جبل الموتى

من الغريب أن تبدأ زيارتك للواحة بجبل يسمى جبل "الموتى" , و لكن هذا ما حدث فبعد أن وصلنا حوالى الساعة العاشرة صباحا ً اتجهنا إلى هذا الجبل الذى سمى بهذا الاسم لأن سكان الوحة القدامى كانوا من الفراعنة و كانوا يدفنون موتاهم فى هذا الجبل , ما استغربه هو لماذا تركوا الوادى و ذهبوا إلى هذه الواحة ليسكنوا فيها أم أن هذه المسافة كانت مأهولة بالسكان ؟ المهم أنهم لم يمتلكوا رفاهية بناء الأهرامات فاستخدموا الجبال المنتشرة بكثرة حول الواحة ليحفروا فيها سراديب لدفن الموتى , أحدهم يدعى سى - آمون , لم أتمكن من دخول المقبرة لأنها كانت صغيرة و عددنا كان كبيرا ً .
 
من فوق هذا الجبل استطيع أن أصف  لك منظرا ً عاما ً للواحة , فهى محاطة بعدد من الجبال التى شكلتها الأمطار على مدار ألاف السنين على هيئة مخاريط يمكن تسلقها بدون معدات , الجبال ليست عالية و ربما كلمة تلال الوصف الأدق لها , هذا على الأفق البعيد أما إذا نظرت قريبا ً فسترى عددا ً من البحيرات ذات شواطىء مهجورة , لست متأكدا ً إذا كانت هذه البحيرات عذبة أم أنها ناتجة عن صرف زراعى , أما سفح الجبل فهو محاط ببيوت بسيطة أغلبها يتكون من طابق واحد , الشىء العجيب فعلا ً الذى لاحظته طوال الرحلة أن البيوت فى سيوة هادئة بشكل غير عادى حتى تشعر أنها مجرد مقابر كالتى تمتلأ بها الجبال . هذه البيوت تفصل مجموعات ضخمة من النخيل المتشابك حتى أنك لا تستطيع أن ترى نخلة دون أن ترى معاها 5 نخلات !!

الطريق

ركبنا الأتوبيس بعد منتصف الليل بقليل بعد عدة محاولات "لدفس" الشنط فى أماكنها , لن أنكر أنى كنت خائفا ً من الطريق خاصة أننا سنسافر وسط الصحراء فى الشتاء فى ظلام الليل , أضف إلى ذلك أن مناطق فى سيناء و أسوان تعرضت لسيول قوية قبل السفر بعدة أسابيع , لكن الحمد لله لم تحدث مشاكل سوى أن الأتوبيس الثانى تعطل عدة مرات و تم استبداله فى النهاية .

الطريق من الأسكندرية إلى سيوة نستطيع أن نقسمه إلى جزئين رئيسين : الجزء الأول هو الاتجاه غربا ً من الأسكندرية فى طريق مرسى مطروح أما الجزء الثانى فالاتجاه جنوبا ً فى اتجاه الواحة , لا أتذكر بالضبط كم كانت المسافة الكلية ( لم ألحظ اللافتات لأننا سافرنا بالليل ) و لكنى متأكد أنها كانت طويلة , و للأسف لست من النوع الذى ينام فى المواصلات و لكنى بعد أن التهمت 7 ساندويتشات شاورمة و قطعتين بيتزا تونة ( يمنكنك تخيل رائحة فمى ) و بعد محاولات عديدة و تجربة كل أوضاع النوم من ضم الأرجل أو ثنيها و سند الرأس للخلف أو للأمام تمكنت من النوم لأوقات قصيرة متقطعة .  الشىء الذى أغاظنا جميعا ً هو أن مصطفى مشرى أحد زملائنا نام تقريبا ً طوال المسافة دون أى إنزعاج كأنه فى سريره بينما نحن نكاد نجن من أجل نصف ساعة من الراحة !!

واحة الغروب

بعد انتهاء فصل دراسى أول أقل ما يمكن أن يقال عنه أنه "غريب" (ربما نتحدث عنه لاحقا ً) قررت أنا و 9 من زملائى بالقسم الذهاب إلى سيوة فى رحلة نظمتها الكلية , خلال هذه الرحلة سجلت مجموعة من المشاهدات التى أريد أن أحدثكم عنها.

Clean Your Grub !!

If you are an Linux user, you must be familiar with the kernel updates (especially when you download a cut edge version), those updates are important and surely we do them, but the problem shows up when you find your grub full of kernels ( a kernel version + recovery), this happened to me I had 4 kernels with 4 recovery and another memory check, add to that I have Windows 7, so actually I had 10 items in my grub menu which makes it looks like a start menu :D, so I searched for a way to solve that problem, and I found this link ... it's very good, I tried it my self and removed two kernels and left two for safety, just follow the instructions but be careful coz you are missing with your kernel here!!

