Saleh Blog

Lately, I have been talking a lot. That’s not the normal me, usually my relatives (especially my parents) are complaining about me not talking with them or discussing anything. The reason I start talking more is because a good friend moved his desk to a lab I spend many hours a day sometimes there and it is really awkward not to chat to him from time to time. Another reason is because I’m being a part of a student society in my college and they like to ask me some stuff about computers.

Anyway, that wasn’t my point. I have a problem pronouncing the letter ‘R’ which is called lisp! I knew I had this problem since I was a kid, but I never thought about it much because I’m not used to talk much. However, now I’m a part of a society and I’m really shy to talk to anyone and I couldn’t manage to fix my lisp. I have been trying to pronounce my last name (ends with R, lol) many times but I can’t manage to get it right in English and Arabic (there is an Arabic letter close to R). I had a problem with people sometimes when giving my last name lol. I searched the web but I couldn’t find anything helpful to cure my lisp.

If anyone got any resources available online or how to overcome this problem please let me know :).

Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst, writes about whether to choose Ajax or Flash for business web application. In addition, he shows some advantages and disadvantages of both technologies and when to choose the each one of them.

In selecting an RIA technology, application development professionals should choose AJAX when time-to-market is critical and updates are frequent. Experienced Web developers ramp up on AJAX quickly. AJAX also makes it easy to build RIA capabilities into existing apps with small, frequent releases. Finally, AJAX’s customization capabilities make it possible to tune client frameworks to meet specific application footprints; this makes AJAX the better solution for smaller RIA deployments and for deployments where performance is critical.

The much anticipated open-source IDE, Netbeans 6.0, has been released and available for download. The IDE Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris and easy to install. In addition, Netbeans supports many languages including Ruby.

The screencast is also available if you want to know more about it.

Graphing is an important tool for business. In fact, my first freelancing Flash program was about graphing. A new tutorial by W. Jason Gilmore in Developer.com about using PHP/SWF Charts system to create a chart/graph has been posted.

PHP/SWF supports a wide variety of charting formats, including bar, candlestick, 3D columns, pie, 3D pie, and advanced charts such as scatter, polar, and composites.

He starts off by showing how to install the charting system. After that he goes into coding and shows an example of using bar chart. He also shows how to use a 3D column chart which really looks amazing!

Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar lanuches a Design Competition for all high school seniors from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The award is a four-year scholarship in VCUQ. Dealine is 31st of January, 2008. So hurry and sign-up…

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest 2007 for Arab and North Africa Regional Contest [ACM–ICPC/ANARC] starts today (03-12-2007). This year ANARC will be held in the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Egypt. The winner will move to the world finals which will take place in Alberta, Canada, in April.

ANARC contest will be held in Wednesday 05-12-2007 and will last exactly five hours. Every team will be given the same set of problems to solve in Java and C/C++. The award ceremony will take place the same day few hours after the contest where the winner will be announced.

Me and my teams were suppose to participate in this contes but we faced some problems.

Found this article about programmers looking for job. The first part of the article is about the phone interview. The poster will discuss about the face-to-face interview on other parts in the future.

That reminds me of my part-time job phone interview 1 month ago. The Sun campus manager called me directly from UK, overseas, to do the interview and it went really well. I’m happy that I’ll be working for Sun as a Sun Campus ambassador. Sun Microsystems after all is an open source alliance member and they are the one maintaining the Java language which I really love.

I might have posted this video before [Am I a video freak?]… But what the heck! It’s fun to watch again!

Zain, the third-biggest Gulf Arab mobile telecommunication firm by market value, concluded the purchase of 100% of share capital of Iraqna company for mobile telecommunication services in Iraq. The acquisition costs $1,2 billion and was made through MTC-Atheer, Zain’s Iraqi subsidiary, which was one of the 3 mobile telecommunication firms operating in Iraq.

Commenting on the transaction, Dr. Saad Al Barrak, Managing Director-Deputy Chairman of Zain Group, stated:”We are delighted that MTC-Atheer acquisition if Iraqna will create one of the most dynamic and resourceful mobile telecoms companies in Iraq and in the region at large
This investment reinforces and demonstrates our commitment to the future prosperity of Iraq while complementing Zain’s aspirations of becoming a top ten global mobile operator by 2011.”

– Zawaya

Zain has been expanding their market, and now they cover 20 countries across the Middle East and Africa. The firm, formally called MTC started in Kuwait, is now in the process of building the 3rd Saudia Arabian mobile phone network firm.