Nael El Shawwa - My thoughts on technology and web applications

#DevTO - You don't just write code

2011-06-26T18:06:00.000-04:00

#DevTO started out with @kevinkvs and @jonezy thinking about the need to have a regular meet up for developers in Toronto to share and learn from each other. I first heard of this idea on Twitter from Chris and was immediately intrigued and offered to help out. @clickflickca also joined in later on the fun and brings his experience organizing and running other events around Toronto. A big part

All developers are not created equal - hence not interchangeable

2011-06-16T11:00:00.001-04:00

Earlier yesterday I came across this article on the New York Times: Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry. At first I thought, "Man, another big site had their customer data compromised", but as I continued reading this incident is a little bit different; especially the nature of the attack that was described in the article. The marketing and PR departments for these brands - and in this

Rogers OnDemand Online Vs. Netflix

2011-02-26T20:55:00.001-05:00

A week after the condo I'm renting suffered from a bathroom flood fiasco, I sat down last night to watch some TV at home. Now, my whole unit is a mess, and furniture has been moved around so I couldn't really use my TV, instead I decided to use Rogers on Demand Online (RODO). However, I am also a Netflix customer, but for some reason I chose to try RODO. Rogers On Demand OnlineI first signed up

Mobile e-commerce & augmented reality?

2010-12-11T14:20:00.001-05:00

When you think e-commerce what comes to mind? For me, I think Amazon.com and eBay.com. I remember reading somewhere that Amazon wasn't the first online bookstore, but in fact it was books.com - which is gone now by the way, and instead redirects to Barnes & Noble. Today, Amazon doesn't just sell books anymore, heck I can even order 18-inch wheels from there. But, what comes next? The e-commerce

Don't tell me your TV supports Twitter (Part 2)

2010-09-03T14:53:00.002-04:00

In Part 1 I ranted about the Samsung commercial that I caught on TV raving about accessing Facebook and Twitter from their new TV. I questioned how TV manufacturers are repeating the marketing campaigns the telecoms did a few years ago when the iPhone came out on select telecoms. The ones that weren't chosen such as Bell and Telus raved about their Blackberry, Palm and HTC lineups. They coined

Fast Mover Advantage?

2010-08-28T15:17:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading the book "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrich. The book provides great stories into the lives of the "founding fathers" of probably the most successful website on the Internet today - Facebook - although it wasn't a first mover. What amazed me the most about the book is how fast everything was happening. Maybe once upon a time "First Mover Advantage" was important

Don't tell me your TV supports Twitter

2010-08-24T11:30:00.014-04:00

Last night I caught a Best Buy ad on AMC about Samsung's smart/social/internet TV. It reminded me of the Telus/Rogers/Bell BlackBerry ads a couple of years ago marketing Twitter and Facebook as features of their smartphones. They're still doing it with terms like "social phone" or "smarter smart phone" which I don't really understand. I was still really excited about this ad, especially because

Yahoo's culture vs. Google's culture

2010-08-14T19:56:00.003-04:00

Two interesting articles I have read in the past week had to do with Yahoo's "hacker-centric" culture - or lack of. Two different views, one from Paul Graham's "What happened to Yahoo" post and the second from Ryan Grove's "What's happening at Yahoo!". Both were excellent reads and provide an interesting look into Yahoo's culture. These articles got me interested in comparing both Yahoo! and

Daily Digest

2010-08-09T23:16:00.003-04:00

Last night I came across this sweet web app called paper.ly that generates a newspaper of your Twitter feed daily. It comes with a pretty basic embed that displays a table of contents for your own personalized news paper that you can embed on your blog or website. The people I follow are mainly from the tech community in North America and the Toronto Twitter community. You'll find posts from the

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

2010-08-08T18:24:00.002-04:00

Just came across this fascinating video on TED. Needless to say that when technological ideas have sex we can end up with the Twitters, Facebooks, iPads, iPods, iPhones, etc. etc. Enjoy. At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says

Stay on your toes, think proactively

2010-08-07T21:57:00.004-04:00

I was coming back home today and while in the elevator the lady that just got on forgot to press her floor's button. She realized a little too late as we passed the 15th floor; her floor. She then press 17, but that too was too late, then she pressed 18, and again that was too late. She gave up and got off the 20th floor with someone else. At that point I was thinking, if she pressed 17 and 18 at

@flipboard - my personal magazine

2010-07-29T22:37:00.006-04:00

I haven't tried this yet, and I don't have an iPad still, however this video is just screaming at me to go buy an iPad just for this app. It's kind of like how Shazam and UrbanSpoon apps in the iPhone ads were the "kick over fence" for me.I'm not all that interested about using it for Facebook, the use case that appeals to me the most is its Twitter integration. Twitter is a brilliant way to keep

Dojo templates & Google Maps InfoWindow

2010-07-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

I have been building mashups using Google Maps since 2007 and one problem I had is passing in the content for these bubbles that show up when you click on a marker i.e. the InfoWindow. One big annoyance with it, is that you have to pass in the HTML content as a string when opening the marker. I don't like it because I have to intertwine HTML inside of JavaScript. So how can we make this better?

