General

Mohamed Raafat Samy is an MVP - Welcome 2008

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:42:38 GMT

Great news of 2008: Just today we knew that Mohamed Raafat Samy is now an MVP (Solutions Architecture MVP). Mohamed is a technical architect in ITWorx (a true rare title in Egypt !!), a top contributer n Microsoft online spots, a SUPER fan of anything that carries the "Microsoft" name on it

Mohamed is also and most importantly my closest friend in the software field, and of the closest in life in general. It's so exciting to see him get what I and many around him always believed he truly deserved.
Congratulations Mohamed, you earned it, man

Also congratulations to Marwan Tarek (also from ITWorx), for becoming MVP as well (SharePoint MVP). I only saw him in ITWorx public CuttingEdge Club event and he was pretty impressive, so, lots of congratulations to him as well

Another reason I'm so glad tonight is that it was a chance to meet the 3rd side in our friendship triangle, me, Mohamed and Nisreen. We're friends since the COM+ course we had together with Ehab El-Gendy, the great instructor, back in 2004. Since then we have been very close friends although sometimes it takes us long to meet as happened recently. The MVP news was a great reason for us three to meet after long time and enjoy sitting like the old days. Love you a lot, guys!

'Twas the Night Before Implementation

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:51:20 GMT

Source: cyberjoke3000 Yahoo Group
Referred by: Scott Kuhl

'Twas the night before implementation and all through the house,
not a program was working, not even a browse.

The programmers hung by their tubes in despair,
with hopes that a miracle soon would be there.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of inquiries danced in their heads.

When out in the machine room there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a super programmer (with a six-pack of beer).

His resume glowed with experience so rare,
he turned out great code with a bit-pusher's flair.

More rapid than eagles his programs they came,
and he cursed and he muttered and called them by name.
On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete!
On Batch Job! On Closing! On Functions Complete!

His eyes were glazed over, fingers nimble and lean,
from weekends and nights in front of the screen.
A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head,
soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
turning specs into code; then turned with a jerk
And laying his finger upon the "Enter" key,
the system came up and worked perfectly.

The updated updated; the deletes, deleted,
the inquiries inquired, the closings completed.
He tested each whistle and tested each bell
with nary a bomb for all had gone well.

The system was finished, the tests were concluded,
the users' last changes were even included.
Then the user exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt,
"It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!"

Have Fun

Microsoft Feast Gift: 3 FREE MS Press Books (LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:50:06 GMT

Today is the primary day of Muslim's ADHA (Sacrifice) feast. I'm enjoying it with family activities in my grandmother's house and few hours later my uncle's house. Thanks God both have wireless Internet connectivity. This how I could still check my Google Reader items (see shared items), while showing my profile pictures to my uncle's little daughter and other kids from the family!

Then I noticed that the feast has a great gift, coming from Microsoft this time. I found that Microsoft has opened 3 MS Press books completely FREE for public.

The books are:

Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo (ISBN: 9780735623910)
This practical guide covers Language Integrated Query (LINQ) syntax fundamentals, LINQ to ADO.NET, and LINQ to XML. The e-book includes the entire contents of this printed book!
Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX by Dino Esposito (ISBN: 9780735624139)
Learn about the February 2007 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0, including an overview and the control toolkit.
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney (ISBN: 9780735625396)
Learn how to use Silverlight to simplify the way you implement compelling user experiences for the Web. Discover how to support an object-oriented program model with JavaScript.

Download your feast gift FREE from Microsoft.

Note: Thanks to Sreenivas Mogullapalli, a fellow GWB guy, for spreading this gift news.

Technorati Tags: FREE,book,ebook,Microsoft Press,MS Press,LINQ,ASP.NEt AJAX,Silverlight

InfoWorld: Facebook chooses Microsoft over Google

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:45:54 GMT

Quote from the official InfoWorld press release:

Microsoft will purchase a $240 million minority stake in Facebook as well as become its exclusive third-party ad platform

Facebook will sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which as part of the deal will also expand the advertising services it provides to the social networking phenom, the companies said Wednesday in a statement.

The size of the ownership stake Microsoft will take during Facebook's next round of financing puts Facebook's valuation at a whopping $15 billion. Google had reportedly been courting Facebook as well.

In addition to the ownership piece, Microsoft will also extend its existing agreement to provide banner ads to Facebook in the U.S. With this deal, Microsoft will become Facebook's exclusive third-party ad platform as well as provide Facebook ads internationally.

"This is about placing a big bet on the future of Facebook and positioning Microsoft possibly for an outright acquisition later, as well as keeping Facebook away from Google," said analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence.

