tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34998638280391507072011-11-28T03:23:09.951+03:00When a Tandem, or HP NSK program crashes, it creates a memory dump file called a SAVEABEND file. When my brain crashes, it adds an entry to this blog.Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.comBlogger571100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-70280782151623706342008-11-14T22:12:00.004+03:002008-11-14T22:17:31.838+03:00

Greetjan Wielenga posted a very cool entry on dzone here. It is very cool with nice screenshots and a mini how-to.Many Thanks Greetjan.I haven't blogged for a while. I'll try and keep up with writing a bit more than Java Code.

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-68472784495481735402008-07-17T21:22:00.002+03:002008-07-17T21:27:49.594+03:00

Well, this is my last day in Jeddah, and tomorrow I'm on my way to Bahrain, inshallah.I had some time at the hotel, and since they have very good high speed in-room internet, and I got my laptop, I fired up Ubuntu, got the latest NetBeans loaded and upgraded, and fixed an outstanding issue with JSyntaxPane. So now, it is bug free :-)

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-39714142079570330862008-07-07T21:47:00.004+03:002008-07-09T14:16:09.148+03:00

Personally, I prefer reading light text on dark background. Most web-pages use black text on white background, including this blog. I'll probably change the theme on this blog later, but I'm actually lazy because of this amazing tool. All you need to do is drag it on your bookmarks toolbar, and voila! One click, and all the text in the page will be grey on black, and links blue on black.This

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-2924654182198408412008-07-02T12:33:00.003+03:002008-07-02T12:40:10.869+03:00

Joel Spolsky has a great article about Bill Gates, and being a great leader. It's not that long and definitely worth reading.The main point is, to be a good and successful leader, you have to know what your company / department / ministry / whatever is doing. You must have passion about what you are doing. How many times have we seen unfit managers who have no clue what their sub-ordinates are

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-20908923488687661792008-06-29T12:34:00.001+03:002008-06-29T12:40:37.369+03:00

Some more free time and I had time to fix Java and Groovy Lexers to have better String handling. The older versions did not process String Escape Characters properly.I also added Property file and SQL lexers and did some refactoring by moving the lexers in their own package. The Build file was modified to also build the Java lexers from the flex files (you need the JFlex.jar file in your ant/lib

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-55055951293121221712008-06-23T12:39:00.006+03:002008-06-23T14:14:05.261+03:00

I had some more free time to work on JSyntaxPane. I did some refactoring, that should not change the way to use it though.Refactoring was done by creating a new SyntaxDocument to store the Tokens, instead of having the SyntaxView store them. The former way was actually very stupid!The Document should know about its own tokens, and the View gets the tokens from the Document. That is how it is

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-91544008162057034492008-06-18T15:22:00.003+03:002008-06-18T15:37:32.927+03:00

Based on demand (can't say popular, yet), I just created a Google Project for JSyntaxPane. The NetBeans project is located as the main download.You'll find the source under the src folder of the archive.Here is a break down of what the classes do and how you can use the library in your own projects:The SyntaxTester is a NetBeans created Main application you can use to see and test how syntax

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-79390853107955495272008-06-16T11:54:00.010+03:002008-06-16T13:49:40.446+03:00

I've been playing around with implementing a Syntax Highlighting / Coloring Editor or Text control in Java Swing. Just for fun. It would be part of TranScope to edit scripts, mostly Groovy, and to view some TAL / DDL and XML. That was both hard, time consuming and a hell-of-a-lot of fun and rewarding experience. I'll summarize what I did, and if there is demand publish my final code as a

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-83775332464835153212008-04-07T09:31:00.009+03:002008-04-07T11:22:34.835+03:00

If you have no idea what XML, Serialization, or if you only think of Java as the coffee, then leave now. Or just continue if you are curious.I've been working on a Pet Project for some time now. It's written in Java, using NetBeans, Swing and with Scripting done in Groovy. It's a very generic Transaction Reader and Simulator.Why? It is just Fun! I'm learning a lot by working on it, and its

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-12390427439419475172008-03-28T20:34:00.002+03:002008-11-13T06:59:16.311+03:00

Only in America. And it actually does happen. I've seen people do that.Of course in Bahrain or the Gulf, we get full-time, live-in maids to get us cups of water...