Dojo How To: Publish / Subscribe

2010-07-18T14:12:00.004-04:00

I haven't been using Dojo for a very long time, just over a year now, but its time I blog about all the little great features I have learned.One of the features I like the most in Dojo is the Publish / Subscribe mechanism. Its flexibility allows you to cleanly implement communication between different components like modules, widgets, portlets, etc.Lets get down to business. Say I have two

John Underkoffler points to the future of UI

2010-07-04T18:52:00.006-04:00

I caught this video by John Underkoffler - the science advisor for the movie Minority Report on TED the other day and it got me thinking about web interfaces, especially for online banking such as CIBC's and online billing such as Roger's. I'm not saying we need interfaces such as this for these kind of online applications, but we are surely due for a major overhaul of these interfaces. I sure

Sir Ken Robinson is a brilliant speaker, thinker and evangelist.

2010-07-01T19:47:00.002-04:00

the intersection of business and technology

2010-06-29T23:20:00.005-04:00

Technology is useless if it does not deliver business value. Either it saves me time and hence money, or it makes me money. It has to be one or the other. Where does front end architecture fit in this picture? As the title points out, its right in the middle.The front end is a misunderstood piece of any application, it is usually overlooked, underestimated, and belittled. Its fairly common to

On selling customer experiences

2010-06-05T01:41:00.009-04:00

I was looking at how much of a dent an iPad will put in my wallet when I noticed the mandatory field reminder on Apple.com's shopping cart. Then I came to this realization, Apple isn't a mobile device's company, nor a computer company, its a customer experience company. So much time is spent on just tweaking and perfecting the whole cycle. From the moment you browse their online store or their

Chefs, Curators, & Developers

2010-05-28T22:12:00.015-04:00

Besides that these people all eat, sleep, and lineup for the latest iStuff, developers ought to have another thing in common with chefs and curators. I would say software development is part engineering/science and part creativity, even as high 50/50 or maybe a little more.CuratorsThe term "custodian of a collection" doesn't describe what curators really do. It almost makes it sound as if they

The Mythical Man-Month

2010-05-24T12:40:00.001-04:00

I think it was in first year software engineering that we had to read this book, and nine years later I really, really understand the underlying purpose of this book. It may just be yet another book back then, but the lessons that are hopefully learned from it will last a life-time - not just for software projects, but any project.The Mythical Man-MonthUnfortunately on software project plans,

Crash 'n' Burn: The 11th hour for Flash

2010-04-20T23:43:00.005-04:00

Adobe's rhetoric continues after the curve ball Apple threw. The whining continues with this post: On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications.Sadly, the whining doesn't change anything, and Adobe's argument would have been more valid if they didn't trying to lock developers into Flash/Flex and if it -Flash- were really open. Also, I think Adobe's Flash/Flex tools favor developing using Cold

How to throw usability out the window - Part 1

2010-04-20T19:26:00.012-04:00

Sometime between when I paid my Rogers bill last month, and when I tried to look it up this month, the Rogers site was "upgraded" to portal. I'm not sure what it used to be before, but I think now it sits squats on top of the BEA Weblogic portal - now owned by Oracle.Note: This is only part I, the Rogers Portal went offline while I am writing this. To be continued when its live again...The

there will always be someone who can do it cheaper

2010-04-19T09:00:00.003-04:00

For most companies offering professional services, the business model is based on cost plus billing. This includes people like lawyers, consultants, accountants, marketing agencies, etc.This is fine for starting up and getting the $ rolling to keep the lights on. However at some point you realize that that was fine for starting out and that it is completely flawed and doesn't make any economic

First Google Maps Mashup Turns 5 Years

2010-04-10T23:34:00.004-04:00

Last Thursday the Google Maps mashup turned 5. Paul Rademacher posted this on Craigslist announcing a Google map mashup of housing properties. That post started it all. Back then, there wasn't even an official API for Google Maps. That mashup now lives at housingmaps.com.Congrats to Paul on this milestone. That experiment started the whole mashup building community, and the reason why Google Maps

Microsoft courier

2010-03-08T22:48:00.003-05:00

I just saw this concept video for "Microsoft Courier" and its pretty good. If it makes it out to market, and just based of this video it definitely kicks the iPad's ass! I was shocked that this is coming out of Microsoft; if this makes it out to market, then maybe Microsoft still has hope after all...

On advertising online. Be powerful, not desperate.

