Black [X] Truder

This Blog Has Moved!

2007-09-14T04:29:00.000+03:00

Dear Friends,

As of today, I will resume posting on another web address. Please update your links and make sure you pay me a visit there, there are wonderful news at the other end :)

Moved to : http://black-extruder.net/blog/

Mysterious Car Explosion

2007-07-31T15:18:00.000+03:00

This took place at 3:15 AM this Sunday, the day the Tawjihi results were announced. Although what you’re about to read may look like a scene from an action movie, this is a 100% real story. It may happen to anyone, and you won’t believe what caused it!

That day, Tareq Al-Helo drove his car to pickup his younger brother Talal (both friends of mine) from a friend’s house. He arrived there, parked his car in the building’s park and waited for his brother. Talal came few minutes later with a couple of friends who need a ride. They all got in and Tareq tried to start the car …

As soon as Tareq turned the key inside the switch, sparks started to come out of the gear box and the car’s front. Seconds later they heard a big “Boom” and the hood went on fire!

They all come out of the car. Tareq ran to get help, Talal stayed at the car, while the other two guys ran away as fast as they could.

Talal tried to open the car’s trunk to take the extinguisher but he got electrocuted. He kicked the trunk several times till it opened, picked up the extinguisher and tried to set the fire down. The engine then exploded, and flaming oil was sprayed inside as well as outside the car. Luckily, none of it got on Talal.

Several explosions followed, the glass burst out, the tires went down and the fire was extending despite all Talal’s efforts. The fuel tank was surely going to explode creating a massive explosion, damaging the building, and blowing off nearby cars as well.

Tareq brought some help back. They all decided the push the car away from the building and so they did. The fire trucks arrived later and put the fire down before it reached the fuel tank. There was nothing left of the car. It all melted down leaving a chassis with two tires and some paint.

The police investigation found out that the car wasn’t sabotaged or tempered with. It all happened due to … static electricity!

For an unknown reason, the car chassis was accumulating charge for some time. The car was charged like a bomb and nobody felt it. Cars are normally insulated from the ground by tires, you can’t get electrocuted if you’re sitting inside a car even if you grabbed a 240V line by your teeth (unless the car’s downside is close enough to the ground so that air starts conducting). Passengers are further insulated from the chassis by seats and car’s interior. The closest point of contact between a charged chassis and the driver is always the gear box.

Looking at it analytically, there’se nothing they could have done. They also couldn’t have known. If only the car was touched by a metallic object on the ground, or if someone was kind enough to step into the car barefoot, nothing of this would have happened.

Anyway, thank god all the guys got out of the car before it’s too late, or else they would be serving their meat in McDonald’s today :)

Musical Perception

2007-07-28T11:37:00.000+03:00

When I was a little kid, long before I first held a guitar, I had a chance to learn the natural notes and some basic music concepts while trying to compose melodies on a very old computer. Few years later, I was introduced to waves through the science class in school and I instantly linked them to musical notes seeing that both share an interesting attribute: frequency.

My understanding of their similarities became deeper as I progressed through school and as I developed my analytical attitude. Now that I play guitar, I get to think of this every single day. One thing that still gets me wondering, after all those years, is the communicative power of music, the thing that makes music similar to a “language”.

It is more like a fact actually, it can’t be denied: music CAN commune ideas, specifically feelings, but how come?

Those who play music can relate better to what is next. Musical phrases built on minor scales sound more saddening than the ones built on major scales, although both are a merely a bunch of waves of different frequencies. Keep in mind that the communication am talking about does not involve the types of instruments, the genres of music, or the vocals. This is all about music in its rawest form, the melody.

Certain songs make us feel certain ways although we weren’t taught to make these connections. It looks like our brains are hard-wired to match frequency progressions to certain ideas. It can’t be learnt, it can’t be altered, and weirdest of all: it is common between all people. We’re certainly preprogrammed to music.

While searching about this on the Internet, I came across an interesting study by a PhD student from The University of Auckland (Link). She made a group of 72 people, 36 of which were professional musicians and 36 were non-musicians, undergo a long series of lingual tests under three different conditions. They did the tests with no music in background, with music played with the right notes, and with music played with inconsistent notes.

The tests were intended to find the effect of music on the brain’s lingual performance. According to the researcher, past research has showed that musicians process music on the left side of their brains while non-musicians process it on the right side. The left side of the brain is dominantly associated with the processing of language.

The test results showed that the musicians’ lingual abilities were hindered with music being played in the background (either with the right notes or not), while they performed better in silence conditions. This shows that musicians’ brains process music as a language.

On the other hand, non-musicians scored seemingly equal results with and without music, indicating that their brains do not process music as a language.

I can’t really tell if my perception of music is affected by me being a musician. So is music really a language? Non-musicians, what do you think?

Blogger in Draft

2007-06-26T17:55:00.000+03:00

Blogger has introduced a new experimental interface that allows users to test all the new features that Blogger is currently working on. It’s called Blogger in draft, and it’s almost like Google Labs!

The interface is available for everyone at http://draft.blogger.com/

The first introduced beta feature is Video Upload! Although am not a big fan of blog videos, native host support for videos must be cool. The Video Upload tool is available in the post editor, right next to the image upload tool.

For more information on this service, check the official blog.

You can also take a look on the video player by checking this post. It looks great and better: it doesn’t link to outside sites :)

An Unintended Transmission

2007-06-20T19:11:00.000+03:00

This is how a friend and I were trying to drive a DC motor and ended up making our first wireless broadcast without even knowing it! It took me one day after to figure out what really happened …

That day, we went down to Al-Abdali, bought some electronic components, and came back to my place to try them up. We were trying to drive a DC motor and control its speed using a PIC microcontroller. The circuit we connected was something like this:

The circuit was basically a common-collector (buffer) arrangement that is intended to switch the motor on/off using a low-current microcontroller logic signal. It worked perfectly for still logic values.

As soon as that worked, we reprogrammed the microcontroller to generate an oscillating signal in an attempt to drive the motor at a lower speed. We used Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) which is a technique that involves changing the duty cycle of a rectangular signal in order to change its DC average. Supplying a motor with a rectangular signal of amplitude 5 volts and 50% duty cycle is like giving it 2.5 effective DC volts. Using the microcontroller we can easily change the duty cycle (0 to 100%) of the control signal and thus change the effective amount of DC voltage delivered to the motor.

It sounds cool but unfortunately it didn’t work using our design (I found later that the switching times for the BJT transistor we used were too long and couldn’t match the frequency of the control signal, we should have used MOSFETs).

Anyway, after we re-programmed the microcontroller to use PWM, the motor became motionless and we started testing the pins with the voltmeter. My friend connected the voltmeter probe to the base of the transistor and there it happened …

We heard a “beep” going out from somewhere!

It wasn’t the circuit … it wasn’t the voltmeter … and it wasn’t the power supply. The sound actually came from the computer speakers that were right next to us.

It was a bit weird … the computer had no connection whatsoever with what we were doing and the sound was produced only when the voltmeter probe was connected to that specific pin.

I was too tired and exhausted that time that I just didn’t bother to find out what that was. We ignored the sound, and kept experimenting with the motor for some time.

The next day I paid it a little thought and found out what was that about …

Whenever the voltmeter probe was connected to the base of the transistor, it was connected to the PWM signal. Since tiny currents flow into the base of the transistor and inside the voltmeter, the probe picked up the entire signal and worked as an antenna! It broadcasted a rectangular periodic signal which, according to Fourier, is an infinite sum of sinusoidals at integer multiples of its fundamental frequency. The frequency we used was 500 Hz, which is pretty low, and so the resulting harmonics were at 500, 1000, 1500 Hz and so on. Periodic signals with low frequencies have denser frequency spectra. The frequency we used, along with its harmonics, was in the audible frequency range and was thus easily picked by the computer’s sound card!

It sounds weird but that’s what actually happened!

It’s not like we broadcasted anything meaningful, but as far as we went, that was an official monotonic test signal transmission :P

My BMW Passed Away

2007-06-15T04:09:00.000+03:00

This wasn’t pretty much the first thing I wanted to post about since I came back but yup … my younger brother finally did it … he drove my car to its final destination … and left it there, lying dead, waiting to be sold for good.

For whoever of you that may be concerned, he got out without a scratch, but not after I got my hands on him. I just hope I didn’t scare the neighbors too much :)

Most of my friends already know about this, my younger brother (who still didn’t acquire his driving license) has been driving for almost a year. My advices and warnings to my parents about that went totally useless. All I can say is that sometimes my parents weren’t strict enough to realize evident cruel facts and take the necessary actions.

Two years ago, he totaled a car we had back then. He was too young and was going to be sentenced to jail haven’t I posed as driver infront of my parents and the police. My driving license was taken by the police and I went into so much trouble trying to have it back that I stopped trying, and I didn’t get it back till the day. Add to that I was blamed by my parents for my reckless driving!

So anyway, we bought our 318i a couple of years ago. My parents registered it under my name. It was truly a fine car … a catch; solid body, magnificent paint, and in a great shape for a BMW that spent an age with guy drivers. My brother was implicitly denied to ride. One day I went to Karak for a week or so, and came back to find him out with the car somewhere. Apparently, my parents, wise enough, decided he shall be allowed to drive now =)

The reckless driving and the skidding started soon after. One day, later on, he scratched its flawless pearly paint. Another day he got a bumper hit. Not so-long after he smashed it, got a tire exploded, hit the axis, bumped it over the roads … once, twice, and every now and then on a one year run. The maintenance rounds couldn’t outperform my younger brother’s driving.

My parents, seemingly seeing these as a series of unfortunate events, didn’t respond to the warnings, and willingly gave him full freedom as to whatever concerns the car.

I, having no time to pay attention to what goes on and off with the car, couldn’t but watch my car die bit by bit … like a leaf in fall … drops off, dries and discolors slowly as life is being sucked away from its veins.

Today my car made it to its terminal stop. Luckily no one got harmed. My father convinced me to let go of the car as I, in the first place, will leave Jordan after I graduate and will eventually be losing it then.

The car was never my problem … something that my parents still fail to understand :)

I’ve always imagined cars in the streets as living entities, each with its own attributes, skills, and mood! A good car … a nice car … an angry car … a powerful car … For me, my BMW was my colour, had my skills, and was perfectly my mood. The way I thought of it, the driver was the part that animated the car, but was also the part the held its character, skills, and gave it its human impressions, which is more important than the colour, the shape, the engine, or any of the physical details of the car.

Putting it my way, no matter what happens to the car, as long as the driver is alive, the same car will always be reborn … in a different form maybe :)

Scheduled for Reactivation

2007-06-10T03:37:00.000+03:00

Hello everyone,

In case anyone is still visiting this desolate place; this is just to let you know that am going to resume posting on my blog soon.

All I can say is that I can't believe how popular I am (not a single 'Weenak?' during 4 months, ya salam 3al sha3beyyeh :P).

Anyways, for those who still care ... this blog is coming back to life soon :)

My First Computer Virus

2007-02-05T22:35:00.000+02:00

After two weeks of exhausting yet “exciting” hard work it’s finally here! Ladies and gentlemen am glad to introduce to you “Genesis”; my first malicious self-replicating metamorphic piece of code, or in simpler terms … my first computer virus! :D

The story began on a cold Friday evening a couple of weeks ago. By then the semester was already over and I was about to start studying for my upcoming final exams. My friend Jareer had an assembly exam and asked for my help trying out few assembly programs days before his exam.

We gathered at Basel’s house, set up a laptop and an assembler and immediately began writing and assembling short snippets of code. One of the things that I always like to do when I help a friend with a computer-related course is to make and show him, at the spot, a practical and interesting application of the thing he’s studying as a mere attempt to raise his spirit before getting into boring technicalities.

The curriculum of the assembly course he has taken did cover File Access interrupts; how low level assembly code deals with files and the file system in general. It was an interesting subject for me to read about, especially that I had no knowledge about this specific topic and I wondered about it a couple of times before!

Anyway, the notes he had were straight forward and provided enough information for me to make a short program that dumps itself from memory into an executable COM file. That is; it creates a simple executable containing its own code.

I showed the program to Zaid, who was there that time, and he laughed a bit. “Not like it can dump itself into an EXE!” he said, which was a good point on why this was a lame attempt. For those of you who don’t know; COM Files are the simplest kind of executables there is; they contain pure machine code right from the first byte all over till the last one. EXE executable files, on contrary, support multi-segment code and contain a variety of tables and values instructing the OS how to load and execute their code. Their structure is so complicated that you certainly need to research a little bit before deciding the mess with an EXE file using a hex editor!

Zaid’s comment on copying into EXE files made me think … “why not? :P” …

The following day was the start of two weeks of hard work. I was a bit uncomfortable during this period because the exams were going and I couldn’t resist working on this thing. I worked whole nights before exams and managed to study a little bit although I wasn’t into it, not at all.

Anyway, here’s a glance of what I got! Some basic information that you need to know before you continue reading on …

Shown above is the structure of simple DOS executable that has no Windows header (left), and next to it (right) is a diagram of the same executable once loaded in memory. The executable file contains what is called a “DOS Header”, which is a bunch of information that the operating system needs to know in order to handle the executable. The header includes such information as: the size of the file in blocks (chunks of 512 bytes), the number of bytes in the last block, the size of the header itself, a pointer to a Windows header (if any exist), the file checksum word, the offset where code starts, and the initial value of the IP register (called the program’s Entry Point).

So what I was trying to make was a piece of code that appends itself to an executable file and modifies the executable’s entry point so that execution starts with the appended code. Later, this code will perform a jump to pass execution to the host program. The “injection” must be accompanied with the appropriate modifications to the file header to ensure that the file remains a valid DOS executable and behaves as expected.

After some reading, I was able to manually inject an executable into another using a hex editor. Soon after I formulated a code snippet to do that and with a bit of more work I came out with Genesis. Here’s how it works …

Genesis will check all files with an EXE extension in its current directory. It will analyze matching files to find suitable victims. Target executables must be valid 16-bit DOS executables that are smaller than 64 KBs. Once a victim is located, it is infected with the virus. The infection process involves creating an encrypted copy of the virus code with a decryption module on top of it. Genesis will encrypt itself by performing a series of XOR operations on its own machine code with a series of incrementing bytes starting with a random value, a key. This key will be saved in the decryption module for the generated virus copy to decrypt itself and run later. The encrypted copy of the virus code will be generated on top of the host program’s stack segment, which is used as the working area for the virus. The following diagram illustrates the structure of an infected executable, and the corresponding process once loaded in memory …

The victim’s entry point will be changed to point to the offset of the decryption module. The amount of memory demanded by the victim application as a stack segment will be increased to allow the virus to use the stack segment to copy itself later.

Although Genesis is a 16-bit virus and is emulated rather than actually ran by Windows on 32-bit Pentium machines, it is definitely considered a computer virus! Both McAfee Enterprise and Symantec Antivirus recognize the viral activity of Genesis, although their responses were a bit different. McAfee blocks Genesis whenever it tries to infect other programs and identifies it as Univ/r. Symantec, on the other hand, recognizes the virus code before execution and identifies it as Bloodhound.DirActEXE. The viral activity is pretty obvious because this virus modifies the entry points of other executables which is suspicious enough I guess :P

You can download Genesis Assembly Source Code (2 KBs) here. You may need a bunch of some handy 16-bit applications (1 KB) for your infection purposes, plus Microsoft Macro Assembler 5.13 & CodeView 3.14 (388 KB) to compile and observe the activity of the virus.

