Fahmyz Blog

Finding Roommates

2006-09-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Who knew that finding a place in SF would be so difficult! As an effort to find potential roommates, I am creating this post which has more detailed information about myself.

I was born in Long Beach in southern California while my dad was on a two year project in the States. My parents returned to Egypt shortly (less than a year) after I was born because the project ended and not because I was born. I was raised in Cairo and lived there most of my life till I transfered to UCLA after my sophomore year. I heared all kinds of misconceptions about Egypt, the most interesting ones were that the president lives in the pyramid, Egyptians speak Egyptian and ride camels. After I graduated, I realocated to the bay area as part of my new job. I have to say, the bay area really rocks and is orders of magnitude better than LA. For the past two years, I have been living in San Mateo within close proximity to work. I decided that this is enough suburb life for me till I retire.

I have wide range of interests that keep evolving over time. The most recent ones are salsa dancing, 3oud or the lute (a middle eastern musical instrument) and painting, all of which are work in progress. I have taken 7 years of french at school and sadly I don't know how to say that in french without going to google translate. I started taking classes again to recapture my previous glory with the romantic language. I enjoy the outdoors from sailing to hiking and I have yet to snowboard at Tahoe. I follow soccer news religiously (mainly the premiership and la liga) and I am a big Barca fan, Go Roonie. I used to play squash regularly at UCLA and for quite some time here till Stanford became more strict letting non students use their courts. I currently work as a software engineer with entrepreneurial aspirations. Its a bumpy road but I won't stop till I get there with there being a constantly moving target. I have interests in technology, business and the AI part of neuroscience. I am in a constant learning phase and in the past two years I have taken classes in tennis, public speaking, improv acting, salsa dancing, painting and french.

I use Pandora for my music needs. You can check my profile here: http://www.pandora.com/people/ahmed_fahmy_2000

I use librarything for documenting the books I have read. You can view a catalog of books I read recently here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=afahmy

Brilliance of A Writer

2006-03-01T01:50:00.000-08:00

I am not much of a fiction reader. I always thought there are better ways to get entertained like watching a movie or a sitcom. Well, I was chit-chatting w/t a co-worker the other day when he mentioned that reading helps him get to sleep faster, so I thought why not, let's give it a try. Now, who do I start reading for? That was easy, Mahfouz was an obvious first choice. Having been raised in Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz for me is a cultural icon to say the very least. So, I drove to the local Barnes and Noble book store and I was very proud to find a whole section dedicated to Mahfouz's work all translated in English. I picked up Midaq Alley the shortest novel I could find. Lemme first mention that I have not read any of Mahfouz's work except for a short story that I studied at high school and I can't even remember which one that was. And man oh man, have I been missing out! The first couple of days reading the book, I was enjoying it so much to the extent that I was looking forward to bedtime everyday. Its really nothing specific to that book, its Mahfouz's writing style that is quite the extraordinary. A typical fiction story consists of two things: dialogue between the characters and description by the author. I usually skip the description part cuz I find it boring and does not add any new information. Well, Naguib Mahfouz is an exception. I would say 90% of his talent lies in his characters description. He presents a very real and deep descrition of the characters that made me feel like I knew the characters for ages. And, to compare that with any other author's descriptive skills would be like comparing a 2d image to a 3d hologram, excuse my geeky analogy. I don't need to add any further praise for a writer whose work has been translated to 6+ languages and has a Nobel prize in literature among his long list of awards. Here's a snippet of his writing in Midaq Alley describing, one of the characters, Uncle Kamel:

"He is a hulk of a man, his cloak revealing legs like tree trunks and his behind large and rounded like the dome of a mosque, its central portion resting on the chair and the remainder spilling over the sides. He has a belly like a barrel, great projecting breasts, and he seems scarcely to have any neck at all. Between his shoulders lies his rounded face, so puffed and blood-flecked that his breathing makes its furrows disappear. Consequently, scarcely a single line can be seen on the surface and he seems to have neither nose nor eyes."

What's next on my reading list? Either The Thief And The Dogs or The Day The Leader Was Killed.

On Intelligence

2006-02-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

Wow, it has been a long time since I posted anything. I have been pretty busy with work and classes. Now, that the African Cup of Nations is over, which Egypt won by the way, I have more free time to blog again. So recently, I started reading IMPRO by Keith Johnstone. Its on improvisation and the theatre. The author has a very interesting view on intelligence. Here is what he said with some editing for the sake of length.