No Silver Bullet

This year we have an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) course, well we work from a book (I don't know it's name :D) anyway I read some parts of it and there is one part that I really really liked, this part discusses the "No Silver Bullet" concept that was issued by Fred Brooks in 1986 in a paper published under the same name, the paper is about software engineering.

This paper tells us that there are two main types of difficulties facing that software development :
essence and accidental, the essence difficulties are the ones that are part of software and they cannot be solved but can be reduced and dealt with, using different methods like Object Oriented Paradigm, the others which are the accidental ones might be solved through researches and other ways.

The four essence difficulties presented in Fred's paper are:

1 - Complexity

• Software is complex in a terrible way even more than Hardware, this is because in software there are numerous cases that are to be handled and different technologies to be supported which implies complexity, this is very clear in large products that contain many modules that have different states and interact with each other in many ways, to bring it closer, count the number of loops, if statements and other controls in a program, you will find that the functionality of the software (when large) cannot be comprehended by one person.
  

2 - Conformity

• "No problem, Call the IT department and tell them to do ... " that's something that each company owner must have said, people not in the field of software development always have a strong belief that software is easy to make and can "adapt" with any thing, this may sound correct but it's not, this causes software to be the last step in building a factory or starting a company, sometimes the design of the institution is not the smartest one but cannot be changed, but anyway the software should support it, this happens a lot when old institutions decide to add technology.

3 - Changeability

• Software must change during any of its steps (requirements, specification, analysis, ...), any way, even a small change implies the reintegrating the modules and regression testing to ensure that the change would not harm the software. Software also have to change when a new Hardware shows up to work on it, and even if the product was perfect a customer is likely to ask for expansion of the software to support even more features.

4 - Invisibility

• Any thing can be visualized, doctors have plastic humans, x rays, images and many other things that help them to visualize anything in the human body, architects, mechanical engineers have drawings, every one has someway that used to talk about different terms in the same languages, unfortunately software is not like that, it is impossible to visualise the way a software works and even thought there is Unified Mpdeling Language( UML) it's not really unified, add to that the fact that even with it you cannot "visualize" the software.

These are the four essences difficulties of software that we software engineers are cursed with :D , and there is "No Silver Bullet" for them which means they cannot be solved.
Anyway I think that Fred is a little bit pessimistic or may be he is just realistic, what do you think?

To read more click here.
To understand the meaning of the term "Silver Bullet" click here.

Mysteries Again

Dan Brown comes again to the best-sellers list with his new novel "The Lost Symbol". Full of mystery, adventure and stunning historical facts, "The Lost Symbol" takes you through a tour in the most famous buildings in Washington D.C., reading hidden symbols and fascinating paintings, reveling with this many hidden facts about the Masons and the forefathers who built America.

The novel is great, I can say nothing but this, it's enough great thing that you will read the 509 pages like you read a newspaper. I just wanted to state here some facts that I came through about the novel and the author:

1. I read Angels and Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003) and The Lost Symbol (2009). The three were best of what I read (maybe because I don't read that much anyway :D) but they resemble too too much, The Da Vinic Code was the best, then I read Angels and Demons you feel like you are reading some things that you already read in The Da Vinic Code, to be fair The Lost Symbol he though very similar in the structure to the other two novels, still has new to offer.

Looking deeper into commons:

• Secret communities:

1 - Angels and Demons:

Talks of a secret brotherhood that was forgotten and thought to have demolished away, the brotherhood is called The Illumaniti, a group of o pressed scientists all over history that tried to keep themselves alive and hide from the church and also waiting for the right time to take the church down.

2 - The Da Vinic Code:

Talks of Priory of Sion, a secret brotherhood that tried always to keep a hidden truth from the church till it was the right time to expose it.


3 - The Lost Symbol:

Talks of the Masons, the well known but still secret brotherhood, They were too much believing in the unfolded potential of the human being especially the human mind, that according to them was capable of doing anything, they hid these Ancient Mysteries in an underground location somewhere in Washington D.C. till it was the right time for human to know the truth.

I think it's crystal clear to you how much the three resemble, in fact they are identical (of course not the brotherhood, I mean the scenarios).

• Beginning of events:

The three novels share one starting point where events start to be exciting and Robert Langdon (Professor of symbology and iconology in Harvard) starts to get into trouble.

The point is a crinimial act to an old man:

1 - Angels and Demons:
The murder of Leonardo Vetra, a scientist in CERN.

2 - The Da Vinic Code:
The murder of Jacques Saunière, curator of Louvre Museum in Paris.

