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Travelling again

I am on my way to Muscat - Oman for two nights then another two nights at Manama Bahrain before i am back to Amman.
I have not been traveling lately. My last trip was a 2 day visit to Dubai on May 13th.
Business trips are no longer exciting to me at all. I try to avoid them when i can. However, they are inevitable.

what to exepct! well High temperature, high humidity, high hotel prices~

Pollution

This time i mean INFORMATION POLLUTION. I was hit by it. I can be diagnosed with new form of Illness. I am informationally polluted. OR, as some may like to call it. I am suffering from Information Overload.

When i first thought of it, it was kind of a humerous gesture on my side. But when i searched the net, i found a lot being written on this subject.

Its toll is becoming obvious on me. Even today, when i wanted to jot a few words on this blog, i had difficulty remebering how to login. Yes, i have not been in the best of my moods to write anything lately, but it has not been that long of a time to wonder how to login.

The acceleration at which information channels are filled and refilled is nothing but amazing. Needless to say, people like me, working in the field of information technology suffer the most. Without going into details, 16 years back, ORACLE corp owned around 16 products ( i could at that time list them along with their prices). One Oracle reporesentative told me last week that, as we speak, there are about 10,000 products. I do not know how true this is, but let us assume that there are about 1000. Just thinking of this immedaitely instigates a sense of loss, distraction and frustration being a person ambitious to maintain a goold level of knowledge about them. Well this is going to be a dauting and an impossible task. Trying to abandon them is just as stressful.

To get a feel that i am not kidding, this is an extract from "http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/chinneg.html" than can shed some light

"The acceleration of change is accompanied by an increase in the information needed to keep up with all these developments. This too leads to psychological, physical and social problems. A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one third from ill-health because of information overload. The psychologist David Lewis, who analysed the findings of this survey, proposed the term "Information Fatigue Syndrome" to describe the resulting symptoms. Other effects of too much information include anxiety, poor decision-making, difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced attention span (Reuters, 1996; Shenk, 1997). These effects merely add to the stress caused by the need to constantly adapt to a changing situation"

Find the Lost History

Even if you must go all the way to China, said the prophet, “Seek Knowledge”
In an era when the relationship between Islam and the West seems fraught with misunderstanding, how many of us realize that Muslim intellectual achievement was once envy of the world? In magnificent centers of learning, from Damascus to Baghdad and Cairo, mathematicians and a thousand year ago developed, algorithms, and trigonometry- the foundations upon which modern technology is build. Inventors devised the crankshaft and early versions of the torpedo and the parachute. Physicians’ techniques ranged from orthodontia to asthma care to tracheotomy. And Muslim astronomers calculated our planet’s diameter and circumference t a remarkable degree of accuracy- at a time when Europeans thought the Earth was flat

If you liked what you have just read, you shall enjoy more reading the book. It is called “Lost History, the enduring legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists.
You will find the above paragraph on the leaflet.

The book is authored by Michael Hamilton Morgan, and forwarded by His majesty Kind Abdulla second of Jordan.

My mother asked me to order it for her through Amazon, and I ordered two.
It is valuable book indeed. A must have

Ammar Sajdi

When it come to this, i hate suspence

spontaneity, suspense could spice up one's life. However, when it comes to traveling, this kind of suspense really stresses me immensely. Yesterday, i received a call from Dubai summoning upon me to be present their as of this evening, and therefore, you need to make last minute cancellation to your meeting and do last minutes formidable hotel and flight booking, not knowing whether you will make it on time or not. After I made all the arrangements, I received last minute cancellations as well. Quite honestly, i was relieved. Home sweet Home

Ammar

In your spare time

When i am not practicing work related hoppies, i am spending some of my spare time playing around with a google software product called sketchup. As its name implies, it is a productivity tool in the domain of computer sketching. You will like it, download and enjoy.
I am also falling in love with another freeware product called DotProject. This latter product shall make a grand entry to our REALSOFT enviornment pretty soon. It is a web enabled tasks oriented project management tool which will help all of us montior project management tasks as well as bug tracking via the internet. You can check this product out (www.dotproject.net). Finally, this product can integrate to our open source bug tracking system called mantis

Global Warming

Records reveal that Britain is witnessing the warmest weather for the first two weeks of May, 2008 since 1772. Additonally, some scientists speculate that in 100 years you can kiss London good by, unless, of course, you can afford a submarine.