The virus source code linked above is safe to download. Compiling this code will generate a special infected program, it will NOT compile into Genesis. This is simply because Genesis is not a standalone program; it is a piece of code. The differences between this program and other infected ones are that this program passes execution to the virus code by itself; it’s not hijacked. Also, this program contains bare unencrypted virus code.

This virus does not do anything except for replication. It also displays a notification whenever it is executed and shows a brief of its file-scan status.

Genesis is just the start; I’ve already started researching the possibility of developing a 32-bit version of the virus targeting Windows executables. The good thing is; the virus code is less than 2 KBs in size which leaves plenty of room for further tricks and functionality. I also became acquainted with some means of evading detection but I’ll save them for my future plans. Putting any more work on an open-source virus will be a waste of my time.

Please note that this virus was made for educational and entertainment purposes only, and as a proof-of-concept that viruses can be engineered on 16-bit platforms and ran on 32-bit ones. Whether or not you decide to screw yourself and your 16-bit applications by running this virus is totally up to you. Genesis should NOT be used for destructive purposes (yeah right :P). No seriously, this is dangerous and should not be run without taking the necessary precautions. Have fun ;)

White & Nerdy

2007-01-12T02:56:00.000+02:00

This song by Weird Al Yankovic, better known as Weird Al, is a must check-out! :D

Quoting Wikipedia,

“Weird Al Yankovic is an American musician, satirist, parodist, accordionist, and television producer. Yankovic is known in particular for his humorous songs that make light of popular culture and that parody specific songs by contemporary musical acts.”

White & Nerdy is a hilarious re-make or a “parody” on Chamillionaire’s “Ridin” which is a good beat rap that is currently being played often by Jordanian radio stations. The parody combines the beat with hilarious lyrics!

Quoting Wikipedia again …

The song both laments and revels in nerdiness, as recited by the subject who can't "roll with the gangstas" because he is "just too white and nerdy", and includes constant references to stereotypically nerdy things, such as editing Wikipedia and playing Dungeons & Dragons.

During the video clip, the guy tries running into gangsters a couple of times; check the clip to know how it ends!

The song lyrics are so much fun. Although the geeky stuff mentioned in the song are simply countless, there’s only one thing that this guy and I apparently have in common: we both do code for friends :D

Full Song Lyrics Here, and Song on YouTube Here!

The 2006 Double Tag

2007-01-01T23:34:00.000+02:00

I’ve been tagged by Ora and Tala to list some of my first-time, best, and worst moments of 2006. Below is a snapshot of the memories I was able to recollect.

For the First Time:

Cracked a shareware program.
Built a device from scratch; a digital ohmmeter.
Got something for my birthday.
Exploited a money system, unintentionally though.
Sat in the back seat of my own car.
Sent an SMS to my brother.

Best Moments:

Getting my electric guitar.
Driving my car after the engine upgrade.
Getting a license key for a $249-valued software just by asking the developers for it.
Losing a police car that once came in my pursuit without letting the cops get my plate number.
When my cousins and I used to freak guys in the streets by showing sudden and unexpected insane behavior.

Worst Moments:

Tasting extreme high-adrenaline fear in a couple of occasions.
Ending eight hours of hard work by realizing that I set 12 volts into my computer’s parallel port damaging the port forever.
Seeing dead cats on the streets.
Giving lame university activities a try and later be assured, even more, that they’re just a waste of time.
Being around people who fail to interpret my character.

Again people, am asking you all to stop tagging me for good. If you guys have any personal questions feel free to drop me an email and I’ll be replying kindly to your queries. In extreme cases I can give you my phone number or even arrange a meeting if you so badly want me to answer your tags, just leave my blog out of this :D

Have a happy new year! :)

Tagged by Abed

2006-12-25T16:59:00.000+02:00

Hey Again, the exams are finally over (for now) so it’s time to blog again!

Here it goes ... Starting with the tags!

I’ve been tagged twice, first one was by Abed a couple of months ago (Sorry for the late response!). The second tag I got was from Ora, and will be replied to in the next post.

Now on a side note, am not really into tags guys so please spare me the apologies next time: I won’t be answering any more tags! (Thanks Abed and Ora though, nothing personal but I really feel terrible about chaining).

1) Do you like the look and the contents of your blog?

Yeah, I designed every single bit of my blog so it looks the exact way I want it to be. Also my posts are about stuff I personally find interesting, so my blog is unquestionably the most interesting blog I ever came across :D

2) Does your family know about your blog?

My younger brother has no idea what blogging is about; he thinks am one of those freaks who write down their diaries on their computers. My little 7-year old sister has quite a better idea; she often asks me to navigate through my latest posts, show her the pictures, and tell her what the post is about if she finds any interesting pictures. She’s also been nagging on me for a while now to make a post about her and upload her picture!

3) Can you tell your friends about your blog? Do you consider it a private thing?

I don’t consider it a private thing, though I don’t like to tell people who don’t know what blogging is about it.

4) Did your blog positively affect your mind? Give an example.

Negative. Blogging has never been an adequate space for me to pose and debate my own views, although few times comments did bring good points to my attention.

5) Do you just read the blogs of those who comment on your blog? Or do you try to discover new blogs?

I don’t have enough time to look for new blogs, but I certainly do check the blogs of those who comment on mine.

6) What does the number of visitors to your blog mean? Do you use a traffic counter?

The number of hits a blog gets is an indicator of how popular it is. Checking how this number changes with new posts gives the blogger a good idea of what topics interest visitors more. I use Google Analytics to monitor traffic on my blog.

7) Did you imagine how other bloggers look like?

Never bothered. I actually know what most of them look like because they post their pictures.

8) Do you think that blogging has any real benefit?

Any “Real” benefit? I don’t think so.

9) Do you think that the blogsphere is a stand alone community, separated from the real world?

The blogosphere is a passive reflection of the real world. Both worlds are linked in many ways, but disconnected in far more other ways. Still, they're certainly not separated.

10) Do you think that criticizing your blog is useful?

I honestly doubt that :P

11) Do some political blogs scare you? Do you avoid them? Does arresting some bloggers in the Arab world surprise you?

Yeah, political blogs are boring to an extent that scares me. I feel a bit scared when I think about political blogs, especially at night :F

12) Have you ever thought about what might happen to your blog in case you died?

I’ll keep posting from the other world.

13) Which blogger had the greatest impression on you?

Ummm, nobody?

14) Which blogger you think is the most similar to you?

Same as 13

15) Name a song you want to listen to.

Metallica's "Unforgiven", dedicated to Abed and Ora :P

16) Ask five bloggers to answer these questions on their blogs.

Am not asking anybody; the tag ends here :)

Blog Inactivity

2006-12-14T23:51:00.000+02:00

Hey Everybody!

Sorry for not posing for the past three weeks! I’ve been running very busy lately and accordingly this blog got into a long idle state. I had many thoughts and stuff to post about but unfortunately didn’t have enough time! The university labs are taking so much of my time this semester and am barely keeping up with my other activities.

I’ve got exams next week; I’ll be coming back to my blog soon after …

You all take care! :)

أهل اربد الأقوياء

2006-11-24T16:19:00.000+02:00

The freshmen taking the military science course with me are nuts! They keep laughing, talking nonsense and acting crazy!

Last lecture I came in and found this on the board ...

Hotmail Goes 1000 MB

2006-11-16T21:19:00.000+02:00

Hotmail was down for the past 8~10 hours, and has just came back to service with a big surprise:

All accounts were upgraded to 1GB storage space!

The downtime, which was a bit too long for the core MSN service, was apparently used to perform the upgrade. I’ve checked several Hotmail accounts and looks like the upgrade went through all accounts regardless of country or account age.

Microsoft has paid its Hotmail storage volume poor attention since the early beginning. Free Hotmail accounts used to start with 2 MBs of storage space and were later expanded to 25 MBs. Microsoft’s main competitors, Google and Yahoo!, have been continuously increasing their storage capacities and upgrading/adding to their services as well. Google currently features 2785 MBs of storage capacity while Yahoo! features 1000 MBs. Yahoo! has also launched a new AJAX-based mail interface recently. Although still in Beta, the new Yahoo! Mail Beta looks very promising.

Instead of working out its Hotmail service, Microsoft decided to launch a new Live Mail service, which was coldly welcomed by Hotmail users.

The new Live Mail was introduced in Beta stage, while (functionally-speaking) was pre-alpha! Live Mail lacked core web-mail features and didn’t even work for some browsers. Hotmail users have been invited to upgrade their accounts to Live Mail but only few tried and retained the upgrade.

Microsoft later decided to feature 1000 MBs of storage space for its Live Mail users, but looks like the majority of users didn’t bother.

During the past year, tricks have crossed the Internet on how to increase Hotmail’s storage capacity to 250 and 1000 MBs. The 250 MB upgrade, which I previously posted about, did actually work. The 1000 MB upgrade, however, was merely a trick to fool Hotmail to upgrade the storage space by submitting a deceitful request to join Live Mail. The trick did work, but few days later Hotmail used to perform the upgrade to Live Mail. Upon downgrading, the 25/250 MB capacity was restored.

Anyways, those tricks are now history as all Hotmail accounts should shortly be upgraded to 1GB. Rumors say that Microsoft is already planning for a further 2GB, or even a 4GB upgrade, which I think is too good to be true! (ma ba7o6 be themte :P)

Reverse Code Engineering

2006-10-28T20:30:00.000+03:00

As I spent the whole holiday sick at home, and I got no chance whatsoever to go outside (except for the last couple of days maybe), I had enough time to finish off all the work and the things I was planning to do on my computer. Many projects from the old days, each in a separate folder, were waiting on my desktop for me to have enough time to resume digging into.

Out of boredom, I decided to dig up something I barely got into previously: Reverse Code Engineering; the art of breaking into executable files and modifying their machine code to obtain different execution behavior.

If you have ever installed or used unlicensed computer software before then you, probably, have used reverse-engineered programs at some point; the illegal ones of them ... Cracks!

Software Cracks are modified software executables that have been reverse-engineered by crackers to deactivate product registration, activation, limitations, and nagging screen routines. The cracked or “patched” program works as good as a full/registered version. It has been altered at the machine language level to do so.

Long before, I made a very basic, yet interesting, experiment in this regard. I coded and compiled a simple C++ program, then started analyzing and messing with its machine code using disassemblers and hex editors. The first program was actually something like this:

These four lines of C++ were compiled into some hundred lines of assembly. I used a disassembler to trace down the string “Password Correct” and look up the instructions that reference the memory location it was being held in.
I came up with the following machine code and assembly listing:

The CMP instruction was comparing a certain value in memory with 7Bh (which is equal to 123 in decimal). The second JNE (Jump if Not Equal) instruction made the program branch at that point to one of two paths, depending on the result of the previous comparison.

Using a hex editor, I replaced 75 (op-code for JNE) with 74 (op-code for JE) which is the opposite instruction. The program (now cracked :P) started to output “Password Correct” for any user-entered password EXCEPT 123 :D

That was the very first experiment, and I was really glad it worked!

In the previous days, I made more tests and came out with much complicated tricks. Instead of reversing IF statements, I tried jumping (using the JMP instruction) to the code right inside the IF statement, trying to bypass the evaluation of the condition, and it worked! :D

My friend Zeid had an interesting argument over jumping and bypassing sections of code. He said that jumping can’t always be the solution because sometimes you skip code that is essential for the proper execution of the program. That was definitely correct, but I actually found a way to do the jump safely!

The “dangerous” jump was tried on the following program:

My target was to make this program call the function secret() with x=17 immediately at startup, i.e. not to even request user input. I wanted to wipe out the user-input section and remove the limitation of x having to be less than 5.

What I did was overwriting the cout and cin assembly code sections with NOP (No Operation) instructions (a cool way I came up with to “comment-out” those sections :P) then replace some of those NOPs with the following assembly instructions:

Carefully tried that, and yup … it WORKED! :D

That was a “dangerous” code jump of my side, but I did good I guess! :P

Coding my own assembly into that EXE and observing how it worked was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done in my life!

Next am trying to crack, e7m … “Reverse Engineer” some old DOS shareware, wait for the results ;)

Terror of the Python

2006-10-16T15:49:00.000+03:00

Despite all the efforts I made to stop this blog from becoming a National Geographic affiliate, it looks like it was destined to. Animals keep popping around like we’re living in a jungle or something, or maybe am just paying unnecessary attention to the presence of non-human life forms around. Anyways, the last animal I met was actually in my friend’s apartment …

This is “Tshi-Tshi”, a Bull (Python) snake that my friend Basel bought as a pet. It’s a non-venomous snake that eats small mammals and lies down sleeping for most of the time. Basel said he always wanted to raise a snake; and since his family is absent for the time being, he brought Tshi-Tshi to share his place with him.

We had a good opportunity to get to know Tshi-Tshi since we gather frequently at Basel’s house. It is a cool animal once you get used to it. I like the way it sneaks on the floor and around the furniture to explore the area.
I also adore its tactical strategies; it lays low whenever possible, clings to heavy parts of the furniture, and never travels fast in an unexplored terrain. A good and strategic hunter for sure!

We also became familiar with Tshi-Tshi’s food, this thing …

This “mouse” thing makes an entertaining pet on its own. The only difference is that you don’t have to really “worry” about this pet; you can do whatever you want with it till your snake feels hungry next time. You only have to pay attention not to cripple the mouse in anyway because if you do so, your snake won't feel like eating it.

Tshi-Tshi has a poor appetite; it eats no more than a mouse per week. The mouse in the picture above was last week's meal and is now resting peacefully in Tshi-Tshi’s stomach. The snake’s eating process is very bizarre and worth watching. Basel has recorded some of its final seconds; you can check it out here …

Video No. 1: "Tshi-Tshi Eating"
(Warning: contains gore scenes unsuitable for children below 60!)

We also recorded an attempt we made to feed Tshi-Tshi. In this video you can see how a mouse reacts when it figures that the long gigantic thing lying in front of it is a SNAKE! :D

Video No. 2: "Roaming around a snake!"

The last video is a must-watch! This video shows the mouse performing stunning acrobatics while being held by the tail few centimeters above the snake’s head :D

Video No. 3: "Mouse Acrobatics"

Poor fellow … it freaked out to the most in its final moments …

May god rest its soul in peace! :P

Download from YouTube

2006-10-12T02:53:00.000+03:00

Most people don't know about this but videos can be actually downloaded from YouTube and other similar video sharing services seamlessly. The option is built-in there although those services decided not to feature it for obvious reasons.

I've been using YouTube to download some song clips, technology showcases and game trailers lately. YouTube has more videos than you can find anywhere else, and is one of the fastest growing web sites on the Internet. With these simple steps you'll be able to download whatever video(s) you like to your computer. Here is what you'll need:

The Video Encoder: FLV_File_Encoder.zip (1.46 MB)

Download this file and extract its contents to a new folder.

