
Anything I can find I'll try to blog about it, be it GIS, mapping, programming, graphics, CAD, networking, gadgets, music, both in English and Arabic. Technically everything tech-related and tech-unrelated.
2009-08-26
تخاريف واحد مبسوط حبتين

2009-08-18
Geomtry Kernels in AEC/BIM field
A geometry kernel is the core of any modeling software, it is simply the part of the program that understands geometry and the relationships of the various entities the program allows you to draw (let it be a 2D line, rectangle, polygon, or a 3D cube, 3D polygon, face, mesh or that cool NURBS object you had been creating for 3 days).
The geometry kernel is an indicator of the robustness of the modeling software.
Some of the kernels used by key players in the CAD/AEC/BIM and MCAD field:
- Autodesk AutoCAD: Autodesk Shape Manager (ACIS based)
- Autodesk Revit: Proprietary kernel from earlier versions of Revit
- NNA Vectorworks 2009: Siemen’s Parasolid
- NNA VectorWorks 2008 (and earlier): IntegrityWare Solids++
- Graphisoft ArchiCAD: Spatial’s ACIS
- Bentley Microstation: Siemen’s Parasolid
- PTC Pro/ENGINEER: Proprietary kernel (with Parasolid for compatability)
- CATIA: Proprietary kernel (with Parasolid for compatability)
- Dassault SolidWorks: Siemen’s Parasolid (despite owning the ACIS maker)
Articles About the usage of geometry kernels:
http://architosh.com/2008/09/architosh-talks-to-dr-biplap-sarkar-about-parasolid/http://www10.aeccafe.com/nbc/articles/view_weekly.php?articleid=594268
http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=5236836
2009-07-18
Oracle to Buy Sun, a second look
For some time now, I've been learning parts of the Java Enterprise Edition platform, and what I've seen is a great platform that can be the best-in-class if used properly and if it was easier to learn.
But what I find so much interesting is the multitude of frameworks in the market, two different presentation layer standards (JSP and its successor JSF), many different JSF extension frameworks (Apache MyFaces Tomahawk, Sun Woodstock, ICEfaces, JBoss RichFaces, Apache MyFaces Trinidad, Oracle ADF Faces), other not-in-the-specification frameworks (Tapestry, Struts, Apache Wicket, GWT, Spring MVC and others), many implementations of the JPA standard (the de-facto standard Hibernate, the JPA2 reference implementation EclipseLink, the Oracle TopLink, OpenJPA, and others), many Servlets containers (Tomcat, Jetty and commercial offerings) and various EJB containers, the complete enterprise applications building frameworks as Spring, Seam, and many others.
And that's just for the parts I explored so far.
Also the desktop front suffers from less overlap/duplication with 2 GUI widgets framework (the Java standard Swing, and the IBM/Eclipse influenced SWT framework) and their respective applications framework (the Swing Application Framework and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform).
The same is true in the IDEs front, we just don't have 2 major IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans), but we have many commercial IDEs built over the Eclipse foundation (many of the IBM Rational offerings, RedHat/JBoss Developer Studio, Embarcadero/Borland JBuilder), some commercial offerings (most notably the IDEA IntelliJ) and the Oracle free (but less fair to play with the market standards) JDeveloper.
At first I just thought that is a waste of brain cycles and time of a talented and very smart community, and not just how many things has been done and redone and then-again redone, it is just plain confusing to try to learn or even design an application while taking in consideration the pros and cons of each framework/standard/application/library and presents a real challenge for a topic that could be easier to penetrate and learn, also such duplication creates many different-and-separated camps of experienced developers in the market.
But then I found that the real reason all these people are still in the Java camp is because of the ability to do things just as you want it (just think of any barely-reasonable way to do enterprise applications and chances are that a framework is out there waiting for you to be used) and the many different ideologies behind each framework (ranging from heavily-closed source and commercial frameworks to BSD-style open source frameworks) and that the ability of the Java community to re-invent the wheel when desired easily a key feature for the backing of virtually all the big software companies in the world (except Microsoft of course, not because it was uninterested, but because it wanted to play it too-hard with the market).
How such community will be affected by the Oracle acquisition is yet to be seen, but I'm not so optimistic as before, the Java EE may grow better under the Oracle umbrella, but it may be less free and less open to the community, which is exactly what the Java EE community doesn't need, the backing of the various software companies and open source communities what makes Java a market leader and the biggest player in the enterprise applications market.
I hope that Oracle understands the chemistry between Java and freedom (or it keeps enough Sun executives to keep such freedom possible) and that only a multiplayer game is a game worth playing.
