What IF?

Well let's start by that History doesn't understand the question what if, like what if I didn't quit from my previous company, what if I didn't drink coffee this morning, what if I studied more before I went to the test, or what if the USSR didn't collapse? well things already happened, end of story.
Or how about the answer, the world wouldn't be the same, how not the same? this question has no answer. History has one dimension, and one Trend.
Well, this gets us to another topic, REGRET, e.g. I regret that I quited my previous work, oh really, and what did this made you, nothing, a better sentence would be, By quitting my previous work, I learned that I should appreciate the things I have, I'm not trying to be this positive guy, but it's a fact regret wont do you a thing, why?, cause things already happened, and you can't change them.
Everybody have done mistakes in his life, shouldn't they regret it? of course not, things that happened in your life made you who you are today, they taught you, they shaped you.
Now, lets assume that you can go back in history, you've built (or bought) your time machine, and you want to go back in history to change the mistakes you made, well the first thing is that this history is your future not your history, cause you've already done that (stupid ha?!), so if you want to go back in history, you should loose everything you took from that time till now, how is that, it's that you didn't gain any experience from what happened from the moment your going back to, till this moment, i.e. you don't have the conclusion that you should regret this thing, so you are going to do the same mistake again, and regret it once again.
OK, so I've done a mistake what should I do? well at first, if you are really convinced that it's a mistake, try to fix it, usually you wouldn't be able to, cause that is what regret is in the first place, OK now what?, LEARN from it. and stop crying like a baby, regret wont do you nothing.
Another Topic Pops up here, if I where in your place I would've done ..., stop the crap, the first thing you are not me, that's a fact, secondly if you were me you won't be in the exact same situation I were in, cause you where in another situation, that's history dude, OK what does that concludes us to ..., Everybody is the best to be himself, i.e. I'm the best man to be me, I don't mean that there aren't people better than me (although there are not :P kidding), better is a relational word, someone is better than some one in something specific, i.e. I'm better that the secretary in writing code, and for someone to be himself, nobody is better him.

Another Piece Of My Crap

Trust No One

If you are a movie fan you would've heard this sentence a lot, well for me it was a little different, it was "TRUST NO ONES CODE", even though I believe in open source and stuff like this, but I had it in my mind for a long time, I wrote almost everything from scratch, I only use my code library.
well for quite sometime, I decided that I might be wrong, there exist people in this planet that are smart, and can do a lot of good job, and they can be trusted. I guess I had to learn the value of this rule the hard way.
everything worked fine, it was like magic, the library I used worked like magic, until the extensive testing time had came ...
and wow there was a little bug, so small, that rarely happen, but the system couldn't go while it's there, and it was in the library.
OK, let's fix the library, and who is the criminal that wrote that library, the whole library was built that this bug won't happen, it was spread all over the library, fixing the bug means changing the whole library, which is not all useful ...
and now I had to spend the night rebuilding parts of that system, I guess I learned my lesson, I would trust nobodies code anymore, I would only trust what my hands have done, but I learned it the hard way.

TRUST NO ONES CODE

Code the Page

Working, and listening to Metallica this what the result code be

On a long information highway, setting in my office
you can listen to the processor moaning out as one line code
you think about the script, or the code you wrote the night before

But your thoughts would soon be wandering the way they always do
When your working sixteen hours, and theres no much fun to do
And you don't feel much like working, you just wish the project was through

Here I am - in the office again
There I am - coding the stage
Here I go - playing geek again
There I go - code the page

So you walk into this balcony, strung out from the work
And you feel the eyes upon you, as you're shaking off the code
you pretend it doesn't bother you, but you just want to encode.

Yeah, most times you can't hear 'em talk, other times you can
All the same old clichés, is it a feature? is it a bug?
And you always seem outnumbered, you don’t dare code a patch
code your patch

Here I am - in the office again
There I am - coding the stage
Here I go - playing geek again
There I go - code the page

Oo-ooh, out there in the spotlight, you’re a million lines away
Every ounce of code you try to give away
As the sweat pours out your body like the code that you write, yeah

Later in the evening, you lie awake on your chair
With the echoes of the alerts ringing in your head
You smoke the day’s last cigarette, remembering what he said
What he said

He-ey

Yeah
And here I am - in the office again
There I am - coding the stage
Here I go - playing geek again
There I go - code the page
There I go - code the page
There I go, yeah, yeah
There I go, yeah, yeah
There I go, yeah
There I go, yeah
There I go, oo-oo-ooh
There I go
And I’m gone