Instructions:

1. Copy the link of the page showing the video you want to download.

For example :
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MJDdJoBTwYE

2. Go to this web site or this one.

3. Paste the link in the text field and click Download.

5. A Download Link will appear in the Download section little below, right-click this link and click Save-As.

6. Name the file “Some Video.flv” including the double quotations. You can replace Some Video with whatever name you want, just make sure you include the .flv extension and the double quotes.

7. Click Save and wait till the download completes.

8. Move the FLV file(s) you downloaded to the encoder directory and double-click Encode All.

9. The encoder will encode every FLV file in the directory and produce equivalent AVI files which can be played by most media players. You can delete the FLV files afterwards.

Let me know if you had any trouble :)

A Very “Proud” Fellow

2006-09-30T02:51:00.000+03:00

A couple of days ago I was working on some mathematical formulae related to the file-wave conversion, the thing that I was burbling about in the previous post. It was 2 o’clock after midnight and everything was totally quiet. I could hear my younger brother slam the house door and move up the stairs to our room. I was digging into the Fourier Series coefficients formula when he entered the room holding this …

Ghaith: esh hada bil zab6?
Loai: Saqer!
Ghaith (sarcastically): billllaaah 3alek?

Apparently, my brother “borrowed” it from one of his friends. It is a very young eagle who’s being kept by his friend as a pet! :S

I was a bit surprised to hear that there are people in Amman keeping eagles as “pets”! I know that eagles can be raised in farms or in the deserts as luxury birds, or as hunting assistants, but I least expected to see one raised in an apartment :D

My brother said that as long as it’s being fed good amounts of meat, which is the only thing it eats, it won’t cause any problems; it won’t fly away and it won’t think of hunting down the street cats :P

The little eagle sounded very quiet, a bit arrogant maybe, more like it thinks nothing in the world can harm it! It didn't pay any attention to our gestures and acted very calm. It is a very fearful and proud bird indeed :)

We tried to push it to fly around so we can see how it looks like with its wings spread wide open, but it wasn’t really into it; it flew one meter and landed on one of my guitars.

My brother told me it may not be in the mood because it just had a fight with a cat right outside the house. My brother and his friend put one of the neighborhood cats in front of the eagle to see how it would react. The eagle, being apparently well-fed, didn’t bother at all. The cat, however, had a different opinion: it thought the little eagle was a pigeon and so it attacked it!

My brother told me they had to pull the eagle away instantly because it was being hurt by the cat and it didn’t fight back, nor did it try to escape. He said it looked like it's being “annoyed” more than it looked scared. I think it is fascinating, though a bit dumb, that these birds do not know what fear is. Even the fatal dangers won’t scare the little ones of them.

I admired the bird a lot. My brother soon took it back to his friend who’s been waiting outside. I didn’t have a lot of time to experiment with it like I usually do to animals I get my hands on ;)

The next day, I showed my father the eagle’s pictures and he really liked them. My father turned to know a lot about eagles as he used to capture the young ones in the old days. He said that in 5~6 months, this little fellow will grow to become a dreadful hunter, and will become far too big to be kept in an apartment!

His owners must be thinking of this, it must be hard to let go of a proud bird like this. No wonder why eagles are symbols for power, pride and freedom :)

Computer Files as Waves

2006-09-26T21:52:00.000+03:00

Few days ago, I was out for lunch with some friends, among which was Zeid. After having our meals, we settled down somewhere and started talking about various stuff, like we always do.

Zeid told me he’s been thinking about a new file compression mechanism but he’s still uncertain of its effectiveness. He said he thought of turning a computer file into a “wave”, literally transforming the bits and bytes into a waveform, then use Fourier Series to represent the wave with much less data. This small quantity of data can be used later to re-construct the wave and produce the original file again!

The idea sounded crazy at first; how can a computer file be represented by a wave? I was wondering while Zeid continued to discuss his idea and I soon began to figure what’s in his mind …

Waves or Signals, whether analogue or digital, are a primary concern of engineering students. Many engineering courses focus on waves, their applications and how to process them. One wave processing technique that all engineers know about is the “Fourier Transform”. The idea of this transform is quiet simple; you take a huge wave with a large number of points, make some calculations, and then extract a number of certain “coefficients” that is less than the number of points. Those coefficients (which are actually just numbers) can be used to reconstruct the wave again!

So if you have a wave of say 1000 numbers, you can compute special 50 numbers (coefficients), and use these anytime to get the original 1000 numbers back.

It sounds like magic, but there’s a catch that all engineers know about: The re-constructed wave is not an exact replica of the original wave; it is only a very similar wave!

During the transformation, the more coefficients you grab, the more close your generated wave will be to the actual wave. So it’s like a tradeoff between a high compression ratio and an accurate representation of the wave.

Considering our digital concerns, any series of “continuous” numbers can be called a wave. By the term “continuous” I mean “progressive”, or “gradually changing”. For example, consider the following two series of numbers:

Series A : 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1
Series B : 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 8 , 7 , 3 , 2 , 1

Both series can be called waves! This is because there is some kind of “continuity” between the numbers. Series A, however, shows more continuity than Series B and is, therefore, a more appropriate “waveform”.

Now if you want to treat a bunch of numbers as a wave, those numbers must be acting like a wave; they must show some continuity, or else they don’t deserve to be treated like a gentle wave ;)

Therefore, the biggest debate over Zeid’s theory must be: why would bytes be continuous? i.e. who said that bytes in any computer file are continuous? For example, a simple text file with the phrase “Hello World” is represented in memory by:

72 , 101 , 108 , 108 , 111 , 32 , 87 , 111 , 114 , 108 , 100

As you can see, these bytes are not continuous, and representing them by a waveform is useless. This is the case in most computer files; bytes are not linked together!

Still, Zeid thought that there must be some continuity if we looked in the right place. Say for example a picture file! Pictures are actually series of numbers representing colours of pixels, and in most pictures those numbers change “gradually” making them a very good candidate for wave representation!

During the subsequent days of our conversation, I was investigating the proclaimed “continuity” of picture files and its effectiveness. I took a sample picture and split it into three arrays, each holding the values for one of the three basic colours (Red, Green, and Blue) for all the pixels. I found that the three arrays show a good deal of continuity and are therefore very suitable for wave representation.

So next I made a program that computes the Fourier Sine Series coefficients for a picture, and then uses them to re-construct the picture again. The results were amazing! Take a look at these:

The number N indicates the number of Fourier coefficients per line of pixels (actually, I split the picture into 96 waves per each primary colour). The last transform (N = 48) rendered very close to the original image although it dismissed an exact 50% of the data of the original file :D

There is a lot more to talk about concerning this subject but I’ll have to look deeper into it and have a discussion with Zeid. This compression mechanism may work for other computer file types as well; sounds, videos and maybe others. I’ll have to research more!

Gosh I still can’t believe I did this ...

I have successfully represented a computer file as a wave!! :D

Classically Conditioned

2006-09-23T15:33:00.000+03:00

This post is about one of the hotwirings of my brain. I thought of writing about this when I read Lubna’s post “Songs in the Memory”. Lubna was talking about how some songs relate her to places or events in her memory. Linking a song to an occurring event or a situation is an example of the use of our “Involuntary Memory”; a conception used to describe a condition where our brains store data and link them to a “sensual stimulus”, which can be an image, a smell, or simply a song!

This is a cool memory feature we have, but what happened to me and what I’ll be talking about here is a bit different …

A couple of years ago I was developing a Network Gaming System for a Network Games Place called Splash. It’s basically a login system that allows users to play games on the network for an amount of time they pay for. Guys who play network games should know very well what am talking about. The network system carries many other tasks as well, and is a very complex piece of software.

I started programming my network system like 5 years ago on my home PC. Being a network system, it had to be developed on a couple of computers at least, so as to test and experiment the features as they are programmed. Unluckily I had no other than my single computer and I had to program the whole product under virtual network configurations.

I sold the first copy of my system shortly before doing my IGCSE AS exams. After deployment, I began to realize that the system needed much more work than I ever thought it did. All the things that worked perfectly on my machine ran differently in the real network implementation. Serious problems started to arise; core features stopped working for unknown reasons and mysterious bugs appeared every now and then. The worst part of the problem was that the business already started to rely completely on my network system, there was no go back …

I got hundreds of calls from Splash staff at different times of the day and for months. Some calls came at nights before my IGCSE exams and were really freaky; “Mar7aba Ghaith, all our user accounts are gone”, “Ghaith; the system isn’t logging anybody off, everybody is playing for free”, “Ghaith, the server is down and it’s refusing to start again”.

When any of that used to happen, I’d hurry to take a taxi to the place and see what the problem is about, and then go back home, fix the problem, and come back to the place with a newer version of the software. I had no laptop and I couldn’t risk bringing the source code to the place, so this was my only possible course of action.

So anyway, during some of the most terrifying moments of my life, moments when the system came down and I was sweating at the server machine reviewing the logs to find a clue, the guys at Splash were playing songs from Fadel Shaker’s newest album “Seedi Roo7e”, which has been just released back then. They were enjoying the songs while I was freaking to death trying to fix the problems with the business owner over my head. My heart was beating soo fast while the songs played. I could hear every single musical note played alone because for me … time was freezing …

Today, it’s been a couple of years since I last rushed to Splash. I’ve sold two more copies of my network system to other network games places, and all of them are stable and rocking good! In fact, my network system is now the finest work in the local market with absolutely no competitor.

One peculiar phenomenon that I got out of this whole experience is that, till the day, my heartbeat rate increases instantly and uncontrollably every time I hear one the songs of “Seedi Roo7e” being played somewhere!

It sounds funny but it’s true. It’s a case of an unconscious learning behavior known as “Classical Conditioning” where an animal (me in this case :S) is taught to make a certain response to a stimulus by pairing this stimulus with another stimulus that is known to cause the response.

The physiologist Ivan Pavlov made a very famous experiment in this regard. He kept ringing a bell pre to presenting food to one of his dogs. Dogs usually salivate when they see or smell food, but Pavlov’s dog started to salivate at the sound of the bell itself!

You can see how Classical Conditioning is different from Involuntary Memory. The last links a stimulus to some collected memories, while the former links a stimulus to a behavior. Classical conditioning applies to us (humans) as much as it applies to animals even though we’re not aware of it; remember that the whole process takes place in the unconscious areas of our brains!

Still, if you think a bit about your daily activities, you can find many automatic reactions your body was classically conditioned to make in response to stimuli around. So next time you freak out when you hear your phone tone being played somewhere, you should know what that is about ;)

Behind the Mall

2006-09-16T21:51:00.000+03:00

This Thursday, half the population of mo5ayyamat 3amman was in Sport City to checkout Al-Mokhtar Mall opening festival at 6:00 PM. The big mall, which has been in construction ever since dinosaurs walked the earth, was announced open for visitors.

It was a cool scene at the front doors, an enormous number of cars were trying to squeeze everywhere along the main street, and even a bigger number were flooding into the back streets of the mall to find a place to park. Fireworks covered the sky while herds of sheep and families were approaching on foot to the main entrance.

Of course I wasn’t there at the front door, or else I wouldn’t be alive to blog about the event. My cousins and I were busy having a big problem at the back street of the mall!

The mall lies in front of our main “headquarters”, or better say, our headquarters now lie behind the mall. “Our”, this time, refers to me and my cousins. We all grew up together in this area before everyone of us moved away. The sport city district, and specifically that street right behind the mall, became central meeting grounds for me and my cousins. We usually group there before deciding where else to go. It has always been such a lovely, calm, and soothing area where we could escape the lights and enjoy a good time (no pun intended) with a number of friends and relatives.

The construction of the mall wasn’t of so much annoyance to anyone of us as we were no more residents of the area. We enjoyed watching the progress of building and made many jokes about the mall. We never actually thought they’re going to finish any soon and we weren’t much interested in the effects of the mall on the area.

Last week, my cousin told me they’re opening the mall this Thursday which made me a bit uncomfortable. I was planning to go somewhere in the Sport City that day and spend some time later in our “headquarters” because it’s been a while I didn’t pay the guys there a visit. I guessed the sport city circle and all nearby streets will be jammed and it won’t be a good idea to be there when it happens, but I had to go.

On Thursday, I went an hour before the opening festival, finished my business and came back to our headquarters right when the festival started. The number of cars parking in the back streets of the mall was shocking! Cars were everywhere and more people were coming. Some people parked their cars in the garages of buildings in the area, which are our friends’ and neighbors’ houses!

Of course my cousins and I weren’t so happy about the situation. One of my cousins (codename: M7ammad el 7ara7sheh) spent the time staring at those who were parking their cars in front of others' houses. I, in turn, blocked the street several times by parking my car (bil 3ard) preventing any more cars from passing! Unfortunately, our efforts went in vein as people eventually kept flooding and we were unable to do anything about it!

After some thinking we decided that the best thing to do at that moment was to leave, or more precisely escape the area. We fled away with our cars and left the residents of the area to mourn the peaceful times, which now became history!

I would have loved to share with you a picture of the scene, but that would pose a threat to the secrecy of the location of our headquarters, as well as to the identities of our uncovered personnel in the area.

It was a bit surprising how such an event as the opening of a small mall in Amman had “that much” of people’s attention. It was also weird how people were so ignorant and unaware of the discomfort they’re causing to residents of the area, especially when they crowded such a calm and small area with their cars!

Ya3ni howweh awwal mall bil 3alam? Ma kollo 7abbet mall wage3! Our studies team in the area predicted that the mall will stand for 2~3 weeks at maximum before it collapses down to the ground, just like all other buildings which are higher than two stories in Amman. Actually, the mall already started to fall apart during the first day as one of the fireworks caused a complete electricity shutdown for about a minute :D

Blog Script Upgrade

2006-09-12T03:21:00.000+03:00

Ever since I enabled comments on my blog and implemented this commenting system (which now happens to be a far deviation of the original Metempsychosis Comments Hack 1.03 by Ebenezer Orthodoxy), I’ve been constantly tweaking and adding features to the core Java script that submits comments to Blogger and formats them the way you can see on all posts on this blog.

I was able to fix almost all errors and make the commenting system look and work best, despite my very basic knowledge with Java!

There was a single bug that I couldn’t get rid of since the beginning! Am not sure if any of you have noted, but post pages took so long to load after you submit a comment, and used to scroll twice to the top, which was a bit annoying. This happened because the commenting system used to hold a “hidden object” to exchange data with Blogger’s commenting system behind the scenes all the time. When pages were refreshed, that object was also invisibly refreshing its contents, which made the blog took additional time to complete loading!

Good news is; that bug is finally history! I made a major upgrade and coded the hidden object to be created only for the time it’s being used, after which it will be unloaded from the browser window. You will also be scrolled down to your just-submitted comment when the page completes loading :)

The change may not be that obvious, but all post pages will actually load much faster from now on, especially long posts with many comments. Please let me know if you find any problem with the commenting system; send me an email, or just drop me a comment here.

I’ve also designed a little animated roller which appears when someone submits a comment; everybody is welcome to try ;)

On Tagging & Stuff

2006-09-09T02:45:00.000+03:00

Now that the last tagging wave is over (through Jordan Planet to say the least), I can share some thoughts I had in mind about tagging while I was reading some responses to tags that have been floating around recently.

