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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

FCIH Initiative launch

Finally we are glad to announce the launch of
FCIH Initiative Program
On Next Sunday 25/7/2010 at FCI-Helwan
Join our great event; Join a group of carefully selected sessions highly needed in your practical life.
Event Schedule:
Day 1 [Sunday: 25-7-2010]: Let's get started
10:00
10:30
Orientation
10:30
12:30
Object Oriented Blocks
12:30
01:00
Break
01:00
02:30
Good Code
02:30
03:00
Break
03:00
04:00
English for Business
Day 2 [Monday: 26-7-2010]: Develop your path
10:00
11:30
Web Development A – Z
11:30
12:00
Break
12:00
02:00
Software Quality Engineering
02:00
02:30
Break
02:30
04:00
CV Writing and interviewing skills
Day 3 [Wednesday: 28-7-2010]: IT, World of Endless Choices
10:00
11:00
GIS: Geographic information system
11:00
12:00
CMS: Content Management System
12:00
12:30
Break
02:00
02:30
BI: Business Intelligence
02:30
03:30
RIA: Rich Internet Application
Day 4 [Thursday: 29-7-2010]: Into the business world
10:00
01:00
Agile Software Development
01:00
01:30
Break
01:30
3:00
Understanding Business Analysis
03:00
04:30
Global / Local IT Market
04:30
05:00
Closing
Don't miss the chance…..and don't forget our date "25/7/2010" at FCI-Helwan.
Waiting you there :)
Yours,
FCIH Initiative Team

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Adding arabic letters jeem, peh, and veh to keyboard layout in Linux

The letters

چ
پ
ڤ
Do not come on the standard layout of arabic keyboard on linux. It is easy to add them.
You will need to edit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ara and log-out and login again.
The need to edit only the lines corresponding to they keys you'll attach those letters to. I chose the key corresponding to
ج
ب
ف
(naturally).
The 3 modified lines are:
key { [ Arabic_feh, 0x100fef9 , Arabic_veh ] };
key { [ Arabic_jeem, less , Arabic_tcheh ] };
key { [ Arabic_beh, bracketleft, Arabic_peh ] };
Notice that the new characters are in the third position. The first position is the letter typed when you press the key. The second position is the letter if you were pressing shift, and the third one is the letter if you were pressing the 3rd level selector key. To know which key you have (or to change it to a more convenient one) to go System>Preferences>Keyboard, Mappings tab, click on "Options" then click "Key to choose 3rd leve" then choose whichever key you prefer.
Enjoy your new characters :)

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Thursday, July 15, 2010

FCIH Initiative.. Postponement announcement

Hello all,

Because of some out-of-hand circumstances, we are sorry to announce that the big event is going to be postponed for few days. We are going to update you with the new dates along with the complete schedule within few days isA.

Sorry for any inconvenience,
FCIH Initiative team.

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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Creating a simple Open Search Provider/Plug-in

Yesterday, I needed to check/search my delicious bookmarks more than once. I then realized that delicious have its a search plug-in as a part of a tool bar (along with other bookmarking tools, few search tools, though), which -I guess- loads all your bookmarks to browser & make them available for search.

As I’m not so much into too much plug-ins, specially if they load lots of data (in contradiction to Pointy-haired Boss) , not to mention that I won’t need bookmarks when I’m offline, anyway, I decided I should create my search provider.

Creating the provider:

Here’s an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
   <ShortName>My Delicious</ShortName>
   <Description>Search Shady’s Delicious Bookmarks</Description>
   <Tags>Delicious Bookmarks Search Favorites</Tags>
   <Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">http://delicious.com/favicon.ico</Image>
   <Url type="text/html"
        template="http://delicious.com/search?p={searchTerms}&amp;context=userposts|m.shady|&amp;lc=1"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Away from the fact that I badly need a WYSIWYG code hi-lighter, let’s check that XML. First the ShortName which appears in your search box, something like this:

Click to Enlarge Description and Tags are obvious, & I think optional too.