2010-03-06T17:30:00.006-05:00

Okay, I'm giving Microsoft a break this time, so what could have been "why not microsoft (part 3 of many) turned to be quite a positive video from Microsoft...This real life story is pretty good, there were no sneaky, below the belt punches. It showed how MS Office worked for this couple and helped them stay organized.I don't mind witty commercials with side comments against competitors. What

Synchronized Cardioversion is print media's only chance

2010-03-03T21:25:00.005-05:00

I just watched an interesting video posted on Mitch Joel's blog under the post "Print is Not Dead". The video is an attempt by some print magazine people to convince the rest of us that print magazines will still be around. Will they? 5 years from now? 10 years from now? I'm betting on no.This video is exactly the problem with the current print industry. They are still in denial. And why wouldn't

why not Microsoft (Part 2 of many)

2010-02-18T00:28:00.007-05:00

Round 2 of this series. I'm about to gut this video and turn it inside out. Kids, cover your eyes, this will get ugly.Delegation of mail and calendar. Once upon a time, in a world when dinosaurs roamed freely on this Earth there was a need to do this. (Okay, it wasn't that long ago, but you get the point). However today, I don't think this is needed anymore. You get an e-mail invite, and you can

Why not Microsoft (Part 1 of many)

2010-02-16T20:21:00.007-05:00

I just saw this Microsoft channel on Youtube comparing Microsoft solutions with Google's. I couldn't resist writing this up.If I need to mix different features in a blender then its not easy to manage. In fact it could very well turn out messy."Documents zip across back and forth without a hitch". Okay, but what usually happens when you have "documents zipping back and forth, and back and forth,

On the rise of social eCommerce

2010-01-30T00:01:00.004-05:00

Deborah Collier published her five predictions for social e-commerce in 2010:Goodbye to the MiddlemanThe Year of the Deliver CompanyCreative Sponsored AdvertisingMobile Commerce RevolutionFree Culture FrenzyHer predictions can't be anymore bang on, if these become a reality of 2010, then we are well on our way to reaching that stage of "Social eCommerce" in the first half of this decade.As it

iPad: Same Content, Different Form

2010-01-28T22:54:00.005-05:00

After I got past the unfortunate branding fiasco of the latest and greatest from Apple, I can't wait to first get my hands on one (like millions of others) and then maybe even owning one (like millions of others will).There are many pros and cons of this new device, just like there were many pros and cons of the first iPhone. When the first iPhone came out, all I thought back then was "Why?!"

The agile kitchen

2010-01-24T21:25:00.005-05:00

Last year I posted about why successful restaurant kitchens are more Agile than many software 'kitchens'. Tonight, I'm posting more about this topic. A good software developer is disciplined, just like a good chef is disciplined. Both will put extra effort to make that application or dish 'hit that sweet spot' nom nom nom. Both will cook stuff up that will add value, and not just because they can

Blast from the past - Team Athena

2010-01-10T10:38:00.003-05:00

Back in 2005-2006 when I was finishing up my Software Engineering degree, we had to build an autonomous search and rescue robot using the Lego Mindstorms kit. Here is a video I found this morning of our robot "Athena" - the lean and mean machine - saving a poor, helpless, and yolk-less egg...

Two Thousand & Ten

2010-01-03T21:20:00.003-05:00

I'm going to go a little off track with what I'm going to post this time. I'm not going to talk about technology, Google Maps, web applications, software, photoshop, SEO, or how tos or any other "geeky" stuff. Its the start of a new year, a new decade, and hence I'm going to post about something different.All in all 2009 was an interesting year, and good end to this decade. 2009 started out with

I would pay for personalized news delivered to my [insert gadget name here]

2009-12-05T12:17:00.006-05:00

After reading a post by Kevin Kelleher on Gigaom titled "Does Google Event Understand What News Is" and Schmidt's opinion on the WSJ this week titled "How Google Can Help Newspapers" I came up with some comments on this.I agree that Google is forcing a new business model down old medias' throats (such as the newspaper), and I agree with Kevin's comment that Murdoch is merely testing how much he

Toronto Google Street View Time-Lapse

2009-10-17T18:31:00.004-04:00

Its pretty exciting that Google Street View has finally launched across several Canadian cities.What is more exciting, is finding myself standing outside the ThinkWrap Solutions office!View Larger Map

Nicholas Zakas on "Writing maintainable JavaScript"

2009-10-07T21:37:00.004-04:00

A great video on JavaScript best practices by Nicholas Zakas at Yahoo!Nicholas Zakas: "Maintainable JavaScript" @ Yahoo! VideoI think his best suggestions are:don't put JS in CSS; its bad for performance as welldon't put CSS in JS; change styles by changing classes, and not actual styles. don't put HTML in JS; this is rather tricky to avoid, but again if the markup changes, its really time