For those who do not follow blogs much; tagging is a game where a blogger publishes his answers to a number of pre-written questions, usually personal, and then asks (tags) other bloggers to answer the same questions on their blogs and pass it on to others, pretty much like a chain letter. In tagging, however, the recipients are asked “in name” to respond!

Most people can’t find anything wrong about tags, chain letters, or even spam! To them, nothing can go wrong only because they forwarded an email to 100 of their friends and relatives, or just because they answered some questions on theirs blogs! Computer Geeks, on contrary, are very serious about such issues and feel greatly threatened and annoyed by the passing of such waves of letters or tags!

So who’s right of the two? Is tagging that much dangerous? and what are the risks of answering a tag and passing it on to others?

First of all, let me start by saying that no one knows the Internet better than computer geeks! Therefore it is natural to assume that the decisions they make regarding web activities are based on more thorough understanding of the Internet, its effects, and its relevancy to the real life. Hence the answer to the first question is: Yes, tagging is definitely dangerous!

But why? What’s really wrong about answering a couple of questions?

The reason that makes tagging such a threat is that in most cases it violates Geeky Internet Law #1:

Never share you personal info on the Internet!

If you've read so far and are now wondering “why shouldn’t I share my personal data on the Internet?” then I suggest you disconnect and stop using the Internet from now on :D

Sharing personal info on the Internet is the worst thing you can ever do! Unfortunately, the “Why” isn’t always clear as it should be! I usually compare this Internet law to driving laws; you can’t always see what could go wrong if you violate a simple driving law, but with some thinking you can come up with many possible scenarios where your violation leads to an accident!

One tag that had my complete attention, or better say “drove me nuts”, is the “What’s In My Bag” tag, which has been circulating between female (and even some male!?) bloggers around. I was shocked because bloggers who answered this tag were letting people know what’s inside their handbags and they were doing it gladly! Jano, Khalidah, Wedad, Roba, Rambling Hal, Salam, 7ala and Moey (!?) answered the tag! Most of them even provided pictures for their bags’ contents!!

Was it safe to answer that tag? I don’t think so! What can go wrong because of it can’t be determined that easily, just like I said, but I can imagine more than one scenario where somebody could make use of knowing what’s inside somebody's else's handbag! Keep in mind that many of those bloggers have posted their pictures on their blogs and recognizing them outdoors won’t be a hard task.

I may sound a bit silly but believe me; whoever you are, there are many people out there waiting for a good chance to screw you! We all have rivals, foes, or people who just don’t like us much; don’t give them any chance :)

I hope I made clear (in my own geeky view at least) how can such tags be hazardous to your safety people. I was glad to note that other bloggers like Qwaider recognized the problem too, check his comment on 7ala’s post :)

To end with, I’d like to introduce a new tag that I myself came up with today. I am tagging you Qwaider :P

1 - How much money do you usually carry around in your wallet?

2 - How much time (on average) do you stay away from your car?

3 - If you’re leaving your place and wanted to hide the house key somewhere for your brother/sister to take it later, where would you hide it?

4 - In your own opinion; what items in your place are worth breaking in for?

5 - If somebody wants to blackmail you, what would be the best approach?

(P.S : It’s just a joke people, mesh tro7o mjawbeno :P)

Nighty Confrontations 2

2006-09-04T03:08:00.000+03:00

This is the second post in a series of posts about some funny incidents that took place on the streets when my friends and I were stopped by the police/Intelligence agents late at night. Make sure you have read the previous post Nighty Confrontations 1 to know what this is about :P

(9orah archiveyyeh tanyeh bardo ma elha 5a9 bil mawdoo3)

P.S For Ma'en: zalameh oo e3ref hada el share3 ween ;)

Story 2. Sho Hee Saybeh?

Okay, I wasn’t with the guys when this happened so it’s being told “3ala themmet-hom”. It was Sami, Zeid and Mr. X in Sami’s car. They were parking at late night in a dark street somewhere and chatting together when suddenly …

Two accelerating cars came out of nowhere and skid blocking the street, then men in civilian customs went down and ran towards Sami’s car …

Sami: Quick!! Close the doors!!

Sami closed a door … Mr. X closed two … while my good friend Zeid wasn’t quick enough to close the door next to him. The men opened that door and got all three out of the car.

Unknown Man: shabab haweyyatkom …

(Sami and Mr. X reaching to their wallets, when surprisingly …)

Zeid (in a sharp and confident tone):
esh haweyyatna? Meen ento? SHO HEE SAYBEH?

Unknown Man:. :|

(The Unknown Man, shocked by Zeid’s kind of “counter-attack”, reaches to his pocket and presents his gadget: MO7'ABARAT 3AMMEH)

Unknown Man: haweytak?

Zeid (still confident): ma ma3e

Unknown Man (5aff 3aglo oo eltamas): ma ma3ak? Bte3ref enno bagdar a5thak 3al markez tnam el leleh 3enna?

Zeid: ...

(The other men search carefully through Sami’s car)

Unknown Man 2: ntheefeh seedi

(They all move back into their cars and disappear)

Seconds later …

Sami: enta jad ma ma3ak el haweyyeh?

Zeid: aah

Mr. X: o mkayyef 3ala 7alak o btes2al el zalameh 3an haweyto?

Zeid: aah wella? SHO HEE SAYBEH?

(Sami and Mr. X look at each other and burst laughing)

Nighty Confrontations 1

2006-08-30T05:27:00.000+03:00

As I promised earlier, here’s a series of posts about some hilarious (though a bit frightening) times my friends and I got stopped by police patrols or intelligence agents late at night. We often get suspected and stopped for a routine check since we’re a bunch of guys moving around at night. It’s pretty hard to avoid the night watch because police patrols can be hidden anywhere while Intelligence agents simply appear from the void. Maybe the biggest lesson we learnt through all these experiences is that the streets are never empty as they may look like …

(9orah archiveyyeh ma elha 5a9 bil mawdoo3)

I usually hang out with my schoolmates; Waseem, Sami and Zaid because so far those are the only ones I knew who can stay up till the dawn. Waseem asked me not to mention his name on this blog, so I’ll call him Mr. X from now on :P

Story 1: Sho Teshrab?

This was one of the first times we got stopped by a night patrol. It was the four of us in Mr. X’s Hyundai bus. I was a bit scared because I still haven’t got used to being stopped by the police back then. The police officer asked us for our IDs and was going through them …

Officer: Tarawneh? Meen feekom Tarawneh?

Ghaith: Ana

Officer: Tarawneh sho teshrab?

Ghaith (thinking): sho “ashrab”??! Am I dreaming or did he just offer me a drink?! Since when did police patrols start to offer drinks??

(2 seconds pause)

Ghaith (still thinking): I have no idea what’s going on but I guess I’ll go for tea, or coffee, or … could they possible have Nescafe?

Sami (breaking the silence): Mohandis 7asoob!

Ghaith (thinking): what??

Officer: wil shabab?

Sami: kolhom handaseh, oo ana 6eb.

Officer: esh 6al3een hassa tsawwo?

Mr. X: wala eshee, ga3deen benlaflef …

Officer (handling the IDs): twakkalo 3ala Allah.

(Seconds after we moved on, and I was still trying to figure out what has just happened …)

Sami: Ghaith lesh ma jawabto lamma sa2alek esh bteshta3’el?

Ghaith: esh “bashta3’el”?! sme3to 7aka “esh teshrab”!!

(2 seconds pause)

Everybody went laughing hysterically!!

Story 2 coming in next post ...

The Extraordinary Guys

2006-08-26T17:56:00.000+03:00

The community in Amman is a complex, yet very connected set of social networks. Tracing some social relations you’ll come to conclude that everybody is connected to everybody in some way or another. This doesn’t apply to other communities as much as it applies to Jordan, specifically Amman. I think that this high connectivity is directly related to the relatively small size of our population (compared to other foreign communities), and most importantly: our Jordanian traditions that emphasize the importance of keeping in close touch with all relatives and friends.

Most people think that the word “community” strictly describes the world of the “elder” people, but I don’t think so. Communities are characterized by the environment, and since all of us: engineers, doctors, tradesmen, natives, foreigners, grown-ups and youngsters share the same environment; then all of us make the community!

It should also be acknowledged that our (and every other) community is made of groups of sub-communities of people who share a common location, identity, or interest.

Among the many communities and social groups that form our society, there is the “Guys” Community, a community formed by mostly all the guys of Amman, say those who are 18-25 years old, and who don’t spend Thursdays watching TV or sitting infront of a computer.

The way I see it, guys socialize in more interesting ways than girls and grown-ups do. The relationships they tend to build range on different scales of friendship and respect. Also, guys meet on more “free” grounds; they don’t meet in parties nor in family gatherings; they meet in hangouts! Therefore guys usually build “deeper” and more “open” links to each other.

It’s pretty hard to imagine all of that if you’re not a guy who keeps in touch with a number of different gangs. The Guys Community is large Jordanian community with a great potential and a promising future.

During the past 5 years of my life, I came to know hundreds of new guys through work and though the expanding network of universities and friends. With these new connections, I started to understand the structure of the guys’ community. I also started to meet new “gentlemen” guys I personally refer to as the “Extraordinary” …

The extraordinary guys are those who haven’t let a single moment of their lives slip away for nothing since the very beginning! Every one of those guys has developed some kind of an amazing skill, made a remarkable achievement, or already became independent of their parents' care, and almost nobody knows about them!

Mostly all guys grow up under their parents’ care preparing to advance to the next level; becoming independent. Guys at this stage are only asked to pay attention to their studies, no one is asked to work, make a living, or accomplish. Some have interesting hobbies, and have developed remarkable skills, while others have started to work alongside with studying. Only very few guys, however, already make a better independent person in this early stage. Among the hundreds I know, only 10 guys make it as “extraordinary” in my opinion.

This Thursday, I was at Sleman’s farm with a big bunch of his friends and buddies celebrating his graduation. After lunch, we split into groups and everybody went doing something. I joined Sami Kreishan and some other guys and sat having an exciting chat over a range of subjects. I got introduced to Bashar, an interesting guy who makes professional web-site Flash designs. I will simply refer to his work as “beyond description”, because no words fit in this regard. Bashar has already started making a living out of his flash designs and has other remarkable skills. I realized that he’s definitely an extraordinary guy as soon as he showed me some of his work on his laptop.

I had a joyful chat with him, and made sure I had his contact details before we left. He’s also coming to my university next semester so we’ll have more chances to talk and explore each other :)

Bashar and other extraordinary guys are well-known in the guys’ community. Those guys have already accomplished what even grown-ups were short to. A gathering of 2~3 similar guys can lead to a very huge and successful project, but it’s just that every one of them is a Jack of a different trade, and the circumstances rarely join a group of such guys in one place.

The extraordinary never show through universities, exhibits, or social events. They have their own life and they’re way beyond showoff. If you met somebody in one of those places and thought he’d be one of the extraordinary, think again.

Those guys have a very promising future, and every one of them has a big chance to become a model figure in the near future. Sadly, but not so surprising, they prefer not to be spoken of, so unless you come to know them personally, you’ll never meet them again :)

Meeting Sami Kreishan

2006-08-18T12:06:00.000+03:00

A couple of weeks ago I met Sleman, a friend that I haven’t seen in a year or so. He was doing Tawjihi this year, and has passed with an excellent grade :)

We went out for dinner with a bunch of friends to catch up some of the days we missed. Sleman had so much news; he said he started learning guitar a year ago, little after the last time I saw him, which was a bit surprising because I too started learning guitar about the same time!

Sleman asked me where I go for music lessons and I said am trying on my own. He said he had been taught playing guitar during the past year by the legendary Sami Kreishan …

Sami Kreishan is a top Jordanian guitarist. I would have simply said he’s the best, but I’ll stay opened to the possibilities because I didn’t check every other player in Jordan. Among the Jordanian guitarists community, Sami has been a well-known figure. Some are astonished by his abilities, while others say he’s a showoff. Both parties, however, can’t but agree on his astounding level … the guy is amazing!

Sleman said he could arrange to take me with him to his next lesson, and I couldn’t say no. I wanted to see how good Sleman got with playing guitar, and of course … wanted to meet Sami Kreishan :)

So it was Wednesday, the past week, and I picked up Sleman and drove to Sami’s place. We arrived there a bit early and Sami was out for sometime so we waited outside his house. Ten minutes later, he arrived, parked his car and went down walking into his house without noticing us. His humble appearances made him look like any other guy out there; nobody would have guessed what that guy with the short pants was capable of!

We went down, followed him, and knocked the door. He opened it with a wide smile and greeted us, then we all went inside and waited for him to arrange his stuff and prepare for the lesson.

Sami’s house was full of guitars and equipment. I can’t recall much but for a moment I thought I was playing “find 40 guitars in the view”! He had soo many guitars arranged everywhere in the living room … an American Stratocaster … a Squier Showmaster … some Ibanez … a flying-V something … and I stopped counting for my own sake!!

His little “studio” was full of guitars, guitar accessories and equipment. Distortion pedals where covering the floor all around him, boxes were everywhere, and next to him stood one big Marshall Amplifier that could have easily brought the building down with its sound.

The guy must have been running a serious guitar business in his place!

Sami arranged his stuff, picked a guitar, and started playing …

I don’t think I can explain it to non-guitarists, but Sami could perform as well as some of the top worldwide guitarists, namely Joe Satriani (Link), Yngwie Malmsteen (Link), Michael Angelo Batio (Link) and Steve Vai (Link). The guy turned to be a professional player, much more than I thought he was. Now I have a solid belief that this guy can compete internationally.

So after some warm-up with cool shredding (Link) pieces of heavy metal, Sami stopped and started the lesson. I tried to be a silent observer because I didn’t want Sleman to waste his class, but I simply couldn’t but ask at some points … Sami had all the answers I needed!

During the past two months, I had a strong feeling that am lacking an essential technique because I couldn’t play some licks no matter how hard I practiced. Watching Sami playing last week helped me figure some big facts that I missed all the way till now, details that remained “secrets” for long, holding me back from advancing to the next level …

Whether Sami is the best guitarist in Jordan or not doesn’t matter as much as that he’s got this far with playing guitar. The new techniques I picked while watching him play last week were the best kind of info I ever had about playing guitar. I’ve been playing for hours since then, exercising over and over with some new solos that have just been unlocked for hard practice!

Next week I’ll meet him again in a celebration for Sleman’s graduation, I hope I get to know him better :)

EDIT: I was asked by Sami to publish his contact details here since many people are linked to this page looking for them. This post, surprisingly, is the first hit on Google for "Sami Kreishan". Here it goes guys;

Sami Kreishan
+962 79 5364002

Major Blogger Upgrade

2006-08-15T12:59:00.000+03:00

Happy news to all those hosting their blogs at Blogger!

