Personal

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. ...

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

Yesterday was my last day in estarta, marking the end of nice period full of experience, knowledge, and amazing friends who have been like a family. And now it’s time to move on, as a Technical Team Leader in esense. The excitement increases as time goes by (since I haven’t started there yet), I have only one week of preparations to step back into this role (yes, I have been TTL before) in this new environment, can’t wait. ...

Do you go through the same, time-consuming, frustrating discussion with your colleagues when you want to decide what to have for lunch? well…this is exactly what we have been going through where I work. To solve the problem (partially, because humans can never totally agree! ), I made a small, quick and dirty web application; LunchPoll. The user (Active Directory user, it works on Windows Authentication) would go to the home page, select the available poll: ...

Lately, I have been living a financial chaos; I couldn’t tell how much money I had in the bank, lent to friends or in my Pocket! (ok the last one was exaggeration…I could count it anytime :P). I decided to put an end to this, so I started looking for a software to track my financial status; went through many solutions starting from Excell sheets passing by GNUCash, AceMoneyLite , and ending with Microsoft Office Accounting Express (the latter makes me want to start my own business! wow). Nothing seemed to meet my simple requirements of …just…tracking my money! ...

On friday, my mothers cousin died in a car accedent on a highway; he, his wife and one of his 3 kids died in the accedent! the 2nd child is in comma while the 3rd survived. It was shocking! the last week he was enjoying the holiday at his family’s place with his three kids! The more we live, the more it’s obvious how iferior this life is! the things you loved most could very easily disappear in one glimpse, and in a so hurting way! that’s why we should not cling to it at all, of course we do our best to live it right, but not make it our goal at all. Paradise is there waiting for those who submits to Allah and live through the path he showed by prophet Muhammad. ...