Saleh Blog

<< 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.

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.