I guess I'm going to release an album when this project is over :D

Chain Letters

A typical chain letter consists of a message that attempts to induce the recipient to make a number of copies of the letter and then pass them on to one or more new recipients. A chain letter can be considered a type of meme, a self-replicating piece of information that uses a human host to distribute copies of itself. Common methods used by chain letters include emotionally manipulative stories, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and the exploitation of superstition to threaten the recipient with bad luck or even physical violence if he or she "breaks the chain" and refuses to adhere by the conditions set out by the letter.

more

So, let's define "chain letter". A chain letter is ANY e-mail that contains instructions to "forward this out" or "forward this to everyone you know" or anything else of that nature. Who creates chain letters? Now you might want to think that when you get an e-mail telling you there's some sick child with cancer and they will receive $0.03 for every time this e-mail gets forwarded out, in fact the mental image may just tug at your heart strings so bad that you forward it to other news or joke lists that you're on, in hopes of spreading the word and bring hope to this poor kid.

more

Well, guys, the thing I hate more than receiving SPAM, is receiving Chain Letters, it usually has a big size, as everybody in the whole stupid part of the earth, has forwarded it to somebody else who has forwarded it to another body to ..... and forwarded it to me.
Alright, there is no sick girl whom AOL has paid a fu***** cent for each one receiving a damn message, Hotmail is not going to delete your account if you don't send this message, (they can know when was the last time you logged in to make sure you are using it), and Bill Gates is not throwing money over anybody, and you wont get a free mobile, or a free shit or anything. you are not going to be rich or anything.
Chain Messages are used by spammers, as they collect as much emails as they want throw this thing, imagine a single chain message going around, and then getting back to the same spammer who sent it, how many emails he would've received. What could happen if people were wise enough not send this shit all around? do you enjoy having this FREE SOFTWARE, or VIAGRA, or stupid things going around in you're mailbox? if no, then stop forwarding this damn emails.
if you are not convinced yet, well then enjoy your life, but don't send me any stupid chain message.

Another Definition of a Holiday

Well if you remember my first definition to a holiday, well I guess I have another one:

A holiday is the day that you can go to work late, and you can have lunch (Falafel) break whenever you like, whereas a working day is the day that you have to go to work early, and you have to take your falafel break only at a specific time, if you didn't take it, el 3awad b salamtak

Technorati Tags: Holiday, Definition, Work

NULL Issue In MySQL

In the last few days, I was working on some mysterious issue regarding some SQL statements, it was something like this.
SELECT count(*) from some_table WHERE (condition_a);
the result was:
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    11223 |
+----------+

alright Now:
SELECT count(*) from some_table WHERE (condition_a) AND (condition_b);
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        0 |
+----------+
aha Ok then:
SELECT count(*) from some_table WHERE condition_a AND NOT (condition_b);
The result was also
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        0 |
+----------+

HA !!!!
Ok for those 11223 records the condition_a was true, from the second statement I could tell that condition_b was false, so NOT condition_b should be true, but it was also false from the third statement.
So for Logic to play around condition_b, and NOT condition_b both are false (How can that be) all theories of logic are broken (what is going on?)
After breaking up the two conditions, I found that I was comparing one of the values in condition_b with NULL, so in BOTH cases the result would be FALSE, I've always assumed that NULL would be casted to 0, but the fact that in MySQL it's not.
So this was just a thing that you might want to take care of when you write your SQL statements.
Hope it was Useful

Technorati Tags: MySQL, Gotcha, alaa, SQL

Old File

This program is a semulation of a process management system.
I wrote in 3rd year, after I took the OS course, so hope it might be useful for some people.
jobmanagement.c
Enjoy ...
I published it before, I thought it won't harm if I do it again.

Technorati Tags: c, programming, OS

When will we grow-up?