During a conference call after the announcement, Owen Van Natta, Facebook's vice president of operations and chief revenue officer, didn't acknowledge Google was one of the company's suitors.

He said Facebook chose Microsoft because of its reputation as one of the world's top technology providers. "We were fortunate to have a lot of folks who wanted to partner with us around advertising," he said.

Real World Scrum Best Practices Through My Project Team Member's Experience

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:18:19 GMT

Mohamed Nour, a really smart decent guy with superior technical skills is one of the great guys I work with right now in a really big project that's in it's last stages right now.. He wrote an excellent article talking about the lessons we have learned and the experiences we as team and individuals got through applying Scrum methodologies on the project.

The article summarizes months of different techniques, some are standard, some we just made up ourselves; and how influenced our project, and how it can influence any other project running Scrum. It's really useful not just just for those interested in Scurm methodology, but any developer working in a serious big / long taking project.

Read the article ... "Scrum In Action".

P.S.

Nour was the only member in the team I've never worked with before the current project starts, however, his many skills and productivity were so clear from his articles, technical talks and moreover his older team members talk about it. Working with Nour and the rest of the current team (Mohamed Tayseer, Mai Soliman and Emad Lotfy doing the tough testing, LOL) was one of the true blesses of working in such big project. Plus the experiences we all had of course by practice, which Nour summarized a great deal of it in terms of project management, and we still have had in other areas like architecture. I always wanted to talk about it, and it seems that I really should.

Top Ten Software Architecture Mistakes

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:58:53 GMT

Another top ten mistakes/DON"Ts article I found. This time in a very interesting field, which is architecture.
Having read the mistakes. I can tell for sure, if you'd ever done architecture-related task, you must have done at least three of these mistake once or more.

Quote from the article: Mistake #1:

Scoping Woes. "This is the sort of situation where a simple travel booking system ends up with full expense claim management facilities being built into it, with inevitable repercussions for project costs, timescales and quality...It is really true that no security is needed beyond simple login? Once logged into the system can users really perform any system operation?"

Open your eyes, get a cup of coffee, and read the list.

P.S.
Note the "RelatedVendorContent" resource list just under the tags in the article.

When geeks go together for heavy iftar

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:08:38 GMT

Right now I'm at Cilantro Maadi (in Cairo) with Mohammed Raafat Samy, my friend whom I used to be proud of being one of the very few architects in Egypt.
Here are things to learn from such experience and other geek outing experiences I had before.

If you are having iftar at a kababgy (Meat specialized restaurant), make sure to arrive early, or be no more than two, so that you can get a small table for you in the middle of the way and can enjoy catching all the staff while they're serving others to get your food quick
Don't let your friend order for you. Especially if he starts talking about "HARD CORE meat". This usually means lamp meat, be careful if you're not into that
Keep talking about Facebook and "finding the right answer to an old problem" in general when you feel willing to stop the geeky chat about architecture heroes.
Watch for the fork and so to come quick. They'll always come late, however you use the power of your central location!!
Of course both of you has his laptop under his side of the table. When washing hands, just keep one person for watch for all the laptops and iterate.
It doesn't matter who pays. Geeks don't think about such shit !!
Be free for the rest of the night. If your friend is a work mate, you're spending the rest of the night at office, if he's an architect from another company, you're going to the very other side of the town to have some double concentrated caffeine.
On the way to the cafe, it's always so much fun to listen to an episode or two of ArchCast architectural webcasts. Expecially when the topics are around DinnerNow and "validating architecture"
It's always interesting to spend a sufficient part of the night talking about how to localize the "scenarios" DinnerNow ideas, and other architectural demos.
When you get to the cafe, switch your laptop on. At least one of your friends has an adapter to plug all the laptop ACs into.
Enjoy continuing your work even when got all the caffeine. Also have an ice-cream (or a "multizer", if you are in Cilantro!).
Don't forget to blog about you experience!!
Of course this is a good chance to share resources between your laptops. You know you waste much time on that anyway. Geeks are too mature to do such a mistake.

How to prevent Facebook applications from spamming your mini-feed

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:36:34 GMT

** To none Facebook users: This post iwas meant to be imported by Facebook and is posted here for benefiting Facebook users outside my friend circle. Sure it's not targeting most geek users. **

Many people send you forwarded "blah blah Wall" garbage ? or does any other application keep adding meaningless entries to your mini-feed (the part of your profile that lists your latest news/actions) ??
Then these entries stay there until you login and remove each entry manually by hovering (pointing) your mouse over the entry, use the link "x" that appears then and click that link.

It's easy to prevent these from originally showing up in an automatic way without completely removing the application.

