Lazy social networker ? : Hootsuite for the rescue

I’ve been on facebook / twitter for a while and before that blogging since i was at college early in the days. Never been an active one since then.
Recently I discovered http://www.bufferapp.com and it was amazing .. set for 30 min and decide what you want to post for the next 24 hours and it will buffer the posts accordingly.
The problem is it requires about $8.5 a month in a yearly subscription !
I searched and found an alternative, http://www.hootsuite.com is an awesome one but a bit complicated. It does the job nonetheless

Common Cold vs Flu

It toke me a while to distinguish between these two !

both of them suck anyways

My Flynas Travel Experience This Eid

 

 

Flying on budget airlines for the past few years since I located in Jeddah was a must not only for the prices they offer but also for the timetable they follow that suits me for my short weekend escapes to Kuwait every now and then.

I used to go with Flynas to Kuwait on Wednesday afternoon and back on Saudi Airlines on Friday evenings. This would round up to KD140 ish if you booked early enough and on the sale day for Flynas (Tuesday).

This Eid we decided to head to Dubai for few days then back to Kuwait for a 10 day vication and back to Jeddah. We ended up withFlynas. 

Flynas Called at Iftar time the day prior to take off and informed us that the plan cant accommodation all the passengers and offered either 

• Divert to Sharjah / Abu-Dhabi airport
• Postpone the ticket till after Eid
• Give back our booking money 

We refused any of their offers and stated that I’ve booked a month earlier and a Premium ticket. They replied with OK no problem. What will happen next ? The passengers (30 overbooked) need to deal with it and chose one of the options or no one will fly. 

And yes it is mentions in their TOS so legally they are covered.

This is the day before Eid. The move they pulled was outrageous and people need to know about it. The thing is you don’t really chose a low budget airline over another. Your either bound by the price or the timing. 

flynas

logo

Google Plus and stuff

I have been trying to update my blog everynow and then, but continue to fail in finding a good subject to write about.

Let’s start to what was I am up to.

 

I got an idea for an iPhone app. I mapped the idea out and picked up the logo and the background. now for the coding part.

I am planning for a trip to europe this fall. Booked my tickets already but still didn’t map out where to go in Rome.

Trying out google plus is cool, but not a lot of people are on it. mainly Kevin rose and his gang are there. I almost can confirm they are getting paid to post stuff so people don’t get bored and ditch google plus as google buzz and wave failed before.

Oh, And the picture above is a decoration I got from Kuwait to display in my office. I see it as in ENT doctor who’s reviewing an x-ray of a patient who swallowed a an object .. What is it ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[digdog dig]; — “Actually, Sheldon Has Better Design.” If you’re…

If you’re an iOS developer, and love the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, then you have to watch season 4 episode 12: The Bus Pants Utilization (original air date is January 6, 2011.)

In this episode, Leonard comes up with an idea for his iOS app and derails his friendship with Sheldon.

What’s the App?

It’s a handwriting-recognition based equation solver, or in Sheldon’s way: “The Surprisingly Helpful Equation-Linked Differential Optimized Numerator.” The idea behind this is to use iPhone’s camera to take a picture of the equation, and scan it with handwriting recognition, then run it through a symbolic evaluation engine, and bam.

Learning Cocoa

During the episode, they show several actual Objective-C code snippets and interesting design sketches on white boards, here are some of them:

They have a CRecognition object holds an UIImage instance variable, and sadly they name it _Photo (with underline as prefix), it’s not the naming convention Apple suggested.

The next morning, Sheldon starts his own design, if you look closer, it’s much more considered than Leonard’s.

For example, since this is an utility app, Sheldon comes up with a flip view design that similar to built-in Camera/Stocks app. A full screen SPhotoView with a snapshot button in the middle, and on the other side, it’s SEquationView and a UITableView at the bottom with some buttons.

