/b0rked - Real Life Considered Harmful
Checked: 1 hour 36 min ago
Updated: 20 weeks 18 hours ago
Update every: 2 hours
Open Source, Technology, Politics, and brain dumps of yours truly.
Blog Update, Google Summer of Code, and all that jazz!
It has been a while ever since I posted anything in here. Anyways, my proposal to Google Summer of Code has been accepted, you may have a look at it here. I am so excited I am feeling nauseous :P. It also happens that my friend Ahmed Darwish’s proposal has also been accepted. So I am anticipating a real exciting summer coming ahead, just wish us luck :).
On a side note, I’ll be moving from this blog soon and make another one which will be more professional and more frequently update (hopefully).
On yet another side note, I’ll be attending the 100LIVE Electronic Music Festival this Friday (and no electronic music is NOT trance music, so don’t go expecting it’s a party where everyone is jumping up and down to such cheesy music :S). If you’ll be there, drop me a comment.
Regards,
On College and the Real World!
This is a reply I sent to a thread posted on Google Summer of Code mailing list and I though about putting it here as it sums up my view about the problem we face when we are faced by real-life challenges while mainly having an academic background, here it goes:
“Despite of the very good replies to the original sender. The thread
points out a major problem i see in many academic institutions, namely
in CS, CE, and EE majors.
I’ve spoken to many of my colleagues about participating in GSoC, and
many of them were also very apprehensive about it.
In my very personal experience, some academic institutions offering
CS/CE/EE majors have a very theoretical approach in teaching their
subjects, add to this the time-consuming nature studying in college,
so some students decide to sacrifice academic excellence for technical
ability and some other take the opposite path, only a few find the
time to excel in both worlds and the result is often that there is a
gap between the academic knowledge gained through college and the
real-life experience required to do real software development (and
participate in FOSS projects as well) with both being inversely
proportional to each other, this is not a rule at all, but just my
mere observation.
Even in academic subjects that are related to real-life applications,
the students are often required to write proof-of-concept code that
only simulates, and hardly relates to real-life examples of the code.
For example, in an OS course you’ll write a program that simulates
process scheduling, yet you miss on many aspects that’d be imposed on
you due to factors such as computer architecture, parallelism, memory
architecture …etc.
So I think that GSoC participating orgs need to offer ideas for
students who didn’t have any exposure to their codebase, so that they
take their time to learn. This doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t o
their homework and work hard, but this is merely to help the ones with
less experience to be more experienced.
I’m sorry if this deviates from the main point of the post, so I
apologize for any in advance for filling your inbox with this long
message 
Regards,
Mohammed”
A Beautiful Place Out In The Country!
“A Beautiful Place Out In The Country” by Boards of Canada.
Enjoy! 
Enta men el a7rar ya 3ali!
I just deactivated my fakebook acount!
As for my “social networking” needs, last.fm is my cup of tea, and it’s really enough for me, at least it’s authentic and original!
That’s my profile if you’re _really_ curious about my musical taste.
Oh, and let’s not forget to mention that social networking for grown-ups does indeed exist.
One of These Days*
Staring your day attending a lecture where you can’t get anything, then get together with a colleague for some meeting and waiting them for two hours only to tell you they’ll postpone it, getting squeezed in a -supposedly- air conditioned bus (where no one should be left to stand in the first place), and ending it by a quarrel with a low-life microbus driver.
Tell me about bad days, baby!
____________________________________________________________
* A song by Pink Floyd
Say No to The New ADSL Regulations
Click here. Vote and Sign the petition!
Relief!!!
“فلما ضاقت و استحكمت حلقاتها…………فرجت و كنت أظنها لا تفرج”
…And Speaking of Vacation
Seems my newly found fandom for Pink Floyd is turning into an addiction. And in spirit of me finally taking the vacation, I present you with yet another Pink Floyd video.
And here are the lyrics if you’re interested.
Careful With That Axe, Eugene
I am not such a rock fan, but this one is awesome! Careful With that Axe, Eugene by Pink Floyd. Enjoy!
x86 Should Die!
x86 floating point unit sucks! (N.B.: This is a completely biased view based on frustrations of an assembly language n00b)
Campaign for Al-Aqsa
See 7ala and E-Nadaha for more details, may God bless their efforts. To the United Nations, Amnesty International and Red Crescent To the Kings, Princes, Presidents, Leaders of the World, and all final authorities in the international issues To all Human Rights World Organizations, Societies and Institutions To all journalists and media professionals To various Islamic and religious Organizations and [...]
This Semester’s To-Do List
Since we been assigned an assortment of the worst faculty members to teach us this semester - as usual - (and don’t get me wrong, there are still bright people teaching us, fortunately there are always exceptions) , I decided to put college aside a little this semester as it’d be of no point of [...]
Why I Hate J2EE
Whenever I delve more into J2EE, I remember this.
Thinking Out of The Box … Waaaaaaay Out Of The Box!
After two days of struggling to get my printer working under Linux, downloading, installing, re-installing, changing, upgrading, and downgrading printer drivers, googling around, searching Gentoo forums, and searching non-Gentoo forums. Clears out USB Printer support was just carelessly left disabled in my kernel config after a kernel upgrade. Out of the box is sometimes way out [...]
So True !
“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” [...]
Just a Thought!
Is it a coincidence that the front page of today’s issue of government-owned Ahram newspaper features an editorial article about the “Danger of the Iranian Role in the Region”, and that today’s speech at the mosque by an Imam -who happens to be appointed by the government of course- was all dedicated to show how [...]
3 Hours and 10 Minutes Towards Freedom…
…for about three weeks Expect this blog to be a little more active during that time.
And Finally…
… the electricity company has decided not to over charge us! Feels good not to have to file the monthly complaint. Yippy !