I couldn’t record the presentation, so I will upload only the slides.
Geniuses are made, not born
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Posts Tagged ‘CAT’
Geniuses are made, not born
November 1st, 2009Do we really need H4ck3rZ?
September 28th, 2009An important question popped into my head, do we really need H4ck3rZ website?
We have done enormous efforts for renew our web footprint and now we have stuff that CAT never had, like the central authentication and social networking but with no result on the activity meter.
Currently almost nobody is visiting our website and no activity is being done except for the projects which are terribly slow because no serious contributers are around, so let’s think for a moment, what will happen if we gave up and stopped H4ck3rZ? Will you even notice?
فطار الكات
September 6th, 2009بقالي فترة مكتبتش هنا و السبب ان حياتي فعلاً ملخبطة و مضطربة بسبب عدد كبير من المشغوليات لكن ان شاء الله الأمور تبقى اكثر تنظيما و يرجع الاستقرار و النظام لحياني قريباً ، المهم ان كان فيه افطار جماعي للكات امبارح و انا كنت سعيد جداً و حزين جداً جداً ، سعيد لأني قابلت اصحابي اللي بقالي فترة كبيرة ماقابلتهمش زي احمد بكر و ابراهم عبد الفتاح و السيد جمال و كمان المفاجئة ايهاب عبد الرحمن و اللي بقالي تقريباً اكتر من سنه و نص ماشفتوش و معرفش عنه اخبار و كان ليه راجع من كندا بقالو يومين. و كمان قابلت زمايل في الكات بعتز اني في يوم اشتغلت معاهم و شاركونا الحلم و بذلوا مجهود كبير زي احمد مدكور و محمد صفوت و محمود متولي )ميتو ( و ناس كتير مش عايز انسى اساميهم لكن كل الحضور كانوا ناس محترمين بصراحة.
كنت حزين لأسباب كتير و اهمها ان العدد كان قليل ، حوالي 25 واحد بس من كل الكات و ده بيعكس حاجات كتير قوي و برضو انشغال الناس من الحاجات دي لكن كان نفسي احتفل باتحاد الكات اجتماعياً و اشوف الناس كلها اصدقاء و عايزين يشوفو بعض مهما كانت الظروف لكن للأسف الحقيقة ان الوضع الحالي للكات اكتر من مذري و ده اتناقشنا فيه في جلسه ثقافيه جميله بعد الفطار و اللي كان بيتزعمها السيد جمال بخطابه الحماسي المتفائل و ردودي المحطمة للآمال و كان فيه جزء من النقاش عن اسباب مشاكل الكات الحالية و ليه في انهيار سريع في المستوى و ازاي الجامعه مش بتساعدنا و الناس مش متعاونة و حاجات كتير عايزه مقاله منفصلة
المهم كان فيه تكريم بسيط لأبرز اعضاء الكات و اللي تشرفت اني اكون على اول القائمة مع السيد جمال و ابراهيم عبد الفتاح و اللي بنعتبر حاليا اقدم اعضاء في الكات تقريبا اللي لسه نشطاء و متواجدين و اخدت هديه ظريفه و هي “كأس” الكات 
اتمنى اني اشوف جيل تاني زي الجيل اللي عمل الكات و كبرها و وصل بيها للنجاح ياخد الرايه و يبهرنا و يخليني اقول انا بجد فخور بالعمل ده و اتمني اني اشوف الجامعة و الشركات في المنصورة بيدعموا العمل ده بدون انتهازية او سلبيه
و كل عام و انتم طيبين
Lessons We Learned From H4ck3rZ Online Systems
July 3rd, 2009We have been using forums and CMS systems for long time now to run all CAT websites on the internet starting from the ancient CATReloadedt website that was based on Drupal and ending to this amazing and extensible system “H4ck3rZ Network” that’s based on Buddypress and we have faced hunderds of problems that we didn’t really spend the right amount of efforts to learn from and to solve.
We in H4ck3rZ have spent sometime thinking about that and studying how to stop falling into the same problems and how to engineer a system that is really scalable without the loss of users information that is the most precious piece of our software and we could really design a system that can fix most of our problems in a granular manner, so we can fix things as we go and with minimum users intervention. But because we are engineers and our H4ck3rZ community is engineering community, we decided to share you some of the internals and details of what we have done.