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-42735078472421611382008-03-28T19:50:00.004+03:002008-03-28T20:12:25.072+03:00

I hear this kind of conversation among women all the time, in almost the exact same sequence:A: Salam, how are you doing?B: Salam, very good. and you?A: Good Alhamdilla. How's X?B: She's good. ... and this "how are you" continues for some time... It's not the main purpose of the call / conversation at all. Just a preliminary... now, back to A, talking to B.A: Do you know, Y?B: Yeah, she's

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-7775543700729087042007-12-13T09:19:00.000+03:002007-12-13T09:25:13.566+03:00

... when Microsoft is giving away Visa Ultimate for free.Seriously. They are giving it, or any of the other junk they create, Office, Works, or others. The catch? They will monitor you using it. .. It is called the Windows Feedback Program, and is available in the US only.They must be desperate to have someone, anyone, use Vista. They do want to see how did they miss up so badly I guess. Plus

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-24965769126943713862007-12-09T11:51:00.001+03:002007-12-09T12:05:38.521+03:00

I heard this some time ago: In pre med school the Professor was standing upon a corpse with all the new "Doctors-to-be". He says: "There are two very important lessons I'll give you today... Lesson One: you should not be afraid or disgusted of the body, or the dead body.... “At that time he proceeded by inserting his finger into the corpse ass hole and extracted some stuff...Then he proceeded:

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-18805749303224857962007-11-12T13:42:00.000+03:002007-11-12T14:11:40.791+03:00

If you enlarged or zoomed too much on a photo before you will notice pixelation effect.Because all photographs and most pictures are actually a grid of very small picture elements, or pixels, when you zoom in, you see these ugly rectangles. Just like zooming in too much on a photo on a book or newspaper reveals the dots. With a vector drawing program, like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape or

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-2421345851390259192007-11-09T13:08:00.000+03:002007-11-09T13:23:19.500+03:00

Week 4 was finally a success....Correct Muffin mix. Ingredients were all there, including an egg, which I don't remember needing. And no ants...Here they are... And they taste grrreeaat.

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-4618283082230470252007-11-08T19:16:00.000+03:002007-11-08T20:34:42.341+03:00

I love muffins. Specially when baked fresh. Betty Crocker Muffin Mix is really delicious and very easy to make. It doesn't need a whole lot of equipment to make, just a bowl and a spoon, which means it is also easy to clean up afterwards. I used to get them from Al-Jazeerah Supermarket when I was in Bahrain, but did not see them since we moved to Jeddah, until about four weeks ago. So I took

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-36238440515137142802007-11-05T16:11:00.000+03:002007-11-05T16:20:36.830+03:00

Well, according to the Adnan wa Leena prologue, World War III was in 2008...اندلعت الحرب العالمية الثالثة عام 2008Makes you think how time flies ha? When I first saw that in the 80's, it seemed so far away. And now it is upon us.Well, hopefully the prophecy is wrong. It has to be. I don't yet see the cool robots nor the weird looking flying machines anywhere!And I don't know where القلعة

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-57835413941793942762007-10-19T11:28:00.000+03:002007-10-19T11:54:30.794+03:00

rsizr is a very innovative web-based application to intelligently resize images, without loosing much details. Instead of dupkicating or removing some columns or rows of pixels from an image, it uses a technique called Seam Carving to duplicate seams in an image that contain most details, or to remove the seams that contain least details. Even Photoshop (c) does not have that capability,

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-56412238622050575382007-10-03T21:33:00.000+03:002007-10-03T21:41:04.507+03:00

If you use Windows Command Line, or Unix Shell / Terminal, and miss the GUI stuff, then here is a cute little utility application you may find very nice. It's called hotwire-shell. It nicely blends some of the GUI aspects and the power of the command line.Basically you will have a text entry with auto-complete for commands, file-names, directory-names, full history, and a top Window for the