3 - The Lost Symbol:
The kidnapping of Peter Solomon, Smithsonian secretary, billionaire, and Freemason, which happens to be a close friend of Langdon.

• Female role:

Like all novels, a female role is necessary to acquire balance and to be able to describe different feelings. Any way, Dan Brown never tries to hide his intentioned "Stuffing" of a woman to be beside Langdon all the novel.

1- Angels and Demons:
Vittoria Vetra the daughter of the murdered Leonardo Vetra. She worked with him in CERN on researches.

2 - The Da Vinic Code:
Sophie Neveu is the granddaughter of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière, that
has been murderd. She works as cryptographer for the French Police.

3 - The Lost Symbol:
Kathrine Solomon, sister of kidnapped Peter Solomon and a Neotic Scientist that reached astonishing scientific facts about human mind.

Again the three characters are relatives of the old man that was murdered or kidnapped in the beginning of the novel.

• Endings:

The end in each of the three novels is rather unsatisfying, although they are realistic but they are much less than what I expected while I was reading the thrilling novel.
The three novels end up with reaching the fact that whatever Langdon was after during the novel, was actually in front of him all the time.

1- Angels and Demons:
The bomb hidden under the Vaticane is found only one minute before it blows up and is carried in a chopper to blow it in the air, something that is not convincing and rather absurd.

2 - The Da Vinci Code:
Langdon finds out after following the trails that The Holy Grail is not a treasure like many legends say but rather refering to Mary Magdelne who is claimed to have married to Jesus, which is a clear proof that he was human which destroys all what the church is based on.

3 - The Lost Symbol:
The Lost Word which is claimed to have enormous power comes out to be the Bible which is of course ridiculous because Langdon himself in other novels stated that the Bible was written by humans and that it had many contradictions and many many versions. Something else, if it is "just" the Bible, why the Masons hid it all this time although every one knows about the Bible !!!

• Shocking Turnings:
  

In each novel there is a character that all the time is on the good side then suddenly it turns up to be the person who did all the harm all over the novel !!

1 - Angels and Demons:
Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca is wise, helpful and you like him and see him as a very good man, then at the end he turns out to be the one who set every thing up.

2 - The Da Vinci Code:
Sir Leigh Teabing, a friend of Langdon that knows about the Holy Grail more than any one, and helps Langdon in his search for it also comes out at the end to be the one who planned the whole thing to put Langdon in his quest for the Holy Grail and then take it from him !!

3 - The Lost Symbol:
Mala'kh the tattoed man who believes in evil and dark magic, the man who killed Zach (Peter's son) will come out to be Zach himself !!

• In the begining of every novel, Dan Brown states that all the art and history mentioned in the novel is real, anyway many critics say that there are many wrong and false historical events in his novels.

• If you want to know more about the novels or Dan Brown, I recommend the Wikipedia !!
  

• Really after I read these novels, I figured out how much lucky I am to be Muslim, because while so many are running, hiding and believing in mysteries and the unknown, creating with this rituals and rules that they escaped religions to avoid, my religion is based on facts not mysteries and asks me for only simple prayers, doings and sayings that don't confuse me with contradictions.
  

These were the things I wanted to say about the novels, they are my personal opinions and surely you can disagree with my.
Comments are welcomed.

Mounting Volumes through terminal

In Linux operating systems, partitions of your hard drive are not mounted when you start, you can mount them easily through the normal file manager, anyway this way is not convenient, let's say that I want to open a recent document in Open Office but I forgot to mount the volume where this file exists, this will cause a file not found error to appear. Another thing that mounting volumes in different order causes different paths, so you have to mount volumes every time you start up and in the same order.

Sorry for so much talking, anyway thanks to shell scripts. you can write few lines to mount all volumes for you.

We will see how to do this:

1 - As you should know, every hardware is represented by a file in Linux file system in the folder /dev , so the first thing we need to do is to know the names of the volumes we are going to mount. We can do this by typing this in the terminal.

sudo fdisk -l

This will show us the partitions, their spaces and their names (sda1, sda2, ...)



2 - Let's say I want to mount the partitions sda1, sda5 and sda7, before I call the mount command I must create a mount point which is a folder under the /media folder in the file system. Through this file I will access the contents of the partition.

3 - We will create the folder using

sudo mkdir /media/anyname

4 - I will mount the partition using

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/anyname

Note: Partitions that are mounted through terminal must be unmounted through terminal, so if you want to unmount a partition use

sudo umount /media/anyname

It's better if you delete the mount point using

sudo rmdir /media/anyname

These attached files contain the shell script that I wrote to mount and unmount volumes, of course you will change the names of the partitions (sda#) and make them executable using the chmod command.