Steps:

On the top right of Facebook, click "privacy" to go to the "Privacy Overview" page.
From that page, click "News Feed and Mini-Feed".
In the "News Feed and Mini-Feed Privacy" page, check the right part of the page, look for a link that says "Edit Applications" (it shows in relatively small font size). Click that link

Note: You can skip steps from 1 to 3 by going directly to
http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php
From "Edit My Applications" page you reach either by going through steps 1 to 3 or using the previous URL, you'll find a list of all Facebook applications you have and a link "Edit Settings" in front of each. Find the application you want to remove its entries from mini-feed, and click the link "Edit Settings" next to that application.
Step 4 will show a modal pop up (new part of the page that appears on top of everything else) that allows you to edit different settings for that application. One of these settings is " Publish stories about this in my Mini-Feed.", click on that to uncheck the check box (empty the right mark) next to it.
(Optional) Check the pop up for any other settings you might love to change as well.
Finally click "Save" and continue your Facebook journey :).

Note that the same contents of the modal pop up appear to you when you try to add a new application. It's just that most of us ignore reading these and proceed to the application with the default settings.

I hope this helps somebody. For me it helped me get rid of mini-feed entries for the pollution that comes through so many many people via a certain popular Wall application. Maybe I'll post about that later!

** Feel free to share this note with others !! **
But DO NOT send the link to it via messages or emails, otherwise, you'd be SPAMMING (sending unexpected mails without excuse- which is not allowed by all world wide mail systems). To read more about how you can be SPAMMING others without realizing it, read my other article:
http://geekswithblogs.net/Mohamed/archive/2006/08/29/89571.aspx

Links: 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:56:21 GMT

I found this to be a must-read article for everybody doing serious web authoring (design/development, etc...).

Quote from the article:

Sometimes you just want to get the information you’re after, save it and move along. And you can’t. Usability nightmares — which are rather the daily routine than an exception — appear every now and again; usually almost every time you type your search keywords in Google. In his article “Why award-winning websites are so awful” Gerry McGovern points out that “the shiny surface wins awards, real substance wins customers” and that is absolutely true. Nevermind what design you have, and nevermind which functionality you have to offer — if your visitors don’t understand how they can get from point A to point B they won’t use your site.

In almost every professional design (except from special design showcases such as, e.g., portfolios) you need to offer your visitors

a clear, self-explanatory navigation,
precise text-presentation,
search functionality and
visible and thought-out site structure.

And that means that you simply have to folow the basic rules of usability and common sense. You want to communicate with your visitors, don’t drive them away, right?

In this article we take a look at some of the usability nightmares you should avoid designing functional and usable web-sites. At the end of the article you’ll also find 8 usability check-points you should probably be aware of.

Choosing Integrated Ebook Reader & Music Player Device - Any idea ??

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:13:54 GMT

Right now I'm looking for good integrated mobile ebook reader and music player (it'd be great if I could buy a Tablet PC sure but I can't! Not at this stage).
Not knowing where to start from, I've been checking different types of smart phones like i-Mate, Nokia N800 (internet tablet) and 9500, and so on. I am mainly looking for BIG screen, usability in general, and (as it's a phone at the end of the day and should replace my current phone) ability to find new software for and use it to connect to the internet, but these are optional of course.

iPhone looked pretty good for the job. It's designed so that you'd do everything by tapping your finger over the screen, and of course it plays music, and it's specs say it has PDF reader. The demos show that when opening PDF as email attachment.
However, the fact that it has to be unlocked to work with other networks than AT&T (not available in Egypt) causing loss of warranty and more makes it ugly. I think from the people trying to do hacks for reading ebooks too that I can't read PDFs from outside mail app either, I'm not sure, but this would be as ugly if true.

Now Adam (SK co-founder) pointed me to Sony ebook reader. It looks like just the right answer! It's a device created specifically for reading books. It can play music (but only unencrypted MP3s !!), and it has a very long battery life. It's also relatively cheaper than other options ($249). The most obvious ugly thing to me is that it's internal storage is only 20MB according to the specs page!!!!! (60MB according to one review though!). It still allows plugging memory cards anyway.
I think i I get it, I should still consider getting iPod for example (as I think maybe most of my MP3s won't work on it). 1GB memory card or so, and a light led ( The only complains about it I could find so far is that it has no self-light, which is not that bad, but I'm worried to know so late. After all, I'll be most likely getting my device shipped from U.S. which takes weeks. I don't want surprise afterwards). Of course, this is none of what I asked for as "integrated" in the beginning of the post.

So, now, from the talks people tell me about it, it's clear that I can be missing more possible options or having misleading information. I don't know which one is the best bet yet.
To geeks who happened to get into the same situation. Do have any suggestion ???