.. when I was in my early twenties, I saw a performance of the film, Dovzhenko's Earth. There is a sequence in which the hero, Vassily, walks alone in the twilight. We know he's in danger, and we have just seen him comforting his wife. There are shots of mist moving early in the water, and silent horses stretching their necks. Then, amazingly, peasants lying side by side, the men with their hands in the women's blouses and motionless, with idiotic smiles on thier faces as they stare at the twilight. Vassily, dressed in black, walks through Chagall village, and the dust curls up in little clouds around his feet. He walks and walks untils he walks out of frame. Then Vassily walks again and after a short time he begins to dance, and the dance is skilled like an act of thanksgiving. The dust swirls around his feet and he is like an Indian god. In one moment I knew that valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, the the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, the man who dances might be superior to myself. From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.

We Can Do It!

2006-01-21T00:24:00.000-08:00

This is gonna be a short and sweet post. I just wanna show my solidarity with the Egyptian soccer team who is now playing in the African Cup of Nations. We Can Do It!

Leveraging Users' Intelligence

2006-01-18T01:05:00.000-08:00

I have been using Babylon for few years now. Its a pc side dictionary that can translate between most languages. Its fast with a nice user interface and lots of cool features. You can click on a word and it would give you the translation from different sources. It has spelling correction and pronunciaton. There is one feature though that really made Babylon stand out and that is user created glossaries .You can think of a glossary as a small dictionary for a particular topic like medical terms or bird names. Instead of providing all the content themselves, Babylon created a file standard that users can follow to create their own glossaries. The glossaries are shared with other users through Babylon's website. The website also keeps track of how many times a particular glossary was downloaded and that's an indication of its quality. Now all the sudden, Babylon offers very rich content with very little effort from their side. And believe me there are glossaries for almost everything from sports to animals and pets. The ones I found most useful are the slang glossaries cuz you won't find those in a regular dictionary.

The idea could be generalized to be taking advantage of users to enhance the service being offered. Off course that has to be done in a way to leverage the power user without creating a burden on the average user. I can think of three ways where that concept can be put into practice. The first way, which I described in the example of Babylon, is letting the users create most of the content. That content does not have to be only data, it could be skins for an application, graphics for buttons and so forth. Did I mention Wincustomize? It has super cool docks, widgets and icons. The second way is to let the users create most of the functionality. Wow, really? Its true, if you are the service provider all you have to do, is to design your application in the form of a platform where users can add features on top. The best example for that is firefox where most of the plug-ins are created by independent develpers. Third way is to take advantage of users' intelligence to do some, and usually the most difficult part, of the logic. Instead of implementing the logic through lines of code, it would happen in users' brains. How does Gmail know if a message is a spam or not? Let the user decide and use that information to mark that message pattern/sender as a spam in the future. Which results does Google show first when you type in a certain keyword? Use past information of what other users have selected in correspondence to a similar keyword.

So why would a user be willing to do all this work for free? Well, users like to be associated with successful applications, because that in turn makes them successful. Second, its a huge source of personal gratification to know that something you created is being used by alot of people. Third, they get rewarded through fame as they get name credit for their contribution especially if its popular among other users. The best part is that its not only free contributions from users, its also free marketing because users would be marketing their own work. So in summary, designing a service in a way that enables users to contribute yields to reduced cost, richer features and content and better marketing.

Lessons From The Past

2006-01-15T03:37:00.000-08:00

I love this story and its implications. Its from the life of prophet Mohamed (pbuh). Many of the problems the Prophet faced in his life are very similar to what we experience today. There is alot to learn if we analyzed the strategic thinking of the Prophet. So the story goes like this: When the prophet was assigned with the task of spreading Islam, he started doing so in secret first. Few people, mostly black and slaves, started converting and rumors started to spread about the new religion. The rich and wealthy in Mekka were not happy about this new religion mainly because it calls for equality between the rich and the poor, the slave and the free. Their natural response to maintain their status was to fight Islam and they started torturing the prophet's followers to force them to convert back. The Prophet's decision at that time was to move from Mecca to the neighbouring city of Al-Madina. This decision is really the key of the story. The Prophet did not say, I am gonna stay and God will help us. He did not say it does not matter if the followers died because its for a good cause and they will eventually be rewarded in the after life. Instead, the Prophet was practical. He had a plan and long term goals. He recognized his weakness and that staying in Mecca would slow down the spreading of the religion. He decided to move to Madina where muslims can grow in size and power. And it did not exactly happen over one night. It took around 8 years before Muslims were strong enough and went back to Mecca but this time victorers. What's interesting to note from this story: is that it is not enough to only have a just cause, you need strength as well. Otherwise your voice won't be heard and the facts could be distorted and you won't have the means to correct that. In the Prophet's story, when the Muslims seized back Mecca, the Prophet did not take revenge but instead set his enemies free. That had an enoromous effect in making more and more people convert to Islam. Can we learn from this story and apply it to what's happening in our lives today?

