Steps to apply for your Graduate Degree.

   Step One: 

Choose a program that offers your field of interest. You need also to consider the ranking of your program not the institution as a whole.

To check the ranking of the program of your choice visit http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2010/subject-rankings/technology

The above URL is filtered to show the programs of science and technology.

Step Two:

Check the institution research fields, and pick the one of most interest. Contact one or more of the research group to see if you can contribute in the research they are doing. 

Step Three:

Apply online, using the university online application. Most of the data you will fill is related to

1.       Personal info

2.       Educational background

3.       Your research interest

4.       Statement of Purpose, where you state why you are interested in the program in hand and why you think you are qualified to pursue graduate degree, of course you need to list any publications, research background. Additionally, it will be very helpful if you can specify a certain faculty member whom you wish to work with.

5.       You need to provide three recommenders who are familiar with your work. It’s preferred that all three are in academia, but it’s acceptable if you can provide two from academia and one from the industry.

6.       Test scores. All the programs require the TOEFL IBT, you can book your test date at http://www.ets.org/toefl , acceptable test score should be 90 and above. You need to check exactly the test score required for the institution you are applying to. The maximum test score I saw was 100.

a.       You need also to check if the institution you are applying two requires GRE score or not, you can book the exam date on http://www.ets.org/gre.

7.       Some of the universities will ask you to upload your CV, and a scanned copy of your transcripts (of course for you bachelor degree and you Masters), so keep them ready.

8.       Now you are ready to submit your online application, the average cost of the online application is 50 US Dollars.

   Step Four

The last step is to send your supporting documents to the university you are applying to.

1.       Official transcripts in the original language (in our case Arabic). For the bachelor and Masters degrees.

2.       Official translation of the transcripts to the English language, also for both the bachelor and Masters (you can ask Ain Shams to issue transcripts in English).

3.       Official Degree Certificate in the original language. Of course for both Masters and Bachelor.

4.       Official Translation of the Degree Certificate to the English language (you can ask Ain Shams to issue degree certificate in English).

5.       Ask ETS to forward your test scores (TOEFL, GRE) directly to the university you are applying to; you can get the university code from the website. This code you will use to find the university you are applying to on ETS website.

A Wish

I wish for "The Happy Childhood of Science" to be back someday. Where scientist wrote science for General Intelligent readers not for experts. Where anyone can read and understand.

A thought at Midnight

Sometimes I know that what I feel is true, sometimes you feel that what you are doing is right, but you need someone to phrase it for you.

I had a meeting, I'm the only one who doesn't talk. Everybody is looking, expecting me to say something. I have nothing to say. why? I don't want to spill just words, any words. I want the thing I say to have a meaning. A few, profitable words.

That's when it came to me.

Don't talk back unless you truly understand, don't just say a thread of words hanging from a spider web, anybody could just blow it away. It's when you are sure you understand, your words will have the greatest impact.

How To Judge a Photo

When we take a photo, we should consider the following when we rate it.

1. Light Exposure
2. Immediate Impact
3. When you should CROP and when you need a SPACE
4. Try to avoid shooting art work, don't rely on the value of the art work. The picture should have some addition from your own creativity.
   

Ant in a nutshell for windows (part 1)

In a nutshell, ant helps you transform the source code, libraries, and other files the make up your project into a deliverable software package. Additionally, it helps you to do this in orderly, repeatable manner.

Using the ant script, you can make ant do almost everything. This flexibility comes with a price which is complexity. Yet, if you wrote the script well enough, you will be able to maintain it for years.

Installing Ant

1. Download the Ant zip file from ant’s web site.
   
2. Extract the zip file in an easy to use folder, let’s say c:\tools\ant.
   
3. Add the ant bin directory, in this case c:/tools/ant/bin, to your system PATH variable.
   You can do this by going to control panel / System / Advanced Tab / env. Variables then choose from system variables “PATH” . Now just add your bin directory, separated from the other values by semicolon.
   
4. Add the “ANT_HOME” env. Variable [c:/tools/ant] using the “New” button in the env. Variables screen.
   
5. Make sure that the “JAVA_HOME” env. Variable is correctly set to the directory where your JDK is installed.
   
6. Finally, once these steps are complete, you can run ant from the cmd.
   Ant –version.
   Apache Ant version 1.7.1 compiled on June 27 2008.

Ant basic concepts.

• Ant build files are written in very easy, straight forward XML using a quite readable set of tags.
  
• Ant build files are used to build one ,and only one project .
  