Why I use Twitter

2009-08-17T20:16:00.003-04:00

I just read a post by Devin Coldewey about why he doesn't use Twitter. Of course everybody is entitled to their opinion on what they think about a product or service, hence this is my opinion on why Twitter has a place, adds value, and is as complete as a service really needs to be.Until February/March of this year I think, I didn't use Twitter nor believe in why I would but I then decided to

On Guaranteed SEO Results: Have I got a deal for you

2009-06-04T19:52:00.009-04:00

A search for "guaranteed SEO" on Google returns about 5,300,000 results. On the first page alone 6/10 results mention the word "Google". So this begs the question, is there such a thing as "guaranteed SEO"? Let's find out.According to Matt Cutts Google ranks pages according to relevance and reputation. Why should you believe him? well because he is the head of the Google Webspam team. When it

On the GM bankruptcy: Stay small, think big

2009-06-01T19:23:00.008-04:00

Today GM files for bankruptcy protection in an effort to "create a leaner, quicker more customer and completely product-focused company, one that's more cost competitive and has a competitive balance sheet," according to CEO Fritz Henderson. What happened today is only a sequel to many previous episodes where big companies have failed big. Remember Enron? Air Canada? American Airlines? Circuit

Hyperlocal News - Personalized News For You

2009-05-26T20:01:00.009-04:00

With online services like Animotto, Flickr, Blogger and Twitter almost anybody can be a video producer, photographer, journalist or news reporter- no degrees or formal training required. With these new mediums the average person can create and distribute their content with virtually no barriers to entry. This major shift gave rise to terms like hyperlocal and citizen journalism. Hyperlocal is

Referential Integrity: honesty is the best SEO policy

2009-05-21T18:38:00.005-04:00

What does it mean to provide something that is relevant, precise, and efficient? The common factor between these terms is the truth and nothing but the truth. Google defined the rules for this game; they want to help you rank higher, but you need to play by the rules. If you do so you get rewarded by PageRank i.e. your pages will rank higher on the search terms that you want. Try to cheat the

On the current state of online ads: Ads 3.0 - Social Aware. Context Aware. Personalized.

2009-05-21T08:00:00.002-04:00

Mozilla Labs launched a new experiment in how one may enhance their Firefox experience using Jetpack modules. Firefox plugins have been one of the most popular features of Firefox that allows the user to personalize and customize their Firefox web experience to their needs. Jetpack may be "how Firefox might be extending web functionality in years to come" according to a TechCrunch article. This

Navegg for behavior web analytics beyond Google Analytics

2009-05-20T19:47:00.017-04:00

Navegg is a web based add-on just like Google Analytics but aims to report on visitor demographics and behaviors - which you cannot achieve with Google Analytics.This information is extremely important for marketers, but it is also important if you aim to personalize your content for different users. The uses are not just limited to marketing as the data it gathers can and should influence your

Lessons learned from Gordon Ramsay

2009-05-18T15:53:00.008-04:00

Ever watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares? I mainly got into it because of the similarities between running a kitchen Gordon Ramsay style and how a lot of software processes could look at Gordon Ramsay for direction.Ramsay's kitchens are agile kitchens and if his kitchens followed a waterfall model like many software teams do then you would end up getting your food at 2am after arriving for

SEO without social; Cereal without Milk

2009-05-18T02:45:00.011-04:00

How does a bowl of cereal without milk sound? Some do it but you are always left with an extremely bugging question "Why?"SEO, SEM & SERPs - The Whats, Whys and Hows?Search Engine Optimziation according to Wikipedia is the process of improving the volume of traffic to a website from a search engine (aka Google) via organic results. Actually it is not just limited to Google, but if you don't exist

The Three Rules of Epidemics by Malcolm Gladwell

2009-05-13T21:49:00.009-04:00

In his book "The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" Malcolm Gladwell explains how that idea, trend or social behavior crosses that specific threshold and explodes. That magic point in time is the "Tipping Point".Malcolm's book is full of exciting and interesting examples on different trends in history and is a must read for anybody interested in social networks and how

Facebook Application: pul.se - truly personalized recommendation engines

2009-05-10T19:54:00.005-04:00

With the rise of the social web, personalization has quickly become more and more important for the consumers as well as the providers. Personalization allows you to target specific types of content to specific types of people, hence increasing your chances of being able to sell your product or service. Its Marketing 101 - if you want to sell your product or service to anybody you need to speak

Liferay Virtual Hosting & Friendly URLs

2009-05-10T03:14:00.023-04:00

Virtual hosting is an important feature in Liferay that allows you to customize Liferay URLs to suit your needs. You may want to customize the URL for SEO reasons or user friendliness or you may just not like having that '/web/guest/home' in the URL.What is the /web/guest/home for anyway?First let us try to understand what it means. The name of the servlet that deals with incoming requests is the

