Another day (and night?) at work. It is 2 A.M. now and still too much left to do. If not for Sheikh Abdel Basset's sweet recitation of the Holy Qur'an I doubt we could handle the stress!. Any way, I must head home now. Tomorrow is (yet) another day insha'Allah.

Seems the Ajax fever is spreading around. Today I had a meeting with a high profile client that was negotiating building an Ajax prototype to be demonstrated in Gitex!. They were enthusiastic and were talking about the possibilities and I was thinking to myself: "O Allah! no more deadlines!!". Best thing is that they were talking about a 3 weeks deadline which made my refusal much easier!

Can we live without deadlines? or a better question, how many did lines a man can handle concurrently? I have like 6 or 7 deadlines to achieve these days. 4 or so at work plus my masters and other family commitments. I wonder how some people manage to do so many things in so little time!. I wish i will find a clue one day. The sad thing is that i hardly have time to follow the drama in the Egyptian political scene. The national party guys and their leader (Mubarak) are trying to convince us that he can undo in 6 years the damage he made the previous 24 years. I wonder if the guy even considers honoring his deadlines!

I've been doing lots of ajax as of late. At first my thought was: "been there, seen that!" as i already did lots of asynchronus stuff (using hidden iframes). But i'm totally sold now. Here's why:

1. While using iframes I had to manage my call backs from within the returning page (i.e. server output needed to know about the client side control structure, and needed to resend some post operations data other than a mere success or failure message). Now it's totally client side! Using callback functions (with their closures! you dont get to lose the request initiating environment!!) is so very sweet to work with!
2. Handling server misbehaviour!. You dont rely on the iframe to always load any more, you can easily detect when a request times out (without writing your special timing routines for that!)
3. All you communicate is data now. And I even dont use XML, JSON is my winning card here and it integrates oh so easy with the front end logic (our back end code is written in C, thanks for whoever wrote libjson, a life saver for us).

Our national (operated by the governoment) press went hectic these days. Every body and his mother is waving flags for Mubarak and his party. What makes the joke so ironic is that while they praise the president (shame on them) the cut the other competitors down to size (shame on them again). The funniest thing was the so called "Resala" which is released by "Al-Ahram" newspaper (the largest in Egypt). It is posting daily that the competitors' wives are against their running for presedency.! Why dont we hear the opinion of Suzan Mubarak then? or the journalists dare not speak to the first lady?

Hello World. This is my first encounter with blogging. Let's see if it will prove useful .