Ammar sajdi

Born Again

This week i was introduced to the world of MUMPS. No it is not the epidemic that hit you when you were young (Painful swelling of the salivary glands caused by viral disease) a.k.a Abu Dhgaim. Rather it is MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry. Since i spent almost every day of may career life working, reading, training and practicing Oracle and Oracle derivatives software and services, I became so overwhelmed by ORACLE to an extent that i feel that the world evolves around it. Well, and obviously, there is a lot more going around the world. There are communities, project, mission critical applications developed by the MUMPS language over MUMPS database. Such application are both in health and financial sectors. As of today, there are numerous sites that are running mumps. For example Bank of England and Barclays Bank, also it is used by Ameritrade, the largest online trading service in the US with over 12 billion transactions per day.

I know of no installation in Jordan, but something seems to be coming soon as there is a Jordanian tender calling for HIMS package called Vista (MUMPS based) http://www.rss2go.net/topic/national_healthcare (Bad news for local HIMS companies)
I came to know about MUMPS when a customer is Saudi Arabia was asking us if we can build a Data Warehouse solution for a health care system which is running MUMPS! my initial feedback was SAY WHAT? I know about a lot of things in this domain, but not this one. In the World of vista i am only three days old. I downloaded the product on Linux, built a database, and ran the Hello world example. If we take the project, i guess, my i will extend my MUMPS life and may even celebrate MUMPS birthdays, if not, my MUMPS life might as well just nostalgically evade

14 degrees at 12 pm

Since it is May and it has been feeling really cool the past two days, some people may think that weather conditions are not normal. in Reality, it is quite normal to wintess a couple of rather cloudy and cool days in May. Light rain is also normal. It did not rain in Amman, but it did in Jerusalem and Beirut during the past two days

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

Yesterday, we finished an interesting 5 days session with Oracle, where we were introduced to Oracle's BI solution called BI EE. This suite is actually what Oracle inherited from its acquistion of Siebel. I must say that the functionalityies are not new to me, however, the user experience and look and feel are impressive. Especially, when it comes to Bi Answers and BI dashboard products. Soon, we shall also be exposed to IBM congnos after discussing IBM request to expand thier Software Operation in the area.
I have obtained a VM-WARE Oracle BI ready installation, and i am looking forward to examining the product even further this week-end. Another product that we were introduced to is Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) ,which is also a result of an acquistion from Synopsis. This product is ELT tool rather than ETL tool. When compared to OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder), there are certain advantages especially in its capability with working with several different data sources and its capablity to do some transformation at the sources.
In the end, I have come to the conclusion to the fact that neither OWB nor Oracle discoverer superior products but at the same time , do not fall short of the other new products

Quran and Science

قال تعالى
والشمس تجري لمستقر لها ذلك تقدير العزيز الحكيم

سورة يس الاية 38

The Quran sura 36 verse 38
In translation: The Sun runs its course to a settled place.

Scientifically, please refer to the Book Observational Astronomy (by Scott Bireny , Guillermo Gonzalez and David Oesper, P73 which says:-

"The point on the sky towards which the sun (and therefore the solar system) moves is called the solar Apex"

Modern Science has therefore, ascertain, that there is indeed a point towards which the sun settles. This is in perfect harmony with the revelation of the holy Quran.

Actually, the inspiration of the idea came to me from a book called The Bible, the Quran and science by Maurice Bucaille that introduced me to the term solar Apex. I searched the net and found the scientific reference described above

Ammar Sajdi