Real time, social, microblogging and context aware searching

2009-05-09T07:36:00.008-04:00

A couple of days ago Google's Eric Schmidt reportedly said that Google is looking into ways of intergrating microblogging within their search. 'Microblogging' is really code name for Twitter and this news is rather interesting after the rumors earlier this week about Apple, Microsoft and Google were eyeing Twitter - Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone was on the The View on Wednesday to announce that

iPhone Search Bar and Web Services

2009-05-07T07:43:00.006-04:00

I have started experimenting with developing applications for the iPhone last week - which is mainly why I bought a new mac mini to replace my old PowerBook G4.Apple did an amazing job with the documentation and there are a lot of great tutorials and resources available on the web and iTunes. After playing around with the 'hello world' app example I went a head and applied lessons from four

MAMP: Mac, Apache, MySQL, & PHP

2009-05-05T21:52:00.004-04:00

Install Apache, PHP and MySQL on a Mac in a few clicks. Search "Mac Apache MySQL PHP" and the first result you will get is MAMP. Like the popular LAMP installs for Linux you can do the same with a Mac with just a few clicks. You also get additional features that I have not seen on LAMP installs: a command and control center and Dashboard widget.

Technorati Blogosphere Tag Chart

2009-05-05T01:07:00.004-04:00

Just a few minutes after claiming my blog on Technorati I got introduced to their Blogosphere Chart widget which goes to show how useful this tool can be for not only researching your topics but keeping tabs on the top tags this week.The chart below compares Personalization vs. Context vs. Social Media vs. Social Web You can probably already tell what is on my mind, why is 'Personalization' not a

New Bloggers: Submit your content to the Social Web - the sooner the better

2009-05-05T00:24:00.007-04:00

Over the weekend I created my Technorati Profile to help promote my blog, build links, network and aid in my research before posting. Basically these are the reasons why one should use Technorati - one of many similar tools.About a month a go I started an experiment on this blog to generate more traffic with more focused and consistent content. The experiment started out with more technology

Social Media and the Swine Flu: The Social Web Pandemic

2009-05-03T14:21:00.006-04:00

What does it mean that a disease has been categorized as a pandemic? Mainly the disease must spread through a population dispersed over a large geographic area; a continent or even several continents.Consider the Swine Flu example. Lets say the Swine Flu is the recent profile page on Facebook or Twitter for example with around 400 friends or followers - those that caught it world wide. In only a

URL SEO Best Practices & Liferay Virtual Hosting

2009-05-02T22:47:00.008-04:00

It is very important to have a good URL if you are looking to improve your search engine page rank. At least if you are doing everything wrong in terms of SEO, having a good URL gives your website a little bit of hope.Don't use numbers, page ids, user ids, session ids, or even odd charactersThink about it, if the URL does not speak your language, you will have no idea what content it may point to

Thinking Out Loud: Content Personalization - Context Aware Ads and the Social Web

2009-05-01T19:55:00.012-04:00

In continuation from the first Thinking Out Loud post titled "Content Personalization - Tell Me Who Your Friends Are" the second - yet more important - use of this type of personalized content is targeted advertisement. Google has owned this area with their AdSense and AdWords products to deliver 'personalized' advertisements to you. Delivering ads based on content and context are very precise

Minimalistic Web Designs Are More Effective

2009-04-30T23:48:00.005-04:00

Its easy to see that minimalistic web designs are more effective - just compare google.com with yahoo.com and then compare the stock price for each. One glance at google.com is enough for you to know that Google does search, what does yahoo.com tell you? search? email? cars? real estate? news? personals? dating? Less is in fact more.The major component of a simple web design is plenty of white

Recursive Search in Google Maps - Why is it interesting?

2009-04-30T21:20:00.004-04:00

Apparently this has been out for some time now, but I am able to run recursive searches on Google Maps. I have used the "What is nearby" searches, but I was unaware I can do this from the search field.What is a typical search on Google Maps?Obviously the most common would be something like "2000 Main St. Hamilton, ON"Then there is a slightly more interesting search query...something like "Coffee

Thinking Out Loud: Content Personalization - Tell Me Who Your Friends Are

2009-04-28T04:45:00.002-04:00

"Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are"That saying cannot be more true today - especially with all the available social networks. How does Amazon make recommendations to its users? While they don't tell us everything they do, Amazon does reveal one part of it at least when you login:"These recommendations are based on items you own and more"I don't find recommendations

Google Maps Swine Flu Timeline

2009-04-27T21:23:00.002-04:00

A few hours a go I wanted to see a timeline of the Swine Flu and I just found this Swine Flu timeline on Google Maps Mania.Using the Google Earth plugin and the data from the same map I posted earlier that timeline was created. Very neat.Help me find the other two requests.

