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.

Installing Qt on My Ubuntu

This week we are assigned to create a simple drawing program using C++, there are different libraries that you can use to develop GUI using C++, any way my friend Abolnour (our open source godfather) advised me to use Qt which is an open source library that enables you to write GUI programs in C++.

The installation process is easy, you have to go to this download page, then choose the LGPL/Free and choose your platform (I chose Linux 32 bit because I am trying to avoid my Vista :D). it's safer and better to dowload the whole SDK whic includes and IDE called Qt-Creator that you can use to create your applications.

After you finish downloading the file (275.4 MB in our case), you will use two lines in the terminal to install every thing.

1 - Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the file using cd

cd /media/disk/Downloads

that's for me (the path will be different for you)

2 - use the command

chmod u+x qt-sdk-linux-x86-opensource-2009.04.1.bin


which makes the file executable.

3 - use the command

./qt-sdk-linux-x86-opensource-2009.04.1.bin

which will run you an installation wizard that asks you where you want to install the Qt-creator
and the libraries.

After that you can use will find the Qt-Creator in the Applications --> Programming, you can use
this tutorial to learn the Qt.

Any way, you may face the silly error I faced when I tried to build a project
the error is
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

After really turning the Internet upside down, I found that you have to install an extra package using this command

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev

By the way, the best thing about Qt that it's platform independent although you write it with C++, there is something else
called GTK that you can use.

that's all enjoy Qt !!

Linux got it all

Many Claim that Linux distributions have very little when it comes to the cool look, well this is absolutely wrong simply because Linux gives you better look than any one else (I mean ... :D). Just check this site it is really great, it contains a huge number of cool looking themes, backgrounds, screen savers, splash screen, screenlets and even more that work on Gnome Desktop. I am sure you can find something for KDE.

Not covinced yet !!! why not use the fancy "compiz" tool, this tool enables you to literaly "Play" with your Desktop, use the Cube to jump between desktops, fire effect and other great things. After you download it from this page, you will find it in System --> Prefrences, you can configure it there to enable the features you need, and you will find the shortcut keys here.

The best thing that normally all of this stuff is for free, safe and easy download like all Free and Open Source products.
ENJOY !

عربية فول

بجد كل ما أشوف عربية فول ببقى خلاص قلبى بيتقطع ... أصلا ً أنا واحد أكيل و ممكن أكل أى وقت أى حاجة بحبها أى كمية , وبموت فى حاجة اسمها فول و بادوب فى الفلافل , بحكم التواجد فى الشوارع لأى سبب ( أحيانا ً كتير من غير سبب ) الواحد أكل من محلات كتير حاجات مختلفة: أكلنا فول و فلافل و كبده مالهاش علاقة بالكبده ( سلام يا فهمى ) و سجق تقريبا ً ريسيكليد و فراخ بانيه عمرها ماكاكت و كشرى بلاستيك ... الحاجة اللى لسه الواحد معملهاش هيى عربية الفول ... كفاية احساس الأوبين بوفيه اللى مليان بصل و بدنجان و مخلل و الطبق الألومنيا الصغير اللى مابيخلص , الواحد حاول يرضى غروره فى محمد أحمد بس للأسف برضه البنى أدم باطنه فاضية و لازم أكل من العربية فى يوم إن شاء الله و ربنا يستر.

سبيل

أخيرا ً سبيل ... أحمدك يا رب , "لا تنسوا الحاجة فاطمة فى الدعاء" طيب يا سيدى من عينينا ... تمد إيديك و تفتح الحنفية بس ما فيش ميه , طبعا ً حضرتك متنرفز و تعض تلعن فى الحاجة فاطمة و هى أصلا ً مالهاش ذنب , إنما واحد ظريف زيك هوا اللى كاسر الكولدير و مبوظوا , تضطر إنك تشرب من أولة من اللى محطوطين جنب الكولدير مع إن العالم كلها حواليك عماله توعيك ماتشربش مكان حد و ماتكلش مكان حد و ما تمشيش جنب حد و ما تسلمش على حد من الأخر كده أعض فى بيتكو و ريحنا منك .
كل السبل برضوه قديمة يمكن عشان كلها قديمة و مافيش حد بقى بيعمل سبيل أصلا ً أو شوارعنا بتبهدل أى حاجة أو استخدامنا الغير واعى و جايز كل ده بس بيفضل السبيل ليه حلاوته فى بؤقك . شربت منه و أنت راجع من المدرسة ... و أنت رايح الدرس ... دست راس واحد صحبك و هو بيشرب لأنك أستاذ غلاسة فراح هوا رشك بتلات كوبيات ميه مش هموا الشتيمة و الضرب من الناس و أنت طلعت تجرى فى الخالعون .
ربنا يرحم الحاجة فاطمة و أمثالها

نصبة شاى

أى حتة فى مصر لازم يكون فيها نصبة شاى ... أى شركة أو مدرسة أو كلية أو على البحر أو حتى وزارة . النصبة ممكن تكون نضيفة و ممكن تكون ... يعنى مش قوى بس فى أى حالة الحاجة سواء كانت شاى , قهوة , ينسون , نسكافيه أو أى بطيخ بتبقى عسل و بتظبوط الدماغ . يمكن يكون الرغبة فى حاجة تفوق هى اللى بتفوق بس المهم أنك تفوق بدل ماتنام فى المحاضرة .
حاجة مهمة برضو أن اللى بيبقى ماسك النصبة بيبقى طيب و متواضع و محبوب من كل الناس مش عارف ليه و بتحس أنه بينقذك و إنه له مكان مهم فى حياتك . ده غير إن نفوذه بيبقى كبير و يعرف يوصل أكتر من الدكاتره كمان (فى الكلية) و يخلصلك أى حاجة ببساطة لأن كل الناس عارفاه و هو اللىى ظابطلها دماغها.
أنا رايح أضرب قهوة من أحمد ... أجبيلك معايا ؟؟