Emad Alashi’s Blog

The other day I was roaming the Internet; link here link there, tweet here tweet there, and I stumbled upon a very nice game called Geocaching.
Geocaching, simply, is a game in which players hide items in any place in the world, and the other players should find, yes…Treasure Hunt. But the fun part is it’s Global, and the GPS is your primary tool!

The players who want to hide an item, should first label it and give it a unique identifier, then record the coordinates (longitude and latitude) of the place they hide it in, and finally they should post the information along with the coordinates on the game’s website www.geocaching.com.

And I was lucky enough to know that there are 17 geocaches in Jordan! below is an image of my first geocache quest result with my good friend Tamim Salem, using my iPhone’s GPS.

 
The item was broken and this paper is the only thing left.

Can’t wait to quest the rest

When I started this blog my goal was to make it a technical one, in which most posts would have code, samples, screen shots, architecture…etc. This was the primary goal, though it is totally fine with me to talk about software life in general.

The issue is that I get the ideas of my posts from my real daily life, which is mostly code challenges at work. I do write code in my leisure time, but for sure it is not as thorough as the thing at work.
And since I haven’t posted any technical stuff lately…the simple conclusion is I DON’T SEE CODE ANYMORE!

A Technical Team Leader in the place I work at right now has a different meaning from what I knew before; the first word in the title is “Technical” so I expect to deal a lot with code: planning it, reviewing it, discuss it with team members…etc.
But in the environment I work at, there is more pressure toward management and coordination; I find my self during the day doing stuff like updating the Microsoft Project plan, smoke testing, running between other teams we depend on to get their deliverables; checking with the User Experience team if they have the designs ready, checking with the Architecture team if they will pass by to set the folders structure for us…etc. All this leaves me no time to see code.

Is this right? Should a Technical Team Leader do these stuff? If not, who should? Is it a Project Coordinator? what is exactly the job description for a Technical Team Leader?
Questions like these should be discussed with the Development Process people, but till then I will have to say: “that’s not right”.
How about you? what do you think?

“Oh no, I won’t go into that code; I am not that intelligent!”
“oh no, I don’t want to try this software…I don’t know what it will do to my machine!”
“Oh no, I can’t write such a unique blog post!”
“Oh no, I will not twiply to that celebrity…come on…he is a celebrity!”

These phrases kept chasing me for a long while in my life, and sometimes still does. It had the worst effect on my progress, I couldn’t move an inch forward; by a deep feeling I didn’t confront, I was afraid of failure, mixed with a feeling of negative humbleness.
But that was it, I couldn’t stay as a prisoner to these chains, and leave these cookies of success to people who might have less resources and powers.

Then, after realizing this fact and working against it, I am free! within months I have created this blog you are reading, started the open source project Bunian (small but learned a lot from it and in progress), delivered session in JorDev (and still contributing effectively), and preparing a new technical Arabic podcast (to be announced soon).

what helped me to do that:

• Make backup plans for everything you have paranoia about; backup your drive, use virtual machines, make a dummy blog…etc. This way you will not fear the change, the change which will possibly be the next big thing for you
• Don’t take it too serious; be cool about it, it’s not going to be the end of the world if it fails. Of course try your best and plan well, but beyond that you only have to take the step and try things out
• Aim high…but lower your expectations; the higher your expectations are, the more difficult accepting failure is, hence you will not try it out. so lower your expectations and prepare for the failure
• Try to find more reasons to do it, reasons that will only force you do well without the fear of failure. Joy is an example; I like writing and expressing my feelings/experience in words, so no matter how many subscribers there are, I keep posting to this blog (and no, I am not going to tell you how many, at least not right now )
• Think of all the great stuff you are going to miss because you fear loosing part of what you already have, and sometimes even less. What you are missing could be awesome! and this is not gambling, because you already control the bigger part of it, luck is only a part.
• Have confidence in your self, because you CAN be better, and the only ones who can’t get better are the ones who DON’T WANT to get better; that is the false modesty.
• People grow within the limits around them, widen the limits…and see how you will, automatically, grow to fill the space further
• Don’t be hasty, and grow larger bit by bit…one success leads to another.

These are the things I could think of when it comes to it, I still struggle; it’s a never ending battle with my self, but I hopefully I will not surrender, and I hope this will help others as well.
Finally, we are nothing and can achieve nothing without the help of God; do your best, then ask him for success, that’s the best prescription ever.

I don’t know whether thank or scold my good friend Omar Qadan for introducing me to Travian, a strategy game played online.

It’s amazing how a simple,  web-based, HTML-front game can be so rich and vast entertainment wise! It’s a real strategy game where you build villages, resources, armies, embassies, and conduct trading, diplomacy, wars, and alliances…all through simple images, numbers and text.

On the other hand, I can’t ignore the programming part of the game (being a developer that is), it must be big, fun and tiring; think of all these rules and the simulation algorithms the game is being built upon , the server handling thousands of players, …and scripts (yes! lots of hacks!  ). Even the hacking idea it self is so delicious (programming wise only   ), a true heaven for developers .
Also the makers of the game are on the right track of providing developers points through which they can access the game and display information on other sites or applications; ok for now it’s only exporting database tables of statistical information about the game status, but still I consider it a cool step toward supplying nice end-point for developers, maybe Web Services in the future  .

Every time a new idea hits the web I say “ok, that’s it…there are no more idea’s!”, and every time I say that I  am proved to be wrong; YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Delicous, Digg, SlideShare, Flickr…and the list goes on.
So this is a message for all of us, don’t limit your imagination, ideas never run out.