In here, you can see more details. A UITableView holds the scanned equations, and supports rotation for landscape full screen detail view and portrait detail view. On the right side, Sheldon shows better understanding about UIViewController’s view hierarchy design concept.

Later, Leonard’s team is doing some reference counting. Instead of accessing instance variable directly in -initWithPhoto: and -dealloc, they decide to use retain property self.photo, with class method to return a autoreleased CRecognition object, and claim there’s no leaks.

What a mess, you should always use instance variable directly in -initWithPhoto: and -dealloc when creating/releasing instance object.

Here you see Leonard’s app class hierarchy, mostly MFC-ish (thanks, @lukhnos.) style naming convention for the class names, almost everything starts with letter “C” (is for “Class” I think), CAppDelegate, CMainView, CCameraView, CSymbolicView, etc. They should use prescribed prefix like “LRH,” which means Leonard, Rajesh and Howard.

The beautiful Penny is next to Sheldon, and there’s Facebook API on the white board.

In the end, Penny’s shoes app project. There’re many of them on the AppStore already, and the UI design for this one looks kinda lame.

And Sheldon is working on this project… (for customer from hell?)

Conclusion

I love and enjoy this episode a lot, and the TBBT crew does a great job for all these minor details, they look very convincing to me.

But, they should use Mac when doing the coding, I only saw Raj’s MacBook Pro, and rest of them are using PCs. That’s not right, you can’t run Xcode on PC, well, unless they all use Hackintoshes…

Also, If you want to hire someone for your iOS app project, I highly recommend Sheldon Cooper.

References

The Big Bang Theory: 4×12 The Bus Pants Utilization

Apple: Introduction to Coding Guidelines for Cocoa

[digdog dig]; – To nil, or not to nil, that is the question

via [digdog dig]; — “Actually, Sheldon Has Better Design.” If you’re….

ccTLD’s

I have been studying for my exams for the past 3 months and as usual ideas (good and bad) come to my mind. I’ve own 5 TLD (.com/.net/.org) and now I own two ccTLD (.at and .MD).

I am facing a problem with these new domains. The DNS record setup isn’t what I expected to be as I’ve been using godaddy to manage my old purchases.

@_bashar suggested domaindns to handle the new ccTLDs but i think there are some issues to be solved for now

Any suggested dimain management sites ?

Update : So DomainDns worked well and my new domains are managed over there. The website is a bit shaky and unstable but it does the job needed. The problem now with google apps. I use their service to set up google service on my domains (website, gmail, docs, calendar, etc.). The domain verification isn’t working and from what I see in the FAQ it is a common problem. This isn’t expected from google. Disappointing.

 

UPDATE  2 :  Issues resolved , now I own 7 domains and 7 emails !

Vintage Shaikhs !

Can you guess ?

H.H Mohammad Bin Rashid of Dubai and H.H Hammad bin Jassim of Qatar !

I’ll leave you the comments

Change of Interests

I’ve always considered myself as a gadget freak apple fanboy web programmer that read all the php forums out there. Nowadays i deleted my twitter, started to like pages on facebook and downloading style and cars magazines on my iPad for a past time. Strange feeling it is. I visit UnCrate more  than techcrunch for good’s sake !

Even the change in gizmodo’s layout didn’t bother me much.

Maybe gardening is will be my next interest ? who knows !

Hobbies !

Yesterday I’ve been to a coffee shop in Jeddah and found a bunch of guys with the latest Macbook Pro’s and Nikon/Canon DSLR at the same age group as I am. I started to wounder what happened to the days where I used to buy myself new gadgets every now and then?

My BlackBook has been serving me well (beside the unusable battery and the constantly out of space hard drive) for the past 4 years, and I’ve been thinking about getting a new cam but i never get out for sight seeing much.

I’ve got myself an iPad 32 wifi last year and an iPhone 4. hopefully the iPhone 5 that’s coming out this year isn’t life changing otherwise I’ll spend my gadget money on it rather than a new laptop and/or DSLR