Posts by: Ali

Blogger, Pursuing MBA in Leadership and Change management, Project Manager, Developer, Street Racer.

Friendship and Love

Could friendship and Love coexist? This question that I have heard many many times. Today, I decided to write about this topic. Sometime ago, I have written a post to define What is Love?. It may not be the full clear picture, but it should serve the purpose for this post.

Before I start into details about the correlation between Friendship and Love. I shall define what is Friendship?

Friendship is the state of being friends. Its an interpersonal relationship between people. Makes those people so close. People cannot be friends without love anyway! Love is what makes us!

There is a list of values that required as keys to success friendship.

  1. Love – I will talk about this later in types of love.
  2. Trust – Without trust, what is the relationship?
  3. Honesty – Its a key for trust.
  4. Mutual understanding – It is a key for success, however, conflicts could occur, but the  above keys allows to clean the air and things get back to normal.
  5. Respect – Its the key for mutual understanding.
  6. Desire the best for the others
  7. Enjoyment.

A friendship is not a friendship without the above key values.

Friendship is in levels/grades. Some friends, are best friends.

Could Friendship and Love coexist in a relationship? / Could friends love each other?

In one word, yes!

Now, as I said earlier, love is a key to a successful relationship. As I said in my Love definition. Part of love is wanting to spend the rest of the life with this person. In this case, your friend. But this love is non-romantic. Unlike Marriage Love which is romantic, and it may involve sexual relationship.

As for me, I select my friends carefully. I love them so much, no one could imagine my love to them. Though, sometimes we get busy in life, however, our relationship stays intact. I have many differences with my friends, conflicts. Thanks to Love, we never loose each other.

On a side note: If you have someone if your life, who have those key values listed above, be friends.

Good friends are like Stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they are always there. And I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.

PHP Obfuscators and Encoders

A common problem with Interpreted Languages (eg. PHP, Javascript, Java, Python) is that its really hard to protect the source code. Today, I will talk about PHP Obfuscators and Encoders.
Two types of protection can be found for PHP, first type which is the easiest, Obfuscation. Making the code not human readable. An example of such product is ZenCrypt (I wrote a semi-review about it last year). However, a good developer or a reverse engineer can go about that, and alter the code to change its behavior, like bypass the license verification.

The second type is encoding, the encoder encodes the PHP script to some encrypted text (I don’t want to go into details here, but that’s the general idea). Those encoded scripts requires a loader, this loader decodes the script and runs it via the PHP Interpreter. Those loaders are simply PHP extensions. Example of those are ZendGuard and IonCube.

It is not hard to write a PHP extension, but it wont be adapted easily with most online hosts. Maybe Enterprise! But again, maintaining cross platforms is not an easy task.

Since IonCube and ZendGuard are widely supported with most hosts some came up with the idea of creating a hybrid obfuscator. The idea is to encrypt the code and have a php script to decrypt. But the decrypting script is encoded using ZendGuard or Ioncube. An example of such is phpCipher.

Last year in my post I wrote that I will be writing an encoder, I have been very busy since then. But last week I had the chance to start writing my encoder. I have most of the logic done. Once I am done writing my loader script, I will start writing the desktop app to encode the scripts. I am planing to release it on Mac App Store and online on my website for a small amount of money.

On a side note, I may offer my source for sale.

MBA Class – Leadership vs Management

In my MBA class, we are taking a course about leadership. I always thought that leaders are born with this talent. I still do, however, the professor and the article says otherwise, leadership can be taught to people. I can’t really figure this out, leadership is about coping with changes, motivating people and being able to guide and go over obstacles. Even if I agree that it can be taught from experience, yet, talent is different. Management can be taught, its about planing and it comes with experience.

The outcome of todays class is:

  • There are some characteristics that identify a leader.
  • Leadership can be taught, yet, I believe its a talent.
  • Leadership is not management, leadership is inspiration and motivation, people follow leaders.
  • Leaders have their ups and downs, there is a gray area, and it depends on how you see it.
It was a great discussion.

