Hatem’s Diaries

I just saw an interview on Alriyadh Newspaper about Camel Server, it’s an arabic web server software including Apache, PHP, MySQL and some others open source software. The author, daif, is one of my friends and collegue in work and one of the few guys I met here who are open source evangelists. What is funny that last week he asked me to took him a pict, but didn’t told me why and today I saw it on the newspaper lol. Anyway , congratulation for this work and hope to see you in the future with a real title of “engineer”, you know what I’m talking about

English Wikipedia reached its first million article this Wednesday ! Wikipedia is the largest Open Source encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers who contribute, update, and revise articles in a collaborative process.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia. The article is about the Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, and it was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald. Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under development in more than 125 languages.

The full text of the English Wikipedia is located at en.wikipedia.org. In addition to articles, the English Wikipedia offers dozens of graphical timelines and subject-specific portals. Its media repository includes four hundred thousand images and hundreds of full-length songs, videos, and animations, many of which are available for free distribution.

Wikipedia Press Release

After the success of Open Source for software, a new initiative have been launched to create an Open Source Car. The idea looks amazing, but very interesting though. Maybe open source car could be manufactered by many industrials so its price will be competitive, also the design and futuristic look makes me really interested.

The idea behind the OScar project is simple: A community of people plans and develops a new car in the web. The idea is about the goal to develop a simple and innovative car, but also about the way how this goal is achieved. We would like to convey the idea of Open Source to “hardware” and we want OScar to be the precursor for many different projects in this field. If you are interested in how the idea was formed, read the manifesto of 1999.

Friday january 6, 2006 will be held the first online meeting of the PHP4arab groups. The meeting will be on MSN group at 17h GMT, if you are interested to assist it’s open ! I’ll make a speech about Code Generators, so if you have something you want to know or to hear about code generators let me know
The speech won’t be long, as a first experience of online meeting, it will be followed by materials such graphics and code so you can ask questions. Rendez-vous tomorrow friday 6/1/06 at 17h GMT. To participate just join the group and be on time friday in the chat channel of the group. If you have question about the meeting itself contact one of the coordinators Hani Gamal, Mokhtar Diab (see group page on msn).

There is news in the Tunisian newspaper that Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement will be in Tunisia to participate in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as a member of the PCT group (Patents, Copyright, Trademarks).

Stallman, the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft, talked about censorship in many occasions. He conclude about the WSIS in an article published on GNU website :

The summit may have a few useful side effects. For instance, several people came together to plan an organization to help organizations in Africa switch to GNU/Linux. But the summit did nothing to support this activity beyond providing an occasion for us to meet. Nor, I believe, was it intended to support any such thing. The overall attitude of the summit can be seen in its having invited Microsoft to speak alongside, and before, most of the various participating governments–as if to accord that criminal corporation the standing of a state.

Updated : it’s the founder of the free software movement, and not the Open Source ! thx Swobodin.

One of the classes that I’m sharing on phpclasses and I never talk about is DBConv or Database Conversion. The idea of the package is to convert SQL from proprietary structure into standard structure which could be used on different database servers.

I use this class specially to convert from Oracle to MySQL, to have a local database that I can work on more easily and keep compatibilities with the original oracle database.

Oracle users generally have this tool called TOAD, I use it to generate a dump of the oracle database. From menu choose Database, then Schema browser. Select tables you want to convert, then right click and choose “Create script” from the menu. The window below will be displayed :

Continue reading Convert Oracle database Schema to MySQL

There is no big news in the PHP Community since long time, a news that make newspapers and magazines talk about PHP, an innovation that will change the world ! Does the scripting language war is over ? Someone could inform us at least who won.

This month will held the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and next month there is the Forum PHP in Paris. Almost same conferences, same topics, same people talking here and there. Sice last year, nothing new happened ! PHP5 is there with strongest OOP support and lot of new features … and what’s next ? PHP4 is still the most used, and migration have been very very slow !

Continue reading PHP Community down for maintenance

I agree that I have missed this one : Microsoft tryed to recruit Eric S. Raymond the founder of Open Source. A good joke that will make your day haha

From: “Mike Walters (Search Wizards)” 
 To:  Eric,

I am a member of the Microsoft Central Sourcing Team. Microsoft is seeking
world class engineers to help create products that help people and businesses
throughout the world realize their full potential.
[…]

The answer of Eric is better to read :

Continue reading Microsoft tries to recruit Raymond

Matt Munoz, a designer at Red Hat, have described the process they do to create the new Fedora logo. He started with four fedora ideals : Open, Free, innovative and forward looking and you can see how it finished :

Continue reading Fedora new logo design

Bloggers Magazine is out, a new magazine dedicated for bloggers and written by bloggers. The september 2005 edition is about 20 pages with news and articles about blogging and bloggers. In this edition also an exclusive interview with the creator of pLog, an excellent bloggers solution written in PHP, and the first series of articles to create a successful Blog.

Read more at the Blog’s Blog