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ArabTechies CodeSprint: A New Fruitful Community Initiative

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:06:40 GMT

Last week, ArabTechies has taken the enhancement of Arab users online experience one step further. ArabTechies is the first community to bring together Arab people interested in technology - regardless of their technical background – for real life meeting and discussions through which they could share experiences and learn from each other. The barely half year old community has finally begun to show the fruits of its labor with the release of 10 open source projects that were the product of the community's Codesprint that took place from the 20^th to the 23^rd of May 2009.

eSpace Shines at Automech 2009

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 09:17:42 GMT

The eSpace developed Carlog.com was launched at the 14^th International African Arabian Exhibition for Vehicles, buses, and Automobile spare parts, Automech 2009. In appreciation for a job well done, Omar Sodoudi, CEO of CarLog, invited eSpace' s employees who were involved in the project to the First day VIP Automech party.

NeverBlock Ready for the Big Time

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:58:53 GMT

eSpace has had NeverBlock enabled on its own Ruby applications for quite some time now and with a great degree of success. But NeverBlock has so much more to offer to the development community; eSpace is now providing a service in which you can get NeverBlock enabled in your very own application.

eSpace in the Heart of Europe for Research Event

Sun, 17 May 2009 12:43:11 GMT

Luxembourg is rarely heard of in the news, but just last week it made itself worthy of the headlines. The quaint, yet gorgeous, country sandwiched between France, Germany and Belgium, was the chosen spot by the European Commission to host a networking event as part of the FP7 proposal call 5.

eSpace is One of the ASTF's 10 Startups Ready For Investment

Thu, 14 May 2009 09:03:00 GMT

As previously posted, eSpace has participated in the annual Investing in Technology Forum that will come to close today. Over three hectic days of networking, showcasing, discussing and anlayzing, the result is an achievement; eSpace has been chosen as one of the Arab Science and Technology Foundation's 10 Startups Ready for Investment.

Analyze This!

Sun, 10 May 2009 14:36:07 GMT

While working on a project, I needed to to have a feature like facebook’s “Post a link”. The user enters a URL, clicks on preview, and he gets a preview of how that page will be posted on his profile. Facebook does a few tricks:

It fetches the URL’s title and description (a small paragraph about that page’s content).
It provides the user with a list of images from that page so that he pick one of them.
It also provides the user with the ability to edit the title and description if he doesn’t like what Facebook suggested.

A user then posts that URL. That’s when things start to get even more interesting

if the link was for a video from a service like youtube or vimeo, it’ll show the youtube or vimeo player (embedded object).
if it’s a flickr photo page, it’ll show the image.
if it’s not any of the websites that are handled specially, the title, description and image are shown.

I needed to have the same behavior.

IITF, Here We Come!

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:47:37 GMT

From Beirut to Jeddah, to Manama, to Amman and, finally, to Cairo. This year is Cairo's turn to host the annual Investing in Technology Forum, which will be held at Fairmont Towers Hotel, Heliopolis, from the 12th to the 14th of May, 2009.

Object#extend Leaks Memory on Ruby 1.9.1

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:26:59 GMT

The Garbage Collector is a really strange business in the Ruby land. For me, it is currently the major performance drain . If you are not aware of the limitations, here's a list:

The GC is mark-and-sweep; it needs to scan the whole heap for each run. It is directly affected by heap size O(n).
The GC cannot be interrupted and, hence, all threads must wait for it to finish (shameful pause on big heaps).
The GC marks objects in the objects themselves, destroying any value of copy on right.
The GC does not give memory back to the system; what goes in, does not come out.
It is a bit on the conservative side, meaning garbage can stay because it is not sure that it is so.

A fast, simple and pure Ruby reactor library

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:59:45 GMT

Please welcome Reactor, a reactor library with the very original name of "Reactor".

What is a reactor any way?

A reactor library is one that provides an asynchronus event handling mechanism. Ruby already has a couple of those, the most prominent being EventMachine and Rev. Many high performing Ruby applications like Thin and Evented Mongrel are utilizing EventMachine for event handling. Both Rev and EventMachine build atop native reactor implementations written in C or C++; while this ensures high performance, it makes some integration aspects with Ruby a bit quirky, sometimes even at a noticable performance cost.

Testrunner Correct Paths & HTA Mode

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:20:55 GMT

I have written in a previous post about the Selenium Testrunner. One of the main problems that I faced in dealing with the TestRunner mode was the limitation of the JavaScript. In the TestRunner mode of Selenium, you will only be able to test the functionality of your own Website; you will not be able to run tests against third party sites, such as Google or Amazon, due to the cross-scripting security limitation of JavaScript.