www.emadashi.com my new blog space!

Finally, I am doing it! I am becoming a big boy and taking care of my self; moving from the caring WordPress.com world to my own hosting with my own domain: www.emadashi.com

While taking this step I had many flashes ranging from “COOL, I CAN DO ALL THAT NOW!” to “OH MY GOD, WHAT AM I DOING!”; it’s hard, has lots of responsibility, and many sacrifices like simple life, and the Google ranking I will be losing since June last year.

Checking all the stats and visits brings my tears down (not really down though!). So what I am going to do is to keep my old blog (this one) so visitors can still see my old posts and I won’t loose the ranking, what do you think? should I do that? (comment if you please)

The good thing is, though, that if you are subscribed to this blog’s feed, you don’t have to change anything; It will happen automatically and you will still get the new posts (you might get the old posts again once more when I take that step).

So anyway, I hope this step to be a new era for better life, all hope.

Travians be Warned…Rapacious is Rising

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

Introduction to NHibernate Session at Jordev Was Good

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):

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

My First Talk at JorDev .net

 

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

Changing Jobs

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.

How we decide what to have for lunch

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

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.

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