2009-07-03
New Global DEM released from METI and NASA

Some information about the ASTER instrument:
- Building Agency: METI of Japan
- Carrier Spacecraft: USA NASA’s Terra
- Launch date: December 1999
- Stereoscopic capability: Along-track (no need to pass multiple times over the same area to collect stereo image data)
- Bands available for DEM generation: VNIR (near infrared spectral band)
- DEM base-to-height ratio: 0.6
- Spatial resolution: 15m in the horizontal plane
- Single ASTER VNIR scene size: About 60 km-by-60 km ground area (4,100 samples by 4,200 lines)
- Land surface coverage: between 83°N and 83°S
- Grid cell size: 1 arc-second (30 m)
- Tiles Format: GeoTIFF
- Number of tiles: 22,600
- Single tile size: 1°-by-1°
- Coordinate System Type: Geographic (Lat/Long coordinates)
- Earth Model: WGS84/EGM96 geoid
- Collection Date: 2000-2009
- Vertical accuracy estimate: 20 meters (at 95 % confidence)
- Horizontal accuracy estimate: 30 meters (at 95 % confidence)
- Area of missing data: Areas with constant cloud coverage
The process included:
- Stereo-correlation to produce 1,264,118 individual scene-based ASTER DEMs
- Cloud masking to remove cloudy pixels
- Stacking all cloud-screened DEMs
- Removing residual bad values and outliers
- Averaging selected data to create final pixel values
- Correcting residual anomalies
- Partitioning the data into 1°-by-1° tiles.
Previously, the most complete Global DEM publicly available was the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission), it has an 80% land coverage (between 60°N and 57°S). The ASTER GDEM expands coverage to 99%; also the SRTM data has a grid cell size of 3 arc-seconds (90 m) outside of the USA borders, despite being captured at 1 arc-second, it was later averaged before being publicly released.
I hope that NASA would release the full resolution 1 arc-second data of the SRTM DEM globally to augment the ASTER GDEM data and allow for a unified DEM which benefits from the ability of the Radar to collect data in the places constantly covered by clouds.
I currently don't know the shoreline data used to outline the DEM data, but I hope they release it as well or use a publicly available one, such as the NGA Prototype Global Shoreline (PGS) data.
A good technical page about the new ASTER GDEM can be found here.
METI and NASA marks version 1 of the ASTER GDEM as “experimental” or “research grade”, but the size and accuracy of the data makes such an initial release a very good step toward a highly enhanced and accurate Global DEM very near.
Download sources:
I will post shortly about my experience with the download of the new GDEM and its estimated size and usage characteristics.
Sources and News Coverage:
2009-06-16
JDeveloper and Oracle Java
I've started to use JDeveloper the last few days, and as a Java novice that is drowning in the sea of acronyms and the multitude of implementations in the market of Java Enterprise Edition, I find the JDeveloper as the solution to any Java Developer looking for an Oracle-centric IDE (that is half open and half tightly-coupled with various Oracle flagship applications).
As Oracle will now have the upperhand in the Java world, I assume that going the Oracle way would not bring the best value to the Java EE applications, but would bring the best integration of the various Java technologies.
2009-05-16
ضد حجب الحريات بإسم الأخلاق - 2
القضاء المصري حكم بحجب المواقع الإباحية .. والحكومة تبدي "عجزها
يا رب دايماً ماينفعش يبقي فيه حاجة الحكومة تعملها في حرية حركة شبكة الإنترنت.
2009-05-14
ضد حجب الحريات بإسم الأخلاق
صحيت الصبح علي الخبر الجميل ده ... إصطبحا و أصطبح الملك لله.
أنا أعتقد إن حكومتنا يهمها الأخلاق قوي ... أصلها بسم الله ما شاء الله يعني عامله إللي عليها قوي كحكومة ... فاحنا من حبنا فيها عايزنها تبقي هي بابا و ماما و تبقي هيا ضميرنا الحي الصاحي ... إللي بيخلينا مانشوفش الحاجات الوحشة إللي الخواجات بيعملوها علي النت و ماتخليناش نشوف غير إللي الست هايفة وهبي بتعمله هيا و دانا و ماريا و مروة و نجلا و من وقت للتاني بوسي سمير.
أعتقد إن الموضوع واضح .... موقع الإخوان المسلمين موقع إباحي (ماهو إللي بيحرضك تعمل حاجات عيب في الشارع بتخل بالأمن العام) و موقع حزب الغد موقع إباحي هوا كمان (دول بيزوروا التوقيعات يابا ... مش هايعلموك قلة الأدب!) و أي موقع بيتقال فيه كلمة حرة إباحي (يالهوي ... ده بيقول حرة) و إي موقع بيتكلم عن مقاطعة (إنت عايز أمريكا هيا إللي تعمل معانا حاجة قلة أدب) أو عن حق ضايع (يا عم قضيها ... هوا حد لاقي حق أصلاً لما يبقي فيه حبة منه ضايعين) يبقي هوا كمان موقع إباحي.
