Posts

The butterfly side effect in making later appointments

One of the things I learned in life when dealing with appointments at service centers, specifically Visa Related appointments, is to be there as early as possible.  pick the first appointment possible. KSA visa appointments with  vfstasheel  in Egypt starts at 9:00 and is available as 15 minutes slots. The point is,  if you picked 9:00, you should be there 15 minutes earlier which might be too early for some people. However, picking 9:30 appointment doesn't mean you are simply shifting everything for 30 minutes.  You will be subjecting yourself to lots of factors that cause delay in the processing of your paperwork.  you might be actually 1.5 hours later in finishing time.  Picking an appointment at 2:00 pm  might cause you to finish at 7:00 pm or even later. Shit happens,  and the less early you are,  the more you are to be affected by issues with other people or even issues with the employees themselves. Best practice,  be ...

Sharing Is Caring

As they always say "Sharing is caring",  However, it struck me that for new generations, specially with those heavily using Facebook , that it might need emphasize on the different meanings that the term sharing started to have. "Sharing is caring"  means allowing others to use or consume something that belongs to self. usually food or toys among children. The term has evolved in the modern Facebook sphere. Sharing on Facebook started as actually something similar. You find something nice, you share it with others because you care about those others. However, when "others" become a mass, things gets different.  You can care about someone but you cannot care about "others",  that's why we call them "others". The caring implied by sharing drifted from those to whom we share,  to the person who is involved in the topic of sharing. Or the voice of original author of something, who will be offered more exposure and outreach by you...

Android Marshmallow highlights

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Nearly a couple of weeks ago, I got system update of Android 6 , Marshmallow on my  Google Nexus 5 . Having system updates early is one of the things I like much about  Google Nexus devices. There are several wonderful things in the new android, but I was eagerly waiting for this update, specifically for the selective permissions module. Lots of android apps use lots of excessive permissions. too much than necessary IMHO. However, let me tell you about how I found things. One of the things I liked a lot since my last version of android is the launcher app menu,  I used to have to swipe left several times to get to apps with names starting with letters coming late in the alphabet (Z, x, S,  and arabic names).  Android 6 default app menu avoids this horizontal scrolling. and: 1) Uses vertical scrolling which is more natural and usable for users 2) Allows you to search apps, to reach the app quickly by typing a couple of letters form its name 3) The mo...

Converting a batch of files of csv format to xls or xlsx

While working with data, we tend to deal a lot with CSV files. It is more efficient and trivial to manipulate csv data either through command line tools or through programming languages like ruby. However, occasionally we need to convert files to MS Excel format before sending them to 3rd party. Gnumeric is a wonderful opensource spreadsheet program.  It contains a command line convertion tool called ssconvert that can be used to perform direct conversion among lots of supported formats easily from the command line. For example, conversion from csv to xlsx can be done via ssconvert  file.csv file.xlsx OR ssconvert  file.csv --export-type=Gnumeric_Excel:xlsx It can be installed in ubuntu via apt-get install gnumeric In order to convert lots of files, I wrote a simple bash script that will process all csv files in the current directory and generate the corresponding xlsx files.  The script came pretty handy in data preparation. I believe i can be h...

Google Adsense Sensitive Categories

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According to a note from Google Adsense website,  starting last month, they rolled out new beta inventory of ads that might be bothering to some people, which is "Social Casino Games". This includes poker, bingo, lotteries among other games. If you are like me, do not like showing such ads even with the slightest possibility that they could be seen by the ads engine as relevant to some of your content,  you can opt out of them.  Simply by clicking "Allow and block ads" at the top, then choosing "Sensitive Categories", and block the categories you do not like. (see the image below)

Smarter Egypt Hackathon, Nov 2014

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Last weekend, IBM Egypt in cooperation with ITI  and other parties organized a 4 days hackathon in the theme of applying big data technologies to solve national problems in Egypt . The organizing parties involved: Information Technology Institute (ITI) that hosted the event and highly promoted it, in belief of the value of such activity towards the national development of the country, as well as allowing its students, among others, a chance to refine their skills, gain hands on experience on real world critical problems and a chance to make sounding success stories. IBM, Beside the national target, IBM has ongoing cooperation with ITI. and the event was a good chance to promote IBM Technologies, specially in the national projects domain. possible success stories would have high ROI for IBM. Government representatives from few domains that were target of the hackathon theme. The representatives brought sample amounts of data, and their domain experience about their fields...

Facebook "Thank you" moments

Few years ago, Facebook launched their "7 years look back" videos. where any Facebook user can go to  https://www.facebook.com/lookback  to find a video generated for him, showing highlights over his historical activities and photos, beautifully animated along with a nice background music, and it went viral. everybody like to watch and share his highlights. Nowadays, something more of that kind is up.  Facebook launched "Thank you" videos. Facebook users can visit  https://www.facebook.com/thanks  with a list of friends on the side. Upon selecting a friend, a video will be generated with a wonderful theme and soundtrack showing highlights between you both. with generic thank you words. The content is usually photos where  are you both tagged in, or posts made by one of you where the other is tagged. Of course starting with your spouse by default :) The wonderful part is that you can go through the list, and see highlights of you and different people...