Track Swine Flu On Google Maps

2009-04-27T18:45:00.004-04:00

Google Henry Niman has published a Google Maps application to track the recent Swine Flu outbreak around the World. Google Google Maps platform is a great way to quickly publish applications regarding current events.For a Swine Flu tracking application I would like to see someone do any of the following:add a timeline and be able to view how the disease spread, just like the Google News Timeline

Free Ad-Hoc Business Intelligence and Database Reporting

2009-04-27T17:58:00.003-04:00

I struggled for the past week searching for an easy to use, intuitive and ad-hoc business reporting tool. Today I came across Wabit from SQL Power - a Canadian consulting firm that specializes in business intelligence reporting. There are a lot of software out there, but they were either not free, complicated to setup, or required SQL knowledge.Wabit is really easy to use and SQL Power did a

Wordle - Still Beautiful Word Clouds

2009-04-25T23:26:00.005-04:00

Generating a tag cloud is an art in itself, Wordle has perfected this art. I will try and generate a word cloud from this blog every month to try and visualize the topics I have been talking and ranting about here. Heres today's Wordle - click it to view a large size.Tag clouds do not just have to convey information using the size of each word, we are already restricted about what we can convey

Pimp Your Slides Using Prezi.com

2009-04-23T21:15:00.008-04:00

Learned about this neat presentation online application called Prezi. 100% online, free to use with some limitations (no private presentations, 100MB limit). Still awesome application, easy to learn and fun to use.Love it.Decided to give it a test drive and make a prezi out of my last topic "How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog"Sorry about the bad quality images, I just saved

How To: Use Twitter Feed and Bitly to Promote your Blog

2009-04-22T21:41:00.012-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I joined twitter in effort to experiment more with promoting my blog and get a bit more traffic.Before I get into that, rule number one in generating traffic isContent is KingNow I am not an expert in advertising via the social media nor advertising via any media, but I have learned a lot about promoting your blog and self using twitter over the past few weeks. As I learn

PhotoMap: Snap, Grab and Walk away

2009-04-21T23:53:00.007-04:00

Following an earlier post about improving university campus maps I found this neat mobile application that allows you to make better use of a physical map.Basically you snap a photo of the map whether its at a theme park, mall or university and have the application read your phone's GPS coordinates at two landmarks and mark the landmarks on the image.Now you can walk around and follow yourself on

Twitter Mail and Blogger Atlast

2009-04-21T19:29:00.007-04:00

Since I joined twitter a few weeks back I have been trying to figure out how to get my posts here automatically tweeted without me having to tweet each one individually. I was going about it the wrong way, I was looking for a widget that would do this.I was just looking over my settings and I noticed this "send posts to e-mail" field where I had my own email in there to get my own copy of my

Upgrade your university's campus map

2009-04-20T18:11:00.008-04:00

One of the recent projects we worked on was a campus map for the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). The great thing about this map, is that it is not the usual image or PDF map that seems to be the standard on a lot of universities' websites:For example the McMaster University Campus and the University of Toronto Campus use images along side image maps and tables to present information.There are

Neti Pot

2009-04-14T22:30:00.004-04:00

This may be a strange post and certainly not a topic I usually rant about, but this thing is ingenious!I came down with a bad flu, cough and the works last Thursday and been on a bunch of meds but this one really clears out the sinuses. Its a weird feeling, but it works. *Atchoo!*

The first McMaster website? possibly

2009-04-08T22:41:00.003-04:00

I just came across the internet archive - WayBack Machine. Always wondered how the first websites for different companies and organizations looked like.This is the first McMaster site for everybody I know who studied there, or is still there:The first Google.com site. What is really interesting, is that Google remained mainly consistent and they maintained the simplistic approach from the

Why is Yahoo bigger than Google in Japan?

2009-03-27T08:05:00.002-04:00

Found this post on mashable.com about Yahoo being bigger than Google in Japan - when it comes to search. Why?Stan Schroeder attributes this to things being different in Japan; for example the iPhone is struggling for market share there. Japan is way ahead of the rest in the world in technology, and it looks like that the iPhone is well behind in features compared to local phones. Japanese phones

Why Twitter sometimes collapses

2009-03-26T08:26:00.002-04:00

I just noticed something odd in the twitter over capacity screenshot I tookthe tweet birds are not flying in the same direction!

Ministry of Transportation Ontario Online Transaction - FAIL!

2009-03-26T08:04:00.005-04:00

Although I have been in Canada since 2001, I started my drivers license graduated program in 2004 only - I should have done it earlier but that is not the point of this post.The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario has an online transaction application to process your test booking - unfortunately this application seems to suffer from major problems. I recall this happened to me when I booked my

Twitter Over capacity

2009-03-24T21:49:00.004-04:00

wow..what are the odds, I was just trying to add a twitter feed to this blog and it was not pulling in any content.What's worse is that there will be "too many tweets" about this as soon as things are back up.