Blogger is testing a Beta release of an upgraded version of their blogging software. They added amazing new features that all users were asking for, check these out …

Categories Support
Posts can now have labels (better known as tags), and be categorized accordingly.
Blog Access Control
Blog owners will be able to control who can read their blogs. They can either keep their blogs open for the public, or restrict their access to a selection of people identified by email.
Interactive Template Editor
Those who have no HTML or CSS knowledge will be able to change the layout of their blogs by moving sections of their blogs around with their mouse pointers.
Comments Feed
There will be a separate feed file for comments on each post. That means you’ll be able to track new comments much easier than before.
No “Publishing Timer”
The classic publishing procedure that took some seconds to update your blog is now gone. New posts will be published immediately.
More improvements
Enhanced interface and more blogging options.

The Beta is not yet open to the public. For the moment, only few will be given links at the Dashboard to upgrade. However, all people will eventually be able to use the new service :D

I’ve also noticed that Blogger accounts have already been integrated with Gmail accounts. From now on, people will be able to login to Blogger using their Gmail accounts. Blogger has always kept its own accounts' database, though the company was bought by Google in 2002. It looks like Google is continuing to join more services under the unity of Gmail accounts, adopting the same technique of its main competitors: Windows Live (formerly MSN) and Yahoo!.

In my opinion, Blogger will overcome WordPress and other blogging software with this outstanding upgrade. I can’t wait to see.

For more info and Blogger news, check out Blogger Buzz.

Here is a Direct Link to the new Blogger Beta Tour.

Redesign the Web

2006-08-09T13:14:00.000+03:00

If you think like me, you must have always considered the possibility of making changes to the things that you come by or use on daily basis. Little differences in these can make your life much better, or worse. Among the things that I always wanted to change are … Internet web sites!

Many of the websites I visit daily (Google, Hotmail, Blogger … etc) don’t look the way I want them. Sometimes I find it easier to use a page if a certain link was moved to somewhere, other times I wish I can delete some sections of the page and have only the content am interested in. Few times I did come with brilliant ideas to improve the page and wished I could contribute!

I may have sounded a bit picky, but I know all people would like to make some change. There is no single web-site layout that looks fine to all people, simply because people have different thoughts and tastes.

So is there any way you can make changes to Internet web sites that you don’t own? The answer is No …

Instead, you can change “the way they look to you”, which is as much better! This can be done using a couple of FireFox extensions …

1. Greasemonkey (Web Site – Download Link)

This is a famous extension for FireFox that modifies web pages according to special scripts. People have been using Greasemonkey to alter web pages in so many different ways. Greasemonkey scripts modify the internal HTML source of Internet pages once they are loaded, and are thus able to make wide changes to the page elements, their behavior, the page layout, and the functioning of the page!

Greasemonkey is cool, but creating a Greasemonkey script is a hard task for the average user. People usually search the Internet for scripts, but only few are capable of creating them … so here comes the other part of the magic …

2. The Platypus extension (Web Site – Download Link)

This extension will add a toolbar of editing tools that will let you modify the loaded Internet page in real time, just as easily as you modify a word document. When you’re done making changes to the page, Platypus will generate a Greasemonkey script that will re-render this Internet page the exact way you designed it every time it is loaded!

The possibilities of what you can be done with these two extensions are endless. I’ve already started creating “cleaning” scripts to simplify and remove all the ads from my favorite web sites. Below is a new Hotmail layout I designed, next to the old layout.

One thing that still holds this technology back is that FireFox needs to load the whole page before Greasemonkey transforms it. Thus, the changes will not appear until the page is fully loaded. Also, all page elements are downloaded whether or not they are to be displayed.

If future versions of Greasemonkey could modify pages during the loading procedure, nobody will be able to tell the difference between a real and a modified page. Pages will load much faster then, and FireFox will consume even less bandwidth.

Anyway, the current state of this technology is too good to be true for now. For an interesting read on the impact of Greasemonkey on the Internet market, be sure to check this blog post:

http://www.nivi.com/blog/article/greasemonkey-and-business-models/

Enjoy it FireFox users :)

Horrifying Movies!

2006-08-05T00:51:00.000+03:00

This Thursday, Rani, Zeid, Basel and I gathered at Basel’s house after midnight, and watched “Fragile” (Link), which is “supposedly” a horror movie. This movie falls in a bunch of horror movies I’ve watched lately; all of which were either boring or funny! It is weird how horror movies became so dull and meaningless; watching a documentary these days is a bit scarier.

Fragile is about a night nurse that comes to work in rehabilitated old hospital where a group of children is being treated. Strange accidents take place, and throughout the movie the nurse uncovers the truth of a roaming old nurse ghost who loves the children so deeply that it would do anything not to let them leave.

The plot may sound interesting, but only because I put it that way ;). If you watched the movie late at night like we did, you’ll probably fall asleep within the first ten minutes.

I wasn’t quiet awake myself then, but I remember that at some time during the first minutes of the movie, the nurse was standing in one of the corridors of the hospital when one of the kids approached and told her in a calm spooky tone: “She’s coming!” …

Well, am not sure if that was supposed to scare anybody, or create some kind of tension, but I laughed so hard on how lame that was! My friends also mocked the lame scene and all of us started adding our own blowing wind and booo effects.

Really what a funny movie! Ba3deen guess who’s acting the nurse …

Maybe that explains why we couldn’t stop laughing …

The nurse is Ally McBeal :D

At the end of the movie, everybody was trying to escape the hospital, which was being destroyed by the raging ghost. All children were killed, and Ally McBeal escapes the front door with her machine gun, or maybe I was too sleepy and imagined all that, am not sure ;)

Seriously, if you want to know what really happened buy the DVD! But don’t blame me for wasting your time and money!

Anyway, apart from Fragile, some other horror movies I’ve watched lately were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Link), Wolf Creek (Link), Dog Soldiers (Link), and The Omen (Link). Texas Chainsaw is a good horror movie that I got more than one recommendation to watch, and I do recommend it to others now; I enjoyed it. Wolf Creek and Dog Soldiers were a bit different from other classic horror movies but nonetheless were boring. The Omen was entertaining, but didn’t scare a bit of me, probably because I watched it at home …

So what’s wrong people? Ana tamsa7et, wella hadool el aflam ma be5awfo wlad z3’ar?

“Almost” Busted

2006-08-02T22:24:00.000+03:00

My close friends know that I’ve been running away from the traffic police for more than a year now! I keep escaping their motors and Fords at day, and evading their patrols at night. I didn’t do anything against the law if you thought so … it’s just (for reasons beyond the scope of this post) that I don’t have any kind of driving or car licenses :D

Seeing a police Ford roaming nearby means a lot of trouble for me. If I got suspected and caught, before getting my licenses, my car will be stopped and taken away by a creaking winch, which means bye bye to the car body and downside. Getting stopped by the police is not an option for me. I hope they don’t come in my pursuit if I didn’t make a stop at their sign one day :P

Today I was heading towards the technician to fix a problem with my car’s electrical wirings. Unluckily, I got stuck behind a wondering police Ford all the way from “dowwar el da5eleyyeh” to “el-dowwar el awwal”. I couldn’t move left or right, nor horn a long beeeeep like I usually do to old bumpy pickup trucks. I had to behave or else … “BMW ko7le soffele 3al yameen”.

Anyway, it took me almost 10 minutes to reach my destination, which was a car accessories place, and the police car was ahead all the way. I finally got to the place at the beginning of the Rainbow Street, and there … I faced a big surprise! The police Ford stopped exactly in front of the place!! They were also coming for a fix!!

6ab3an ana 7ammaret oo zarraget oo ba66alet 3aref esh a3mel. The police car filled the space in front of the building and I had to either move on or to stop on the other side of the street (mamnoo3 by the way). Moving on meant returning home, which I couldn’t do after coming all this distance, so I chose the later option, and waited for the police to finish their business praying to god they don’t get inspired to do something like “abol shabab lesh safef hek? a36eene ro5asak”.

El mohem, they were a tough twenty minutes I had to spend in my car, pulling on a confident look and trying to take a picture so that I can post about the thing :P. At the end, they moved on “miraculously”, not even having a single doubt that the freaking driver in the next car was an easy “catch” for a ticket!

Today was one of the discomforting nowadays of my driving. You can see how much of a problem traffic police became for me. Ironically, I used to like them and enjoy their stops during the first year after I got the driving license. I’ll post soon about some funny stories my friends and I had with the police :)

The Flash Mind Reader

2006-07-29T11:00:00.000+03:00

This is a little “mysterious” thing I've got by mail, and have kept in my files for years. It is supposed to “read your mind” ;)

It looked real to me, but soon after I discovered what is it about :)

Click here to view The Flash Mind Reader

Try to think of it before reading the comments because I will be posting the secret soon. Feel free to comment if you found an explanation, or if you’re just too desperate to know :P

Need for Speed Memories

2006-07-25T18:01:00.000+03:00

Need for Speed is one of few computer games that I have always adored. I first heard of the game in early school days long before I got my first computer. My younger brother, who was (and still is) a big car enthusiast, was dazzled by the people’s talk about the game. He bought the CD and asked me to install it for him on our dad’s computer at work.

My dad had to go for a couple of hours every Friday to finish off some paper work in his office, and since he is the head of his department he had keys to all other offices. We joined him several times to enjoy Need for Speed for a limited time while he finished his work.

There were computers everywhere in the building, each with a modem connected to the telephone line. I remember I used to use the internal call redirection inside the department to establish modem-to-modem connections and play the game with my brother. It was a lot of fun :)

Years ago, I had no big interest in cars. I thought of them as a mean of transportation in real life, and merely objects with variable speeds in game. I always thought that the one who keeps his car moving at a higher speed for a longer time will win the race, but I lost most of the time for thinking so. My brother had a deeper knowledge than I had, and always considered gearing and skidding, and was thus “mysteriously” unbeatable back then.

I loved Need for Speed 3 “Hot Pursuit”, 4 “High Stakes”, and 5 “Porsche Unleashed”. I didn’t like the sixth version “Hot Pursuit 2”, and I hated Underground and the following generations because the game went off from focusing on smooth and realistic driving to heavy graphics and complexity. For me, after the Porsche version the game has become like any other obsolete driving game, it lost its taste.

What brought upon Need for Speed and uncovered all those memories is that my brother found an old installation of Porsche Unleashed and started playing it a couple of days ago. Today I had my turn and spent a long time playing, and it was the first time I played the game after I had my driving license and drove an actual car.

All I can say is that the game is more realistic and awesome than I ever thought it was. According to Wikipedia (Link), the handling of cars in Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed is more realistic than handling in all other versions, including newer ones. The driving aspects of the game are very close to some actual driving aspects: el low gears begawmo a7san, el sayyara “bet3arred” bil handbrake, o “betshallef” o “betjalles”.

Most importantly, the performance of the game is great on my computer (no super processor or graphics card). The game loads and unloads fast, and the graphics are very smooth. The computer barely feels the game is running.

Unfortunately, today’s game developers are putting enormous efforts on graphics that they stopped paying enough attention to other aspects of games. Many have forgotten that what makes a good game is the core idea that the graphic is trying to convey, not the graphic itself. Graphics are continuously evolving and will never reach a top; therefore every high-graphics technology will oneday become out-dated. On contrary, the ideas that make good games will always be as much enjoyable as they were in their earlier days; the thing that explains why people always turn back to old classics like Need for Speed.

Mabrook Zidane

2006-07-10T23:08:00.000+03:00

First of all, let me start by saying that I have absolutely zero-interest in football and I know nothing about it. I didn’t watch any of the world cup matches, not even the final match! Actually, I can’t recall that I ever fully watched a football match. Sometimes I watched for minutes, and other times I queried about the result out of curiosity, but honestly I never had an interest in any football match or league. During the world cup’s final match, I was far away from the event playing guitar with a friend who shares my zero football enthusiasm :)

This post is not about football, I told you I know nothing about it. This post is about an incidence that took place there on the green field, an incidence that someone reacted to with great courage, proving the world that dignity is much more important than a stupid cup :)

Although I know nothing about football, I couldn’t but stay in touch with the world cup updates. News are just everywhere and everybody is talking about the heating matches. I couldn’t but stay in touch …

As I said, I didn’t watch the match. But I did see a video playback for the incidence that shocked the millions. As I watched the video, I knew exactly what he was thinking at every second of his last minute on the field … Zidane.

If you think that Zidane did what he did because of a word, check the news and think again! :)

Many of you can’t tell, but I can … I can tell the difference between someone who reacts emotionally to a verbal offense and someone who thinks sensibly and acts courageously to defend something that matters to him more than the world cup in his final match. Rumors say that Materazzi uttered a racist note, or cursed Zidane’s mom, but Zidane never told anybody what was it! To him, it was more important to keep his red line, at all costs, sacrificing everything in his last stand, than to explain himself and brag about it to the media. He remained calm, and content … I couldn’t be any more impressed …

Although I do like Italy and I believe their performance was superb in this world cup, Italy’s win against France was a void one. All you Italy fans out there: Haven't any of you played Eight-ball billiard before?

How happy would you feel to win if your opponent mistakenly pocketed the black ball during the first few strokes of the game? Does it feel as good as having a long round and winning by pocketing all the balls yourself? … I don’t think so.

It’s the same as playing against France with Zidane out.

This is not to stay that Italy didn’t deserve the cup, but it’s also not to say that they deserved it. The correct answer is: we didn’t know :)

It’s so unfortunate that what happened to Zidane was stupidly interpreted by many. I thought of writing this post to provide a rare neutral point of view on the subject as I neither root for France, nor for Italy.

Zidane won the Golden Ball award for the World Cup 2006 Best Player (Link). People of France and the journalists whose votes gave him the award still think of him as a champion, and so do I.

Now that the world cup is over, my congratulations go to Italy and all of its fans. Italy is a great team and did amazing in this world cup, but truth be told: they never defeated Zidane. Zinedine Zidane came out of his final match with something much more precious than the world cup …

Note: this post is not meant to be a thread for football rants; comments discussing the football aspects related to the incidence or the world cup are not welcomed and will be eagerly removed.

My Black Beauty Arrived

2006-07-08T23:54:00.000+03:00

After months of waiting I finally managed to ship this black jewel to Jordan :D

This is my new Ibanez Gio RG170DX electric guitar, I found it on eBay more than six months ago and since then I was engaged in the process of buying and shipping it to Jordan.

Bringing this guitar to my hands was a tough challenge. Believe me there were times where I was sure I’ll fail to get it as am sure I do have it now. This was because the buying transaction didn’t go smoothly at all! The seller didn’t accept credit cards or bank/cash transfers as a method of payment so my only way as an international buyer to pay him was to send him a check by mail, and I wish I never did …

I waited for months but the check didn’t arrive at its destination. Only 5 months later I decided to give up and cancel the check for good. During the subsequent month I was heavily researching payment methods and cash transfer services and trying to convince the seller to accept other forms of payment, but he didn’t. He said he could only accept PayPal or cashier checks. PayPal is not available in Jordan and I didn’t want to give the postal service another try, so there I began to see the end of the eBay transaction.

Later on I decided to order the guitar from a web site store, and ship it through Aramex. On eBay, the guitar was listed for $335 including shipping fees. Through Aramex, however, it would have cost me $570 which is like +70%.

More or less I was determined to get it, and I would have proceeded through Aramex paying all those extra bucks if not for the miraculous return of my friend JoooJ (Jubrail) from the US :D

JoooJ is one of my best friends, we were at school together, but he left in the 8th grade (6 years ago) to the US.