The only concern now is that I don’t want to be addicted, so let’s wish for the best…and be warned…because Rapacious is rising

The feedback was very good, and I was glad that everybody liked it. Jordev is really moving ahead, and I am very excited being part of it

Below is the slide show (it’s an enhanced version from my previous one):

[slideshare id=821222&doc=introductiontonhibernate-1228487480885456-9&w=425]

Code is the same of the previous one which you can download from here

JorDev .net is a .net user group founded by enthusiastic Jordanian IT professionals. On Wednesday the 26th of November I will be doing my first session of a series about NHibernate.
Details of talk is here:

Overview	NHibernate is an Object-relational mapping (ORM) solution for the Microsoft .NET platform. it provides an easy to use framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Its purpose is to relieve the developer from a significant amount of relational data persistence-related programming tasks.NHibernate is free as open source software that is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
Target Audience	.NET Developers, Software Designers, Software Engineers, Software Architects
Date	Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Location	MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center, Royal Scientific Society Building, 3rd Floor)
Time	6:30 pm – 8:30 pm (Amman-Jordan local time)
For More Info	Mohamed Saleh @0788716457 Ayman Farouk    @0795727344
Reminders	� Live Calendar Facebook event Outlook Calendar Google Calendar

Yesterday was my last day in estarta, marking the end of nice period full of experience, knowledge, and amazing friends who have been like a family.

And now it’s time to move on, as a Technical Team Leader in esense. The excitement increases as time goes by (since I haven’t started there yet), I have only one week of preparations to step back into this role (yes, I have been TTL before) in this new environment, can’t wait.

Looking behind, it’s not an easy feeling;  departing such people who are dear to me! but my condolences is that I am not leaving the country anytime soon (so we will meet guys ), and I’m full of hope that I’ll find such great environment in esense as well.

Do you go through the same, time-consuming, frustrating discussion with your colleagues when you want to decide what to have for lunch? well…this is exactly what we have been going through where I work.

To solve the problem (partially, because humans can never totally agree! ), I made a small, quick and dirty web application; LunchPoll.

The user (Active Directory user, it works on Windows Authentication) would go to the home page, select the available poll:

Then a list of all available restaurants will show up. The restuarants’ names are in arabic, so don’t be frightned if you didn’t understand the names :

The user will assign a weight for each restaurant depending on his taste for today, and no two restaurants can have the same weight.

And after submitting the poll, the user will see the results; all the restaurants will appear, each one with the value of its weigt next to it, along with the voters names who voted for now:

you can download the source code here. bon apetite

p.s. There is no administration interface, so you will have insert restaurants in the Restaurants table, and Insert an entry for each new poll in the Polls table, giving the Status column the value “1″

p.p.s That never stopped the arguments

Lately, I have been living a financial chaos; I couldn’t tell how much money I had in the bank, lent to friends or in my Pocket! (ok the last one was exaggeration…I could count it anytime ).

I decided to put an end to this, so I started looking for a software to track my financial status; went through many solutions starting from Excell sheets passing by GNUCash, AceMoneyLite , and ending with Microsoft Office Accounting Express (the latter makes me want to start my own business! wow).
Nothing seemed to meet my simple requirements of …just…tracking my money!

Then I found it! ClearCheckBook; very simple, web-based and effective! you can define Your Accounts (your pocket, bank,..etc), define your expenses and income categories (Food, Gas,…etc), and insert your transactions depending on the Accounts and Categories. and you are on!

here are some screenshots that you might find interesting:

https://www.clearcheckbook.com/tour.php

enjoy managing your finance!

p.s. there are some competitiors like Mint and MySpendingPlan but Mint makes it compulsory to have an existing account with a known bank to their service, and MySpendingPlan had many JavaScript errors while I was browsing.

On friday, my mothers cousin died in a car accedent on a highway; he, his wife and one of his 3 kids died in the accedent! the 2nd child is in comma while the 3rd survived.
It was shocking! the last week he was enjoying the holiday at his family’s place with his three kids!

The more we live, the more it’s obvious how iferior this life is! the things you loved most could very easily disappear in one glimpse, and in a so hurting way! that’s why we should not cling to it at all, of course we do our best to live it right, but not make it our goal at all. Paradise is there waiting for those who submits to Allah and live through the path he showed by prophet Muhammad.

God says in the holy Quran:

اعْلَمُوا أَنَّمَا الْحَيَاةُ الدُّنْيَا لَعِبٌ وَلَهْوٌ وَزِينَةٌ وَتَفَاخُرٌ بَيْنَكُمْ وَتَكَاثُرٌ فِي الْأَمْوَالِ وَالْأَوْلَادِ كَمَثَلِ غَيْثٍ أَعْجَبَ الْكُفَّارَ نَبَاتُهُ ثُمَّ يَهِيجُ فَتَرَاهُ مُصْفَرًّا ثُمَّ يَكُونُ حُطَامًا وَفِي الْآخِرَةِ عَذَابٌ شَدِيدٌ وَمَغْفِرَةٌ مِّنَ اللَّهِ وَرِضْوَانٌ وَمَا الْحَيَاةُ الدُّنْيَا إِلَّا مَتَاعُ الْغُرُورِ {20}
Know that this world’s life is only sport and play and gaiety and boasting among yourselves, and a vying in the multiplication of wealth and children, like the rain, whose causing the vegetation to grow, pleases the husbandmen, then it withers away so that you will see it become yellow, then it becomes dried up and broken down; and in the hereafter is a severe chastisement and (also) forgiveness from Allah and (His) pleasure; and this world’s life is naught but means of deception.