Saturday, April 19, 2014

New era of version control systems

May Allah`s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you

"Revision control, also known as version control and source control ... is the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information". That what wikipedia says about VCS, also in the overview they define a VCS as "... any kind of practice that tracks and provides control over changes to source code."

Today, you can find many great, good, bad and ugly version control systems like Git, Mercurial, Bazzar, SVN, CVS [order is not arbitrary]... but It turns out none of them is good enough for the company, a company that a friend of mine has interned at and told me about their ultimate VCS.

In this company - a well known multinational company that I'm not going to name -, if you want to proceed with a change you don't need to fork or clone or pull. What you do is that you duplicate the lines that you are willing to change, then comment the old ones and put a comment before and after the new code where you put an ID. To get this ID you insert a record in a Microsoft Access database where you specify changes and reasons etc, then you get the ID of that record and put it back in the comment. Changes are copied manually and added to the master if they are correct and god knows what test system they have.

Wow, amazing !! I couldn't believe this reactionary VCS, and what are the reasons behind this choice. And yes I called it a VCS because it's a "... practice that tracks and provides control over changes to source code".

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Blogger & AngularJs - Is it a better love story than Twilight ?

May Allah`s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you

I shared recently a post about how I got that idea to use AngularJs with Blogger using RSS as a resource and modding comments. Today, I want to share with you my impressions after two weeks since I launched the experiment.

Disclaimer: The experiment was on this blog, it's a small personal blog with minimalistic design, limited number of posts and few visitors, so my judgement will be based on those facts. Behavior on larger blogs isn't guaranteed to be the same.

What I like about it ?

It's very light, swift and fast, the page is visible quickly even with using a custom font and many base64 resources, not to mention that Angular for a reason that I don't understand loads resources for all posts even if they aren't rendered nor in the DOM yet !!!

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Rebuilding Jaw,B blog

May Allah`s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you

Hello everyone, first of all, I think you noticed the comment's css bug, I don't know why the comments floats from the parent !! so I decided to redesign the blog and do some optimisations.

I didn't wanted the whole experience to be just old regular web development, like I used to do. Hence I decided to apply some of the great tools that I installed a long time ago but never used. I began with setting up directories and use Bower to download libraries, then I initialized Guard to watch javascript files and concatenate them and do Livereload. Also, I used Sass, Compass and Zen-grids for CSS.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Guide : Installing Android Studio on Ubuntu

May Allah`s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you

Hi, if you watched (or assisted -if you are that lucky-) the Google I/O then you couldn't resist installing the new Android development environment the early access preview. Android Studio the IDE built on IntelliJ IDEA with a lot of features for Android development and debugging, making the process faster and more productive. Coming with extensible build tools, powerful code editing, smoother and richer GUI .. you can read these stuff here.

So, if you are like me, an Eclipse/ADT user you must wonder why they went with IntelliJ IDEA instead of Eclipse ? they responded with : "Because when we did just Eclipse, people kept asking for IntelliJ support" , "We will support both Eclipse and the new IntelliJ-based Android Studio. Eclipse support is not going away". Eclipse is still supported but I'm not that loyal :) to the IDE to stick with it.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Pepper Pyramid - (Hologram) Experiment

May Allah`s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you

Nothing nerdy this time, I just wanted to share this experiment about pyramid holograms. In fact, many people prefer to call it Pepper Pyramid, called on John Henry Pepper who created the Pepper's Ghost effect. The principle is simple, the four sides of the pyramid are made of reflective glass or plastic so they can reflect four images taken from the sides of the object or scene, and they reflect each others which makes the object looks in a 3D way.

So here are some not very well pics due to the poor camera and the darkness :


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