• Two basic tags which will make your build file.
  -Target
  -Task
  
• Targets: Are the goals you want to achieve with your build process, these goals could be, compiling your source code, running your unit tests, and preparing a pre-release version of your project. Usually you define many targets in an ant build file
  
• Tasks: Let you define the piece of work which you want to get it done. For example, compiling some java source code using javac, or doing you unit testing using junt.
  
• There are three types of tasks: The core tasks: which are built into ant, and need no special configurations, the optional tasks: which are maintained by the ant team and delivered with ant, like Junit, Third part tasks: which are written and maintained outside the ant project.
  
• Ant version 1.7.1 is delivered with almost 100 core tasks, and around 50 optional tasks.
  

A simple ant build file.

• Ant doesn’t force and directory structure , but we are recommended to use the following.
  
• src directory: where you keep your Application Source Code.
  
• test directory: where you keep your unit test code.
  
• lib directory: where you put your project dependencies.
  
• build directory: where you put Build generated files.
  
• build/classes directory: will hold your compiled classes.
  
• build/test-classes directory: will hold your compiled test classes.
  
• dist directory: any distribution files, your project in jar or war format.
  

Now we will write a simple ant build file, but first am going to say what this build file does.

1-Create two directories, build and dist directory under you project root.
2-Build your source code.
3-Package you project in a form of a jar file.
4-Delete both the built classes and the dist directory.

1. the first target is the init target, which is used to create build/classes, dist directories using the mkdir task and the attribute dir.


2. my second target is compile, which as the name indicates it compile my source files. what ant needs to know is if that target depends on any other target, which in this case is true.we have to create the build/classes first before we can compile our classes. for that we used the depends attribute which indicate the compile target dependency on the init target. the task used in this target is javac, which is a straight forward task. I used the srcdir attribute to indicate my source file directory, and used the distdir to indicate where i want my compiled classes to go.


3. My third target is package, which packages my compiled classes into one jar file using jar task.


4. and finally the clean target, which is used to delete both build and dist directory using the delete task.
   

what i didn't mention here is the default attribute in the project tag. this attribute indicates the default target to run when using this build file and in this case the default target is "package".

Now, to use this build file.

1. open the CMD.
   
2. go to your project root folder (the folder where you keep your scr directory along with the build.xml file).
   
3. type ant in the cmd
   
4. set back and watch :).
   

you will get something like that.

init:
compile:
package: [jar] Building jar: D:\first\dist\tax-calculator.jar
BUILD SUCCESSFULTotal time: 0 seconds

by default ant looks for build.xml file in the directory where you stand, once it finds the build file and no target name is passed as a parameter, ant will look for the default target to run and in this case "package".

in case you want to run a specififc target, you can pass its name as a parameter for ant, it would look like this

C:>first ant clean

Buildfile: build.xml
clean:

[delete] Deleting directory D:\first\build

[delete] Deleting directory D:\first\dist
BUILD SUCCESSFULTotal time: 0 seconds

I hope this post is helpful. stay tuned for more about ant.

Software Development Life Cycle

My nephew wakes up today, he is getting ready to go to school. He have this cute teddy bear named Beary, each time My nephew goes to school he takes Beary with him. He is dragging Beary down the stares BOM BOM BOM on the back of his head. Beary thinks that this is the only way to go down the stares. But if only he had the chance to stop and think, he will find a lot easier way to go down the stares.

We ----Software Engineers---- are Beary the bear, always thinks that this is the only way to go down the stairs, because we are always under the pressure of a delivery time, a series of bugs, and to many details.We think that there is no other way to do what we do. We often don't have the time to stop and think that there might be another way.

Surprisingly, there are lots of ways to do what we do and in a much easier way. In this blog I'll start taking about tools in the SDLC process.

First the Build Tools, the build tools are the most fundamental tools in the SDLC process which if used right they become the cornerstones of your SDLC practice.

Stay tuned.

Just a warm up

Hi there, this is my first entry in two years. Stay tuned, you will find some cool stuff.

As a warm up, something is kinda making me confused. We all know how sophisticated language java is. But I came across something which I believe is a design error.

If I have 2 separate classes in two different packages
package in;
public class Animal {
public Animal() {}//accessible only throw inheritance or throw the dot operator if the accessing class is in the same package
protected void eat(){System.out.println("animal");}}
--------------------------------------------------
package out;
public class Horse extends in.Animal {public Horse() {}/** Override the protected method eat*/
protected void eat(){System.out.println("horse");}}
-------------------------------------
package in;
import out.Horse;
public class BarnHorse{public BarnHorse()
{Animal a=new Horse();//calling polymorphiclly the eat method in the horse class a.eat();}}

the code compiles fine and calls the Horse version of eat and outputs "horse" although the calling class shouldn't know anything about the Horse eat version.

please share your opinion