What is beauty?

This question popped up to my mind and it is inspired by the previous post (What is Love?).

Beauty is an interpretation of some kind of love or let me say liking. When we see something we like, we say its beautiful. Defining the word “like” will take another post, so I will stick with the word “beauty”.

When we see a person who is beautiful, it means that we either love this person, so we like everything about this person, then he/she becomes the most beautiful person in the world. Or we like something about this him/her, so it could be the shape of his/her face, the color of the eyes, or his/her hair cut/style. People sometimes look beautiful for the way they dress and depending on your mood.

If you notice, sometimes you see a beautiful person, and another day, they are just like the rest, the beauty is just gone. It could be that she/he was wearing something you like.

This word has a very complex meaning, I tried to express it in my own simple words.

What is love?

What is love? It is a question that have been asked by Hussain Nasser (@hnasr). So, here is my answer. Keeping in mind that everything I write here is my own opinion, some people may agree and some don’t.. So please don’t flood me with comments saying that I wrote the wrong thing or I have a weirdo opinion.

Love can be applied to everything, you can love a person, or a computer or even a pet. But I will define love based on loving people.

When I chat with my friends, we joke and we say that love is a band-pass-filter. What it means is that when we love, we only see what we like. Love is like glasses with filters, that makes us not only see what we like, it may even makes us like things we didn’t like.

Love is the butterfly effect when you see the person you love. Love is when you feel alone without this person around you, even though everyone else is around.

In love, beauty doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter if the person you love is beautiful/handsome or not, because love makes everything beautiful.

Love is when you want to spend the rest of your life with this person with no regrets! Love is happiness. Love is the most beautiful thing in this life. Love is what makes us. We can’t live without love…

Sometimes people mix love with sex, this is not true! Sex has nothing to do with love. Sex is a physical thing while love is a feeling. Attraction is not love. Liking an attitude is not love.

Viva Bahrain 3G network and Phone battery life!

If you haven’t noticed, using Viva 3G network consumes more battery than any other network in bahrain, zain and batelco to be specific. To make the story short, Viva 3G network is actually setup on HSPA+ which consumes more power than 3G.

Brief Technical Information: Quoted from Wikipedia:

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhanced 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, also dubbed 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

zain and Batelco provide HSPA+, however, the phone has to switch to it when it requires high speed access, but on Viva, HSPA is the default.

I bought myself a Dell Streak

Few days ago, I sold my iPad.. For few reasons.. 1st, I couldn’t find a proper use for it. I used it for browsing, but its size was too big for me. I thought of purchasing the Galaxy Tab, since its 7-inch… I went and I grabbed one and I tested holding it and walking with it. Didn’t wasn’t good either. The Dell Streak is the perfect size, yet, good screen. I immediately fell in love with the Streak. So, I bought one.

Why I don’t jailbreak my iOS device?

I just had a conversation with my friends. Why I don’t jailbreak my iOS devices.

A basic overview:

Jailbreaking the device basicly means getting root access to the device. It’s a Unix term to get administrative access to the device. Allowing you to install apps and customize the system.

What is a patched app?

Patched app is like saying infected with a virus.

What is my argument?

Apps can be patched and they have root access to your device. This means they can collect data and information about you with you knowing it.

You can say trust the community and stuff like that. But that’s what I say.

Loading fixed width lines in MySQL

Today I required to load a file into a database, the file requires some parsing to be loaded. Normal developer would load the file using a programming language, do the parsing and insert into the table. However, for me, I thought I would do it using MySQL DATA LOAD, it is faster and yet, no programming language required to load the files.

I am posting a sample code on how to parse files line by line using MySQL.

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘path/to/my/file’ into table [table-name]
(@line)
set field1 = SUBSTR(@line,1,10),
field2 = SUBSTR(@line, 11,12),
field3 = SUBSTR(@line, 48,19)

Now, what I did, is I just parsed text, since the file was not delimited but it had fixed width.

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