Yesterday was my happy day because I’ve finished the upgrade process of www.cat-hackers.com as it took me 18 hours of continuous coding and 9,800 lines of code to have this done.

We were using phpBB 2.0.22 as a CMS and after a while we needed many features as the number of members and number of posts is increasing, also the topics organization issue needs headache so I decided to upgrade the website and customize the look-n-feel to fit our needs.

The process actually began with finding the correct mods I wanted to use and I gathered the mods list to be applied and started the work.

Actually I take a backup of the system every friday but this time I took a complete image of everything and setuped a local domain on my machine as cat-hackers.local.com to be used with apache and mysql for local testing.

I started the process of applying the CH Mod which took 4 hours of patching the code and after all I tried to start the system with a complete failure because I’m not using vanilla code, I’m using already patched system with much modifications of my own and external mods. So the system was not ready to accept the current installed mods after installing CH Mod, so I tried to fix things up with complete failure because of the new architecture of CH Mod.

I started with understanding the architecture of the CH mod and finally I could gather my ideas to modify the code and actually it ended up with modifying about 30% of the underlying code of phpBB and complete rewriting of the announcement module and search engine.

well I know that I might sound crazy but this solution allowed me to integrate the old mods with new features and more user setting independency and of course integration of our beloved theme.

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Hello Guys,

I wanted to share you my happy experience with Creative SoundBlaster XtremeMusic Sound Card.

I was searching in cairo for audigy 4 sound card from creative and I didn’t find it at all and suddenly I found this amazing piece of art and I didn’t hesitate getting it even if its price exceeded 650 L.E but I’m a musician and I use those type of cards as best as it can be used.

This card brings the best sound I’ve ever heard out of a machine really guys it’s awesome specially on PCI 2.1 bus because I’ve heard that it has some problems with older buses because of its high I/O bandwidth to the mainboard but it worked fine with me on my nVidia mainboard.

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Today is my birthday (1/1/2007) and I’m really really really happy because my fiancee got me a crystal white Apple iPod nano (her nickname is nano too ).

It sounds GREAT and it’s very very tiny as you can see from the picture, it has many features like “photo gallery, calendar, games, etc..” you can get more information about it from Apple website or of course Google.

I want to thank her very much for her surprise and happily I’ll start my new year (insha2llah).

Of course I’ve played with it using “iTunes” on windows and I found it very fun, and Of course again I was very afraid of having problems using it under Linux but surprisingly it worked just fine as milk and soft as silk , I’m using Fedora Core 6 with kernel 2.6.18 and it’s working fine with me.
Amarok detected the media as iPod and it was capable of doing the conversions to/from my files into the internal iPod file management format.

Hey Nano I love YOU (and I mean here nano the iPod and my finacee of course).