After a semester of being the class representative II

Welcome there ..

34 people had submitted their evaluation for me as their representative.

It has been about 20 hours since number was 34 and it is still 34, It seems that ther will no be any further submission.

Submission is now closed and here are results of the form.

• Organization, Fairness and being helpful => Satisfying results.
  

• Attendence => nearly 50:50 Good : Acceptable
  
• Behaviour in problems => Satisfying
  
• Decision in case of diffrences in opinion => Very satisfying (a bell shaped curve biased to [shifted towards] students :D).
  

Check this link to view a detailed version of the results.

I have some comments on the results

• It is not true that these results refer to the person "Mohamed Abdelatif", it refers to the helpful community lead by Mohamed Abdelatif.
• I had fallen in mistakes, because I'm a human, the skill (that I'm trying to gain) is decreasing mistakes results, apologize for them and avoid their occurance in the future.
• I believe strongly in our class, I think we are the most helpful, active and connected class. I do not say that we are in our best state now, but we are better than all other class (at least in our college). That's why I'm enthusiastic and encourage to go on and keep being the representative for the 2nd semester too.
• The rest of the week is opened for any one who likes to be the class representative, If you wish to be, just send us an email saying why you think that you will be a successful representative. And elections will go on Saturday 21.02.09 (The head of the second week of the semester)

After a semester of being the class representative I

Hi all, back to blogging.
The content of this post is somehow different from others, in spite of having a plethora of ideas and things that I would blog about.
But it is time to evaluate my performance as the class representative for the previous semester.

Note: Submission is now closed

New web ideas

Instead of studying algorithms for tomorrow's final exam, I prefered to break the ice of exams days by talking about 2 of these new ideas, I've recently read about

The first is simple; You write a message and determine a distenation email, instead of recieving the message, the distenation will fracly recieve other 2 things: an mp3 attached file and a link to a flash both are audio version of the message. The project launched on Tuesday is called "Blind Speak" is its beta version.

The other thing I would talk about is just a fancy way to preview google search results for a query that is inspired from Linux famous desktop cube.

You can rotate the cube by holding shift + dragging, open a search result by clicking it ..

Check search-cube

Make use of technology, but takecare of your culture

Launched nearly "Google ta3reeb" which converts efficiently the "franco-arab" (a fancy name of Arabic pronounced language written in Latin alphanumeric letters) to real Arabic.


Worth mentioning that the idea is not new, it was previously applied by the Yamli editor, The process is know as "Transliteration".

I'm not saying it is an evil or bad technology, in the contrary the idea appeals to me and helps "franco-arabians" a lot, that's why I wrote about it, but in the occation, I'm advicing those "franco-arabians" -including me :D- to be careful about their culture represented in such a simple thing as catching up with their laguage's keyboard layout.

Get your own supercomputer

It is something like having a Dinosaur as a pet, or spending my vacation on the moon, Regardless that you have to be rich to do .. the point here is that it is possible to do.
I was excited when I heard of it, it worth mentioning.
Nvidia has launched a "personal supercomputer".
The company already produces supercomputers, but for researches and technology research centers, the new point is that it is available for personal use.
About the Tesla personal supercomputer:

• Processing power is 250 times normal PCs and workstations.
• Speed is 4 tera-flops (executes 4 trillion floating point operation per one second).
• Processors: 3 or 4 "Tesla C1060 GPU" each 1.29 GHz in clock speed.
• Memory of each processor: 4GHz, speed: 800 MHz.
• Supported operating systems include Windows XP, Red Hat and SUSE
  
  

The Tesla personal supercomputer seems to be designed for PC gaming, and highly computational research and professional work.
According to Nvidia: several institutes already uses a GPU based personal computer (ex the Max Planck Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cambridge University).
Last thing: its price, it is expected to reach $10,000 very cheap :D
For more information, http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html

Prepare to run a "p-threaded" c project

here is a good quick reference to learning pthreads, but normal building and running won't work as the gcc must be explicitly directed to load the runtime library pthread upon running, for the line "#include " to work. How will we do it?

1. From command line:
   Instead of normal compiling way:
   

   gcc sourc_file.c
   

   
   , you are supposed to use:
   

   gcc -lpthread sourc_file.c
   

   
   directing the linker to link the runtime library "pthread".
   
   
   
2. Using eclipse IDE:
   It is fairly easy too, we will do the same something but from configuration of this project, steps:
   
   
   • Create a new project copy-paste any pthread-using code, (for example: use the above link)
   • Right click your project and select properties (alternatively hit alt+enter)
   • Expand C/C++, and click Settings, you should see something like:
   • Expand the GCC linker and click libraries, you should see something like:
   • At the text are "libraries (-l)", click add, as figured in the above snapshot.
   • Type the name of the run time library you want to add (in out case: "pthread") without the preceding "-l"
   • Now build and run your project .. enjoy pthreads
   
   

Change famous sites templates with foxReplace

It seems that I've signed my contract with Google
and have started designing their pages .. or I'm a VIP that popular sites are writing about me, actually the story is quite different.
The trick is in the fire fox add-on: foxReplace.
After installing it:

• Press file "Edit", then "Replace" (instead press Alt + F2).
• Write in the left box the phrase you'd like to replace, and in the right one the replacement.

cool trick isn't it?