Since then I’ve had little contact with him and I never thought he would come back, but actually he did, and guess what …

He had a PayPal account :D

JoooJ let me make the payment using his account, and I paid him in cash. He saved me a lot of trouble. JoooJ if you’re reading this Thanks a million man!

The guitar arrived today! I got a call in the morning from the shipping company telling me that a package in my name has arrived and is ready for pickup. I went as lightening and brought it!

I can’t describe how I felt to hold it for the first time! I spent the whole day playing!

Maybe you’re wondering why I put so much effort into buying this guitar while I simply could have bought it from Freddy or any local store. The answer is: This guitar is a top of the notch and is not available locally. The price that I got this guitar for is very low compared to its brand, quality and performance. That’s why I was willing to buy it even with $570! Now that I got it with $335 I feel I made the best deal of my life :)

The guitar feels and sounds amazing! Gio RG170DX (Link) is a super-Stratocaster style electric guitar, 24 frets, HSH pickups, shark tooth inlays, bass wood body, maple neck, whammy bar, chrome hardware and most proudly marked “Ibanez”.

My amplifier is a Roland 2 Watt MicroCube (Link), and is also an amazing deal (sorry but I bought the last one from Freddy :P). It has many built it effects: Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremelo, Delay, and Reverb. This amplifier can rock on batteries for 20 hours!! I got it for only 100 JDs! It's the best companion for my guitar :)

My lovely Ibanez is the instrument I just needed. My guitar-playing development slowed down a bit in the last months because I branched into playing metal and I was pushing my acoustic guitar too hard with the solos :P. I think I’ll be doing much better with my electric guitar! :)

Windows Live Messenger

2006-07-03T15:26:00.000+03:00

Final Release Out

About two weeks ago Microsoft released the final version of Windows Live Messenger (WLM). The new Messenger is now out of the beta (testing) phase, which means that there are no more serious bugs, and that people can start using and enjoying this new Live product!

Some of you may have tried beta or even alpha versions of Messenger Live but the final release is something different. I’ve installed it a couple of days ago and all I can say is that I couldn’t like it more :)

The New Messenger

Windows Live Messenger
Home Page - Download - Screenshot

Messenger now has a more appealing Vista-style interface! It’s something you’d want to keep staring at even if you’re not chatting. I’ve always adored the designs of MSN Messenger and appreciated the fact that the Messenger team understand the importance of the interface to the instant messaging experience, and that they put considerable effort into creating new sleek and nice interfaces once in a while, with every major upgrade, as much as they put effort into adding and enhancing functionality.

The new Messenger is loaded with new ideas, options and features. You’ll need sometime to explore all of them. Below are two features I personally found interesting:

Offline Messaging: the ability to send messages to offline contacts, and have messages sent to you when you’re offline. It’s pretty much the same concept as email, but simpler to use. Offline messages are delivered next time the offline contact signs in.

Sharing folders: this is a method of exchanging files more easily, swiftly and in a more organized way than single file transfers.

Apart from the new features, the quality of the messaging system is better now. Messenger Live signs in and out and performs other online operations obviously much faster than MSN Messenger. The service has already been optimized for Messenger Live I guess.

If you still haven't checked Windows Live Messenger then it's a good time to do so :)

Favorite Add-ons

For me, there are things that I couldn’t use MSN Messenger and won’t use Live Messenger without. They are two add-ons that add to the functionality of Live Messenger and more importantly: clean the interface of all the nagging advertisement banners and branding links.

Messenger Plus! Live Extension
Home Page - Download - Screenshot

Messenger Plus! Live Extension, developed by Patchou, is a widely spread and well known add-on for Messenger that almost everybody knows about. This add-on nicely molds in Windows Live Messenger and doubles the features and options you have. The new features are countless, but among the most amazing ones is the scripting feature: developers can now code scripts with syntax similar to Java to control Messenger. I already started to dig into this, and I can see some very neat applications!

Warning: Do NOT accept to install the sponsor program during the installation of Messenger Plus! Live Extension. The sponsor program is considered a malware, and is hard to get rid of once it is installed.

Mess Patch
Home Page - Download - Screenshot

Next comes the most widely spread and the best patch for Messenger. This patch will cleanse the lovely Messenger interface and keep only the things that you use and that matter to you. It will get rid of all the advertisements and links that ruin your Messenger interface! This patch combines a set of powerful tweaks that I personally couldn’t use Messenger without.

To use the patch, quit Messenger (Right click tray icon then Exit), run the patch and select your options, then click “Patch” and run Messenger again.

If you don’t feel like going through the patching options, I’ve prepared a custom patching profile with the suitable ad-remove options selected (Download Here). Use the “Load” button to read options from this profile then click “Apply”.

Few points you need to understand about patching:

Patching means applying changes to the Messenger program. It is not about installing a plugin or a program that will add/remove features.
You will have to re-apply the patch if you re-installed Messenger.
There is a separate patch for every single version of Messenger. Always make sure you’re using the right patch for your current Messenger version.
If you installed a newer version of Messenger, get the appropriate newer version of the patch and apply it.

The Mess Patch is maintained by www.mess.be which is a big community for Messenger tools and utilities. Check there for newer versions of the patch.

Enjoy Windows Live Messenger! :)

The Blue Pill

2006-07-01T02:10:00.000+03:00

If you thought about Viagra, then by the time you complete reading this sentence you’ll have read enough of this post :)

This is a trackback post for Qwaider’s post Blue Pill can go totally undetected.

The Blue Pill is a proof of concept malware developed by Joanna Rutkowska (Blog Link), a researcher at COSEINC. This malware is claimed to have the ability to bypass the OS layer and not only deal directly with hardware and be invisible to the OS, but emulate hardware for the operating system. By acquiring this level, the malware becomes completely undetectable and almost unstoppable. The installation is asserted to be in real-time, without a re-boot! Joanna says the malware does that using legitimate methods, and does not make use of any security exploits.

Quote from Joanna’s Post (Link):

The idea behind Blue Pill is simple: your operating system swallows the Blue Pill and it awakes inside the Matrix controlled by the ultra thin Blue Pill hypervisor. This all happens on-the-fly (i.e. without restarting the system) and there is no performance penalty and all the devices, like graphics card, are fully accessible to the operating system, which is now executing inside virtual machine. This is all possible thanks to the latest virtualization technology from AMD called SVM/Pacifica.

I went through this times and times but I still don’t get it! Something there doesn’t make sense :S

Last year I was trying to interface simple circuit boards to my computer through the parallel port (Post Link). I researched a bit and came across two basic IO functions in C++, which are _inp and _outp. These functions are direct implementations of the assembly instructions IN and OUT and are used to send and retrieve bytes of data from and to any port address.

One of the restrictions on the _inp and _outp functions (due to restrictions on the IN and OUT instructions themselves) is that they do not run under Windows XP (Windows NT generally). This is because Windows XP implements a protection scheme that prevents direct interfacing with the IO ports. The idea wasn’t quiet new for me; I already knew that Windows XP emulates almost every aspect of the hardware, and that every single driver (even the processor driver) is nothing but emulation. That is, applications can’t at any time deal with the hardware directly; data must always pass through the OS layer. This Emulation concept is adopted by many operating systems and even some programs. It has great advantages, to name few: security, performance, optimization... etc

The thing that I did NOT get that time was a 3rd party library named Inpout32 which had a solution to the Windows XP problem with the IO ports, check this out:

http://www.logix4u.net/inpout32.htm

This library provides two functions Inp32 and Outp32 that work exactly as _inp and _outp except that they DO WORK under Windows XP?!?!

Reading the How Inpout32.dll Works page really changed many of the thoughts I had about Windows architecture. I didn’t know there is such a thing as a “Kernel-Level” driver. The word “Kernel-Level” itself didn’t make sense to me! Since when did Kernel – the core of the operating system- had a level that can be attained by applications? And why would the operating system allow this to happen in this first place?

The thing that the Inpout32.dll library does is just a tiny portion of what the Blue Pill is claimed to do. The Inpout32.dll library bypasses the IO port restriction by loading some code at the same hardware-software layer the OS executes in. The Blue Pill, on the other hand, loads itself “lower” than the operating system, i.e. it’s closer to hardware than the OS itself!

The question is: how come such an execution is legitimately possible? Why would the operating system allow a program to take control over it? If this is really possible then it’s like saying that the OS enforces hardware security but made available a key to bypass it! What’s the use of implementing security in the first place then?

In matrix terms, it’s like saying that the programmers of the matrix provided a key inside the matrix that can put the matrix as a whole into simulation … why would they do that?

Waiting to hear more on the Blue Pill thing, but till then …

"I don't believe it. It's not possible!"

One More Farm’s Day

2006-06-21T20:38:00.000+03:00

Yesterday three of my cousins and I spent a yet another day at my cousin’s farm. Going there to prepare dozing amounts of “mashawi” has become a tradition that we’ve been following for a while now. The Farm is not far away from Amman, it is in a place called “Zeinat el-Rboo3” and the view there is wonderful!

Apart from our main mission, which is to prepare and eat mashawi, we enjoy a lot of chatting and hallucinating about a wide range of subjects, basically everything. There were times when we were like 15 guys there, and it was a lot of fun!

Later at night we do other things that vary every time. Sometimes we settle down discussing scientific issues, other times we tell horror stories. Few times did we split into teams and start wondering nearby lands and frightening each other. Yesterday one of my cousins brought a CD full of funny commercial ads and we spent the night watching and laughing.

I also caught a little something before sunset, something I spent the whole evening playing with :P …

This was my first time seeing a live chameleon, and was a rare opportunity to test the animal’s so-called colour changing ability. I placed it between a number of leaves and observed carefully, the thing must have been young and inexperienced because it turned to dark brown and was very stupidly visible! I also placed it on a shiny silver plate and laughed at its attempts to turn silver. That evening, I taught it a life-time lesson: not everything around is green or brown :D

I also put the animal through a number of tests that I’d like to tell you about but I’ll just skip it this time because I don’t want to this blog to turn into National Geographic.

Also, those of you who have been following my latest posts, must have noticed that animal rights associations already have plenty of accusations against me ;)

My cousin Naser wasn’t really happy for the fact that I was experimenting with this thing, and warned me of touching it because some of these produce toxic substances on their skin when they feel endangered. Therefore I “forgot” to tell him that at some time it escaped the container I placed it in, and went climbing the melon that we were eating :F

I liked that animal a lot, so bad I couldn’t take it home with me! I let it go in peace before we left :(

That was one good evening at the farm! For more pictures check my Picture Gallery section, I’ll be posting if anything freaky happens there next times :P

A Very “Unfriendly” Fellow

2006-06-17T03:39:00.000+03:00

One of my friends picked it crossing the street at night, I haven’t seen one in years … a hedgehog!

Of course the first thing that we thought of upon catching this fellow is to try to unroll it. Brute force didn’t work, so we had to think of more “creative” ways to see what’s inside the spines. One method that we tried was to ignite it with car keys (bil 3arabi: ne6ga3o self) … but it didn’t work “to our surprise” ;)

At some point we lost hope of unpacking this thing, so we thought of more interesting ways to have fun with it the way it is ... see below :P

Later, and after a comprehensive study of the animal’s behavior, I came out with a brilliant way to unroll it, a way that I should be nominated Noble prize for: we’ll leave it alone for sometime, and it will unroll by itself. What a genius have I been :D

I stood motionless with my mobile ready for shot. Some minutes later, the spines unrolled and the thing started to move. It was like watching a cartoon, the hedgehog started to move next to the wall really fast, more like it’s “sneaking”!

I wish we had more time that evening, but we had to leave. We left the hedgehog in my friend’s garden, maybe next time we catch it we’ll experiment more :P

Hedgehogs are fascinating, below are some interesting facts I collected from the Internet about hedgehogs …

They are nocturnal animals.
They are noisy animals; they can produce different sounds depending on their mood and what they’re doing.
They have very long tongues.
They easily engage in fights with each other.
They walk fast.
They can travel over 3 kilometers per night.
They can swim.
They have an immense tolerance for poisons. One gram of poison which would kill 300 people kills only 8 hedgehogs.
In the ancient Rome hedgehogs had been used as brushes!

No More X-Files

2006-06-14T02:58:00.000+03:00

I’ve just finished watching episode 19 of season 9 of The X-Files. This episode entitled The Truth is the last episode of the last season of the show, and by watching it I’ve completed watching all nine seasons of The X-Files!

I am a big fan of this show, I started downloading and watching The X-Files as early as I got my ADSL plugged, that would be about a year and half ago. I enjoyed it a lot, sometimes I used to watch like 3 or 4 episodes in a row when I had time :P

Am sure almost all of you know what The X-Files is about, for those who don’t: The X-Files, starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, is a series of investigations of two FBI agents: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully into the world of paranormal and unexplained phenomena. The focus of these investigations went on UFOs, extra-terrestrials, mutants, myths, unseen worlds, government conspiracies and else.

What I loved about this show, apart from the thrilling plots, is the scientific analysis that characters used to derive upon observing an explained phenomenon. This role was mainly played by Agent Scully, a medical doctor and a scientist who was assigned to the X-Files department of the FBI to assist Agent Mulder in providing scientific insights about what was marked unexplained.

Although the main themes of the show were thriller, mystery and horror, it didn’t lack a sense of drama and humor at some points. One episode in season 3 entitled From Outer Space really cracked me up …

It started with a couple driving alone at night back home when their car suddenly stopped working (classic electromagnetic pulse). Immediately, a UFO appeared, and two aliens went down to abduct the couple. The women in the car asked the man “What are those?”, the man replied “How the hell should I know?”, then both went hypnotized.

The aliens started dragging the couple to their UFO, but they were intercepted by the landing of another UFO. A “different” alien came down from the new UFO and approached the aliens who where dragging the couple. One of the former aliens said to his friend “Jack, who is that?”, his friend replied “How the hell should I know?” :D

… and the new alien abducted all four :D

That was one episode I hardly can forget. Man, I wish they make more of this show. Now that it’s over I don’t know what to watch, I already started to miss it. It left a big gap somewhere :(

A Very “Friendly” Fellow

2006-06-10T16:36:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I spent an hour or so in the afternoon fixing a part of my car’s interior. Some screws weren’t tightly fixed in place so part of the dashboard was loose and occasionally felt down on the pedals. This was very irritating while driving, but I didn’t have time to fix it in the past month because I had loads of university exams. Now that I have a break before my last final exam I decided to do it. I simply can’t stand any imperfection in my car :P

Anyway, while I was sitting in the front seat and driving some screws, a cute little fellow approached the tools and started looking.

Well, I don’t know for you, but this is not the first time I see a cat interested in some human activity, specifically a car-related one. Months ago I was helping my cousin replacing his car tire with a spare, and a cat stood nearby and watched the whole process carefully. Maybe it was curious, or just bored, or maybe some neurons in its little brain were short-circuited leading to this weird behavior :P

Cats act really insanely sometimes, but the thing that kills the most is their stupid look when you burst laughing at them :D

Minutes later, this little fellow came near and started stretching its body and moving between my legs as if it’s begging me to let it in, into whatever thing I was doing, and I didn’t mind. I like cats a lot; they were and still are my favorite pets. I never got bored of watching them around, but I needed to finish before sunset, I couldn’t drive at night like this!