Inspired by a post on Khalaf's blog about the human rights report, and the Jordanian responses against it.
Well I guess it's in our culture to think that we are perfect, and we never do anything wrong. We never accept the thought that we might be wrong at some point, if you come to your colleague and tell him that he did something wrong, the first thing that he tries to do is to deny, and if he couldn't he would start blaming somebody else, or even starts blaming you, even if you have nothing to do with it.
One of the points that I learned during My work with the UNFPA, is if you want to reach to something you should learn from your mistakes, and to learn from them the first thing you need to learn is where did you make mistakes, for that you need to criticize your self and to listen to other people criticism, as they have another points of view, you should listen to them, unfortunately in my live, the only people who criticized me was my bosses (who should to make the job better), and my close friends who really cares about me (as we always had this thing between us), other people thinks that they might hurt my feeling with their criticism, for me nowadays, (it's something wrong that I do) as I'm bored of all of this, if I criticized somebody, and he just started to deny it or to take the defensive side, as if I was attacking him, I would put him in some list, and would start to avoiding any interaction between me and him (and of course try to ignore his existence), and if it was work we are talking about, (alright I would tell him first) if he took that side again, I would report it to the manager (as he cannot take that side with him), I know that it's mean, but I just hate this kind of people.
If you don't criticize, and accept criticism, how can you develop?

Let's see what you have to say …

A Definition of A holiday

A holiday is the period of time you start collecting more work to do when you get back to work.
I really need to have some sleep ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Love, Music & me

This is not a stupid article or something, will I guess this is not an article at all, It's just something I'm thinking about.
Well how do I start? Ya, In my entire life I fell in love for 2 times, which were (if I could say) an impossible relation, for me every perfect girl (something like soul mate, but I don't believe in soul mates) has to be an older girl, who has something makes it impossible for us to have a happy ending.
My first was with a girl who was 3 months older (not a big deal), but we were form different planets, like that I'm from Pluto, and she's from Mercury, which should have end up (and it did) in a very little time, my second (My soul mate) we had everything in common, but she was 3 years older, and we couldn't get over it so it didn't last, and there was almost a 3rd, which I cut my mind off cause it (as i think) an impossible one, i guess shes older, and also have another religion (this thing just get my nerves off, the religion thing, that says no happy ending).

What I was getting to say is that all of this happened while music was in my way, I remember every time I fell to love I listened to too much Jazz(as usual), and also to Julia Botros, Bryan Adams, Bonjovi (which I refer to them as my old friends).

What I was thinking about yesterday, is why do I love Jazz that much, well of course because I love there music, the way the notes come, the freedom it gives, but after a deep thought there was something else more important, it is because it gives me something I really need, I usually don't have, and if i have it, it gives me a lot more, it gives me love, Jazz so full of love, I feel jazz like a delicious wine, when you put a little in your mouth, you just want it to remain there cause it tastes so good you don't want it to go to your stomach, but you also want all of your veins full of, so you swallow it, and take another, and that's love.

I feel that music hasn't left something of your life that didn't get into it, but when it comes to love Jazz is the Master, I remember when my first relationship was ended I heard a track called After the Rain, It was the first time I hear that track and really feel it, I just couldn't stop crying, and like that a lot.

For me now I'm alone, desperate, but I have Jazz with me.

Thanks for reaching here

Getting Sick

I really hate to get sick, but what I hate more than that is to take medicine or see a doctor, I really prefer to remain sick than that, so I never took a sick leave cause I never had a proof that I've been sick, which were my annual leaves come in handy, I really wish I could get rid of that habit. :-)

A definition for War

The word war had always had a definition for me, I just want to say it here.
War is when two people (usually soldiers) try to kill each other, not because they disgrace each other, or even hate each other, but because of other two people (usually leaders) setting on fancy chairs, having fancy dinners, living a fancy life have a misunderstanding between them.
I Just hope that all the people who fights in these wars really understood this definition.

Circle of Trust

From a lot of time I believed that every human being has some kind of a circle (or maybe a sphere) around him that separates him from other humans. This circle (or sphere) starts to shrink with another human as long as his relation with that person becomes friendlier.
So if you can notice yourself when you are introduced to other people, at first you try to keen the maximum space between you and him, as your relation gets stronger with him, the physical distance between you and him just shrinks. If anybody tries to break the borders of this circle, you just get nervous, so if you had ever noticed people in the elevator, as the space is so little, everybody just acts weird, like you see somebody looking at his watch, another just looking at the ceiling … .
The other day I was introduced to someone, I don't know about his mentality, but every time he talks to me he gets (physically) closer, I just try to get away, and a long loop of this just starts to happen, after a little while I was very annoyed so I told him that his breath is killing me (it's just to let him keep some space). In the end of the day I apologized for what happened and explained to him everything, for some reason I don't understand I felt that he was more offended by what I say more than when I told him that breath thing. Can anybody explain?