Saleh Blog

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…

Continuation of 2007 in Review – Part 1

The blog!

I have been blogging since this March and to be honest, I really had fun doing it. So let’s see some facts and statistics on my blog since it started:

It is still 21st of December and as the statistic shows, the number of visitors has doubled since last month. The numbers are far greater than what I have been expecting. Lovely…

USA, Kuwait, Canada, and Europe were top countries visiting my blog respectively. I can’t imagine how Kuwait got the second place, I never advertise for my blog and I only know several people in Kuwait who actually reads my blog. In addition, Google, msn Live, and Digg were my top referrers to my blog. BIG TIME!

The topic which took most attention and had most comments is “PHP is not a bad programming language“. That topic alone had 6 comments and over 1000 readers worldwide which is kind of scary number for single post and unpopular blog.

Thanks to NoCreditCard, Bruno Lowagie’s Online Gazette, I’m just a programmer, Olkenava, My Hoppy is Programming, and Archana Patchirajan for referring to my blog. And also my thanks to all who referred to my blog not mentioned here. I wrote all the blogs who technorati reported to me.

Al-3baidly and Nosayba thank you for your constructive comments and arguments we had in college. It’s so nice to discuss with people I know about my blog and topics in my blog. Al-3baidly I hope we can continue discussing about tech and IT more in our free time.

I hope you all enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing it.

Next, let’s talk about the web at a glance in Part 3 of this topic. It might get boring for some of you since most of the stuff I’m going to talk about (part 3 and over) depends on my personal perspective, you might agree or disagree.

The holiday season for most countries all over the world for Christmas and New Year has started and the blogosphere are starting to post 2007’s reviews. Here, in Kuwait University or Kuwait in general, we only have a holiday for Eid ul-Adhu which has ended (New Year 1 day holiday on the way) but since my lovely readers are from all over the world with different cultural background I’m going to take this chance to write the overall year preview.

Lots of stuff happened in 2007 the “Social Network” year as being called in the blogosphere and techies geeks. From the release of Vista, Leopard, iPhone, Java 6, Ruby on Rails 2, SilverLight and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to the rumors of Google. In fact, Google has taken lots of attention with the introduction of Google’s Andriod OS for mobile devices after the rumors of GPhone. I’ve also noticed the use of acronym CMS from Content Management System to Community Management System in my feed. Amazing strides has been taken in technology in 2007 and we are one step closer to Starwars era.

Simple, I got all those items ready! now I only need to do those steps.

Bored from the div attribute of HTML? Well, I am bored myself and I have been writing HTML 4 since I was in Middle School. We have been using HTML 4 for almost a decade and it really needs an upgrade. In fact, W3C and WHATWG have been working on setting the specification of HTML 5. Major browsers companies and groups are taking part in setting some specifications of HTML 5, but I don’t think it will be done soon.

A List Apart has a really great article on HTML 5 preview which I really encourage all web developers to read it.

Look what happens when Microsoft and Ford join forces.