Saleh Blog

I love this program!

Imagine Cup Gulf – Software Design category – regional final is set to start next week on 10th of May in Dubai. Six teams of many teams in the Arabia Gulf region have been nominated for the regional contest.

Here is the contest agenda as received by email from Microsoft:

Under extreme stress and lack of sleep I tried to squeeze my schedule to write this post. I haven’t written anything for some time now on this blog because I’m so busy nowadays. Let’s start off with, what the hell I’m doing?

1- Midterms and school work.

2- Getting ready for Imagine Cup.

3- Working on a research project.

4- Setting up Informatics Day event.

5- Following up CpE Socieities and the magazine.

6- .Net Programming Club.

7- Cisco Course is killing me.

1. School Works

Okay I’m enrolled in 15 credits classes and it is killing me. I had just done a midterm and there are 3 on the way which are in Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. Most of those classes are difficult subjects and takes time to study not to mention all the projects we are assigned to do. Next week alone I have to submit 2 projects… damn.

2. Imagine Cup

About a week left for the trip of the regional contest in Dubai. We still have lots of stuff to do and unfortunately those things would take DAYS to get them done and we have to do it in few hours. Our presentation will be in 11th of May and we have to get everything sorted out at least 2 days before. It’s now 1st of May… Do you think we can still do that? We still have to finish our speech, presentation slides, the freaking video that takes forever to edit, and we still have a lot to do in the programming part. Holy smokes!

3. Research Project

I have been working on it for a year, the final day to send the paper is today, however, my mentor and instructor Dr. Maitham was able to extend the due date. We are like 99% done, we just need to finalize some stuff. I’ll be happy to see that paper published.

4. Informatics Day

Yep, the most anticipated day for Computer Engineering department in the college. I’m organizing it alone, and I think it is fair to say that I’m receiving only little help from some board members of the society, heck some are even complaining about me and I’m really disappointed. It will be the biggest event ever organized by the society and I was able to make it unofficially an open day for the department. I’m glad now we have an open sponsorship from Kuwait Society of Engineers. I invited Microsoft to do 3 workshops for that event; however, I’m really disappointed with their sponsorship. I was expecting much more from them.

5. CpE Societies

We did great events this year and people are happy with our accomplishment in such small period. We still have few events planning to do and I have to make sure that the next 3 tutorial will happen in a 3 week window.

We are also printing a new magazine and it is currently in the print shop. I had to submit few new articles and follow up the design process of the magazine in the print shop. Of course I can’t follow it up much because I’m so busy but other board members are doing that too which really, really, truly reliefs me a lot.

6. dot Net Club

I don’t know if you ever heard of it because it is a new club in the university. I’ve been appointed in Technology position and soon Vice President. We haven’t done anything yet so far…

7. Cisco CCNA-2

This class has huge material that should be covered in less than a 20 days. Online exams should also be taken which is a big time waster.

Pardon me for any grammar or spelling mistakes. I’m writing this post in haste.

Ajaxian has posted a book for Adobe AIR developers called “Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers”. The book is under Creative Commons license so it is free. The book has been out for sometime but this one is updated for AIR 1.0. You can get it here.

I never ever witnessed such a storm in Kuwait! Watch until the end of the video and you’ll be shocked. It happened last Friday! Watch the video:

Me and my teammate are suppose go out that night and take some video shots of pollution in our environment for the Imagine Cup competition. Well, it came right on us like hell. Shit, I never imagine something like this can hit Kuwait! So I picked up the phone and called my teammate to take a video shot.

Mother nature is pissed! What have we done? What have we done! Climate change is affecting the whole world, even here in Kuwait.

This storm lasted for like 10min but lots of damage left behind. Next year, maybe a freaking tsunami hurricane or maybe volcano! Who knows! Shit happens when it is unexpected.

More videos of the storm can be found here.

Of the top ten winners at the 2008 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) competing to be the best computer programmers in the world, four teams were from Russian universities, one was from Ukraine, a former member of the USSR, and three were teams representing universities in North America, including Canada and the United States. First place went to St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics (Russia), followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.), Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia), Lviv National University (Ukraine), and Moscow State University (Russia). Also among the top ten finishers were teams from Tsinghua University (China), Stanford University (U.S.), University of Zagreb (Croatia), University of Waterloo (Canada), and Petrozavodsk State University (Russia). This international competition, now in its 32^nd year, is hosted by ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery), a society of 88,000 computing educators, researchers, and professionals worldwide.

Read the press release.

You can see videos and photos of the event available here. You’ll notice that the interface of the web site has changed 🙂

Dr. Craig R. Barret, Intel’s CEO, has visited Kuwait University last Thursday April 10th, 2008. He was hosted in a Q&A session arranged by CS Club and Computer Science Department in Kuwait University.

In his talk he focused in how to establish a good education system that can be compared to education systems around the world, not only in the Middle-East. Three characteristics have to be available to create an excellent education system which are: smart people, smart ideas, and good universities to provide a good environment for smart people to look for smart ideas.

Smart ideas can be found when doing basic researches, not in developing ideas. Companies like Intel spends millions of dollars in developing, however, Intel cooperates with universities to conduct basic researches. Stanford University in Silicon Valley is a good example of a university that spends millions in basic research. Intel spends 6 billion dollars in research yearly, but only 200 million in basic research.

We do not need a huge research budget to create a good idea, what we need is passion, training, and good universities.

Dr. Craig Barret will continue his trip to visiting Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi. His goal on the trip is to see what’s happening in the ground with his own eyes and visit some technology professionals in universities in the Middle-East.

The session was so informative, and I am so happy to attend it. I also have to say that not even 1 instructor from our department, computer engineering, was there, how pathetic! That’s not like it wasn’t expected. However, a faculty member from electrical engineering has been sighted there!

I’m also glad that some of my friends had shown up.

Best Scene: Miss. Clinton Slaps Mrs. Clinton