Misc

 I just published episode 3 of the DotNetArabi podcast on www.dotnetarabi.com. This episode was with guest Mahmoud Alamanasrah, who have 7 years of experience on data-driven web applications with SQL Server. The episode was about the new features of SQL Server 2008, great for all developers who interact closely with SQL Server. على موقع www.dotnetarabi.com تجدون الحلقة الثالثة من “دوت نت عربي”. موضوع الحلقة هو الـ”إس كيو إل سيرفر 2008 SQL Server”، عن آخر المستجدات و بعض النصائح العامة. كان ضيف الحلقة الزميل محمود المناصرة، و هو عضو نشط في مجتمع مطروي الـ”دوت نت” في الأردن Jordev، لديه 7 سنوات من الخبرة و يعمل حاليا كـ “Technical Team Leader” أي قائد فريق مبرمجين. ...

The other day I was roaming the Internet; link here link there, tweet here tweet there, and I stumbled upon a very nice game called Geocaching. Geocaching, simply, is a game in which players hide items in any place in the world, and the other players should find, yes…Treasure Hunt. But the fun part is it’s Global, and the GPS is your primary tool! The players who want to hide an item, should first label it and give it a unique identifier, then record the coordinates (longitude and latitude) of the place they hide it in, and finally they should post the information along with the coordinates on the game’s website www.geocaching.com. ...

When I started this blog my goal was to make it a technical one, in which most posts would have code, samples, screen shots, architecture…etc. This was the primary goal, though it is totally fine with me to talk about software life in general. The issue is that I get the ideas of my posts from my real daily life, which is mostly code challenges at work. I do write code in my leisure time, but for sure it is not as thorough as the thing at work. And since I haven’t posted any technical stuff lately…the simple conclusion is I DON’T SEE CODE ANYMORE! ...

“Oh no, I won’t go into that code; I am not that intelligent!” “oh no, I don’t want to try this software…I don’t know what it will do to my machine!” “Oh no, I can’t write such a unique blog post!” “Oh no, I will not twiply to that celebrity…come on…he is a celebrity!” These phrases kept chasing me for a long while in my life, and sometimes still does. It had the worst effect on my progress, I couldn’t move an inch forward; by a deep feeling I didn’t confront, I was afraid of failure, mixed with a feeling of negative humbleness. But that was it, I couldn’t stay as a prisoner to these chains, and leave these cookies of success to people who might have less resources and powers. ...

Update: death toll rate reaches 470 and 2400 injuries, and I will stop counting. After a 20 months siege during which there was no water, food, medicine, gas, oil, and electricity…today Israel thinks that’s not enough…and starts a massacre; 160 dead, 200 wounded by 40 rockets hit Gaza and still going. Photos From the Massacre Taking Place Today English news: here Arabic news: here Photos From the Siege English news: here Arabic news: here, and here ...

I don’t know whether to thank or scold my good friend Omar Qadan for introducing me to Travian, a strategy game played online. It’s amazing how a simple, web-based, HTML-front game can be so rich and vast entertainment-wise. It’s a real strategy game where you build villages, resources, armies, embassies, and conduct trading, diplomacy, wars, and alliances—all through simple images, numbers, and text. On the other hand, I can’t ignore the programming part of the game (being a developer that is). It must be big, fun, and tiring; think of all these rules and the simulation algorithms the game is built upon, the server handling thousands of players, and scripts (yes, lots of hacks! 😄). Even the hacking idea itself is so delicious (programming-wise only 😄), a true heaven for developers. Also, the makers of the game are on the right track of providing developers points through which they can access the game and display information on other sites or applications. For now, it’s only exporting database tables of statistical information about the game status, but still I consider it a cool step toward supplying nice endpoints for developers, maybe Web Services in the future. ...

The feedback was very good, and I was glad that everybody liked it. Jordev is really moving ahead, and I am very excited being part of it 🙂 Below is the slide show (it’s an enhanced version from my previous one): Introduction To NHibernate (SlideShare) Code is the same of the previous one which you can download from here

JorDev .net is a .NET user group founded by enthusiastic Jordanian IT professionals. On Wednesday, November 26, I will be doing my first session in a series about NHibernate. Talk Details Overview: NHibernate is an object-relational mapping (ORM) solution for the Microsoft .NET platform. It provides an easy-to-use framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Its purpose is to relieve the developer from a significant amount of relational data persistence-related programming tasks. NHibernate is free open source software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Target audience: .NET developers, software designers, software engineers, and software architects. Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008. Location: MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center, Royal Scientific Society Building, 3rd Floor). Time: 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm (Amman, Jordan local time). For more info: Mohamed Saleh: 0788716457 Ayman Farouk: 0795727344 Reminders Live Calendar Facebook event Outlook Calendar Google Calendar

If you don’t know it: Once upon a time there was a group of little frogs, who decided to go through a competition to climb a tower. The tower was high and difficult, and no one of the spectator frogs believed that any of the tiny frogs can make it to the top. Little frogs started climbing, while spectators yelling: – “oh my, it’s too high…I don’t think they can make it!” – “they are too young, how possibly can they reach the top?! that’s insane” . . Shouting and yelling continued, while the little frogs surrendering one by one, except for this one little frog who kept going and going, climbing up further and further more. Surprising everyone, that frog made it to the top and he won the race! well…the only reason for his success that…HE WAS DEAF, he simple couldn’t hear the negative shouting of the spectators! ...

Through all the meetings I had in my life (the voluntary and the professional), all meetings shared key points that made it either successful and constructive, or a complete disaster and waste of time! These key points can be summarized into: Meeting is conducted to achieve certain target , a solution to a problem, Keep the focus on that goal Time is valuable, and the participants will be very annoyed when they see their effort and time is wasted on a subject different from the one they originally agreed to sacrifice their time for. if the meeting was anything except resolving the original subject, it is a failure. ...