TED: Success is a continuous journey

June 13th, 2009

3 minutes presentation:

Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street, but a constant journey. He uses the story of his business’ rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson — when we stop trying, we fail.

Link

TED: Schools kill creativity

June 7th, 2009

I saw this video last year by Sir Ken Robinson, as the title say “schools kill creativity”, watch and tell me what you think.
Very funny and insightful video (20 minutes)

Google Wave: Is What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today

June 2nd, 2009

Lengthy but a must see presentation.

Arabic Projects Ideas 3: Open Arabic Stemmer

May 23rd, 2009

Nowadays we have many great options to build your own search engines, either for your website, or for you own custom applications. to mention a few:

All of these search engine option works great for English language, and they have decent support for Arabic language thanks to Unicode and UTF-8, but unfortunately they still lack a the power of stemming that you will find in English language.

Stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem, base or root form – generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root.

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

The idea is to build open stem engine for Arabic language, and port to different computer languages: C, C++, Java, C#, etc… so it can be easily used in all Arabic information retentival systems.

If you have an ideas to improve the initial idea please comment.

Arabic Projects Ideas 2: Open Arabic Fonts

May 23rd, 2009

If you build Arabic website you must be hit by the hard reality, Arabic web font options are really narrow, the only realistic choices are:

  • Tahoma: only good for small sizes.
  • Arabic Transparent
  • Traditional Arabic

My idea is to buy other quality Arabic fonts and ask browser/OS vendors to include them, we really need more choice to improve the quality of website productions, and add more creativity to our Arabic Internet.

The idea came after I read something from Jihad Alammar, and Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)

If you have an ideas to improve the initial idea please comment.

Arabic Projects Ideas 1: Open Um Alqura Calendar

May 23rd, 2009

In Saudi Arabia the official calendar is Um Alqura calendar, which is a Hejeri based calendar.
The idea is to buy the royalties of the calculation function (KACST owns it), and open it, and force all software vendors to include it.
Just imagine that your mobile date, match your outlook date, match your favourite website date. Stakeholders:

  • Government: KACST, CITC, Yesser, MCIT
  • Software vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Apple
  • Open Source: Linux, MySQL, Postgresql etc..
  • Mobile phones vendors: Nokia, SonyEriccson, Apple, HTC, etc…
  • Other electronics vendors: Humax receiver manufacturer.
  • Content Providers: Google, Maktoob, Yahoo, MSN, Newspapers, etc..
  • Development Languages: Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Perl, etc…

If you have an ideas to improve the initial idea please comment.

MySQL Founder Starts Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring

May 15th, 2009

Monty Widenius, the ‘father’ of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

Via: Slashdot

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