بس انا أحب أقولهم إن إللي بيستحل حريتي بإسم الأخلاق هوا إللي بيعمل حاجة قليلة الأدب فعلاً و هوا ده إللي المفروض أحجبه من حياتي و أتخلص منه و من تأثيره.
2009-05-12
يالليل من الحب صاحى
على كل طوبة ندى .. وشذى وأمل أنسان
من الضلام فى الضى ومن العطش فى الرى
من ألف حى وحى
من ألف عام وانا عايش فى الزمان الجاى
يالليل من الحب صاحى .. ومن الشقا نعسان
--فؤاد حداد
أنا غالباً سمعتها قبل كده في حفلة من حفلات وجية عزيز الخمستاشر إللي أنا حضرتهم لحد دلوقتي (في ثلاثة أربعة لوحدي ... و إثنين مع كريم و واحدة مع شوقي و ثلالة أربعة مع لميس و واحدة مع راتب) بس مافتركتهاش غير لما عم مهدي قالها و هوا في مصر من إسبوع كده ... ربنا يجيبه بالسلامة
2009-05-05
Finished my first step in Oracle
2009-04-21
Oracle to Buy Sun

Oracle Buys Sun (from Oracle.com) | Sun and Oracle (from Sun.com)
Earlier yesterday, Oracle has announced that it has reached an agreement to purchase Sun Microsystems for $9.50 per share, making it a $7.4 billion deal, by this acquisition, Oracle will have a complete end-to-end product line that focuses on data and business requirements in the largest enterprises.Oracle has been trying to enter the hardware business lately by its HP Oracle Database Machine, which is essentially a complete rack of HP hardware and Oracle Software, but this last acquisition will bring Oracle completely into the major hardware business, this will give it a complete line of products, from the largest UltraSPARC supercomputers Sun creates and maintains, to its mid-range SPARC servers, , to its Blade servers and high-density computing, to its carrier-grade Netra servers, to storage-oriented servers, to the entry-level x86/x64 servers, down to workstations and thin-clients; not to mention a complete processor architecture and alliances with both the major x64 market players, Intel and AMD.
Oracle will also get a complete software stack to build complete systems using its Oracle software, this includes the Solaris/OpenSolaris operating system, which is (quoted from the Oracle press release) the largest platform Oracle is deployed on, the bleeding-edge ZFS storage engine, the Lustre filesystem which is geared toward clustered supercomputers, and engineering expertise Sun have for building such large-scale installations.
But the crown jewel in this purchase is definitively the Java platfrom, Oracle has been the third-largest contributor to the Java environment (after Java's Own creator Sun, and IBM with its Eclipse/Rational product-line and its WebSphere middleware), Oracle has its Oracle Fusion Middleware product-line which it enhanced by its acquisition to the BEA WebLogic product line, its JDeveloper IDE product, it contribution to the Eclipse Foundation, and its native support for Java inside its core Database product-line.
Oracle will also benefit from Sun earlier acquisition to MySQL, which fosters its position as the major (and mostly the only) player in Linux database business (keeping only the relatively smaller player PostgreSQL) and IBM current offerings, DB2/Informix which focuses more on IBM integrated services/platform than being an active player in the Linux market.
Oracle does have overlapping products with the Sun portfolio, like its GlassFish Application Server (which overlaps with Oracle Application Server and BEA WebLogic), its NetBeans IDE (which doesn't completely overlap, but somehow, with the JDeveloper and the contributions to the Eclipse foundation), its MySQL database product (which is not positioned as a direct competitor to the Oracle database, but none the less it has managed to grab a good market share in the Internet-centric database field), and its open source VirtualBox virtualization software (which overlaps with the Oracle VM product, which is based on Xen).
This is no where the overlap that was to be there if the deal with IBM has managed to succeed, it would give the new IBM overlaps in its complete hardware business (which Sun competes across the complete line), its processor business (the POWER vs. SPARC), its Operating Systems business (Solaris vs. AIX & z/OS), its development tools business (NetBeans vs. Rational/Eclipse), its application server business (GlassFish vs. WebSphere), and its database business (MySQL vs. IBM DB2/Informix); this would leave IBM with just one piece of software it really wants from Sun (beside its server market-share), which is of course the Java platform, and quite frankly, it is not worth the $7.4 billion Sun was asking for (which is the same price Oracle agreed on to complete its acquistion).
I was worried that such a merger/acquisition would make too much mess in the Sun portfolio, but now as Oracle is the new Sun, I'm not so worried; Oracle will benefit directly from the hardware business, the processors business, the Operating Systems business, the Java platform, the office productivity products; and will have minimal impact on the development tools and the virtualization products; the remaining parts where Oracle will probably have a major impact is the database business and the application servers business (which are minor parts in the Sun products line).
We will see how such acquisition will result in the near future, and how the open sourcing of many products of Sun will shape the future of such products.