I give a tweet!

2009-03-24T21:28:00.003-04:00

I caught the twitter bug this week and decided to give twitter a chance. I did not even understand the whole idea behind it until I watched this great video that explains it all.Basically its great for learning more about what your friends or in twitter-lingo people your following aka stalking are doing between e-mails, phone calls, chatting, blogging, going out when you actually have a chance to

Computer breakdowns, Google Reader, TimeSpace and goodbye 2008

2008-12-30T04:05:00.006-05:00

Once again I find myself neglecting this blog, lets see if 2009 is a better year.So my PC laptop crashed at home last week, and after many many attemps I managed to boot it into safe mode just long enough to drag all my stuff out onto another drive. I loaded all my photos, university stuff, master's project and papers, etc. on to my G4 powerbook last night and everything seemed like it was

Is this the coolest way to browse Flickr or what?

2008-07-06T22:01:00.008-04:00

I Came across this Flex app (flash) a few weeks ago that searches tagged flickr images that match your choice of keywords. The app is called Tag Galaxy, try it out.So once again I am MIA on this blog for several months now. Nevertheless I have been very busy the past few months working on some very interesting projects.Google Earth Day 2008What have you done for Earth Day this year? I was on a

Deja vu!

2007-08-01T21:47:00.002-04:00

I was checking out findbyclick.com (a community to share map locations and points of interest using the Google Maps application), and I decided to check out the location for Pentura Solutions where I started working this week. To my surprise I found a black car parked right behind the office in an almost empty section of the lot and I thought "Deja vu!" This was the exact same view I saw today

Shakira ver 2.0 : )

2007-07-29T20:15:00.000-04:00

Over a year ago I drew Shakira using lines only, so today I thought I could do a better job at this and made another Photoshop drawing of Shakira. [Note: this drawing is property of Nael El Shawwa]Like the drawing of Ali you can follow the same pointers given there to produce a similar effect. Ali's hair is not as fancy as Shakira's so this part is the trickiest to do. My advice is to divide the

Photoshop Vector Cartoons

2007-07-04T23:16:00.001-04:00

I first started drawing these cartoons around two years ago [see the Photoshop labels for other posts like this]. Today I started a new type of Photoshop art called vector drawings. Its not really difficult to do, just needs an eye for colors. For example, I did this cartoon of my cousin Ali - he does not wear a rose on his ear, but I thought it would be hilarious if he did. So here is a simple

Rethinking time

2007-06-09T01:00:00.001-04:00

Adam Schwabe blogs:The Polar Clock has circular bars that move to complete the day of week, date, hour, minute and second in what first appears to be a confusing arrangement, but is surprisingly logical.This is a pretty neat perception of time, and it makes a lot of sense, probably even more sense than the confidential method. Other than having a really cool looking "clock", the interface is also

Sweet Revenge...at last

2007-05-23T20:55:00.000-04:00

Today was the Champions League final between AC Milan and Liverpool. After the defeat in 2005, Milan was back with a vengeance this year breaking Man Utd in the home game by 3-0 and now defeating Liverpool 2-1. The game did not start well for Milan in the first half. It was obvious Liverpool dominated that half by cutting the majority of the balls. I have to say Pennant from

28 Weeks Later

2007-05-19T17:05:00.001-04:00

I watched 28 Weeks Later last night at the moviers, after watching 28 Days Later last week on TV. The first part was really good, and I was waiting to watch the second part all week. The story is about a disease that spreads in the UK which causes people to turn into some sort of man eating zombie - very similar to the idea of Resident Evil. Both movies tell about the story of survival and how

kicking off the summer

2007-05-10T19:03:00.001-04:00

Its been quite warm laterly - not as warm as where I used to live, but warm in Canadian standards. This is a good thing, since I am sick of the cold. At least the heat cannot get painful, while the winter can with your ears and fingers feeling like they will fall off or break. In the summer, no matter how hot it may get, I have never had that feeling.Im done all six courses in my Masters program

MR Velocity Imaging talk

2007-05-05T21:31:00.001-04:00

On Monday May 7th, I present the results I obtained during one project I took on during my second semester of my Masters program. The topic is on MR velocity imaging and regularization of images. Basically the goal is to acquire noisy images while sampling less data. The reasoning behind this is that it is less expensive to sample less data that is noisy than to acquire complete noiseless data

New Blog !