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-22801398665078618822007-10-03T14:47:00.000+03:002007-10-03T15:31:56.949+03:00

What the hell am I talking about? Fasting got into me? not really. I am talking about a software tool that you can use to create a "Time Machine". To the Past only. Imagine you can store every single version of a file, and can easily get back older versions of the file. Then you can compare your current version with any old version, or compare any older two versions. This is the Time Machine

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-56133075921040182472007-09-26T23:45:00.000+03:002007-09-27T00:07:19.624+03:00

After months and months of waiting for the Vista Ultimate Extras, finally one such Ultimate Extra appears yesterday. Windows DreamScene.What is it? Just an animated Wallpaper. A High Definition video... It comes with 5 animated wallpapers. They do look good, but that's it, and you will probably get bored of watching it after like 7 seconds. Totally useless. And why the wallpaper? I'd

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-72269605113873402362007-09-21T13:47:00.000+03:002007-09-21T13:53:47.484+03:00

Google Earth 4.2 has a great little easter egg. Just press Ctrl-Alt-A (must be Capital A) and you will be presented with a screen to choose your aircraft, and location. And then you can happily cruse around or crash your plane in the ocean. It is GREAT fun.There are already tons of info on how to use it. I will not repeat them here.A nice quick start guide is here.Have fun!

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-74335765794310196382007-09-16T13:44:00.000+03:002007-09-16T20:05:56.672+03:00

I don't usually watch Bahrain TV. But last night while flipping channels I noticed this Bahrain TV show. I don't want to even start to critique the program. That's not the point of this entry.Anyway, the program is Live and you call and get some questions about Bahrain or Heritage and you win some prizes.At some point, the two presenters Abu Abdulla and Zahra Arafat where talking about the

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-60850136640140068292007-09-02T13:40:00.000+03:002007-09-02T14:06:45.228+03:00

I love my M600i. The keyboard is great, and the phone is generally very good and nice interface. The only issue I had is that it did not come with Arabic Fonts. So I initially was forwarding the Arabic SMS I get to my old K600 to read them. Stupid, I know. I saw some Arabic enabling software, but was to thinking it was too costly. I did not find anything usable, until now. It's free too!

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-52242205150119830252007-07-22T14:47:00.001+03:002007-07-22T15:03:18.933+03:00

The One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, was a project started at MIT some time ago by Nicholas Negroponte. Its main goal was to create a durable laptop that can be used in harsh environments by children. It was supposed to cost about US $100.From their website Our goal: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.It took sometime for the

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-89008393407014471842007-07-21T12:01:00.000+03:002007-07-21T14:15:56.871+03:00

I hate the Windows XP Start Menu. It tries to be too smart, and never really works. I usually switch back to Classic Menu on any machine I start using. I even hate the Vista Start Menu more so. Heck I hardly use Vista anymore!Anyway, I'm a keyboard guy, I love VIM, and I find myself pressing Windows Key + R to get a Run command and then typing notepad or calc to start some applications. I

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-57334581434364927792007-07-17T20:15:00.000+03:002007-07-17T21:40:16.266+03:00

You probably heard about the Bulgarians that copied ATM and Credit Cards in Bahrain some time ago. You may also have heard about some people who said they had all of their money vanish from their accounts, and saw some transactions on their bank statements that they did not make. Or all sorts of "fraud"... What are they talking about? What's happening?The current cards use a magnetic strip to

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-88617191396327446362007-07-15T21:37:00.001+03:002007-07-15T21:55:21.179+03:00

As if the many disconnects we get here in KSA is not enough, now many pages return "500 Server Error" and I need to refresh and refresh to display the page. I initially thought the problem was with the site I visted, but no, it;s some proxy somewhere between me and the internet. Sometimes half the page loads, and sometimes only the text loads with no images...And because ADSL is sold by STC and

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-66697659304098617502007-07-13T19:28:00.000+03:002007-07-17T21:07:34.124+03:00

