i can fly!

it gets very windy this time of the year, i remember i was once walking last year when i felt the wind pushing me from behind, it was so strong that it really pushed me forward, i decided to give it a try and just jump upwards to detach my legs from the ground and yes, the wind pushed me about a foot forward, today i got to do that again, i cut a long distance by just jumping upwards and i was accelerating in speed it got a little bit dangerous too,

it's really inspiring how strong the wind can be, no wonder people have always dreamed about sailing and flying, i'd love to try any of that but i don't think i'll get the chance in the foreseeable future,

i got lucky with algorithms!

the exams are finished, not bad i think, i just hope the grades come within the expected ranges, anyway i think i enjoyed this semester, now i have great plans for the midyear vacation, let's see what we're gonna do.

maybe the best thing that happened for sometime is that i got the highest mark in the algorithms year works, i'm so happy about that, i really love algorithms, maybe the course had some issues, but i hope it'll be good at the end.

VS JIT-Debugger Pop-ups

a friend of mine told me about that game, after i got the game and made the installation, i started the game and boom, the game is suspended and not responding because Visual Studio Just-In-Time debugger got its nose in the execution sequence, i looked it up on the net and i found many people complaining about the same thing, many decided to uninstall the new .Net and revert to older versions which they've been living happily with but didn't get much luck, finally, i found the answer on Microsoft forums, it suggested that deleting some registry keys can solve the whole problem so i made this reg file and i think it did the trick for me.

Tracing Code, Specially Assembly

well, the second exam was Micro-Processors, i really liked this course, and i think i made some good work at it too, the exam went ok, i just didn't feel good about that strange looking question that weighted slightly above 1/5 the total mark, it listed some PIC16F84 code and asked u to trace, describe and fix the functionality it provides, the exam was over when a friend of me showed up saying "hey, it's a factorial, isn't it?" well, buddy, it didn't look like a factorial to me!! and it got much better with the more "factorial" u hear as u go,

now, let me tell u something, whenever u trace any non-trivial piece of code, u must use a table (with borders) of variables and update them step-by-step,

another thing, those pieces of asm codes usually evaluate to something meaningful, specially when u're asked to describe or name it, something like "a*b", "factorial", "pow(a,b)", "Σ a_i" or other simple math formulae, maybe that's because nobody writes code that just looks ugly, it's usually written to make something good,

problem is, i did make some sort of a table, i had a row that looked like [3, 2, 1] and the other (that's what u evaluate) started with [4], then u multiply successive elements and update the second, so i just messed it up in the third loop and ended with [4, 12, 36, 36] so the result of foo1(4) was "36", not "24", because i should have multiplied 12 "by 2 not by 3",

maybe i'll remember that for the rest of my life...

Mohamed Abdel Wahab Songs

i had this song in mind "emta ezzaman yesmah ya gameel" when i searched for Abdel Wahab songs, at first i didn't get much luck with my search, but at last i landed on that site and i found many songs in mp3 and ram, enjoy!

Early in the morning, preparing for the exams...

well it's been some time since i last wake up that early and i have to say it's very quite and clear now, very beautiful indeed, i open the window and the morning sun covered the room in marvelous colors i didn't see before in my cozy room,

this couldn't have been complete for me without a touch of sadness from Anouar Brahem music, and now it's become so captivating i feel i'm lost in all that beauty,

approaching the end of the semester, the first exam's just tomorrow, starting with Operating Systems, i've much to revise, we covered a very reasonable amount in the course, maybe a little more practice and it'd have been nearly perfect,

this semester has been so full, and i'm quite satisfied with the things i did and the experiences i gained, maybe i'll have to tell you about that, but let's keep it for later...

