Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Deactivated your Twitter account? No Problem

As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account just to try things out. Apparently you couldn't get it back.

So How can I get my sexy following list back without following them one by one?

I decided to tweak the Twitter Mass Follow Tool into a new version which I called Twitter Stealth Tool. Now this tool will allow you to steal or copy followers from anybody (as long as you are following him/her).



  1. Sign in to Twitter by clicking the button
  2. Type in the twitter name of the person you want to steal his followers
  3. Select friends that you wish to follow
  4. Use the sorting tool to find them easily and dbl click to see their profile
  5. Click follow selected
Thats it, I copied h9290 list that will include all the IT guys and bahrain folks. Now I can use the Twitter Mass Unfollow tool to clean the following I don't want.

You can copy followers from multiple people.


Monday, August 9, 2010

NO JAILBREAK FOR YOU!!!

Looks like Hackers is pointing their rifles at Apple away from Microsoft. Apple releases iOS 4, while Jobs busy wrestling users for the IPhone4 Antenna problem, weeks later a Zero Day flaw in the CFF font get exploited and viola JailBreakme.com was born.

A week later Apple annonces that it is releasing a patch for this flaw. The flaw is basically as follows, you visit a website and this website can execute malicious code in your phone.


Now the flaw documentation is public hackers will be utilizing it.

Let the race begins.

HP CEO out, Apple Head out, who's next?

You might heard the news that HP CEO Mark Hurd has submitted his resignation amid sexual harassment investigation with a Jodie Fisher a known actress. This might cripple down HP or on the contrary might give a chance for a new blood to circulate the giant firm.

Next we hear that Mark Papermaster Apple's Head of Devices Hardware, the guy responsable for Apple IPhone design leaves that company for good. Although no offecial statements on why Papermaster left, all fingers seem to point on the IPhone4 antenna problem.

If the math is correct, we should be hearing some other news, soon.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Thin clients are sexy

In IT, a thin client is either a machine or a piece of software which is very light to install and configure and depends on an outside server who does all the donkey work.

As users are becoming more lazy, IT folks need to make things easier for them. That's why we shift all the hard dirty computational memory consuming work to a slave server or perhaps a cloud so users can work in a clean comfortable fast thin environment.

Think of a thin client like a fancy restaurant. Customers enjoy the atomosphere and service while the crew inside the restaurant work non stop to satisfy their needs. Customers do not care what's going on there. They request their food items and it get prepared, cooked, decorated and served.


Web is an ocean full of sexy thin clients, the browsers are the software and the servers to which the requests are sent is the fat clients.


Although this might seem to be a great architecture , each architecture must have some hidden flaws.


Tuesday, August 3, 2010

VB.NET Polymorphism Fail



I have been working on a project where I stumpled upon a classic Polymorphism case which .NET marked as a compile error.

To simplify the problem in order to show it to you , I created the following simple UML design .




The method Add in IBirds is overloaded, it can take a IBird to add it to the Birds list or it also can take IBirds object to add all birds to the list.

Iflyable is also an interface that both Duck and Ducks implement, so when I send I cast Duck or Ducks to IFlyable and send it to Add function it should fit right in without problems


Because IFlyable can be either IBird or IBirds it should definitly work in runtime through late binding. However .NET display this Error instead


Error 1 Overload resolution failed because no accessible 'Add' can be called without a narrowing conversion:
'Public Sub Add(birds As IBirds)': Argument matching parameter 'birds' narrows from 'Birds.IFlyable' to 'Birds.IBirds'.
'Public Sub Add(aBird As IBird)': Argument matching parameter 'aBird' narrows from 'Birds.IFlyable' to 'Birds.IBird'. C:\Documents and Settings\ncs\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\Birds\Birds\Form1.vb 26 9 Birds







I think it should be displayed as a warning at least so we can evaluate it on runtime.
The weird thing that it works on Debug mode.

To solve the problem I should put an If statement that check the type of the object and cast it to either IBird or IBirds which I don't like. I wrote an article about how to minimize the number of if statements in your code only to add more?

Here is the Source code for those interested.


Monday, August 2, 2010

An Idea: Digital Sharing of NewsPapers

Last year I wrote an article, an idea in fact, called it the NewsTouchPaper. Although I don't find it very difficult to develop yet lots of devices that appeared in year 2009 and 2010 have actually replaced that idea such as Kindle and IPad.

Few weeks back I was in Starbucks sipping my Espresso and reading the newspaper (the classical paper one), a thing most people still do. I found a very interesting article, so I needed to share it on Twitter and Facebook. Of course it will be so easy if I was on a computer or a tablet. Elmohem I had to take a photo of the article upload it and then Tweet.


Here where all the light bulbs start flickering on my head, thought I would share few with you.


1. ReDesign the NewsPaper so each article is accompanied with a Short URL version of the same article (e.g. http://news.bh/abdA) which points to the NewsPaper digital version of the article, this way I can easily type it in my BlackBerry and post it.




2. Another idea is to use the same concept, but instead put a QR Code (This is also a great QR code generator by Michele Smarty http://www.toolsiseek.com/qr-code-generator/) so people with SmartPhones can "Scan" the code and get a URL to the particular digital page or even better get a compressed digital version of the article that can be uncompressed and shared easily.







3. More fun? Make this URLs centralized for all newspapers in Bahrain so people can actually visit the site from the short URL, sign in with their twitter and facebook account and comment.

Even more fun? Create an application that does just that allowing more seamless integration.


No need to spend much, we just need some regulation and a good leadership to achieve this (note I didn't say management)