Concepts Every Software Engineer Should Know.

July 23, 2008 · Filed Under Programming, Tech · Comment 

As a student I’m always looking for things to learn and what am I still missing. I know college teaches you a lot of things but reality is that it doesn’t teach you everything. I just came across this great list of things Software Engineers should know and in my case I would also say Computer Scientist need to know too. Out of the top 10 I have covered a few in some length and already know what they mean. Others I have explored by myself. What I am really looking forward to learning and practicing is parallel computing and cloud computing. How to distribute process to work faster. And for now my favorite yet difficult topic has been algorithms. I also have a great love for security but that’s a whole new topic for me.

Yasser

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Facebook Platform Available To Public.

June 2, 2008 · Filed Under Programming, Tech · Comment 

TechCrunch just announced that Facebook has made an interesting move in making there platform open source. It is available for people to download and use under their copyright rules. As far as competing with Open Social then it is a smart move since you never want to stay back in an industry where everything is about the latest technology.

The fb-open-platform.tar.gz archive contains the tools necessary to implement Facebook Open Platform — including the API, FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — in your own environment

This might lead to more Social Networks opening up, some public and some private. It is bad for people who have been investing in social networks and now have this new resource available. This also reminds me of the time part of the source code was leaked but not very useful.

Yasser

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CSChat

March 5, 2007 · Filed Under Programming, Tech · 1 Comment 

My second project for Computer Science 2 was creating a simple Chat program. They wanted us to use a GUI, that was basicaly the whole idea behind this project. If you ask me, this is a simple, bit dumb of a project to give us. The hardest part was figuring out what they wanted us to do because of the weird explanation they use. My previous project on Battleship was a bit more complicated since it involved actually thinking and planning. For the chat program we didn’t even have to do the networking part because they gave us Classes that do this for us. The program uses one of RIT’s Computer Science computer as the server for the chat. Everyting runs very simple, I dont know if you are allowed to connect from outside RIT but you are free to try.

My code: CSChat and here is the explanation of what we have to do Project 2

Yasser

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Battleship

January 23, 2007 · Filed Under Programming, Tech · 1 Comment 

In Computer Science 2 they made is due our first project. What they mean by project is create a real program from scratch with instructions that contradict themselves and not very clear always. It was an easy thing to code but error checking was horrible since I am not very familiar with Java. The project was a 1 player Battleship game (who plays Battleship by themselves?) , reading the boats from a file.

This were the instructions that they gave us: Battleship v2

And this is my code that I submitted: Battleship

I hope everyone enjoys, coding is a bit sloppy but when your rushing time it’s hard to write nice code.

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JavaScript InLine Debugging (JaSiLDBG)

December 6, 2006 · Filed Under Programming, Security, Tech · Comment 

JavaScript is one of the most powerful languages, it is just not seen this way. With the new wave of people using AJAX they now realize how powerful JavaScript could really be. But its power goes beyond that; with JavaScript we are able to completely reconfigure a website without having to save it or change the source directly. Not everyone is aware that we could run JavaScript from the address bar and this way we could modify a website, inyect AJAX commands or change value of forms, cheat in games. JavaScript doesn’t only control websites, you can control Flash movies or ActiveX controllers, this allows us to be able to cheat in certain games or “security mechanisms”.

Me and my friend Sirdarckcat (Eduardo) have create a document explaining all the things we could do with JavaScript to control websites and how you could do this. And to make things easier we have created a couple of libraries that you could use to modify websites as if you where using FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Many people could probably be thinking that all these things could be done with certain plugins. But they miss out on the beauty of JaSiLDBG , this does not require to be installed as software, you could run it from anywhere on all the popular browsers (havent tested all the browsers in the world) out there. So you read it and let us know how powerful do you think JavaScript really is.

Yasser

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