].length();
              int type2Base = nums[2].length();
              // The wanted number to convert length to itterate through each digit
              int numLength = nums[0].length();
              // We first want to convert the number to decimal then to the other alien system
              //  num Stores the number in Decimal Format
              int num=0;
              // Iterating the number digits, each time multiplying that digit weight by the first alien system base powered to the position of that digit
              // e.g.: if we have a number 1a4 and its numbering system contains the following digits: 14as ( base 4)
              // then the number in decimal equal to: weight(1) * 4^2 + weight(a) * 4^1 + weight(4) * 4^0
              // weight(1) = 3 (since it's the fourth number of the system) 
              // weight(a) = 1 ; weight(4) = 2
              for(int i=0;i<numLength; i++)
                  num += (int)(nums[1].indexOf(nums[0].charAt(i)) * Math.pow(type1Base,numLength-i-1));
              // result string will store the number converted into the second numbering system
              String result = "";
              // Now we want to convert the decimal number to the second alien numebring system
              // This can be accomplieshed by taking the mode of the decimal numeber by the second numbering system base (decimal % base2)
              // and taking the index of that mod result in the second numbering system (this will give us the weight of that number in the second base)
              // each time iterating a digit and concatinating the old result to the new one
              while(num != 0)
              {
                  result = nums[2].charAt(num%type2Base) + result;
                  num = (int) num/type2Base;
              }
              // Final Result will contain the string to write to the output file
              String finalResult = "Case #"+caseNum++ +": "+result;
              // write the finalResult to the output
              outDos.write(finalResult.getBytes(), 0,finalResult.length());
              // if it isn't the last case, add a new line behind this line
              if(caseNum <= numOfRecords)
                  outDos.write("\r\n".getBytes(), 0, "\r\n".length());
              // flush the buffer to write the output to the file
              outDos.flush();
          }
          // Close the files
          outDos.close();
          inDis.close();
      }
      // If any Error Happened, Just Print the stack trace
      catch(Exception ex)
      {
          ex.printStackTrace();
      }
  }
}

Firefox Always Win!

2008-07-22T01:32:00.004+03:00

We did it!

We set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help we reached 8,002,530 downloads.

You are now part of a World Record and the proud owner of the best version of Firefox yet!

Don't forget to download your very own certificate for helping set a Guinness World Record.

Well, Congratulation to Firefox ;-) ... They Deserve it!
They Sent me a very nice certificate :). I Like the Fact that I helped to set a Guinness World Record :-).

Thanks to Firefox and their Lovely New Version 3.0 :-)

Here's My Certificate :) ...

CSS Tips & Tricks - Centering A Div!

2008-07-22T01:20:00.002+03:00

I've been asked how to center a div couple of times. I sometimes forget how :-) . Here's two ways you can use to center any div:

Way One: This way works on both FireFox and IE.

div {

position: absolute;

left: 50%;

width: 500px;

margin-left: -250px;

}

Way Two:

/*To center the div on IE Put a text-align: center on the body tag*/
body {
text-align: center;
min-width: 600px;
}
/* To Center div on Firefox use the following code */
div{
margin:0 auto;
width:600px;
text-align: left;
}

Note that we use "text-align:left" here to cancel the "text-align:center;" from the body (since it will center the text inside the centered div).

That's how you can center a div, if i come up with new ways I will update this post.

Hope you find what you're looking for.

Kill The Mouse - Learn Fast Typing

2008-07-22T00:18:00.002+03:00

Have you ever wonder how those programmers type 50 words in less than 1 minute without even looking at the keyboard! Yes, you can do it. What you really need is a little practicing, me myself I am not that fast but I found that the best way to learn typing without looking to the keyboard is CHATTING :-) (Now, who says that chatting is no good!). Well, Human by their nature are talkative, they love to talk, so that would be the best way to practice while you're not wasting your time to follow some boring typing lessons (asdf lkjh, if you got what I mean ;). So, you practice while you chat, wow it looks like a double winning to me ;).

So, why don't you start investing your chatting time for some typing practicing. All I want you to do is CHAT, but don't look at the keyboard. It will look very hard to you at the beginning, but you're not losing anything, you still chatting, no one would kill you if you late to answer them while chatting. So, Just try to chat while you're not looking the keyboard, Look at the screen. Keep chatting.

After a couple of chatting days, you will find yourself comfortable with not looking at the keyboard. Actually, you'll forget to! (That's pretty good!)

Now, what else can fasten your typing? Well, I call it "Don't Look Back!". It's ok if you have misspelled some words, don't try to fix them, just go with it as it is! But, next time try to type it correctly, still wrong, leave it, go a head, the other chatter will understand you anyways ;-) so you don't have to worry.

The most important thing is: Only Chat! Don't push yourself to remember where's that key, just press the first key that is on your mind, got it wrong, it's ok, continue.

That's it, just follow with these steps, and believe me you'll become super fast in no time!

Is that all you can do? No, there is a lot of funny and interesting games to play with and learn typing, here are some of them (Taken from the PowerTyping.com website):

Foggies

Baracuda

Save the Girl

Alpha Rain

Hope You Enjoyed this article.

How to get a free Google hosted emails! ( @yourname!)

2008-07-21T17:27:00.010+03:00

Recently, when I was searching for a free hosting companies for the Web Development Course Students to Upload their basic HTML web pages, I found a website that gives you a free domains (sub-domains) with a Full DNS control and domain management. This gives you the ability to change the CNAME of that domain. Recall that Google Apps and Google Hosted Emails (And other Hosted Services from Microsoft) require you to confirm (activate) your hosted account by changing your CNAME of that domain, so that they confirm that the domain you entered is yours.

