Track your financial status

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.

When a family dies in a car accedent!

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.

Are code comments important?

From the very first day I have heard about Agile development and I have been hearing things like “code comments are not such a good thing“

The main idea behind that is that the code should be self explanatory; giving functions good names and splitting concerns into different functions.

But what about the “why”; why this certain code is written this way? why not do it that way? and this is what I have gone through today!

I was working on this bug I had which resulted with a really nasty Timeout Runtime error!
I instantly remembered that there was some place in the code that had the same functionality, so I jumped to it and found it is doing the same thing….almost!

Why my code isn’t working?!…my code saves the domain object…and that code saves the domain object too! Ok, he is using the repository directly…and i am using the service…so what?!
Being that guy my team leader Muhammed Tobji, who happens to be a really smart guy, I was sure I was on the right track!

After spending sometime struggling with that bug, I noticed a lot of comments above the that line of code of Tobjis, it said:
“Don’t use the service…use the repository…or you will have a Timeout exception!!”
GGRRRRR!!!

It was there! I don’t know how much time I could have wasted trying to find the solution, when the solution was already there! The code was almost cleanly refactored, the name of the functions were logical and self explantory, and yet..that was not enough! there was we still a need for comments because it was exceptional situaion (and software has lots of exceptional situations )

my conclusion is “use comments”! Be wise though, don’t comment the obvious, but in such situations…please…do post your code comment

(thanks Tobji )

In the memory of Srebrenica genocide

Can the mind imagine how brutal the man kind can be!!

The last couple of days was the memory of one of the ugliest genocides took place in the recent history, with 8000 people killed mercilessly in couple of days!

The frightning side of the story is that it was under the supervision of the so called “The United Nations” (UN)!
Is it surprising? I thought so at the beginning, but after the spread of the news about UN forces abusing children all over the glob , it isn’t any more!!

I will leave you with the wikipedia article for more information about Srebrenica genocide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre

New laptop

This is my first post from my new laptop HP Pavilion dv 6755ee

Overall, I am happy with what I am experiencing till now, except for:

1- The fans opening is placed at the bottom of the laptop, which causing it to go on high temperature fast!
2- There is something wrong about the text in some applications in Vista (like visual studio 2008), it’s somehow blurry, I googled it and found some posts that didn’t help; suggesting to take off ClearType or set a dpi option that is already checked!

I will keep searching for a solution and see what I will come up with. Will keep you posted

Using FeedBurner

I have been trying to figure out how the stats that WordPress provide works while hosting my blog, I FAILED!…or did they?

It was not a straightforward thing, I would click on a stat number that says I had certain number of views on one post today, I would click on it to see the chart is empty :S.

Anyway, I am using FeedBurner now to see if things get any better.
So if by any chance you have subscribed to my blog, please change the feed address to the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/eashi

My “Introduction to NHibernate” presentation and slides

I have delivered the presentation I talked about in my previous post here.

Actually it was pretty simple and straightforward, the slides them selves don’t have code content; all the code was shown in VS directly (I always found it better to see the code in its really environment to better understand).
The attendees were handful, but if felt really great when they expressed how excited they were about the whole thing.

You can find the Power Point slides and the sample code in the following zipped file:

http://www.freedrive.com/file/395364,emadnhibernatepresentation.zip

I intend also to share with you the process I went through in order to conclude to the presentation in its final state.

I hope you benefit from it

Update: I did this presentation again with enhanced slides, you can find those slides on this post