I saw Remember the Titans few days ago, and loved it. One of the best lines in the movie was when Denzel Washington was talking to the two groups of his team. The team at that time was not getting along and extremely racist black and white groups. He told them:You don't have to love each other, but you have to respect each other.And just as we do not need to agree with each other on many

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-52579636267276398212007-07-02T16:59:00.000+03:002007-07-02T17:04:13.865+03:00

I'm trying to get rid of this tune that's been playing and playing in my head for some time now. It's the very old tune used as theme from old Bahraini program Cinema Al-Video. Remember that program? By director Thawwadi? Does anybody know what is it called? Composer?Well, THERE! Maybe now I can get rid of it, or if I'm lucky, I can find it somewhere :-)

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-1574083244759131762007-07-01T16:49:00.000+03:002007-07-01T17:01:01.765+03:00

Unless you have something like Firefox Adblock extension, you may have noticed the Ads By Google column in my blog. Actually I have Adblock, and I thought my AdSense account did not work!So anyway, I'm not really trying to make any money from this blog. But I am just curious how the whole AdSense concept actually works. It's actually pretty cool when in my Weddings Post you see some Wedding

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-6680360616068676252007-06-28T18:37:00.000+03:002007-06-29T09:13:36.635+03:00

Ok, so some people do want to make the best wedding and spend all their just started life savings. And they want to start their life together with big a loan just to have a wedding. Their call, it's their wedding and their life after all. I do not agree on it, but hey, just my opinion.But having seven days for a wedding? C'mon!!! Day for henna, for Jalwa, for whatever, and then two days for

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-42655964914052071172007-06-23T09:21:00.000+03:002007-06-25T07:01:36.626+03:00

You know those very old computer terminals with just green text? The IBM and mainframe Terminals? Or at least the emulators that access some of these mainframes. These are now almost only seen in airline reservation systems.Why are they being replaced with "good looking" interfaces, lots of graphics, colors and many fonts, drop down lists and whatever controls. WHY WHY WHY???An operator, or a

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-1180171793876665172007-06-20T20:25:00.000+03:002007-06-20T20:44:10.902+03:00

Okay so I really hate Vista, and I think Microsoft products are crap. But there are still a few sites out there that think everybody else in the world is running Windoze. Take for example GMArabia who insist on using ActiveX and Microsoft DOM components. Their main page does not even load on anything but a Windoze PC.Anyway, so there is Wine and you can run lots of Windows progs on it, but

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-33526609975876429552007-06-20T08:22:00.000+03:002007-06-20T08:33:31.590+03:00

I love my iPod video. I have tons of songs, some pictures, and many files backed up. Another great feature is that I can use the iPod as a portable image tank to store my pictures from my Nikon D50 directly without a PC. An average picture is about 3Mb, so 40-50Gb should be enough for a few days photo shoot. But What I do not like is that i had to use iTunes to manage my music collection. And

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-4269235760996549862007-06-01T17:30:00.000+03:002007-06-02T08:04:14.953+03:00

I missed Eragon on the big screen, and just bought the Special Edition DVD yesterday. My wife read the first two books and loved them. I myself did not read the book, but had an idea on some of the ideas behind it. Lord of the Rings and Star Wars heavily influenced the writer. Both stories and movies are one of my favorites.So, I just had to watch it. I knew the reviews were not that good.

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-28317080836594353912007-05-26T08:15:00.000+03:002008-11-13T06:59:17.238+03:00

This is a bit too late for me. I already have Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron Laptop. However this is a good step nonetheless.My as well as my wife's experience with Vista is awful. The latest bad Vista news has been that the HP All-In-One scanner, copier, printer just refuses to work, or the printer completely disappearing from the PC 's Setup Printers. We had to completely re-install the

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-66484043246977807522007-05-06T19:49:00.000+03:002007-05-06T20:13:38.830+03:00

In case you do not know, here is the Wikipedia explanation:A short circuit is an accidental low-resistance connection between two nodes of an electrical circuit that are meant to be at different voltages.This is similar to a secret shortcut that was never meant to be used, but it exists, and therefore will be used instead of the long, usually intended and designed path that was designed.So, why