Image is the small icon that appear beside when you select your provider (check the pic above again). You can either supply it as a URL to an image file (usually .ico or .png) or you can replace it with the base 64 string of the image (though I wasted quite sometime to make that work), like:

<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,AAA…AAA==</Image>

Finally, URL note that I’m using {SearchTerms} to pass the string typed in the search box. You can send other parameters to your search page. You might want add another URL for suggestions, here I’m only providing the search URL.

Using the provider:

To add the provider to your browser (as far as I’m concerned it works fine for Firefox & IE) you have one of two options:

Adding it as a suggested search provider: This can be done by adding a single line in your page <Head> tag, note that the attribute title in the below tag refers to the name appearing in the list as [Add “title”], check the image below the tag.

<link rel="search"
           type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
           href="http://localhost/SearchProviders/delicious.xml"
           title="Delicious" />

Click to Enlarge

Using JavaScript to add the provider: The other available option is to add the provider using scripting, here’s an eg of how you can do that:

<a href="#" onclick="window.external.AddSearchProvider('http://localhost/SearchProviders/delicious.xml')">Add delicious Search to your browser</a>

Clicking a link like the one above will pop up a windows asking if you want to add the search provider.

References: http://www.opensearch.org

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Friday, July 09, 2010

Changing regional settings for System accounts (including ASPNET) in Windows 7

One of the small issues I faced while switching my development machine to windows 7 was a bug/exception in an application I was working on in parsing date format.

After switching my regional settings to the “expected” format, I still got the same exception. After playing a little with the regional settings, I realized that I was switching only my account date format, not the whole machine's date format. To push those settings to other system accounts (like ASPNET, etc), I did the following steps:

After setting your your account regional settings, switch to “Administrative” tab:

Click to Enlarge

From “Welcome screen and new user accounts”, click “Copy setting”:

Click to EnlargeMake sure “Welcome screen and system accounts”  check box is checked, press ok, and Voila!

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Monday, July 05, 2010

FCIH Initiative -- Students to Business

FCIH Initiative …..
Don't wait the chance, Create It

Thinking about your future? Worried about your career?

Thinking that you are far away from real market life and limited by your academic life?

Want to be professional but don't know where to start?

Interested to know how people work and deliver projects?

Need to gain experience in market? Need to know about Egyptian IT market?

FCIH Initiative is now here for you

Our goal is you, preparing for you, planning for you

Build your own market and Make companies sigh for you

This summer, we'll be together to make your dreams come true

To bridge your academic study to your career

Plan for your career right now

Meet your older colleagues and learn from them

Join us and enjoy:

Trainings – Research – Business Experience – Technical Knowledge – English Club - and more….

FCIH initiative program will start on 17-7, so don't miss the chance.

We're planning to provide:

· Technical sessions

· Training program in 3 tracks (java, .net, and PHP)

· Sessions talking about market, and adding to your personal skills.

· Program for those who are interested in research.

· Soft skills program.

· English club.

Now, don't worry about the future...Together we'll build a better tomorrow

Contacts:

Mail: FCIH.Initiative@fcih.net

Website: http://www.helwan.edu.eg:90/fcih/details.asp?id=161

FaceBook Event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=128813070490801&ref=mf



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Saturday, July 03, 2010

Customizing your eclipse download

In this site (http://ondemand.yoxos.com/geteclipse/start) you choose which plugins you want to download you eclipse version with; as opposed to downloading a predefined standard template and customizing it later after you install it. Enjoy :)

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Thursday, July 01, 2010

Downloading metacafe videos

The following script will download metacafe videos for you:


metacafe-dl.sh:
url=`wget @1 -o /dev/null -O - | grep 'mediaURL' | sed 's/%22/\n/g' | grep -A 6 mediaURL | sed 's/%3A/:/g' | sed 's|%2F|/|g' | sed 's/%5C//g' | sed 's/%25/%/\
g' | tr '\n' '#' | awk '-F#' '{print @3 "?__gda__=" @7}'`

wget --referer=http://s.mcstatic.com/Flash/vp/mc/Portal_3.2.1.1.swf @url -O `echo @url | sed 's%/%_%g'`.mp4

Just call the file like this
./metacafe-dl http://url-of-the-meta-cafe-video

(due to technical error replace @ with a dollar sign instead).
And you will have your file there. Have a nice time ;)

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