Google Hosted Apps allow you to build your own email system based on Gmail architecture. That is, your email users will be seeing the same Gmail interface and services but the email address will be not @gmail, it will be @yourdomain.

So, want to make @yourname emails. Let's get started.

First of all you need to register at this website. Open the website and follow these steps as shown in snapshots (Click on the snapshot to see it in full size):

And You're Done! You have a @yourdomain Email ready to use.

PS. You can use this method to create @yourdomain Email but at Hotmail Style. You just go to domains.live.com and follow the wizard there.

I've set 2 domains using this website, namely mkhatib.co.cc and al-khatib.co.cc and I changed Google Logo to this one :-) (inspired by Google of course :) ).
Hope you enjoyed this article. Leave me a comment if you need any help.

Good Luck.

MS SQL Server 2005 Error

2008-07-15T23:11:00.001+03:00

When dealing with MS SQL Server You face some problems, one of them you may face when trying to add a new SQL database Item to your Visual Studio Project, once you do so, you may see the following message:

Generating User Instances in SQL server is disabled. Use sp_configure 'user instances enabled' to generate user instances.

Well, the error message actually solve itself by itself. It's clear that you need to run the command "sp_configure 'user instances enabled'" to solve the problem. But the question is "where is the hack should I run this command!?".

This problem is not a Visual studio error. It's a MS SQL server error. So, to solve it you need to run it as a query of in the SQL server. So, Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express, and click New Query, and type the following command:

sp_configure 'user instances enabled', 1; RECONFIGURE

This should solve the problem, now go back to Visual Studio and try creating a new SQL database, it should work.

P.S. If you don't have Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express installed, install it from here.

Hope this solved your problem.

Google Code Jam!

2008-07-13T21:56:00.003+03:00

Most of you may (or may not) heard of GCJ (Google Code Jam), it's a Contest in which all developers around the world can participate in it. GCJ divided in many rounds in which the last 100 participants will win as listed below in the prizes table. First round is a 24 hour question, which is called the Qualification Round. You'll be presented by some algorithm problems that need to be solved, anyone solve 1 Problem will be moved to the next Round, Round 1.

Each time you move to a new Round, you have less time to code. You must download 2 input files to test your code on. One is small one, and the other is large. You test these files, and send the output files to Google along with the code (the judgment will be only on the Output files not on the code).

To Register to GCJ go to This page.

Hope you a good luck.

Installing Microsoft SQL Server Manaegment Studio Express Problem

2008-07-13T21:51:00.002+03:00

For those who use Windows XP SP3, they may got an error message when trying to install Microsoft SQL Server Manaegment Studio Express, Such as:

Setup is missing prerequisites:
-MSXML6
Go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=54583

Going to the above website didn't solve the problem. To solve the problem, download MSXML6 from Here.

Once you got the 1.5 MB "msxml6.msi" File, Run it, and install it. If you have MSXML6 already installed, just hit Repair and re-install it.

This should Fix the Problem.

Starting Web Development and Design Course!

2008-06-17T10:44:00.002+03:00

Today will be the first day in a Web Development And Design Course, So I though that it would be nice to make it available on the net, So I will be posting here my course sessions, examples, techniques used and I am thinking of making a screen casting for it! (I'll try!)

Today I am just Posting the course outline for those interested and want to follow up with me. My students also will be browsing this blog for information about the course, so anyone has a comment, question, suggestion please post it as a comment.

Hope you all will follow up with me.

Good Luck.

Links & Files:

Get Ready To The Big Day!

2008-06-16T22:44:00.002+03:00

The Day We Have Been Waiting is Coming At Last! Firefox is counting on you to make a Guinness Record World for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Prepare your mouse!

Tomorrow, Tuesday 17, June 2008 is the Big day!

Please Help Firefox to get that record, it deserve it!

Hopefully one of my next posts will be congratulations for the winning :-) .

Kill The Mouse! - Episode 3 - Firefox

2008-06-14T02:07:00.014+03:00

Browsing the net takes most of our time, so why not to make it a little faster to browse the web and find whatever you are looking for.

I will be using Firefox for illustrating the idea, but it may apply to different browsers. (But of course, Firefox is the most recommended!)

If you still using IE, or any other browser (poor you!), try to give Firefox a test drive, you will be amazed! To get Firefox, Click Here.

Tabs

Ctrl + T: New Tab
Ctrl + Tab (Ctrl + Page Up): Move to the next tab.
Ctrl + Shift + Tab (Ctrl + Page Down): Move to the Previous tab.
Ctrl + W: Close the current tab.
Ctrl + R: Reload the current tab.

Ctrl + N: New Windows.
Ctrl + "+": Increase the font size.
Ctrl + "-": Decrease the font size.

Ctrl + D: Bookmark the current tab.
Ctrl + H: Open the history side pane.
Ctrl + U: Show The HTML Source of the page.

Ctrl + F: Search for a phrase in the page.
Ctrl + E: Set the cursor at the Search Box.
Ctrl + J: Open Firefox Download Manager.

To win some more extra time, you can tell Firefox to remember all your passwords and fields, that is you don't have to retype them multiple times.

One more tweak for saving the time you need to type a full URL. Firefox Provides a way that you can map a shortcut to open a website.

Example:
URL: http://www.google.com/adsense
Shortcut: ads

To do this, simply go to "Bookmarks" click on "Organize Bookmarks", Right Click on an empty space and choose "New Bookmark", and fill as the picture below:

Click add. So now you can instead of typing the full URL "http://www.google.com/adsense" you could just type "ads" and hit enter!

That's all for now.