Congrats JackCards!

Today, JackCards.com, a company founded by my friends Kim Dowds and Katherine Santer got a great review in the Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts from the article:

....Jack Cards did introduce me to some clever and original material that I never would've seen in my CVS....

....I think its system would be welcomed by many people looking for good-quality, well-designed cards that catch the eye. It saves users the hassle of last-minute trips to the card store, and still lets greeting cards keep their personal touch, which is what makes them such a permanent fixture in our lives.

I wanted to pass on the great news, and say CONGRATS! Their hard work is definitely paying off!

I personally love the service! The service has exposed me to some very unique and high quality cards at prices competitive with my local CVS. If you are in the habit of exchanging cards, like my wife Randa is, it is the best service I have seen in this space!

Personal stories in history...

Just finished reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini. It is a very touching story about life and tragedy in Afghanistan. A beautifully written account of the lives of 2 women, Mariam and Laila, and the challenges they faced living in a very difficult era of Afghan history.

The story I feel gives an important perspective on history. Though fictional, it felt like a real account. It made me think that many periods of recent history are not well documented in this personal way. I love reading stories like this, because they add a vivid touch to the facts.

Another story I read a while ago was, "In Search of Fatima" by Ghada Karmi. It is her memoirs while she lived in Jerusalem and then London during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. As far as I know, there are very few Palestinian memoirs from that era and this story is a small step to fill a critical hole needed to understand the Palestinian perspective. On a funny note, as I was reading "In Search of Fatima", the book talked about people I knew. I later discovered that Ghada was my mom's cousin. Small world!

Borat introduces Flock... clever!

Hassan Al-Karmi: A great family member passes

My great grand uncle, Hassan Al-Karmi, passed away last night at the age of 101. He was a great man that I am very proud to be related to. He was an incredible author, thinker, poet, speaker, educator, and father to us all.


His most impressive writing include 14 dictionaries of which 8 were published. His BBC program "Qawl al Qawl" ("Saying Upon Saying") was heard across the entire Arab world and was known to be a favorite among many Arab leaders.

I recall when visiting him as child that he would frequently have me write a little essay that he would critique while explaining the origins of some of the words I wrote. Even in his 90s he was sharp. I remember seeing him recite long verses of old Arabic poetry at the drop of a hat.

My thoughts and prayers go out to him and all the people he touched. May he rest in peace!

Some articles about the passing of Hassan Al-Karmi:

• [The International Writers Magazine] Remembering Hassan Al Karmi by Marwan Asmar
• [Petra News Agency] The passing of a Palestinian Scolar Hassan Al-Karmi (Arabic)
• [The Guardian] Hasan Karmi: Palestinian intellectual and broadcaster passionate about the suffering of his people
• [Jordan Times] Hasan Said Karmi — 'a soul burning for Palestine’
• Wikipedia Entry
• [The Independent] Hasan Karmi by Donald Macintyre
• [The Guardian] Letter by Sir James Craig

Whose fault is it?

My mom told me this wonderful little story that I would like to share.

It starts with someone asking the devil about how he is able to create problems in the world. The devil decides to show his friend how he does it. He goes into a beautiful bakery that has a lot of cakes on display. He puts his finger into some syrup and then dabs the syrup onto a glass widow near a beautiful cake display. An insect sees the syrup and flies towards it. A man with a dog walks into the bakery to buy a cake. The dog notices the insect and gets excited jumping towards the insect. As the dog jumps, he spills over the beautiful display of cakes. The store owner gets upset that the display has been destroyed and starts beating the dog. The dog owner jumps in to defend his dog and fights the store owner. Local youth in the area see the fight in the store and run in to help their friend the shop owner. By the end of the process, the whole store gets destroyed.

Now if you look at this story, whose fault is it? Is it the devil, insect, dog, dog owner, shop keeper, or the local youth. The lesson is that people end up behaving badly as a result of a downstream series of events not in their control. We as people (individuals to organizations to governments) need to first think about the consequences of our actions, and try to understand the root cause of the problems we see and try to fix the root!

JS, CSS Editor for eclipse

I have been using Aptana (open source extension to eclipse) for a few weeks now and really like it. Javascript dev is usually a pain in eclipse since testing needs to happen in the browser. This gets most of the syntax issues as you are writing the code.

via Ian Connor

The Prince is home now!

We are now back home. Baby Amir and mom passed all their medical tests with flying colors. Since Randa did a c-section, her recovery is slow and will take a few weeks. However, everything appears to be moving as expected. Amir is still figuring out his rhythm and clearly adjusting ours to match his :).

Throughout our lives there have been a few moments that we both recall to be life changing in a grand way. People have told us that seeing your child for the first time is an amazing experience, but words can not describe how much joy he has brought into our lives. We both wept when we first saw him. The toughness of Randa's pregnancy was instantly forgotten at this moment.

Now the fun begins and we both pray that we will be great parents for the new bundle of joy that has entered our life.