The cat, seeing that I apparently didn’t mind, climbed my jeans and stood in front of the pedals! By then I started to think that it must be REALLY curious to jump over a human and step into his car just to take a look around?!

I had been working close to the pedals and the cat was standing in my way so I tried to move it out, but instead it jumped and took seat next to me :S

I ignored it for a while and continued joining the falling part of the dashboard, it stood there still and watching as I moved the tools and drove the screws.

Some time later, a huge truck was coming down the street, and the loud sound of its engine freaked the cat! When it passed right next to us, the cat has freaked out enough that it decided to leave whatever thing it thought it was doing and jump out of the car.

It looked through the glass, the shiny clean transparency that appeared to be a way out, then jumped confidently, and … just like in the cartoons … BOM :D

I burst into laughing, while it escaped out the door it initially came in through. They say “Curiosity killed the cat”, only this time it caused it a headache :D

Nothing Else Matters (Cover)

2006-06-08T17:49:00.000+03:00

So close no matter how far
couldn't be much more from the heart
forever trust in who we are,
and nothing else matters ...

Download "Nothing Else Matters" played by Ghaith (4.3 MB)

About My Friend

2006-06-07T01:59:00.001+03:00

I felt sooo embarrassed to read her post, I spent almost half an hour convincing myself that the words were hers and I couldn’t believe!

Now am taking even more time trying to come out with few sentences to pay her back little of her kindness. I thought it must be unfair to drop her warm post a comment on the way, so I decided to write her a post in return :)

She happens to be a true friend of mine, a very special person I met during my first days at the university, two years ago. Since then she’s became a kind supporter, a favorite Internet buddy, and a friend with a nice smile that would make my day at the university.

I must say it’s not easy for me to get to know people like her. Unluckily I turned to be such a cold and emotionless guy who most people interpret incorrectly. I give very wrong impressions, and worse of all: I don’t care for it. It takes quiet a personality to digest mine. She, on contrary, is such an active, lively, emotional and adorable lady! I must be really lucky to know her.

We do have different personalities, but she made it as one of best friends. She’s one of few people in the world that know what am really about. In return to her sincere friendship, I offer my modest help and support anytime, and in anyway I can …

Lubna Marwan Taimeh … Thank you

In reply to:
http://xlubnax.blogspot.com/2006/06/let-me-tell-you-about-my-friend_06.html

ياللهول

2006-05-17T19:51:00.000+03:00

Check the comments left by students on this university announcement :D

Secret of the Runes

2006-05-12T16:54:00.000+03:00

This is the name of a music album released by Therion in 2001. Therion is remarkable Swedish metal band that used to play heavy metal since 1987, but turned in 1996 into playing symphonic metal; a wonderful subgenre of metal music featuring orchestral elements such as cellos, violins, choirs, flutes and horns.

I found out about Therion while playing a collection of gothic rock/metal songs that I downloaded recently. The collection had a very nice song called “Ljusalfheim” from Therion’s “Secret of the Runes” album. At first, I couldn’t collect any of its lyrics because it sounded much like Latin for me. Later, I googled and got the lyrics that -to my surprise- turned out to be English! I must say I started to like the song even more and kept playing it over and over.

Soon after, I downloaded the whole album and did some research. Secret of the Runes is a concept album based on Norse mythology; that of Scandinavian people. In Norse mythology, the world is divided into nine different realms: Muspell the realm of fire, Niflheim the realm of ice and cold, Asgard and Vanaheimr the realms of gods, Hel the realm of the dead, Álfheim realm of the Elves, Niðavellir realm of the Dwarves, and Miðgarðr which is the world as we know it. Therion devoted a track for each realm, picturing it through lyrics and melodies. Runes shown on the album’s front cover are Nordic runes from the Elder Fuþark alphabet, each rune is a symbol for a song. It’s also worth mentioning that every song in this album is in a different language!

Therion have their lyrics written by Thomas Karlsson, a college student with an interesting background on mythologies, magic and stuff. The whispers you hear in Ljusalfheim are his own. Karlsson, though, was never regarded as a band member.

This album is a musical and conceptual work of art. I’ve uploaded Ljusalfheim and posted its lyrics below so you people can check it out. Enjoy!

Download Therion – Ljusalfheim.mp3 (5.4 MBs)

Ljusalfheim Lyrics:

Solar glare from Lord Frej,
the Shining One,
in Ljusalfheim he's King of elves.

High above the rainbow
and in the tarn deep in the wood
you'll find the elves.

Follow their light
it's brighter than the sun
it makes you fly...

In the realm of Alfheim
you never know what you have seen.
A pale mirage?

Beauty make you sunblind
it fills your mind
you fly away and lose your hug.

Fly with their wings
they make you feel so free
but you may fall...

Flee from their light
they'll maybe drag you down
or make you fly...

Sources: Wikipedia, and various Internet web sites.

Blog Updates

2006-05-06T01:23:00.000+03:00

Hi All! Today I made two interesting updates to the blog!

1. Broken Links Fixed:

Download links on this blog, which have been broken for months, are now up and working! I kept moving my files over the Internet because I couldn’t find one good file sharing server. I spent months looking for a reliable service, and I think I finally found one. Links allover the blog should be working now, please report if not. I’ve also updated my music selections' list with new songs you may find interesting!

2. Comments Enabled:

When I first started blogging, I decided to disable commenting and make my blog look and feel like a personal web site. I posted about things I thought were interesting without letting readers respond, argue, or post any suggestions. I thought I wouldn’t have enough time to read and reply to their comments!

Another reason that kept me from enabling this feature is that I don’t tend to argue much nor have debates over my own thoughts! I always had the attitude of keeping what I think for myself, and express my opinions only in few occasions. I love to engage in meaningful scientific discussions that are purely a communication of facts, while on the other hand I hate struggling with people who think of a discussion as a matter of forcing opinions.

Anyway, looking now at others blogs I think I’ve missed a big deal of what a blog is about, so I decided to enable comments for a while and see how it goes. I believe it’ll be a lot of fun, and am anxiously waiting to read your first comments :D

I’d like to emphasize that any impolite comments will be strictly dealt with, and in most cases the commenter will be punished (ra7 a7o6 rejle fe ja3ooro lamma ashoofo). That would be my one-line commenting policy!

Blog now open to your comments :)

Death Metal Concert

2006-04-22T23:39:00.000+03:00

On Saturday 14^th I went with some friends to attend a so-called “Death Metal Concert”, where four local bands (Esotic, Bilocate, Phex and Blind Vision) played covers for Metallica, Megadeath, Cradle of Filth and others, in addition to some “songs” of their own.

Though am not a big fan of Death Metal myself, I was very anxious to attend the concert, I wanted to see how-far local guitarists got with playing.

I must say I was very disappointed that afternoon. I didn’t like the performance of the bands, for one. And I hated being together with such a retarded audience! People there were merely a bunch of "coOl" school kids and university freaks, all in black t-shirts either labeled with deep nonsense statements, or had artworks of famous metal bands that those freaks probably know nothing about.

Many times during the concert did a number of idiots do some insane acts like taking off shirts, creating mosh pits and even jumping off the crowds! It was funny to see them exercise their stupidity this way :)

Clearly those people had nothing to do with music, but were rather “3aysheen il dor”, as one of my friends better described it, giving metal music this insane figure.

Stupid Puzzle

2006-04-16T20:29:00.000+03:00

Last wednesday, in the university, I got stopped by a friend who said he had an interesting puzzle to share. The puzzle was:

You are provided with three non-scaled containers of sizes 10, 7 and 3 gallons. The ten-gallon container is full of water, while the other two are empty. Divide the water into two equal amounts.

Apparently, you are required to think of a sequence of pouring operations, after which the containers will become filled as required.

The guy said that some people, given a deal of time, did solve it so it shouldn’t be much of a problem for me. As he was explaining the puzzle, I was wondering whether it would take anybody more than few seconds before he/she can figure an answer, but it seems this wasn’t quite the case.

I hurried to attend my circuits’ lecture, which has already started by then, took a seat and immediately started working on the puzzle. To my surprise, I spent about fifteen minutes thinking and couldn’t get an answer. I was starting to question the validity of the containers' sizes when suddenly a cool fact came to my attention …

The build of this puzzle can be exploited to get the answer!

During those 15 minutes I was fooling myself for thinking! At no point I really had to “think” about the next step of solution. Try it yourself, the first step is pretty clear: pour water from the biggest container into one of the others. At every subsequent step you find yourself ahead a number of choices, all of which, except for the correct one, are pointless, and do nothing but probably take you few steps back. You don’t need to think because the right step is always so obvious; the other “choices” never make sense, and are only there to mislead you.

Sometimes the more effort you put trying to make something appear complicated, the more clues you leave proving it is not. Definitely interesting to think of it this way! :p

My First PIC Circuit

2006-02-20T23:54:00.001+02:00

You’re going to like this. This is my first self-controlled circuit! It is powered by a 9V DC transformer, works on its own, and is not connected to my computer in any way. In fact, a whole little computer is mounted on this circuit, something called a “PIC Microcontroller”.

The circuit works as a counter, pushing the button will increment the displayed digit by one. Pushing at 9 will reset back to zero. Circuit assembly may look trivial, however considering the fact that it is operating by itself and running a program, it is certainly a piece of art :p

Making this was a lot of fun; I got to use oscillators and voltage regulators, both components I never knew of. Also, this was my first time deployment of resistors and capacitors in logic applications. I enjoyed messing with these and observing how it affected the circuit. The most enjoyable part was making changes to the PIC program and burning it into the PIC microcontroller that is driving the circuit.

A Microcontroller is large IC, containing a processor, memory, I/O ports, and sometimes EEPROM. It is very easy to utilize yet more job-specific than a lone processor. Microchip PIC (Peripheral Interface Controller) is one type of microcontrollers that have interesting features. The one I got is PIC 16F877 (works as fast as 20 Mhz, has 8 kilo words program memory, 256 bytes EEPROM, 368 bytes RAM, 35 assembly instructions, interrupts, analogue to digital conversion… more)

PIC programs are written using PIC assembly on any desktop computer, compiled then burned into a PIC using a hardware programmer. Once you power it up, the microcontroller starts executing its program. This IC makes a computer by itself :)

I’ve been researching this for a while, but couldn’t make anything because I didn’t have a PIC programmer. I tried to build one but didn’t get lucky, so ended up buying one from eBay.

Previously, I started interfacing electronics to my computer, but soon realized that creating a functioning circuit needless of a nearby computer is far more powerful! Now (il mafrood ya3ni) am working towards creating a self-driving car; a robot. It’s not going to be serious as a start, though I have some plans in mind. I’ll start with buying whatever suitable remote controlled car, take off the remote control circuit, plant some infrared sensors, and finally embed one PIC microcontroller and connect it to sensors and motors. On power up, the microcontroller will run a program that will “hopefully” allow it to do something I was never capable of doing myself … driving responsibly! :’(

More circuitry on the way, keep checking :)

My First Guitar Solo

2006-01-25T12:13:00.000+02:00

Luckily I had the chance to record this!

Last night I finally started to play Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark” guitar solo with enough speed. I’ve been practicing this for a while, but never could have timed it correctly. Yesterday I thought of giving it a try before going to bed, and magically it did work!

Hear it yourself, the solo is played at the end of the extract, enjoy! :)

GuitarSolo.mp3 (687 Kbs)

Interfacing

2005-12-06T20:40:00.001+02:00

During this week I was able to break through some hardware difficulties, and unlock a secret I was fascinated with years ago: the field of the so-called Computer Interfacing, i.e. connecting computers to external peripherals and electronic circuits.

It all started back in school days, years ago. I had contact with people who were able to step outside software dimensions, and make programs that interact with outside world elements using sensors and actuators. The idea was astonishing, though I had absolutely no idea what bits look like outside computer cases back then :)

The closest thing I was ever able to do was arranging some bits on the computer’s parallel port (printer port). I didn’t know how to extract them or make use of them practically.

Through all those years I kept this in mind, and collected pieces of the puzzle one by one. It’s only this week that I’ve been able to link different software and hardware technologies together, and assemble something that actually works!

Well, for now I only got a blinking LED and a little animated show using a seven segment display. I was thinking of buying more ICs, sensors, and motors to play with but had second thoughts: I’ll think of a complex, yet feasible, project, then buy the parts and implement it. At least I’ll be out with something instead of having tested the operation of a bunch of ICs!

If you’re a computer geek, you’ll probably be wondering how this works. What I did was plugging the 8-data pins of the parallel port into a bread board, and sending bytes using the assembly OUT instruction to port 378H (address of parallel port). I also had to use a DLL to bypass a protection scheme Windows XP implements against I/O ports instructions.

After issuing the instruction, pins with logic high will rise to 4.4 volts, while those with logic low will drop to ground level. Those voltages are all what you need to power and interact with all kinds of circuit elements.

To power motors and heavy actuators, you’ll need higher voltage. Just grab one of the power supply cables which supply 12 volts (Yellow Wire) as well as 5 volts (Red Wire) and ground (Black Wires).

Most of you friends were excited as I showed you pictures I’ve taken of the circuit. I’ll keep you informed of any progress, keep checking :)

Terrible Week

2005-11-19T13:54:00.000+02:00

The past week happened to be one of the most exhausting weeks of my life. My physical and mental abilities got totally devoured that I barely stood on Thursday. I had some university exams and my reason failed due to fatigue. I also missed some lectures simply because I couldn’t be there. Time slipped away and my life didn’t progress at all.

It all started on Sunday. Being back to the gym I should have paid extra attention to myself. I was spending more hours at the university helping friends with the exams. We also studied together at my and their places. Later every night, many things remained unfinished and I couldn’t help but overload myself and get them over.

The decisions I made the past week weren’t mine. Am not happy about the way I spent my time, neither about the exams. I hardly remember any of it now; I must have been working offline all that time! Probably the only worthy thing I did was helping my friends the far I could :)

Thought the past week was a cold example of a typical human screw up, I don’t feel any sorry! I never regretted what is fate, the very events that are designated to be.

Jordan Planet

2005-10-10T18:02:00.000+03:00

Accidentally and fortunately today, I came by a very interesting site I would like to tell you about. It is more into an “online community” for ....

Jordanian Bloggers! :D

http://www.jordanplanet.net/

At the very first glance, I was forcefully attracted to read something written to the right, I was really amazed:

Jordan Planet is a portal attempting to link different Jordanians, who share the passion of writing blogs, as well as promote and encourage blog writing in Jordan.

For a long time, I though I and my friend Zeid are the only Jordanian bloggers in the world, ya3ni who would expect to see a list of more than 40 Jordanians interested in blogging!? The site is incredible, and even more are the bloggers who listed their blogs there.

Most of you probably read blogs before, and felt the enjoyment of hearing from people. I myself enjoy reading my friend’s blog, and rush into reading any new post. Blogs are really interesting, especially those of people who live in your community! Keeping in touch with these blogs will be really fascinating, not mentioning having one of your own :)

For the past two hours, I've been navigating through blogs linked by Jordan Planet, and reading different posts. People are using their blogs for reasons other than mine! Some are posting their daily life details, others are writing some thoughts and opinions, but obviously NONE is publishing creepy programs like I do :S

This quick “overview” charged my head with ideas of what to share on my little web space. Soon, this blog will be changing into something more interesting, enjoyable, and trendy!