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-81932917131730931202007-04-02T08:03:00.000+03:002007-04-02T08:12:04.019+03:00

Well' I haven't heard much of these for some time, but I remember having fun in some of the old days with surprise exams, and things like that.One of the best I heard was about the Pearl roundabout when I was in college. One civil engineer student told another civil engineer student that the pearl in the pearl roundabout fell due to the very strong wind. The guy actually went to see it!From

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-61357452827454645162007-03-13T11:48:00.000+03:002007-03-13T11:50:54.576+03:00

This is a good one. May be too old for some though. Ever since leaving my old place, I didn't hear much jokes.. كان الرئيس في زيارة لمدرسة ثانوية وفي نهاية الزيارة طلب منه الناظر أن يتكرم بعمل لقاء مفتوح مع الطلبه على غرار مع يحدث مع شباب الجامعات . ووافق الرئيس .. وبدأ اللقاء- قام أحد الطلاب وقال:سيادة الرئيس .. ابنكم الطالب محمود عبدالغفار .. عندي ثلاثة أسئلة أرجو أن يتسع

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-73702498689896511582006-12-10T16:28:00.000+03:002006-12-10T16:34:54.040+03:00

I got this from a colleague, and it is a very good read. It happens a lot too:Once upon a time, unbeknownst to each other, the "Automated Accounting Applications Association" and the "Consolidated Computerized Capital Corporation" decided that they needed the identical program to perform a certain service.Automated hired a programmer-analyst, Alan, to solve their problem.Meanwhile, Consolidated

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-40563406492440522592006-11-29T08:52:00.000+03:002006-11-29T10:57:13.966+03:00

It's been about two weeks since I started driving here, and it is not as bad as I thought it would be. First you really have to change your mindset and understand the mentality of people on the road. Once that is done, it will not be bad. There are many people from very different regions of the world here. most people do not have the proper traffic training, and they just hate rules. Even

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-57793694175940518512006-11-08T07:27:00.000+03:002006-11-08T07:48:46.929+03:00

Leena and I were busy packing and arranging for the move over a week ago. The move to Jeddah was planned months before that. But somehow it just seemed like another minor thing. Even though we both knew it was a BIG move. We knew we will leave many things here, and will start a new life in Jeddah. We knew of all of the details, but we just did not feel how BIG it was Until last

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-42901893616446465592006-11-02T21:50:00.000+03:002006-11-02T22:27:55.629+03:00

No, it is no typo. This is one very versatile word in my family's personal and growing vocabulary.My family, have passion for laughter. One of their talents, and joys, is remembering sentences, sayings, and miss-pronounced words and creating our own proverbs and sayings.Today's word is "7ajafaan". This is pure family heritage. It's not even a word! Yet we say it so often, that it is part

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-4000754933171134002006-10-29T21:07:00.000+03:002006-10-29T22:18:37.659+03:00

I got a Mont Blanc Pen as a farewell gift from my dear friends and colleagues. It's a Mont Blanc, it looks very professional, it has the new, and very cool Mont Blanc floating star, it is one of the new styles, and I generally love their products... but.. but... but I just don't like that style at all. It is too "complex" for me.See the many fine rings it has? The black and silver? The

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-48635216372728668662006-10-28T22:39:00.000+03:002006-10-28T23:07:00.561+03:00

My wife read the book, "The Devil Wears Prada" and she enjoyed it. Today we went to see the movie.I was reluctant at first. I knew the movie was about fashion, main character is a she, so I thought it's a chick flick. It's not like that, although it does show a lot of chicks and a lot of fashion. I did like the movie and the points it was trying to make.The movie is about Andrea, an educated

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-58070613857033328542006-10-17T20:46:00.000+03:002006-10-27T18:07:20.296+03:00

And yet another post about MySQL and how it uses indexes. I have a transaction log file that contains a million plus records. Two essential fields I almost always use are TranDate and TranTime, CHAR(6) and CHAR(8) respectively. They contain the date and time in YYMMDD and HHMMSSss. After the log table contained a million records, my queries were starting to take longer and longer, even though I

