ychaker

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ychaker

Countries of Citizenship

I am a citizen of Lebanon and the U.S.A., and am fluent in Arabic, English and French.

Work Experience

2008 - present Software Developer, OpenSource Connections, Charlottesville, VA

VCU WorkWorldWeb:

ychaker

Letting Go

The last four years have been the longest and hardest years so far. This is not something unusual for someone to say about their college experience. For some, college is a big long party and for others it is a big long struggle. But for me the struggle did not come from the college life itself, yes I was an engineering student at one of the top universities in the country, but the school work and the jobs and the social life were not what made it difficult.

My story begins long before then...

Growing up, it was known what my path to getting a Bachelor's degree was going to be. The first step was getting the American citizenship. That took about 15 years to achieve for many reasons one being that the mail man would return the mails sent to us by the immigration office because we had them delivered to my uncle's house and the name on letters would not match the one on the mailbox because ours was not on it. After that mess was fixed, things got smoother until the day my brother and I were suppos

ychaker

Lebanon in the Media

I was watching Taken last night and it is about this former government agent whose daughter gets kidnapped. In one of the first scenes his other former government agent bodies come to visit and they are playing poker and reminiscing about the good old days. It just happened that all they could remember was when they were in ... wait for it... I'll let you guess...Lebanon. And immediately the thought came to my head, Lebanon must be one of the most referenced foreign countries in entertainment (movies, songs, etc) after France for its romance. Of course the moment I thought of that they mentioned France and later on the daughter goes to France and gets kidnapped. I will not spoil the movie for anyone but there is a point I want to make and this piece of information is part of it.

First let us revisit instances where Lebanon was mentioned or referenced. One of my earliest memories of such a thing is when listening to Dr. Dre's album 2001 and the

ychaker

2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony

Everyone who watched the opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, saw the grandiosity of the event. I had many "Holy crap!" moments myself. It was a huge display of art, technology and precision. No doubt about that. China is famous for fireworks, they had that. It's also known for its recent and rapid development in technology, we definitely saw that as well. As the commentator on NBC said: "there are issues and controversies surrounding these games but no one can dispute the quality of this display"

My favorite part by far was the Tai Chi part. I am a big fan of martial arts and have taken a few weeks of Tai Chi so I really appreciate demonstrations of this art. The first part of the act was very typical Tai Chi, I even recognized some of the moves! Then they introduced kids in the middle and the commentator said something that got my attention. I'll get to that in a minute. Then all of the sudden there were 2008 Tai Chi martial artists. 2008! The pe

ychaker

Gaming

I finished a game! I repeat, I FINISHED a video game! it has been very very long since the last time I played a video game from start to finish. School did not come in the way. I did not reach a point where I got stuck and lost interest in the game. The game wasn't too long and boring. My computer did not crash and I lost all saved games. No, none of that. I actually finished an entire game by myself. No cheats, no walk-throughs, nothing. It's been an estranged feeling for a long time, and it's good to be back.

If you are wondering about the game, don't get your hopes up too high. It's not one of the most anticipated games of the year. It's just Rainbow Six's Vegas 2. It's a Tom Clancy game, which makes it good by default, but it's not GTA4 nor is it Assassin's Creed or Halo 3. But all of that is on the way. I've got my Xbox 360, I have my copy of Halo 3 which I have not opened yet, and my copy of GTA4. I already started GTA4 and plan on finishing what I started. So watch out for a future post on t

ychaker

#RoR Triumph!

Ruby on Rails is magical, if you've worked with it before you know what I mean. Building my own website is a little experiment and exercise that I wanted to take on to utilize Ruby on Rails. The site as it stands is simple and does not seem like a good candidate for RoR. The idea for me was to develop something easy and deploy it to gain the experience in actually deploying a Rails app. To make it interesting, I created a way to post messages on the front page remotely by simply signing in and filling the message form. This takes away the pain of actually modifying the HTML code every time I need to post a message. This is not fancy by any means, but it does the job. And now that I have something setup it becomes easy to add new features as the site grows.

Deploying the new site was not easy. The simplest things are never easy! I

I am hosting my site on DreamHost and they seem to have a good offering. They do support Ruby on Rails which is very good and important! They also have a very helpf

ychaker

I will_paginate, and then some!

The best part about using an open source technology is the contribution from the community. Many of us look for the same basic functionality out of what were are developing, and one of those functionality is pagination. In a framework like RoR we do not have to worry about re-inventing the wheel. That's where cool plugins like will_paginate make a developer's life so much easier. This plugin allows you to limit the number of objects you display per page and add the little toolbar at the end that allows the user to navigate through the pages. All of that is done by just adding one line of code.

The website for the plugin list 4 methods to install and use the plugin:

• use the gem (recommended);
• install as Rails plugin using git;
• download tarballs;
• export from SVN (obsolete, strongly discouraged).

ychaker

Lebanon and the Internet?

There has been a lot of discussion at my work about introducing to the US government the WEB 3.0 technologies. This got me thinking about how Lebanon is represented on the web and it seems to me that every arabic website was made on a Windows 3.1 machine using basic HTML and Crayons (http://www.crayola.com), i.e. by a two-year old!!! Not even WEB 0.1!?!?!?! I do not claim to build "beautiful" things, but at least I am assured that when I create a sign up page that requires you to activate your account from your email you actually get that email instead of a smtp error page (example: http://www.divx4arab.com) or an error page even before you are able to attempt to sign up (example: http://www.arabfilms.org/signup.php). That's of course regardless of the cluttered page full of ads for all sorts of random things (including the couple pornographic ads that have become a regular for some of the

ychaker

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