منذ ان كنت صغيراً ولدي رغبة بانتاج مجموعة برامج اساسية لكل مستخدم حاسب عربي ومسلم، القائمة كانت تشمل البرامج التالية:

• برنامج للقرآن الكريم مع التفاسير المشهورة.
• برنامج للتقويم الهجري، مع مواقيت الصلاة.
• برنامج قاموس عربي انجليزي، انجليزي عربي.

قمت بعمل برنامج للأذن عام 1997 باستخدام لغة ديلفي، لكن للأسف لم احتفظ بالمصدر ولم ارفعة على نفس الخادم الذي رفعت فيه البرنامج، عموماً كونه المعادلة غير متطابقة مع معادلة مدينة الملك عبدالعزيز والعلوم والتقنية، فان البرنامج ليس له قيمة فعليه كبيرة. صفحة البرنامج القديمة

Today at 7:15 pm Riyadh time, I am going to give a presentation titled “Tips for faster websites” in front of Riyadh Geeks group at Bader.

Alriyadh Newspaper covered the meeting and the presentation: http://www.alriyadh.com/2009/08/08/article450749.html

I got many calls and emails from to attend the presentation, which made me bit nervous and worried, thank you all, and see you their.

Update:

We’ve just finished Riyadh Geeks meeting, big audience, thank you all for coming, and special thank to “Riyadh Geeks” for inventing me, and arranging this event.

When Microsoft released Bing search engine, I was really impressed, it looks good and the search is good.

But unfortunately Microsoft have a very bad habits of ruining really good products.

When you try to search for Why is Windows so expensive?, the first result you will get is: “Why are Mac’s So Expensive?”

Every time I visit a family I spend considerable time fixing Windows desktop and laptop, I don’t mind helping, but I mind not getting paid by Microsoft!

Windows machines are really hard to maintain, and you will rarely find someone happy with, unless he do the periodic re-installations, plus Windows is really pricey software, Windows 7 pro will cost $199 (home is $80 cheaper), it was acceptable 10 years ago when the computers prices were around $3000, but nowadays it i

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

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)

Lengthy but a must see presentation.

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:

• Lucene
• Solr (uses Lucene)
• Sphinx

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.

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.

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.