2007-04-26T17:43:00.000-04:00

A new control panel was made for this blog site, and I was playing around with it and realized I just lost my blog style which I customized in their site. Sadly they do not save the html code of your previous styles, but only the actual template so I lost a lot of the customizaton. Anyway, I chose a new style and re-added the CBC news feed, but for some reason my Adsense advertisements failed to

Absolutely beaut-ti-ful!

2007-04-25T19:14:00.000-04:00

Kaka's second goal in the AC Milan - Manchester game yesterday that unfortunately ended 3-2 for Man Utd. was without any doubt the best goal of the game. Man Utd suffering from numerous injuries in their main ranks was left with a horrible defense line, which Kaka easily took advantage off -twice- . I do not remember laughing so hard when a goal was scored in a soccer game before. Watch for

Malaysian man pays US$54,300 for car license plate..

2006-10-16T11:33:00.000-04:00

Jeez, can anybody get even more stupid? $54k for a licence plate? Why? Why? Why? Well actually a lot are even more stupid than this. In the UAE were I used to the live, the goverment used to hold auctions on licence plates, and people would buy. The only difference there is that the licence plates have only numbers on them, not letters, and they have different colors. For example, the red licence

Tired beyond belief

2006-10-16T03:07:00.000-04:00

I think today can go down in my book of tiring days as the most tiring day ever. It started out with the gym this afternoon, then some jogging, followed by a game of squash (you might be thinking 'wow Nael seems pretty active' but mind you the last time I did any activity of half this magnitude was 2 months ago) then taking out some empty boxes that were lying around in my appartment, and tidying

First attempt at Autodeskin' it!

2006-09-22T00:27:00.001-04:00

I am taking a graduate level Mechanical Engineering course for my Masters degree. Its a 3D Surface Modelling course. A program called AutoDesk Inventor is used to build 3d objects from 2d drawings. I started playing around with it today to figure out how things work in it. The final result is the following drawing:Hmm..this would look neat on my desk at home..or even in my office (aka a cubicle)

Google your computer

2006-09-18T08:48:00.001-04:00

Since I formatted my computer last week I had to reinstall a lot of the software I initially had. I was downloading Google Earth since I like just playing around with it once in a while, and I came across Google Desktop. It brings Google search to your desktop and allows you to search for files on your machine very quickly and efficiently. It has several nice features since you can add several

Where did my summer go?

2006-09-08T20:07:00.000-04:00

So summer is officially over now, and its back to school for thousands of students including one new grad student by the name of Nael..yup thats me, I started my studies yesterday, but I had no classes yet. Neither did I have classes today, but everything should kick into 4th gear next week.I managed to get myself my old undergrad job at UTS again, so Im an SSC again for the 3rd year in a row.

M. Eng in 7 days

2006-08-31T18:34:00.001-04:00

My final week of my summer is about to start. Next week this time I would have finnished my first day of classes in the Masters of Computational Engineering program - if I have any classess that day. I have to take 7 courses during the program to graduate with this degree and I should be all done by Dec 2007. The plan is to take 3 courses now, another three next term and one more course in my

Windows XP on Apple Power PC? Why??

2006-08-13T22:05:00.000-04:00

Although I prefer Mac OS, Windows still has some advantages...one actually. There are a few applications I use that are only available for Windows. For example, I play this web based online game called Utopia. You can download a calculator to help you do some calculations that can help you make decisions in the game. Unfortunately this calculator is only available for Windows and the developer

OpenGL Programming

2006-08-07T23:13:00.001-04:00

In an effort to get more involved in 3d programming which may be my field of study when I finally sort out my Masters of Engineering here at McMaster I downloaded what is referred to "The RedBook" which is the official guied to learning OpenGL.OpenGL is an environment for developing 2d and 3d graphics applications from simulations to games. Its widely used in industry since its first release in

Moog screenshot

2006-08-03T16:06:00.000-04:00

Here is the screenshot you were promised yesterday:Some more changes were done today..its getting better everyday..hmm..The stop server button is not aligned properly...grr..

Modularize Modularize Modularize

2006-08-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

Four years of software engineering and years of getting that word hammered into my brain and I still failed to follow that concept at work which got me in trouble later as I have been modularizing my work for the past three days..If I did it from the start I would not have had this happen. The problem is that everything was together and I had no easy way of modifying the interface. Modifying

Reminder to all: Italy world cup champs 2006

2006-07-29T13:41:00.000-04:00

Ok, I know promised I will not talk about this anymore, but I just pulled out the pictures I took when I went downtown and celebrated with the Italians. Check them out here.

One Red Paperclip...

2006-07-29T13:04:00.001-04:00

I have been keeping track of this little story of a Canadian guy who started trading a red paperclip July 12 2005 in hope of being able to trade his way into a house. Surprisingly he accomplished that on July 12 2006. This just proves that almost anything is possible!! Who thought someone would be able to trade his way from a paperclip all the way to a house.So this whole red paper clip business