Ahmad Al-Obaidy IRAQI open sourcer

قصيدة معبرة للشاعر احمد مطر عن احلام العرب في اوباما. فحتى ان كان اوباما صادقا وقادرا على تغير السياسة الامريكية، فهل هناك حالة من الوعي العربي تسطيع الاستفادة من هذه السياسة الجديدة لتحسين الواقع المر للمجتمعات العربية.

مِن أوباما

لِجَميعِ الأَعرابِ شُعوباً أو حُكّاما:

قَرْعُ طناجِرِكُمْ في بابي

أرهَقَني وَأَطارَ صَوابي

افعَلْ هذا يا أوباما

اترُكْ هذا يا أوباما

أَمطِرْنا بَرْداً وسَلاما

يا أوباما

وَفِّرْ لِلعُريانِ حِزاما

يا أوباما

خَصِّصْ لِلطّاسَةِ حَمّاما

يا أوباما

فَصِّلْ لِلنّملَةِ بيجاما

يا أوباما

قَرقَعَةٌ تَعلِكُ أَحلاماً

I've always wanted to blog about the books I read in Arabic. Yet only yesterday, I decided to add bi-directional text formatting to this site, in order to render Arabic posts properly.

Bi-directional text formatting means that the CMS will render any Arabic paragraphs from right to left automatically in any post, and yet to keep English paragraphs direction from left to right. A simple example for right to left Arabic text:

هذا السطر مجرد توضيح لعرض الكتابة من اليمين الى اليسار.

I've been watching GWT since it was 1.4. GWT is very exciting piece of technology. Very revolutionary approach for Web development. Basically GWT is a java to javascript compiler. It let you to develop Web applications in Java.

The new release came with many great features. The deployment is made very easy. In fact, for Tomcat it is just a copy paste process. Eclipse plugin is at last available, which made the developer life even easier.

With Java 1.5 support from the previous release and with Gilead, I think GWT is getting to be very productive way to do Java Web Development.

In a recent project of mine, I had to connect large number of microcontrollers to a Java Messaging Server. I've selected Streaming Text Orientated Message Protocol (STOMP) because it is simple and clean. Also it is has been supported by ActiveMQ for a long time.

I wrote a simple stomp client library in Dynamic C. The code is released under LGPL and hosted in this site
http://code.google.com/p/dstomp/

Having a flu, gave me a couple of hours in bed to try to build Linux kernel from the source. I tried the 8th release candidate of 2.6.29 kernel. Everything went so smooth and without problems.

[code]
#install the required packages for the compilation
sudo apt-get install build-essential bin86 kernel-package libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev wget libncurses5 libncurses5-dev fakeroot

# download and unpack the source
mkdir kernel
cd kernel
wget -c http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.29-rc8.tar.gz
tar -vxzf linux-2.6.29-rc8.tar.gz

cd linux-2.6.29-rc8/

Today I've discovered something that can keep me single for at least extra 3 years, "cooking rice in microwave". It is like magic. You can have a tasty rice in couple of minutes and using only one dish to avoid the messy clean-up.

What brought this up, is that I have a saucepan of QEEMA but with no rice. So, after little dig a friend advised this recipe.

1. Select a deep microwave dish with a cover.
2. Get the ratio right. The ratio is what's important: 1 unit rice, 2 units water. For example: 1/2 cup of rice, add 1 cup of cold water; 1 cup of rice, add 2 cups of cold water.

Building a customized version of Ubuntu could be very useful. For example it could be used to provide

1. a customized interface language (such as Arabic).
2. customized applications such as Quran, Arabic encyclopaedias, dictionaries.
3. customized art works (backgrounds, icons, themes).
4. customized drivers.

Fortunately, building such CD is made very easy with UCK (Ubuntu Customization Kit). I used this tool back in 2006 to build Arabic Edition of Ubuntu. I reported the method in iraqilinux.org back then, but as the site is closed now :( I think, reporting it again wouldn't hurt.

For most of people, dictionaries are very useful piece of software to be on when browsing the net. On Windows there is EasyLingo and Babylon. But what about Linux, and to be more specific what about Arabic dictionaries in Linux.

I am working on a telecommunication system to use RF modems for vehicles tracking. The system contains multiple base stations. The clocks of the station need to be synchronized. One popular protocol for this task is Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP):
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2030

I needed to provide a SNTP service from my server which is implemented in Java. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, I googled the net. It turned out that Apache Directory Server implements this protocol.

A lot of the readers of this site can't just wait to check it up from their PCs, they need to access it from their cell phones. So here it is http://m.obaidy.net

Drupal (the engine behind this site) keeps amazing me every single time. I did no code, I just used ready made modules and themes.

First of all there is the Domain modules http://drupal.org/project/domain, a collection of modules that allow your site to manage multiple domains.

Second, is the domain_theme module http://drupal.org/node/303406 which allow you to choose a different module for each domain.