بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

إن شاء الله سيتم عقد قراني علي المهندسة سينار كمال شبل يوم الأربعاء 1-8-2007 في مسجد عبد الحي خليل باشا في المحلة الكبرى بعد صلاة المغرب

و الدعوة عاااااااامة

After waiting 5 days of downloading, I finally got the installation DVD iso of the sexiest operating system ever - MAC OS X Tiger 10.4.6 for Intel with SSE2 and SSE3 patches for older and new processors support. I didn’t waste much time and I burnt the DVD and freed a partition of 6 GB to have the system installed on.

In the past few days I had some reading about this system and its hardware compatibility to expect the types of problems I might face with my hardware. I was dying to see it and finally it’s here on a DVD

So I rushed and booted the system and I got a nice Apple Icon in the center of the screen and I waited for 5 minutes with complete patience in hope to see the next, the thing which didn’t happen!

Quickly I started searching on the internet and I found two great website http://www.osxx86.info/ http://forum.insanelymac.com then I started searching for how to get the boot log, I found the -v and -x boot options for verbose and safe mode. I discovered that the installer was printing out a message “still waiting for root device”!, After some search I discovered that I should set the DVD and the Harddisk as Master devices (primary master, secondary master). then quickly I had things working but this time with a new error “Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88″, so again quickly to google and I found that it may have millions of reasons! - I tried a very strange one which is reburn the DVD but using the lowest speed 2.4x and surprisingly it worked!!

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I’d a very complicated problem related to storing data, I have a bad story also about losing my work files. So I decided to unify my storage into a single (24/7) online storage server - but low cost -.

I had some old hardware in my closet and I decided to use them as effecient as possible, so I started with a Manli Motherboard and a P3 Processor (1.2 GHz) with 1 20GB Harddisk and 2 160GB SATA Harddisks.

I had a problem regarding the SATA harddisks as I don’t have SATA controller in my Motherboard, so I searched in the hardware market and I found a PCI SATA Controller based on VIA VT6421 chipset which was perfectly compatible with Linux 2.6 kernel. At then I started assembling things together and I bought a good ventilated chassis to make things comfortable for the hardware inside.

I have used the IDE 20GB Disk as the system harddisk and installed Fedora core 6 i386 on it and then I had a large free space remaining on the disk. I used this disk to mirror the fedora updates repos and I wrote a small script to rsync the fedora updates mirror every 2 days on 3:30AM automatically using Vixie Cron.

#!/bin/bash
if rsync -avrt rsync://distro.ibiblio.org/fedora-linux-core/updates/6/i386/ \
–exclude=debug/ –exclude=repodata/ –exclude=*debuginfo* –exclude=*i18* \
–exclude=*langpack* /fedora-6/updates/
then
createrepo /fedora-6/updates/
fi

The remaining 2 160GB SATA Disks were connected and configured as RAID 1 (Mirror) to get a high redundancy and availability possible having a total storage area of 160GB. I think I’ll buy another 160GB disk and I’ll switch into RAID 5 to get 320GB of total storage.

The machine is headless and I’m using VNC to control everything, It’s used also as a DNS caching and forwarding server to my computers and download machine

The last thing is to see how to access my files in an effecient and a speedy way, I used a NFS server optimized to get the best performance on LAN, I can get transfer rates up to 9Mbytes/Sec and Samba server with authentication to have access from windows machines.

The performance is really nice although the machine is pretty old and has only 256MB of memory but Linux is working great with outstanding performance and excellent stability. I’ve achieved disk reads of 53.5 Mbyte/Sec with buffered reading on the RAID 1 array.
Soon I’ll buy a real IP address to bind with this machine to have it accessible through the internet for remote files access. I’ll show you some of pictures about it

Web 2.0, is the name of my last presentation as a CAT member, founder and H4ck3rZ founder. It hurts me alot to see myself saying good bye to all those good friends and mates, they were friends through the good and bad times and we were supporting, helping and challenging each others with love and passion and a clear goal of success.

I don’t know if I had succeeded to deliver my message to the CAT members and to inspire them to succeed in their future, or not? I know that lately I’ve became somehow inactive due to my work schedule and my ShabaCAT project which is still under heavy development and painful progress.

I can’t remember how many presentation I’ve made, but I’ll try to remember them for the sake of history documentation:

• Windows vs. Linux, 2003
• The Open-Source Approach, 2004, 2005
• Linux Installation Festival, 2005
• XML and Related Technologies, 2006
• SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux), 2006
• About H4ck3rZ,2007
• Secure Shell, 2007
• Get That Job (CV Writing, Excel at Interviews), 2007
• Web 2.0, 2007

I can’t remember anymore really, if you remembered anything please don’t hesitate to tell me, I know it’s not that big history but I’m proud to have mentored most of the CAT managers and founders through their very first presentations and later, they were all smart and they just needed someone to show them the way.

In “About H4ck3rZ” presentation, I had that motto “Change Your Attitude” and I still believe that many people remember it and many were inspired by this motto as I believe that it’s the main key for progressive success.

I think that I’ll not have so much attendees in this presentation because of the bad timing and poor marketing for this Scope 6. I know the reasons and may Allah help Ayman Taher as he is the current CAT Coordinator after me and Ahmed Abdalla, He is a great person with astonishing personality and I know that he will continue fighting members’ laziness and he will be the greatest CAT Coordinator ever

Good Bye CAT, I’ve been enjoying living this dream and seeing it almost come true and All I’m asking is “Don’t Forget Me!”

Today *el 7amdolelah* I successfully passed the SCJP 310-055 exam, the exam which I was delaying for months because of work overload, now I’m heading for the SCWCD isA soon.

Actually I decided to take the exam just the day before taking it and it was risky because I didn’t prepare well but I got good score 79% *more than I ever expected, due to my poor preparation* but actually unlike most of people who enter the exam here, I didn’t save brain dumps, but I read some of the common exam questions and I faced about 10 questions of them in the exam, the rest took me alot of time to solve because I’ve been working with many programming languages and sometimes things become a little bit tricky with it comes to differences between languages, so I was fighting to focus of the differences between Java, C# and C++.

While I was coding my first “not-so-large” java program I got a phone call from my collegue in linux-plus ‘Ahmed Kamal’, he said to me that they are doing a major migration project from windows to Linux in some company that uses Oracle eBusiness Suite. They had everything done except for one thing.

The version of the Oracle eBusiness suite they are using exports the reports to “pdf” which contains encoded arabic characters in ISO8859-6 (old) encoding, and it can’t be read correctly unless you open it using Acrobat Reader 3 on windows (which is very old) and for some reason, all the pdf viewers in linux and the recent versions of Acrobat Reader cannot decode the arabic content!. they tried to convert the encoding of the pdf file into unicode *utf-8* and I tried too with complete failure, so they told me that they decided to run “wine” under linux and run acrobat Reader 3.0 to open the file correctly under linux.

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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,
I know it has been so long since I wrote anything here, but I’m truly happy and I wanted to celebrate this success with everybody out there.

CAT (Computer Assistance Team) as the leading IT Community in Mansoura University has honored me to be the most effective founder in CAT growth.

I’m exteremly happy and I wanted to share the certificate with you..
Thank you CAT.

It has been quite long since I thought about writing this, and I was going to write it public, but I’m having bad times these days and I thought that it’s better to talk than exploding.

I have been the CAT (Computer Assistance Team) coordinator and like any coordinator I had revolutionary ideas and I was totally ready to implement and see things work out, but the fact that I was too busy and I had another friend who should have been working with me, but he left me almost alone and that was awesome.

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