Sami & Randa

Amir Shalabi

Dear friends and family,

We are very happy to announce the arrival of our pride and joy Amir Shalabi on April 9th 2007 at 4:22pm. He weighs 6 pounds and 6 ounces (3kg). His height is 19.5' (50cm).

Thank God Mom Randa, baby, and Dad are doing well, and will be leaving the hospital in a few days.

With love,

Sami Shalabi "DAD" :-)

Physics legend on getting creative ideas

Came across this talk by physics legend Murray Gell-Mann. He is a very impressive man! The talk builds a framework for getting to creative ideas. He explains his ideas through observations he saw and collected from science. An inspiring talk that can be applied to any field. The QA at the end has some funny moments.

Enjoy!

Software Engineering Proverbs

Came across Software Engineering Proverbs. A wonderful collection of proverbs. Here are some of my favorites:

A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it.
-- Einstein

We reject kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in rough consensus and running code.
--Dave Clark (1992)

"If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture."
-- Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

Happy Holidays everyone!

I have been under the radar lately, and wanted to get out of my hole and just say "Happy Holidays!"

Be happy or get out!

A study from the University of Toronto says that creativity is improved when people are in a good mood.

This was something that was obvious to me. I have found that I get into the "zone" only when I am really in a good mood. In any work environment, positive karma is a must! If you are ever in an environment that has bad karma, either change it or find a way to get out. Life it too short!

Amazing Advertising

Found this link that shows some creative advertising campaigns.. My favorite is the lady swimming with sharks..

Been really busy!

I have been really busy with life, work, and family. All is well!

The Economics of Open Source Education

Came across the essay The Economics of Open Source Education. It does a good job analyzing the effects of open source on education.

It is only in the past couple of years that we started to see the effects of open source in the software industry. It has created new business models for building and selling software. Now that the world is more connected, I believe its effects will appear in new domains beyond software.

Open source is one of the great innovations that will impact the 21st Century. Enjoy the article!

Ajax Hangs in Safari

At my recent gig, Zingku, I have been doing some heavy duty AJAX. There was one particular bug in Safari that I wanted to share with folks that took a while to figure out.

Our environment uses Tomcat as its servlet engine and only on Safari we would experience these random hangs in some AJAX based requests. These AJAX requests would never leave the browser and were difficult to reproduce. However, they happened often enough to frustrate us. The lack of debugging tools in Safari made things very difficult.

Well, after a weekend of digging into the problem I figured out the magic URL that caused the hangs to occur. Safari would just hang on AJAX URLs that contained the character ";". The reason it was hard to find was that we do not explicitly generate URLs that contain the ";" character. Tomcat does in the form of a ";JSESSIONID=magic_number" token when it thinks the browser does not have the right session cookie. This is what made it feel random.

The solution was to encode the ";" prior to feeding the URL into the XMLHttpRequest.. Here is how you can do it using a quick localized hack:

url = url.replace( ';', '%3B');

I hope Apple will introduce some better debugging tools for Safari in the future.

Run away from EJBs

I came across this article (Java EE Fallacies: EJBs are too complex, POJOs are easier.).

EJB, at least EJB 2.0, was one of the most over engineered and painful frameworks I have ever used. Given how bad the taste EJBs left with me, there is nothing any updates will do to get me to ever use or consider them for anything.

The author talks about non-functionals such as "real time monitoring (JSR-77), threading, proper load balancing etc" are just plain over engineering again. These requirements should not be solved by the mother of all frameworks. My experience suggests that these requirements need to be hand tuned for the app and by the app, not some advanced solves world peace framework.

Given the EJB experience what I suggest to any developer is to evolve from SIMPLE working systems as opposed to starting a project with the goal to solve everything. Grow into your requirements and iterate furiously.

PS. I can see some previous colleagues telling me, "I told you so" when we first starting using EJBs. Right Bob and Brian :)...

Volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation

This is an amazing story of the ultimate skunk works project..

We're hiring

We are a small funded company that is building an exciting consumer site that brings together web, mobile, and IM. We are looking for a junior engineer to join our small growing team.

• Do you love to code? Does the line between hobby and work feel blurry?
• Have you been inspired by your own ideas and then get them done?
  
• Do you like working in small teams?
• Do you love working on every layer of the software stack?
  
• Are you excited by stuff you can do with mobile phones and IM?
• Do you like to invent and learn new technologies?
• Do you like to work with little supervision?
• Do you love your Unix and Java?
• Do you debate about programming?
• Do you obsess over creating beautifully simple code?
• Do you love to get things done?
• Do you want to work on a cool consumer Web 2.0 product that will change the world?
• Do you want to work in the Boston area?

If the answers to these questions is yes then drop us a line (jobs at zingku.com)!

I need my Web 2.0 logo

Came across this site focused on "Web2ifying" well known corporate logos. Some are just hilarious. Enjoy