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-5176002951097802902006-10-16T21:23:00.001+03:002008-07-02T21:17:07.431+03:00

I was writing some reports, and needed a better way of visualising some data. Instead of of having something like:Term Resp CountATM01 APP 100ATM01 DEC 10ATM01 REV 5ATM02 APP 250ATM02 DEC 23Listing 1something like the following is much easier to look at, and graph:Term APP DEC REVATM01 100 10 5ATM02 250 23 null Listing 2There is

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-73058270240356408052006-10-05T22:23:00.000+03:002006-10-05T22:38:36.375+03:00

I was very excited when Shark Hunter presented his first session on AI. He started with Genetic Algorithms. The idea that a solution "magically" evolves is fascinating. All you need to do is present your candidate solutions as a sequence "chromosome" of some objects "genes", then assign a fitness to each chromosome, then mimic nature by mating and mutating the population. Eventually "life

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-62774551304591384792006-09-09T10:27:00.000+03:002006-09-09T10:38:30.990+03:00

JRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language in Java. The common Ruby implementation is in C. So what is so cool another implementation of Ruby in Java?Well, I did several small applications in Java, and it was my language of choice for some time now. Java is Free, and lots of IDE's are free, like eclipse, and netbeans. Java has millions of free libraries for almost anything.

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-82811567158860266392006-09-07T17:50:00.000+03:002006-09-07T18:23:45.814+03:00

Ruby can be very useful for performing some rapid and powerful operations on files. The Ruby syntax is much more user friendly than awk or sed, especially if you are familiar with Ruby.The one liners can be found here.If you are running on Windows, then substitute type for cat.As an example, Here is a handy oneliner# delete leading whitespace (spaces/tabs/etc) from beginning of each line $ cat

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-58313149921162392892006-09-06T11:54:00.000+03:002006-09-06T11:57:16.658+03:00

In line with my previous post about the movie Click, I recalled an interesting email I got some time ago. Thank's too Google, Here it is again/ (Copied from here)An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-21406940675643409582006-09-04T21:22:00.000+03:002006-10-31T11:50:49.976+03:00

I just came back from the movie Click. It's a nice 'n' easy Adam Sandler Movie. The movie seems a bit shallow, and the points it wants to show are obvious. There are no big twisters, no big surprise at the end. But still, it got me thinking of my own life. I was talking about the same subject after lunch with my family before going for the move. We talked about how some people struggle so

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-17082316903862869552006-08-30T20:28:00.000+03:002006-08-30T21:15:47.059+03:00

I've been designing and using simple, and complex databases for at least ten years now. These are my rules of thumb database design rules:Database design: It is easier to think in terms of Entity Relationships. Entities then become tables. Entity Attributes then become columns. ER can be mapped to classes very easily. Uses consistent names for fields. If you can, stick with full words or

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-15635931597069029332006-08-27T21:44:00.000+03:002006-08-27T11:53:32.161+03:00

We have an old version of SQL GUI tool that can return the results of an SQL statement as tab delimited data. This works fine for small result sets. However I created a Reconciliation system that needed few 10's of thousands of records. The GUI just could not handle that. So, a nice exercise to use Ruby to the rescue and learn more about it's DBI.Here is the sample Ruby code:require 'DBI'#

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-61408541487749050962006-08-24T17:33:00.000+03:002006-08-24T07:39:00.687+03:00

I have been coding for well over 15 years. I like creating new stuff and seeing them work, or break :-) So programming was the ultimate toy, sort of speak. I can actually write something and see things happen on screen. From the very old basic moving circles on my MSX Sakhr, solving quadratic equations (before I learned them in school), plotting x/y and time functions, Programming is FUN!Back

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499863828039150707.post-33002510484681087682006-08-23T20:06:00.000+03:002006-08-23T20:08:39.970+03:00

Okay, this will be the first blog here. This will mostly some tech blog, about coding, hacking, new techniques, and probably some Ruby programming.Stay tuned.

Aymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08469152582879981718noreply@blogger.com0