How To Create Wealth

2006-01-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

Recently, I finished reading Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. Paul Graham is an essayist, painter and programmer. The book is a compilation of articles he wrote on his blog. He writes about random and diverse topics that he finds interesting. Some of his good articles are: Why Nerds Are Unpopular and Hackers and Painters where he draws the analogy between programming and painting. However, the one that really got my attention was this one: How to Create Wealth. Graham first describes the difference between wealth and money and explains how wealth is not fixed (i.e. we can all be wealthy). He then argues that the fastest way to create wealth is through start-ups and explains why start-ups are usually associated with technology. One of the memorable quotes from his article:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four"

Great article and worth checking out.

May You Be Prevented From The Evils Of Envy

2006-01-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

Or "Yakfeek shar el 7asd" like my grandma used to say in arabic. If you grew up in an arabic family like I did, you probably would have heard about one or more of the following superstitions: Sleeping in your socks could make you blind, closing and opening scissors causes fights to happen and having your slippers flipped on the floor is bad because its facing God. The evils of envy is another one and by far the most overrated of all of them. You might be familiar with some of these preventive measures against envy: Having a blue crystal in the car, bokhour at home or simply living in extreme secrecy and hiding anything that anyone could possibly envy. True story: Up to this day, my parents won't tell everyone that I moved to the US. They do that because people in Egypt tend to associate the US with living comfortably and my parents fear that I might get envied and some sort of harm would happen to me in result. Its not like my parents are not well educated or anything. My dad has a Phd and my mom is a civil engineer. Its nothing specific to my family either; all the arabic families I know are like that too.

Let's take a look at the reasons why people fear envy and I will refute them all, fair and square. The first reaction I get from friends when I bring this topic up is that they start showering me with stories about how they have been affected by envy one way or another. Whether its a couple who broke up because people envied how happy they were or someone's new car was involved in an accident because someone gave it the eye or many many other stories. My take on this is that people who envy are envying all the time, its just we tend to make the association with harm when something bad happens to us. The other common reason people fear envy is in reference to the quranic verse in surat "Al-Falk". My personal opinion, and I am certainly not an expert in quran tafsir, is that people are misinterpreting the verse. What the quranic verse says is to be cautious from the person who envies. And thats where harm could really come from not from the act of envying itself and thus one should avoid those who envy if possible.

There are many drawbacks for fearing envy. For one thing, it makes us worried about nothing. It influences many of the decisions that we make in a negative way. It forces us to hide things and isolates us from others. Enough said, Flame On!!

The Power of A Good Idea

2005-12-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

Do you have any friends who go to Engineering grad school? Have you visited their work cubicle before ? What you are gonna find there is quite amusing. A toothpaste and a toothbrush, lots of caffeine in its various forms like tea or coffee, a 12 pack of microwaveable asian noodles and the Dummy's guide to grad school survival. Okay, I made the part about the Dummy's guide but really they almost live at school. A friend of mine is doing his Phd in biotech at Stanford and he is an exception to what I just described. His daily schedule is very similar to mine. He works from 9 to 6 and is usually free on the weekends. To add to the mystery, he usually takes time off from his research during winter and summer to travel. One day I asked my friend to reveal the secret behind his productivity. He told me that at any given day, one could have a few good ideas. You try to work hard to get some results out of those and any effort beyond that does not really add much value. While my friend is much smarter than the average me, there is some truth to what he said and I have seen that personally in my own work. I tend to have this bad habit that whenever I get stuck at work, I mechanically try many things very quickly to solve the problem. This is another case of Dijkstra's I described in my previous posts. The cost of trying out a mediocre solution to the problem is small because it did not require much thinking from my side. But, at the end I am not getting any close towards solving my work problem. I was able to become more productive by forcing myself to concentrate on few good ideas that could really solve the problem.