The Ancient Problems
For long long time a faced a problem that we didn’t learn from it, that’s having accounts of our members stored inside the system and we didn’t feel the problem until we faced the problem of migration from drupal to phpBB and the booming fact is that migration might not be possible and people have to register again, we also had a mailing list that had its accounts stored in it and it’s a completely isolated island and we had no easy way to check if both systems are in-sync or not. More problems was arisen when we started the foundation system because each foundation started building its own website and again we lost the user base and people started new registrations on each website independently and moreover people used several e-mails and usernames and that was really a hit because now you cannot identify people by username anymore a good example is that I used the username h4ck3r in H4ck3rZ Foundation online systems while I use the username ‘linuxawy’ in PixiCat and please don’t ask me why 
read the rest of this article in my blog Soliman n H4ck3rZ
The CAT Mission Statement
November 28th, 2008This post is about a document that became part of history, but for me part of the unforgettable history because it was a state-of-the-art and I believe that it encircles all the problems (or most of) that CAT are facing from the early days of CAT until now. It was the document behind the “Foundation System” and it was written in almost 5 hours with no single go-back-for-check. So you might find alot of spelling and grammatical mistakes so be tolerate 
» Read more: The CAT Mission Statement
5 Years in CAT, So What?
November 21st, 2008Can you believe that? It has been a little bit more than 5 years since I started working with CAT-Reloaded, or to be more specific, since we formed CAT-Reloaded, as CAT-Reloaded is only 5 years old.
It’s shocking to remember all what happened while being/working as CAT, we had GREAT times together and very HARD times together but what I remember most is what I’ve learned from being CAT and working in such an activity.
I wrote earlier some series called “My Story With CAT” but I didn’t have the chance to complete it, maybe soon, but what you are about to witness is the end of this glorious story.
After 5 years it’s important to see where I stand among my dreams and what were my goals regarding CAT and where is CAT now. As I can remember, I’ve changed alot with CAT and gained a huge experience from working with students as a student and as a tutor, but the most painful part is that I didn’t gain much of technical experience out of CAT as most of its members did. » Read more: 5 Years in CAT, So What?
My Story With CAT 4
December 16th, 2007Right after “About Us” session, things went bad and I think that it was the last “well-organized” event CAT has ever managed and launched. Many people left and we wanted to run more activities to let CAT survive.
I think that’s when I suggested to change the coordinator and I didn’t want to lead as previously because I was too busy for it but we found that if I and Abdalla collaborated to be “A&A” coordinator that would be much better as I may have some management skills and I may have some creative ideas, and he has the time and spirit/patience to follow up.
That idea turned out to be awful for many reasons. Let me tell you how….
I was completetly busy managing the current tasks and my business life and of course my education and it turned out that doing something in CAT takes enormous time, because people are not well organized and they have responsibilities as well. That what made things go terribly wrong and it ended up like this http://www.ahmedsoliman.com/2006/08/03/im-sorry-cat/ wanna know why? Wait me tomorrow
My Story With CAT 3
December 12th, 2007One thing I have to mention separately, meeting “Yara”…
It was on the first meeting for me with the CAT guys, she was there and it’s unusual to find girls interested in that field and real astonishing is to find them active and brilliant. But “yara” was and she grabbed my attention directly because of her well organization and she is extraordinarily smart. I got to know her more by the time and she was the best work companion for me ever, she was effective in every idea or cooperation she does. I even thought that she was the best girl I’ve ever “worked” with or will work with.
If I made my own business, I’ll love to have her working for me because she is really an added-value for any company, may Allah bless her and show her the way to success ever after isA.
So, After having some courses plans to be launched in the college I got a rising demand for Linux courses at “Origin” and that was great because it helped me develop excellent relationships and helped me deliver my “freedom” message through an enormous number of courses. By this time I got busier and busier because I was managing too many things at the same time (as usual).
My Story With CAT 2
December 11th, 2007We have launched CAT Scope 3 and it was pretty successful, we had many presentations and I can’t remember all the presentations’ titles but I can remember a few.
- About CAT Reloaded.
- Ahmed Soliman: The Open Source Approach – It was a sponsored presentation by Origin IBM.
- Hesham ElSawi: IT Training, it was a very nice presentation about IT training in generally – It was a sponsored presentation by Origin IBM.
- Abdel Rahman Za’za: USB Technology.
