This exercise was making the paper puppets. Though I was not involved with the workers or even the timer guys. I was observing the whole operation. The teacher acted like the project manager, and 5 class colleagues were doing the assembly line workers job.

During this exercise, each worker was given a task to be done. The teacher was putting pressure on them as she was acting like the project manager. As a result, they were trying hard to finish as much paper puppets as possible. I was observing the behavior of each worker, since the last three workers were sitting idle until the second worker finishes her job. Her task was a longer task than the rest, thus she was a bottleneck. The class was fun and we have learned a lot.

Some of what we have learned from this class was:

1. The way you layout the operations space, is going to influence the production and product quality, it even influences the communication between the workers. During our exercise, though they were close to each other, each worker was only talking to the one right next to him/her.
2. During the exercise, the first worker tried to optimize the way he worked but the project manager which is the teacher told him to follow the process. This teaches us that if we ever want to  re-engineer a process, we need to talk to the workers. They see the obstacles, they most probably know how to optimize their work.
3. During the exercise, the workers found defected paper, but due to the pressure, they passed it on just to finish the process. What we could learn from this, when project managers or management puts so much pressure on workers, workers will have ethical issues and lead to high rate of defected products.
4. After we were done with the exercise, the teacher asked the workers how did they feel about their work load. Some said they were doing so much work, others said they didn’t have to do much. It is probably one of most faced issue with operation workers. Work isn’t divided equally among workers.
5. We also have discussed what we could have done to help our second worker which she had more complicated work to do, we have came with so many solutions which seemed to help, like hiring one more worker with her. Or distributing the work among other workers too.

Note: Part of our class, we are required to write a blog post on our class blog, I wrote almost the same content there, link: http://opsmgt.edublogs.org/2012/05/12/project-managers-vs-workers/

Here are some pictures that I took during class while we were doing the exercise: (Note: Some faces are blurred because they asked me to blur their faces).

Special Thanks to Mohammed (@madridlad) for recording this video.

Sometimes while driving, I take a look around me, and I see a woman crying or a furious person yelling at the phone. That person made a change in our life.

This change could be anything, like if we were upset and seen that person yelling at the phone and how he or she looked like, it gives us a look out of the box, and it changes the way we behave afterwards.

Sometimes, it goes a step further and we talk, and if we do, it may take a new direction. That person no longer someone we just saw. This person becomes part of our lives. And sometimes, this person may become very close to us. That’s how people walk in our lives.

Then, for some reason, we breakup with a close person, or this person is just gone for any reason. A person we are so used to have around us. Someone we loved and cared for. When that person walks out, does it mean really out?

Personally, I think No! People can never leave our life, even if they are dead! Memories (Read Our memories post) are like strings keeping us attached. Love is another string that keeps us attached. No matter what, those strings exist.

The thing is you never really stop loving someone, you just learn to live without that person.

Yesterday, I was watching The Incredible Hulk. When Bruce goes for so long, that Betty had to move on. But when she saw him again, all the feelings came back again, she never stopped caring, she just learned to live without him. I know its just a movie, but this part is true and applies to life.

Another thing is, you can never hate a person you loved once. You may get mad, upset, but never hate.

When people decide to leave our lives, they believe they have reasons that made them leave, their reasons may not be valid for us, however, we have to learn how to forgive. And always remember this Quote about Forgiveness:

Forgiveness is the perfume a flower leaves on the shoe that crushed it.

Sometimes, our memories just flash before our eyes. Sometimes it depends on a specific case, like driving on certain roads, and or remembering a specific conversation with someone and how it was choppy and having to repeat the same again and again, or like having a certain gadget that reminds us of certain people in our life.

Our memories never leaves us, they can never get forgotten! However, they just hide back in our heads waiting for a certain moment to come back. All of our memories hide back in our heads by time. And when they flash back, they give us the feeling of being happy, or missing someone or something, and on certain specific cases, makes us upset and/or angry.

Our past is what makes who we are, the beauty of our memories is that they can be used for the future! Happy memories are suppose to make us happy. Even if it involves some people that left our lives. Yes, we will miss that person or people. However, it just makes us happy!

Missing someone sometimes makes us upset, and even in certain cases angry, but we have to understand is that when people leave our lives, they never meant to hurt us. And if they meant to hurt us by leaving! Its good that they left, God knows how much more they could hurt us if they stayed in our lives.

If we feel we were left to be hurt, sometimes it leads that we want to revenge and make them pay back! Well, I tell you this, Happiness is the best revenge! Just smile, be happy and continue your life like they never existed. If they ever loved you, they will pray for you to be even happier. If they didn’t, they will envy you and makes them very upset to see you happy.