While I am at it, lemme give some examples of what I consider good business ideas. These are already established businesses so don't quit your job and walk to a VC yet. LinkedIn, Evite and TinyURL are examples of what I like to refer to as simple-but-beautiful ideas. They are beautiful ideas because they are simple yet very useful to many people. They are simple because they are not technically hard problems and the implementation behind them has already been done many times before. Add to that, they have the property of self marketing which means everytime someone is using the service, he/she is also refering someone else. That combined with a friendly intuitive user interface enabled them to gain a large user base very quickly.

A Case of Dijkstra's (Not A Technical Post!)

2005-12-27T22:13:00.000-08:00

E.W. Dijkstra, a brilliant scientist and a fine man, is credited for the invention of Dijkstra's Algorithm aka the shortest path algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is what's used behind the scenes to give us driving directions on mapquest or gps navigators. What's interesting about Dijkstra's algorithm, and is also the case with many computing algorithms, is that its applicable in our everyday life and not just technical problems. Let's look at this fun problem. It's really short and simple. So we are trying to find the shortest
path from node A to node D. The numbers on the edges between the nodes represent the distance.

A _3_B__4_ D
\_2__C__6_/

So we could go from A to D through B with a total cost of 7 or through C with a total cost of 8. In this simple problem obviously going through B leads shorter path. Although, and especially
in more complicated graphs, one might be inclined to go with C thinking that if C is closer to A than B that would yield a shorter path. And that's exactly what D's Algorithms proves wrong.

Dijkstra's Algorithm reminds me to focus on my long term goals. We do have choices that we make everyday and sometimes you have to pick the non ideal ones (short term wise) because it eventually leads to the shortest path to our end goals.

Sharing Can Be Good

2005-12-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

Let me compare and contrast the Joel model to what I like to refer to as the Hacker model. Jeol who, which hacker, what model? Bare with me, it will all be clear after I tell you this story.

Few months ago, a friend of mine invited me to dinner at his house. I knew my friend from Symantec where I used to intern and he used to work as a lead engineer. My friend managed to file 2 or 3 patents in his one year there so that should tell you something about him. After an excellent dinner, instead of offering me dessert, my friend offered to show me some of his Windows kernel hacking skills. For those who don't know the kernel is the core component of the operating system. Windows does not publish any of its internal OS implementation details so hackers spend alot of time trying to figure out how it works to be able to break it. Security engineers, like my friend, spend an equal amount of time but to prevent against hackers' attempts. I was very impressed with what my friend showed me. I asked him if any of that information is published somewhere. My friend smiled and I saw that look in his eyes that kinda says you are too naive kid. He told me that security engineers spend most of their day trying to figure out this information and obviously no one is gonna reveal this information publicly as they maintain a career out of it.

The Joel model is in reference to Joel Spolsky. Mr. Spolsky is the author of the famous blog: JoelOnSoftware.com that became very popular among software engineers and geeks in general. Joel Spolsky became very famous to the extent that he gets frequently invited to speak at every major software conference. He was the keynote speaker for my company's annual engineering conference last year. He even published a book off his blog that was a top seller on Amazon. Joel founded a very small company in NYC that does bug tracking software. Despite his fierce attempts to make his product look sexy or high profile its a bug tracking software afterall. So, where did all this popularity come from? I attribute his fame solely to his blog. Joel decided to follow the complete opposite of the Hackers model. He shares the lessons and tricks that he learned over the years. He publicly describes his business strategies, how he runs his company, his management style and more. Of course his unique humorous writing style helped but I am sure that required time and effort from his side. In return for his efforts, Joel earned his name which I claim is much more valuable than any business advantage he could have from not sharing his personal insights.

I like the Joel model better. For one thing, It provides value to other people. Second, it gives you credibility if you have a product that you wanna advertise. Its the best marketing strategy you could ever have. I am gonna try to follow the Joel model in my own blog. Instead of JoelOnSoftware, its gonna be AhmedOnEverything. I don't really expect it to be popular or anything, I would just like to share the things I learn from my every day life that I think would be useful to others.

Moving To The City?