- Hatem Mohammed: FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) Technology.
- Hassanien Mohammed: What does graphics mean?
My presentation “The Opensource approach” had the award of the best and the most popular presentation (it’s not award but it’s a nomination after surveying the attendees). And things went perfect and we started to organize things to become more smooth and smooth.
The problem was that all the guys were beginners and they knew nothing about meetings and discussions and Allah knows, it was a mess!. I could manage to cope and manage to run the meetings as good as it’s possible while many people couldn’t cope and “Ahmed Abdalla” (as I remember) spent all his efforts trying to educate people how to talk in a meeting or how to brainstorm (while I believe that he himself didn’t know a solution, but he couldn’t cope with the situation because he barely can speak – that’s why he was trying to educate). He later discovered that my advices about leaving people and trying to guide their conversations into useful ones is more efficient than leaving the whole topic and talking about how to talk in a meeting.
Anyhow, those days were nice and binGo and psycho specially were growing up fast as they are really talented but they needed some guidance, I think they had a good opportunity really and they used it very well.
Ahmed Abdalla was then elected as the CAT coordinator and I didn’t apply for being coordinator because I was too busy at Origin with the IBM scholarship I was teaching and I had a very important project to manage along with my educational studies.
Let me say this, abdalla was a great guy but he was very lousy and he was losing control and things went sleepy, so CAT had a sleeping period they we have suggested opening chances for CAT-driven courses to be launched in the faculty for free for a selected number of qualified students. I was about to start a Linux course and we had many interviews with students applying for that opportunity and we were criticized hardly because people thought that it’s not fair to choose the qualified only. However we thought that it was the best idea at then because we didn’t want people to rush into the courses and being unqualified will definitely ruin the course quality.
However, we canceled the idea and the only one who have started a course was me and it was never completed…
Let me resume tomorrow…I’m at work now
My Story with CAT 1
December 10th, 2007It’s a very long story to tell, if you have time only start reading now because it might take a few minutes reading the whole story.
CAT is Computer Assistance Team, a network of talented students in the college of computers and systems engineering – Mansoura University started to form a family under the name “CAT” to provide intensive information and to open up students’ eyes to the computers world earlier on 1996. At ths time computer knowledge merely existed and a few people who could really say that they have ever used a computer. The team contained many people whom I don’t know all of them but I hear names and I met a few of them. People like “Hesham ElSawi”, “Ashraf ElRefaey”, “Mohammed Ezzat” and etc.
That family achieved alot and they launched 2 conferences under the name “CAT Scope” and that was from 1996 to 1999, then things died and no one had more power to revive that dream.
After a few years, some students in the same college had the same dream once and they started to communicate with Eng.Mahy (Research Engineer in Communications Department). She was contacted by “Abdel Rahman Zaa’za” who was very ambitious and excited to create a team excellent in IT (Information Technology) and they started to contact Hesham ElSawi again and they’ve held many meetings to organize how things are going to work.
At this time I was working as a part-time instructor at Origin-IBM (Authorized IBM Training Center) which was managed and partially owned by Hesham ElSawi. And then he told me that he wants me to help them and join the team. Firstly they started with the name “Smart” and that was the suggested name, then hesham proposed “CAT” to be named after the old CAT family as a continuation to the idea, then finally we decided that it’ll be “CAT Reloaded” – I think it was Ahmed Abdalla’s suggestion as he is a fan of “The Matrix” series”-
At this time I was superior to the team, I had such a great computer history and had achieved many success stories while I was near to their age. I was afraid because I had such bad days meeting people who had hated me for being better or smarter rather than trying to compete me. But luckily things went perfect and they guys respected me very much and I started to help arranging everything. The first event for this IT addicted family was to arrange for CAT Scope 3 and try to face the college routine to achieve this goal.
I started to know everybody more “BinGo, Psycho, Biko, Ahmed Abdalla, Hassanien, Ahmed Nassar, Samer and etc.”, some of them I knew earlier like “Hassanien and Ahmed Nassar” but CAT helped me to know them deeper and deeper.
Generally, we have achieved much and CAT started to take much out of my time and I could barely manage the college/education, work and CAT…starting from here the story I’m telling is beginning…
This is the story you didn’t expect to hear, the impact of CAT to me and how did it affect my career life and my choices.
Let me tell you…in the next post
