Sunday, April 30, 2006

Sky Diving, feel the gravity

Hello all,

Today I did a very crazy process :D, one of my friends here, was looking to make a sky diving, and knowing the fact that Iam dying to make it too, I joined him in this :)

When we knew the exact place we'll do it in, we were having two options, either to do it in the Tandem way or do it as Accelerated Free Fall way, everyone from those has its pros and cons, so let's give you a quick preview for both:

Tandem Pros:

  1. Very small preparation and time till jump (about 10 min).
  2. Don't worry about anything, you just look around and don't do anything.
  3. Cheaper.

Tandem Cons:

  1. Knowing the fact the it's easier, then actually you learn nothing.
  2. Not really free fall, as someone will be sticking into your back, and for this extra weight, you'll have some thing like small parachute to decrease your acceleration to about 0.1-0.2 G.

Accelerated Free Fall Pros:

  1. Real free fall with G acceleration.
  2. Learn how to do stuff by yourself and how everything is working.

Accelerated Free Fall Cons:

  1. You must care about everything, and actually you'll do and know a lot of stuff which is not easy at all.
  2. Accelerating down with g is great, but put in your mind that you'll have no chance to breath well, your face will be like water and you'll feel with hugeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee pressure on your face and stomach.
  3. More Expensive than Tandem.

So putting all these in mind, we decided to do it in the accelerated Free Fall way, so I'll leave the talk about this part to the next episode and I'll leave you to the pictures, enjoy :)

Next time I'll tell you about the weird stuff I did up there and how everything is working and also the big surprise, a video for the whole process ;), but for now, just enjoy the photos with small resolution for internet :)

http://www.mmeshref.com/album/Sky%20Diving/index.html


Monday, April 17, 2006

Very very cool video

See this video till its end, it's amazing :)

Bug in Google

Hello all,

Few moments ago while I was searching for something using google, I discovered a bug, the bug simply that for a given string, the output is always nothing, I mean by nothing here not zero results found, I mean white page.

And as every software developer knows, and as we got from ACM contests, a valid function is that have a valid output for every input, so we all know that entering non-valid input for any program is not an excuse to crash or make nothing, the input string is to search simply for "\\." (without the quotations), and any way, I've tried the same input on MSN, Yahoo, and Altavista, and everyone of them handled it by its way, Yahoo seems to me that it has removed the "." and just searched for the "\\" part, both MSN and Altavista returned zero results.

A very weird thing one of my friends (yasser) discovered after that, that whenever you enter any special characters compination in Google (like "$%%^!"), you'll receive the same output, weird right?!!

Even if it's not a bug, it will be worst, because it's really weird to output a white paper for the user in which he doesn't know what's happening, for me as example, the first time I pressed search and I got this white result, I thought something is wrong in my connection and tried it several times (you know sometimes you may have some http errors which prevent some parts from any page from appearing), so when anyone got the same output, is it from Google or internet connection error, or something else?!

Cool, it's the first time for me to encounter white page in google :D

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Ma3ateh Organization Ltd!

Hii all,

Today I was thinking about making any weird stuff, and I got this idea :D :

http://ma3ateh.blogspot.com/

Saturday, April 01, 2006

USA & Cars

Hello again, and back to normal blogging :)

Today I'll talk about some sort of weird issue (yes it's weird :D ), about getting a car in USA :)

But before talking about this, I need to share a very great situation happened to me this week.

Usually before I came here, I was thinking about Americans and American politics as two separate issues which are not related to each others by any mean, in other words, what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, is not related to Americans them-selves.

I was not able to prove whether this is true or false until I came here, every time I meet an American and he/she knew that Iam from Egypt, he/she asks me about my opinion in US, and before I say a single word, the sentence I usually hear is:
"USA is great, every thing is good except politics"
Yes, believe it or not, I heard this many many times from American, so what about the story I was gonna tell you about?!

It's simple, 2 days ago I was in my way to see a car in MS Campus in Issaquah/Sammamish, and as usual, when I open the msn maps to request the map, I typed the address with Redmond instead of Sammamish, and as you could expect, the address I went to (which was actually nothing more than mountains which tell me that it's impossible to find MS here).

So I waited there for a while trying to figure out what's happening, until I met two Americans, a man and his wife, they have taken the map and spent about 5 min with me trying to figure out where I need to go, and then they reminded me with the Redmond issue and that I wrote Redmond instead of Sammamish, so I thanked them and open my GPS to search for the new address (no this is not the story yet), and again, I typed it with NE instead of SE so I went to the wrong side of the city to find my self in a farm and found a man who was fixing something, and here you're the dialog:

Me: Hii, Iam just lost, is Microsoft Campus near from here?
The address with me is saying that it's supposed to be here.

Him: If Microsoft is really here, I was gonna be so rich and was not gonna fix these stuff any more :D, what's the address you're looking for?

Me: it's ...... Sammamish.

Him: Yes, that's it, but as I remember there's no Microsoft here, may they gonna buy this land and make a branch here, but as far as I know for now, no MS here.

Then another man and woman appear, then:

Second Man: So you're looking for Microsoft, do you have the exact address?!

Me: That's it, it's the one I told you about it before.

Second Man: No, this is not the address, this is just the street name.

Woman: Look, better thing is to call the man you're going to again, look call him now and ask him about the address.

Then they let me called him and I said the address for them and they typed it.

Second Man: OK, 1 min, Iam gonna see this address on map quest and print the map for you.

Then I went and parked my car in their farm, and the woman came to talk with me a while and she brought a paper and pen and draw the map for me and discussed every single detail with me about the directions until the other man prints the map for me.

So this is the story, imagine how much help have I taken?!
Imagine to be working in your farm which is really too far away from the main street, Ohh, I forget to tell you, I entered with my car in a private road which is about 1 mile long until I reached their home, so their home is really far away from the traffic, so imagine you're working in your home which is far away from traffic and suddenly found someone with his car in your farm, then you left your work and brought nearly most of your family members to help him, and the best thing in this, that you know nothing about him, because I may be a gang, I may kill them or make any thing bad to them, but really they remind me with the amount of help you could get in the same situation in any Egyptian Village, they were really great and so helpful.

Now to the main subject, the cars, Ohhh, the post is too long, so let's keep it to the next post ;)
To Be Continued.....