Saleh Blog

<< Part 7
Best Movie

Lots of great movies released this year such as Eragon, Transformers, Pirates of The Caribbean At World’s End, Spiderman 3, 300, Harry Potter And The Order of The Phoenix, The Golden Compass, National Treasure Book of Secrets, and many others. But I have to select only one for the best movie and it goes to Pirates of The Caribbean 3. Eh captain Jack Sparrow, savvy? Of course, it depends on my own taste of movies. Doesn’t it you evil Davy Johns! I won’t let you take my heart and keep it inside your stupid locker!

Best series is hard to select, I love both LOST and Prison Break. I still haven’t seen season 3 of Prison Break because it is still airing. I think I’ll select LOST as the best series. Of course, there are other good series such as Seinfeld, Less Than Perfect, According to Jim, 24, ER, Band of Brothers, Taken, Friends, and Grounded for Life, Monk, 8 Simple Rules, and many others. But they are all old series or there is no season released in 2007.

Upcoming… part 9

<< Part 6
Best Tech Release of the Year

Definitely with no hesitation at all, iPhone is the top release of the year. If you never heard of iPhone I can only imagine the amount of beer you have been drinking through the whole year. Too much attention this sexy phone got and I’m sure Steve Jobs is really happy with the result as it is now half way through the goal Steve has set which is selling 10 million pieces. Of course, it is not the best phone in the market as it lacks many features such as MMS and 3G technology not to mention the stupid camera quality, but the usability and ease of use it provides breaks all expectations and slaps all disadvantages it has. I wonder of James Bond will use iPhone on his next movie?! That would be awesome!

2007’s highest growing search term is iPhone as Google reported lately!
Help freeing the iPhone by watching this video:

Soon part 8!

Interesting video… See what happened behind the scene just before ACM ICPC 2007.

<< Part 5
My year’s top books

It has been a busy year, college homeworks are really getting annoying and our instructors are pushing us hard with all the works they are packing all over us. However, I manage to read some books both in Arabic or English. I’m going to talk only about English books here.

Hmmm, technical or fantasy books or …?! Let’s just keep it technical and IT books. My number #1 book of the year goes to… The Principle of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. I have been designing web sites for long time, this book made me realize many web design concepts I never really paid attention to or not even think about it. It is fun (at least for me) to read this book and I really recommend it for every web developer out there.

I’m going to put a shot of one of the shelves I have to make the post looks better lol!

And I guess another one makes it durable!

Next.. Part 7

<< Part 4
My year’s top gadgets

I never really bought much computer gadget as I did in 2007. Hell, in December alone I spent over $300 on computer gadgets. I’m going to talk about SOME of the computer gadgets I was able to collect in 2007!

First of all, here is a picture of my laptop setting just next to my desktop PC. It is an Asus A8Js and you won’t find it in Kuwait because I searched it everywhere and couldn’t find it so I decided to buy it overseas.

Click on the picture to see a large size.

That’s my 3rd laptop and my first laptop I bought it from UK about 9 years ago. I think its from somewhere in Newcastle. I won’t show it to you because it is ugly and broken.

I’ll start off with my Logitech Freedom 2.4 Cordless Joystick which I’m really happy with it. The control is really excellent and comfortable as well as its weight and size. Easy to access buttons and fast respond (at least for me). I mainly use it for Flight Simulator X and X3: Reunion games. I’ll give this joystick 8/10…

Click on the picture to see a large size.

Keyboard has been an essential component even for my laptop. I have been using wireless keyboards since few years back when I went to Canada and bought my first Wireless Creative keyboard from Best Buy, Eaton Centre in Toronto, for freaking sake $150 (now it’s broken). This year alone I have bought several keyboards and I’m thinking to buy the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave for my Desktop, I saw it in Best Buy the other day. Currently, the best keyboard of the year is my dear Logitech Cordless Desktop Comfort Laser (with mouse) which I usually connect it to my laptop. It is a Split-key which seems to be very comfortable for fast typing without looking in the keyboard. I’ll give it 9/10…

Click on the picture to see a large size.

I have also bought several sound cards and speakers/headphones for my laptop and desktop PC. I do not use anything less than 5.1 for speakers anymore and I own a Creative Inspire P5800 5.1 speaker which was bought at the beginning of the year and I’m glad I did. And of course I had to buy a sound card for my desktop and another for my laptop to provide high quality sound in both machine which are X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook and Live! 24-bit External, both from Creative. But for 2007 I give my Logitech Digital Precision PC Gaming Headset as the best owned speakers/headphones of the year and its in the upper right corner of next picture. Hmmm, superb sound quality for gaming or any use and it includes a USB input or you can use the normal 3.5mm analog connector. It has a unique design that allows air to flow into your ears to feel cushioned and comfortable… 9/10 should do it.