FastrerFox, i just wanted a stop-watch!!

on of my friends told me the blog takes too long to load, i decided to work on it a little, i started by removing any embedded multimedia that referenced other domains and replaced them by links, i felt it's pretty faster now, i didn't have FasterFox till then as i didn't really need it, at home at least, so i got it and checked the counter, well, not bad, end of the story,

then, i just decided to search for "FasterFox" on blogsearch.google, i don't know where i got this bad habit :), but again, it showed some value, i found people saying stuff like phishing and security concerns, i found that article on planet.websecurity for example when i started to get interested, maybe u'll be too if u check wikipedia for FasterFox,

i ended up setting FasterFox to the default mode, where i doesn't change FireFox's default values, after all, i just wanted a stop-watch for the pageload...

well, maybe FeedFlare is not the answer

after reading the FeedFlare Developer Guide as planned, all i can say is this thing is cool but isn't as powerful as i expected, the DTD restricts the abilities to showing a single text or link based on the data you can access within ur feed, the feed that i have no control over so far,

i took a look on what the community thinks about FeedFlare and i found that some people are not happier than i am, another blogger too said "FeedFlare? No Thank You." one year ago, released on December 13, 2005, part II on January 25, 2006, i'm quite disappointed, after studying the subject, i won't be able to get what i wanted, the language they used gave me a much better image,

only because i want to go through with it, i'm going to try the flare i created, just for the fun of it, it displays a link to the first label's feed, that's the best i could get so far, check the results on the blog feed,

enjoy!

FeedFlare is the answer

i think i found the solution to the problem i mentioned in my previous post, i was checking my FeedBurner account when i found it, it's FeedFlare, it enables you to add custom xml units to your feed to be rendered with each item, there's a lot of FeedFlare units already available, but i couldn't find anything related to the labels that would solve my problem, now i'm checking the FeedFlare Developer Guide to find out how to add my labels back, i'm not sure i'm gonna be able to make the aggregator handle these labels as i want, but anyway it's cool stuff, let's see what can we get, cheers.

Where are my labels in that feed?

i added that feed subscription button to the blog and i just wanted to give it a try, i subscribed the blog in* my Google Reader and all the posts came into view, well, great, but where are my labels? the aggregator enables you to tag items in your feeds, but what about the author labels? i just want my labels to be there after each post like what i see inside the blog,

i tried to figure out how to customize my feed but i was only able to control basic options like whether to syndicate the full post or only the first paragraph or add a footer, it was clear i had no control over the feed content, i even tried adding template code that generates the labels for me but i found that you can only add HTML code in that footer!

i want the aggregator to be able to use the labels i add, within his feed viewer the same way he does when he's on the blog, in a meek trial to go along with the idea, i used firebug to add some label to the viewed item inside my Google Reader, i used same url of the subscribed* feeds, and the reader opened the feed telling me i'm not subscribed,

well, it worked partially, as the page was reloaded not like what i expected, i.e the nice 'loading' on top of the page while everything is still in place, since i used the same url maybe it has to do with the link location or dom hierarchy or whatever, the solution was going to be aggregator specific, maybe special tags can be added to the feed so the aggregator can detect those links and be aware they are parts of the original feed, and maybe we can find people linking to other feeds from their own feeds too!!

i think it's gonna be useful if you can go through your labeled feeds just like the original blog, but at least i should be able to customize my feed content...

*if you don't know already, it's the aggregator that pulls the feed not the feed pushing itself, it's the desired illusion of the service.

El-Tanbura, seductive folk melodies of the mythical Simsimiyya

what can i say! it just struck me when i first listened to the very fine tunes they played, i couldn't help playing the songs again and again as if not believing that such melodies can exist in the real world, it was like a journey through the mysteries of the Arabian Nights, very genuine and very seductive.

the homepage, provides plenty of samples and a very interesting biography that describes the origins of the band and the roots of the fascinating genre they play, it also mentions the myths about the origins of the instrument they use, called Simsimiyya, which adds a little spice to the whole thing,

you can find a complete song here on boomp3.com, i hope you enjoy this unique experience as much as i did.