But we have to remember, sometimes people just leave our lives when they feel they have no other option. Sometimes they just panic, and leave. Sometimes they leave our lives because of fear. Sometimes they leave because they think they are hurting us staying longer.

I usually try to find excuses for people, I hate blaming people around me. Specially people that I love. That’s why I relay on my notes, I just fire up the notepad, and start writing my feelings, specially if they are blaming feelings, because somethings are better left unsaid. After I’m done writing! I just delete all! It makes me feel better, and I just let go!

Sad memories are always good! They remind us that we are still alive! But they are’t suppose to affect the future. And aren’t suppose to make us sad either. They are meant to make us understand why we were sad at that certain time, and try to avoid doing the same mistake again, if there was a mistake or something to be avoided.

On a side note, I was once told, that I love my stuff so much, but I can let go easily. Well, thats not true! I can’t let go easily, I can’t sleep for nights and keep on thinking for days. Its just that I never show it.

I got this device on December 1st, 2011. This gave me enough time to evaluate the device.

Hardware / Design

This devices is equipped with 4.65″ HD Super AMOLED Screen, 1 GB RAM, 16GB Storage, 5 MegaPixel Camera, Front facing camera and 1.2Ghz clocked CPU.

I absolutely love the device design, really slim slick and curved. Lightweight, causing it slip from the hand, I dropped it few days ago.

The screen on this device is Wow. I just love this screen, and its size. And the above Tech specs speaks it all.

Battery Life
Its a new battery, and honestly, I think its awesome… I manage about 7 to 8 hours heavy almost continuous use. On low usage, having few emails running in the background, I managed 1 day out of the phone. Comparing this battery to other devices I owned, including iPhone 4, I find this battery superior to the others. Keeping in mind that I run this device on VIVA Bahrain HSPA+ Network.. This network drains any phone battery, including iPhone 4.. However, this phone manages longer standby periods even on VIVA Network.

Camera
Usually Camera’s are not that important for me, however, I cannot say its a bad camera, but it could have been done better. I love the speed of its captures, however, sometimes due to speed, it loses focus. So, you gotta touch the screen for focus and capture.

Network Speeds

I have managed to get about 8.7Mbps Downlink and 1.9Mbps up on VIVA network, that was first day I got the phone. Today, I am facing issues with VIVA Network making me unable to go more than 1Mbps on any handset I got. So, probably gonna post a pic when I get my issues fixed.

Software

ICS is what android should have been. Being an iOS user for sometime, I think, ICS has reached to a stage where is can compete with iOS.

It is a complete redesigned OS, it features soft-buttons which already existed in HoneyComb (Tablets OS).  A new Lock screen and a new way of answering calls.

It features resizable widgets and screenshots!

I believe at this stage, ICS is ready to compete with iOS at moment.

So, I asked the VMWare admin to add an extra virtual disk for me on each of those machines. and I extended (/) partition to the new disk.

Keeping in mind to follow the procedure is: /dev/sda was the only disk for each machine. So, when we added an extra disk, it was assigned /dev/sdb

Using fdisk, create a new partition:

fdisk /dev/sdb

Make sure you make your choices as primary and assign it first partition.

So, once created, it shall be assigned /dev/sdb1

pvcreate /dev/sdb1

This will create a physical volume for the LVM.

And after creating the physical volume we attach it to our existing Volume Group.

vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1

Then we extend the Logical Volume which is mounted to (/) by 20GB, make sure you change the number to the attached disk storage.

lvextend -L +20G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Then we resize the filesystem, since we are running default installs, it runs ext3, so extending it online using the command below:

resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Verify the new storage size using:

df -h

It must show the extra 20GB or whatever disk size you added.

We hold a very old friendship, goes back to 1994. Though, our families are related, we first met in Bahrain Science Center.

We studied there, had fun, and enjoyed time. Yes, I still remember those memories last they were yesterday. I remember when we were learning Visual Basic, and you designed the Game Interface for me using Bordered Frames. We were kids back then! I still remember when we used to sit in the Computer room formatting Ali’s Computer.. I wish you Remember?! It was Compaq, looked like Apple Machines back then.

And years later we got busy with our lives, and then we meet again in Bahrain World Trade Center. I still remember our chats, I still remember when you said that you wanted to get a BMW 335 Coupe. I still remember when you bought one.

Now I miss seeing your car in the car park, I miss seeing you in the elevator in the morning. You go to floor 14 and I go to 15.

I pray for you my friend, and hope that when you get better, you read this blog post and remember our child hood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This link for my disclaimer: http://almahdi.cc/disclaimer/

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.

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.

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.

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.