Click on the picture to see a large size.

There are many other gadgets I’d like to share, but the post will really get long and boring. So let’s end the gadgets part here.

Coming next… part 6

Having trouble typing Arabic letters? You’re keyboard has no Arabic print letters? Well here’s a solution… Yamli! It’s a new Arabic search engine but unlike other search engines, you can use english letters to write Arabic words. I’m not good in using numbers to type Arabic words, but you can do that here!

Yamli, in Arabic “يملي”, comes from the noun “إملاء” which refers to dictation or transcription of spoken text.

Using Yamli is very easy. Simply spell out each Arabic word the way you would pronounce it, and Yamli will convert it to the corresponding Arabic word using its patent pending technology.

You can also use common shortcut characters. For example “3” for “ع”, “2” for “Ø¡”, “7” for “Ø­”, etc …

You can also search news, images, videos, blogs, and even wikipedia for Arabic words using English letters and numbers. There is a great tour shows how to use the engine in details.

So you picked up a project and write the code in Java then comes the time to distribute your program. You are going to need to create an installer package rather than distributing it directly as a JAR file.

It is better to give them a normal plain installer package that they know how to run through the wizard.

Geek Stuff Javazing blog has an article on how to do that. Ultimately before you’ll be able to follow the tutorial you going to have to download the following tools:
1. Ant tool.
2. NSIS: a scriptable win32 installer/uninstaller system.
3. ProGuard: java shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator.
4. Launch4j: Cross-platform Java executable wrapper for creating lightweight Windows native EXEs.
5. NSIS Ant task: to compile NSIS scripts.

Nowadays lots of noice being made by Asus Eee PCs, the $299 ultraportable laptop, a one step closer to the dream of many people for a $100 laptop for every child in the third world countries. There is also another version of the laptop tagged at $199!

Anyway, thanks to Hackszine I came across this video which shows how to install a touch screen to your Asus Eee PC… very neat!

2007 For Programmers

It’s now the time of year when we look back before we start the motion towards the New Year. The astonishing Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 with the incredible amount of add-ons such as LINQ which is a superb plus for developers. Not to mention the popularity of XML is rising as more languages are based in XML structures such as XAML for SilverLight.

Programmers all over the world are thinking of Java 7 and how the end result of the platform will be. The release of Java 6 was absolutely a big tornado in the programming world with the new XML parsing APIs. Hopefully, for Ruby on Rails, the web framework for Ruby programming language, we are going to see more of RoRs applications in 2008 since it passed the 2nd milestone in 2007 by releasing version 2 of the framework. Apple now supports RoR as it being shipped with Leopard as a built-in application.

Here’s a statistics of programming languages popularity in 2006 and 2007 from O’Reilly:

It’s hard to expect what will happen in 2008. But I really hope Google Code expands to provide more and more usable codes for developers. It makes life easier, ain’t it?

Haven’t read part II ? It’s here

The Social Web Gurus

Social websites have grown up very fast upon the beginning of the year 2007 and still growing at rapid speed. As another year draws to close, it is time to look back and see what have been taking in the web. The web was the top reflection of the tech news as social networks are getting bigger and hotter. Facebook now worth 15 billion? No (He means it worth more) according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO. MySpace is now crying as it growth slows down in at the expense of Facebook growth. It’s hard to anticipate what will happen in 2008 regarding social networks, but I can say that the buzzword web 2.0 will no longer be used. We don’t even hear the buzzword web 3.0 anymore because no one cares.

Microsoft SilverLight (so-called Flash Killer) has gone out of beta and Adobe Flash/Flex engineers are feeling the pressure of the competition. In addition, the introduction of JavaFX by SUN to compete on creating Rich Internet Applications is starting to buzz out Microsoft and Adobe. The battle of RIAs technologies has started already, more heat will be drawn in 2008 and I expect more RIA tools will be introduced. However, I think Ajax popularity will remain the same.

More web services and mash ups are being available for web developers and Google is taking the upper hand in providing APIs as it marches towards world domination with the release of more APIs at astonishing rate. Social networks expanded their list of APIs. In addition, developers, in 2008, might actually adopt Microformat concept and then the web can be more semantic.

It’s like bubble of late 90s and early 2000 all over again. I think soon there will be no domain names left to take! Unless companies, for some reason, want to take weird names such as: hitMeHard.com! Actually that name is also taken by buyDomains.com!!!!

I’m gonna end this part with an interesting video I found in DILigence blog:

Stay tuned for Part 4 to part 11…