2005-12-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

So I am seriously considering moving to the city. Yes, it is crowded, expensive and it's gonna be a long commute to work. And yes this means I will have to get a roommate if I wanna live in a decent place without spending all my paycheck on rent. I think its gonna be worth it though. Like a coworker of mine says its a better value for your time where value is fun/goodtimes/blast however you wanna define it. I have been living in the peninsula for over a year now since I moved from LA. There is really not much to do there like any suburb area. Everything closes early (i.e 11 the latest) and most of the population is either much younger (high-school and younger) or much older (parents of the high-school kids) . Even though I live only 15 miles away from the city, it's still not very convient. I have to worry about driving, getting stuck in traffic (45 min drive on average), finding parking or being tied to the subway schedule. More importantly its different being an outsider than someone who actually lives there. When you are coming from the outside you don't have much time to spend. So you tend to go to places you already know with friends you knew from before. You don't get to explore or meet new people. I could ramble on and on about this but I think now would be a good time for me to experience living in the city. So when am I gonna move? Depends on how early I could get out of my current lease which does not end till summer. Hopefully, I will be able to move earlier than that.

Back To Blogging

2005-12-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

It seems like forever since I have posted on this blog. I almost forgot I even have a blog. Few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I have a blog and that reminded me about it. I guess I have been pretty busy the last two month or may be I did not have anything interesting to write about. Anyways, I am back to blogging now. This time for real ;) I even have a list of topics to write about for the next few weeks. ISA, I will get to write at least one entry per week. I will also make this public soon. Don't know how soon , but once I have few entries out there. So stay tuned everyone (that's just me for now since I am currently the only reader for this blog).

Ramadan Is Interesting because ...

2005-10-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

Ramadan started today and I am excited about it. The sunset is around 7 p.m. which is the latest I have ever fasted. Lack of tea and caffeine is my biggest challenge. In a regular non-Ramadan day, I would normally drink 3-4 cups of tea. The interesting thing that I noticed today is that I got hungry around 10 a.m., noon and 4 p.m. which are the times I usually eat breakfast, lunch and have a snack. It does not make sense to be hungry at 10 in the morning since it's still very early in the day. My explanation for that is the stomache memory factor so it should be much better once I get used to not eating at those times.

What I like about Ramadan (aside from the spirtual aspect) is that it's very different than any other month in the year. It kinda splits the year into two parts: pre Ramadan and after Ramadan. I really appreciate this break of routine. For one thing it makes me look at how I have been spending my time before. And since the month is mostly dedicated to religious activities, I don't have time to perform any of my pre-Ramadan activities and hence I don't get to make any immediate decisions regarding my evaluation. Instead I have time to plan with ease.

A 5K Race

2005-09-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I ran in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Callenge: a 3.5 mile race along the SF bay. It all started 10 weeks ago when I got an email from a coworker about the race and I thought it might be a good way to get in shape. I started preparing for the race by googling for a running guide. Google, being the great search engine it is, returned this page among its results. "A guide to running 5k in 10 weeks" and the description followed, "A guide that will transform you from a coach potato to a runner in 10 weeks". Perfect! So I started following the website's guide taking advantage of the running track close to my apt. For the first 5 weeks I was on schedule, running 3 times a week and increasing the load every week. But then I went on vacation for 3 weeks and needless to say that was the end of my training. I came back gaining weight and out of shape. So for the remaining 2 weeks, I decided to follow a different strategy and not practice at all. To my surprise, on the race day I ran the whole way non-stop finishing in 35 minutes which is not bad for a first race. The thing that definitely helped was the hundreds of people running in the race. I was expecting someone to stop along the way so I would stop too, but no one stopped till the finish line.

To Blog or Not To Blog

2005-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about having a blog for a while. Infact for about few month now. My main motivation was to have a way for family and friends back home to know what's going on in my life in some detail. Also, I thought it's a good way to organize/archive my thoughts and polish my writing skills. What I originally had in mind was creating my own blog from scratch: writing all the scripts myself, the UI design, photoshop editing and so forth. That sounded like alot of work which turned me off from the idea for that long. I was reluctant to go with the ready-to-use blogs like this one. It did not sound elegant or flexible enough and was simply an easier solution. However, after thinking this over, I realized that I am too lazy to write my own website and probably the time spent developing it could be better spent doing something else. So, now I am all set with this blogger experimenting with the blogging idea in general to see how it's gonna work.