Minesweeper Flags Game

2005-10-08T14:30:00.000+03:00

This is my first VB .NET application and my first game quite a long ago. It is basically the same as minesweeper, except that your objective is to detect the mines with minimum number of trials. Some of you probably played MSN Minesweeper Flags, well: this is the single-player version!

Unfortunately, to run this game you’ll need to download and install "Microsoft .NET Framework Redistributable 2.0 Beta 2". It is a 23 MB setup package that the game needs in order to run :(

Good News is: once you install this package, you’ll be able to use other applications developed using the new .NET technology, including my future applications. Setup will automatically check whether your computer has this package or not, and will direct you to download it if necessary.

Download Minesweeper Flags 1.0 (976 KB)

Enjoy it :)

Visual Basic .NET Review (Part 2)

2005-10-01T12:35:00.000+03:00

Visual Basic .NET Language Features

Fully Object Oriented

Objects, Properties, Events, and even Data Types all became classes and are treated exactly the same! Programmers who used to mess with objects in VB6 will be surprised to see how efficient VB .NET became regarding object orientation! Actually, I doubt existence of a more OOP language!

Very Fast

VB .NET code runs faster than any previous version of VB. According to some tests done by a friend of mine, its speed is quite the same of C++.

Hardware Independent

VB .NET code runs on any hardware platform since it is compiled into Microsoft’s Intermediate Language (IM) and further compiled by the framework on target machines as described previously.

More like C++

VB. NET code has inherited some properties of C++. My first notes are:

Functions can now be overloaded.
Objects became classes.
Classes can inherit other classes.
User-defined data types became structures.
Objects now have constructors and destructors.
Try/Catch scheme instead of On Error statement.
Similar scope specification: variables declared inside inner loops are not defined outside them.

Improved IDE

Visual Basic was well known to have the best IDE (Integrated Development Environment) ever! VB .NET continues this, its IDE is more organized and user-friendly; the very sight of it will make programming even more enjoyable!

Great Controls

The .NET Framework provides a wide range of all-function controls. What is really amazing about these controls is that they are supplied by the framework itself rather than by the operating system, i.e. they can function under all platforms!

Improved Code Editor

The code editor has undergone dramatic improvements, it now automatically adjusts code as you make changes, it instantly detects syntax and some run-time errors, and it helps keep code more organized by automatic tabbing, formatting, spacing, and sub-dividing code.

No-more API

The .NET class libraries provide functions more than sufficient to establish any kind of program or application. Use of API to do work where the language couldn’t help is history. VB .NET can directly access the operating system and computer hardware.

Great Resources Support

When it comes to resources, it’s a bit like “Yummy” :D !

Using VB. NET, you can link and embed resources such as strings, icons, images, sounds, and files into your application. What’s more is that these resources are instantly added to your application as objects in the My.Resources() namespace, and you can manipulate, extract, vie, play, run them in any way you want. This support will lay path for greater multimedia applications in the future.

Automatic Saving and Loading of Application Settings

You can define some variables as “application settings”, and your program will automatically save and load them. Thus, you can easily create a settings profile for your application and have it save and load them while paying attention to what really need to be coded well instead.

Super-Integration with other .NET Framework Languages

Thanks for CLR, CLI, and CTS, VB. NET components can easily deal with components developed using other members of the .NET platform. This comes really comforting especially for those who have a personal experience with the pains of transferring data across components developed with different languages.

Up-to Date

VB6 had disabilities dealing with new software, like versions of Microsoft Office newer than 97, and Microsoft Windows XP. VB .NET is more fitting now.

Visual Basic .NET Review (Part 1)

2005-10-01T12:17:00.000+03:00

Two years ago, I got the 2003 version of Visual Studio .NET, I was quiet surprised by the changes Microsoft made to its so-called visual studio. Visual Basic was my ultimate programming tool, and I should have started learning VB .NET immediately. Still, I was waiting for something more. I didn’t want to engage myself in learning a new “still under-development” programming language.

Since then, I hear all the time about the framework, and how it is becoming different from anything that ever existed in the field. It is only a week ago that I got VB .NET 2005 Express Edition, and it turned to be really worth waiting for :)

“The .NET Framework is the next iteration of Microsoft's platform for developing component-based software. It provides fundamental advances in runtime services for application software. It also supports development of applications that can be free of dependencies on hardware, operating system, and language compiler.”

Below are some paragraphs from “Programming Visual Basic.Net” by Dave Grundgeiger, a good book although a bit out of date now. In Part 2 of the review, I’ll highlight some of the new features of VB .NET.

Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Runtime (CLR)

At the heart of the .NET Framework is a new mechanism for loading and running programs and managing their interactions. This mechanism is described in the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), a specification for a runtime environment that allows software components to:

Pass data between each other without regard to the programming language in which each component is written.

Execute on different operating systems and on different hardware platforms without having to recompile the high-level source code (a low-level compilation still automatically occurs on the target platform).

Although the CLI specification was created by Microsoft, it has since been submitted to the ECMA standards organization (http://www.ecma.ch), which now has responsibility and control over it.

The CLI is just a specification—it has to be implemented in order to be useful. An implementation of the CLI is known as a Common Language Runtime (CLR). Microsoft's CLR implementation on the Windows platform is not under ECMA's control, but it is Microsoft's intention that the CLR be a fully compliant implementation of the CLI.

The CLI specifies how executable code is loaded, run, and managed. The portion of the CLR that performs the tasks of loading, running, and managing .NET applications is called the virtual execution system (VES). Code run by the VES is called managed code.

Intermediate Language (IL) and Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT)

All compilers that target the CLR compile source code to Intermediate Language (IL), also known as Common Intermediate Language (CIL). IL is a machine language that is not tied to any specific machine. Microsoft designed it from scratch to support the CLI's programming concepts. The CLI specifies that all CLR implementations can compile or interpret IL on the machine on which the CLR is running. If the IL is compiled, compilation can occur at either of two times:

Immediately prior to a method in the application being executed.

At deployment time.

In the first case, each method is compiled only when it is actually needed. After the method is compiled, subsequent calls bypass the compilation mechanism and call the compiled code directly. The compiled code is not saved to disk, so if the application is stopped and restarted, the compilation must occur again. This is known as just-in-time (JIT) compilation and is the most common scenario.

In the second case, the application is compiled in its entirety at deployment time. IL is saved to .exe and .dll files. When such a file containing IL is executed, the CLR knows how to invoke the JIT compiler and execute the resulting code.

Common Type System (CTS)

The CLI specification defines a rich type system that far surpasses COM's capabilities. It's called the Common Type System (CTS). The CTS defines at the runtime level how types are declared and used.

Previously, language compilers controlled the creation and usage of types, including their layout in memory. This led to problems when a component written in one language tried to pass data to a component written in a different language. Anyone who has written Visual Basic 6 code to call Windows API functions, for instance, or who has tried to pass a JavaScript array to a component written either in Visual Basic 6 or C++, is aware of this problem. It was up to the developer to translate the data to be understandable to the receiving component. The CTS obliterates this problem by providing the following features:

Primitive types (Integer, String, etc.) are defined at the runtime level. Components can easily pass instances of primitive types between each other because they all agree on how that data is formatted.

Complex types (structures, classes, enumerations, etc.) are constructed in a way that is defined at the runtime level. Components can easily pass instances of complex types between each other because they all agree on how complex types are constructed from primitive types.

All types carry rich type information with them, meaning that a component that is handed an object can find out the definition of the type of which the object is an instance. This is analogous to type libraries in COM, but the CTS is different because the type information is much richer and is guaranteed to be present.

250 MB Hotmail Account

2005-06-17T01:39:00.000+03:00

I found this trick to boost your Hotmail email account to 25 MB instead of 2, after which it will further be made 250 MB. I tried it myself, and it is working! Though of sharing it with you, enjoy:

Login to your account
Go to Options
Click My Profile
Change country to United States
Wait for browser to load US settings
Change state to Florida and zip code to 33332
Click Update
Click Continue
Go to Language and make sure it is English
Paste this link in the same browser:
http://by17fd.bay17.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/AccountClose
Wait until the screen says "Your Hotmail account is closed and ready to be deleted."
Click Close Account
Go back to Login and relogin to your account
Bypass the steps to reactivate your account

All your previous emails will be preserved, and now you account size limit will increase to 25 MB. Within a month, it will be upgraded to 250 MB.

What's up

2005-06-15T19:49:00.000+03:00

Hey! Bet most of you were wondering where I disappeared. Actually, many things happened during the past months and I was just lazy to blog. I continued my car accidents scheme, I had 3 new accidents. The last one was the terminal for my car: I lost it. I didn't update the accidents list because this thing became no more funny, some friends were injured, and I felt terrible for a couple of "weeks".

Anyway! I got ADSL; and am spending much time at home, no more hangouts till dawn. Two more copies of my network system were sold, and am thinking about making some upgrades in summer, still not sure. My final exams are about done and I still don't have a clear schedule for summer activities!

Apart of all mentioned above, nothing is really "up". I'll try to keep the blog updated as much as I can :)

Einstein's Puzzle

2005-03-05T03:59:00.000+02:00

Albert Einstein supposedly wrote this puzzle. It is said that only 2% of the world's population are able to solve it. I think the puzzle is amazing, and worth trying!

Puzzle Context:

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors. In each house lives a man with a different nationality. The 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same beverage.

The question is: "Who owns the fish?"

Hints:

The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is on the left of the white house.
The green house's owner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man living in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

I've done the puzzle using an extremely effective way; the puzzle can be represented by six dimensions of properties crossing together. Drawing each two dimensions together, you'll get a set of 15 different tables (Colour Vs Nationality, Pet Vs Drink, Position Vs Pet …etc).

So what I've been doing is filling these tables and copying adjacent values till I got all of them filled. The given hints are basis to start filling the tables. I've prepared an excel sheet with the tables arranged a certain way to make the process easier.

You can email me and I'll send you the answer willingly, but be sure to try doing the puzzle yourself or you'll miss a lot!

MVES 3

2005-02-26T17:11:00.000+02:00

MVES (Multi-Variable Equation Solver) is a program that can solve any number of mathematical linear equations.

I've coded this version in about 2 hours the day before my economics final exam. Making it was really refreshing, because this version came to be much better than previous ones, and I did make it in a time am feeling my coding powers are fading.

Go download it if you have time, and please read the documentation file included in the setup package, it's really interesting!

Download Here (2.0 MB)

My Car Accidents

2005-02-19T02:01:00.000+02:00

I have a lovely Honda Accord 1982 Sport, and I've been driving it for long enough to take part in more than one car accident. These accidents are wonderful incidents that always happen in the most suitable time. Below is a list of the accidents I've been part of (so far) with a description of each.

Accident 1 : "Nothing worth mentioning"

It happened in the first few days of the last Ramadan, it was the first day I decided to pray Salat Al Taraweeh. I was driving three guys to Masjed Al Kaloti in the Rabyeh. Just at the entrance of the car park, a cop (who's commanding traffic in the area) pointed me to drive the car in. I instantly responded and turned quickly to make a little "touch" with the back bumper of a near car. I was shocked, yet then relieved to see that the bumper of the other car was barely touched. Thought nothing happened to my car, yet later when I parked I noticed that the body was a little damaged.
No need to say that I never prayed Salat al Taraweeh again that Ramadan.
Accident 2 : "Performing a drift slide at a high speed"

I was hanging out with a group of friends at the night preceding Eid Al Feter. We were driving somewhere when, coming down an inclined street, I had to turn a corner and take some narrow street to the right at a really high speed (something around 50 Km/h), and thought I could make it together with a drift slide :D
The car drifted a little and ran straight into the block in the middle of the street. One of the front wheels hit the block; the car then drifted and hit the back wheel with the block again. Hopefully the body wasn't even touched, but the axis, wheels, braking system and steering system were all severely damaged!
Minutes later, I left the deformed street with clouds of dust filling the area. The scene gave the impression that whoever caused this, couldn't have possibly survived it, yet so I did.
Accident 3 : "Bumpers together"

This happened just two days ago!
I was on the main road, on the way to visit our school. A bus at the front suddenly braked, and traffic stopped. All cars managed to stop safely, yet because I had those super brakes (upgraded from accident #2, remember?) and I was driving (as usual) at high speed, I failed to stop and bumped a taxi car.
I went down examining both cars, nothing really happened except for a small hit. Both bumpers were just as fine as before the impact. The taxi driver however claimed that the hit caused a small curvature in part of the inside body of his car.
We called the police. The police officer, coming 10 minutes later, mocked both of us for stopping for such a small incidence. The taxi driver, however, insisted that his car was damaged and had a fight with the cop.
So what started as a visit to the school, ended as a visit to the police department. I really enjoyed all of it, together with having my first ticket!

A Little Puzzle

2005-02-06T17:17:00.000+02:00

Just few days ago, I was working on some sort of a puzzle published by the chess club in our university, the puzzle was:

"How can you place 8 pawns on a chess board such that none intersect vertically, horizontally, or diagonally?"

Sitting down working on it, some friends passed by and asked for what I was doing, and knowing that it was a puzzle they immediately joined trying to get it solved.

We spent about 20 minutes trying arrangements, but none succeeded, so I decided to code a program to solve it. I left the guys with the puzzle and went to the computer lab and started making a program to solve it, yet five minutes later one of the guys called and told me he did solve it finally! I quitted the program and went to check the so-wanted solution. It was great!

One further question was to be answered: "How many different solutions do we have?".

What we thought of is that you can rotate the solution 3 times to get 4 different arrangements while still not breaking the rules, so the answer would probably be 4 possible arrangements.

Anyway, 2 days later I finished the program and started the search, the program came out with 92 different solutions!!!
That means, neglecting rotated copies of arrangements, we have 23 possible solutions for the puzzle!!

Try doing the puzzle yourself, and if you have time, download my little Chess Puzzle Solver utility (14 Kb).

PSUT Chess Club Logo

2005-01-29T01:34:00.000+02:00

Some time ago, the chess club in my university announced a competition for designing a logo. I designed some templates, but they never asked for them: the competition was cancelled :’(

Click here to take a look

My Chess Game

2005-01-22T19:54:00.000+02:00

This is the game-version of my chess engine, a pure C++ application am currently developing. The setup contains a documentation file explaining everything, enjoy it!

Download Here (1.23 MB)

Favorite Quotes

2005-01-22T17:19:00.000+02:00

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
All great discoveries are made by mistake.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
There is no difference between a wise man and a fool when they fall in love.
For a true problem, there is no solution.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Solving of the problem is on finding out the people who will solve it.
If something moves and is green=Biology; If something smells bad=Chemistry; If something doesn't function=Physics.
Only a fool can repeat something that the other fool has done.

Picture Gallery

2005-01-22T02:32:00.000+02:00

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2005-01-22T02:29:00.000+02:00

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2005-01-22T02:22:00.000+02:00

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2005-01-22T00:00:00.000+02:00

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