Internet
The main piece of news for day 2 in the Firefox Summit 2008 is that everyone is now trapped in the small town of Whistler after a rock slide cut off the highway that connects Whistler to Vancouver. Fortunately, nobody was injured because of this. However, clearing the massive boulders that are blocking the highway will take 5 days according to official sources. Since the summit ends this Thursday, most attendants need to go to the Vancouver Airport on Friday to catch flights to their home countries. The cause of this rock slide is unclear at the moment, but there are people in the summit who are speculating whether a company whose name starts with an 'M' is behind all of this. A bug was filed in Bugzilla to track the issue, and some of the currently-proposed solutions involve riding bears, taking boats, or taking helicopters. In reality however, we will most likely end up going through a different route that takes around 8 hours in bus.
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Submitted by Ayman on Thu, 2008/07/31 - 4:13pm
The Firefox Summit 2008 started today in the city of Whistler, BC, Canada. Around 400 contributors to the Mozilla project gathered to meet, share thoughts and discuss the 3.0 release of Firefox and plan for the next releases. I'm attending the summit as the Arabic localizer. I will post a daily highlight of the summit on my blog, so let's start with day one.
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Submitted by Ayman on Wed, 2008/07/30 - 8:54am
Anyone interested in web development should have heard about the Model-View-Controller software pattern by now. This pattern emphasizes on separation of application's data model, UI (view), and control logic. The concept itself isn't new and has been around since 1979, but recently there have been many successful implementations of the pattern in the domain of web development.
Like any self-respecting web developer, I started to explore the available frameworks, and quickly settled on Python as a language and TurboGears as a framework. I viewed many webcasts and documents, then decided to practice my newly gained knowledge by writing a basic del.icio.us-like social bookmarking application in TurboGears. Now I'm documenting my work as a tutorial, hoping that other TurboGears newcomers would find something useful in it. The tutorial covers the following concepts:
- Designing data models.
- Developing controller Logic.
- Creating view templates.
- Working with forms and widgets.
There are also sections for the reasons behind my Python/TurboGears choice, and the installation process.
Please read on for the tutorial itself and an attachment of the project's source code at the end. I recommend viewing the code while working with the tutorial, as I didn't include imports or other tiny bits. In addition, the tutorial assumes good knowledge of Python.
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Submitted by Ayman on Fri, 2006/08/18 - 6:17pm
A while ago I came across the Python Challenge. It is a series of programming challenges that require writing short programs in order to advance through levels. The creator(s) of the site put a lot of effort into it. The challenges are a lot of fun to solve, and the whole thing is very addicting.
If you don't know Python then I suggest you read its tutorial and then start solving the challenges, it will be a great learning experience. If you do know Python, the challenge still has a lot to offer on the educational and fun fronts. It will make you explore a variety of libraries and programming domains.
Most of the levels can be solved with other programming languages as well. However, solving them in Python makes the programmer experience the beauty of Python, its power, and ease of use.
To sum it up, if you enjoy programming, the Python Challenge is for you. I don't remember having so much fun on a website in a long time :)
Ah, and by the way, I'm currently in level 27.
Submitted by Ayman on Sat, 2006/06/17 - 8:02pm
Syria Planet, the community site for Syrian bloggers, is now online, it features an aggregator of member blogs (Syrian or about Syria), and forums for arranging activities and meetings, and discussing what's going on in Syria and the blogosphere, among the other things.
Check out the site at: www.syplanet.com.
Submitted by Ayman on Wed, 2006/03/08 - 11:47am
While waiting for ADSL to be enabled in my area, which (I've been told) will happen soon, I did some tinkering with my Gentoo Linux workstation to make it more protected against remote attacks, and I thought of compiling a list of security measures against the dangers of full-time Internet connection. Obviously the list is not complete, but it has tips that can surely help.
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Submitted by Ayman on Sun, 2006/03/05 - 4:44pm
Submitted by Ayman on Thu, 2006/02/02 - 1:32pm
The other day while I was browsing an extremely popular Syrian website, I found a very serious vulnerability in its code. I wasn't looking for exploits or anything, but a page URL was screaming "exploit me!". I emailed the site admins notifying them, with their MySQL password and a link that opens the site control panel without any form of authentication as proofs. The problem was fixed later. I won't reveal the identity of the site or the details of the exploit for obvious reasons, but I'll explain the problem in general.
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Submitted by Ayman on Thu, 2006/01/12 - 9:33pm
I was phone-interviewed by Baxter Yazbek a couple of months ago, on Firefox localization and the 1.0 release. The interview (along with a nice article on Firefox 1.0) is out now on the 15th of February issue of Asharq Al Awsat newspaper. it's available online too (Arabic).
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Submitted by Ayman on Fri, 2005/02/18 - 7:28pm
