Yesterday, the event was held in Open Craft: Mark Spencer, the founder of Asterisk and Digium, was in Egypt for a holiday and we had the opportunity to have him give us a technical seminar. The man was super cool and very informative. The presentation was never long, it was direct and still very useful. Mark could have a little bit underestimated the audiance knowledge about Open Source but I think it's not him to blame. I believe that there isn't real Open Source usage in Egypt and the area since software piracy is very common, thus even the commercial software is distributed for free.

Hi all, I liked vTiger 4.2.x as a good and balanced OpenSource CRM solution. Most other powerful solutions weren't LAMP, Java and other technologies. Anyways I developed for some time over vTiger 4.2 and things were fine, still I had some criticism about the vTiger code which I had discussed with Gopal, one of the core developers. Anyways, I was awaiting the release of vTiger 5.0 unpatiently and as soon as an RC was there I was grapping it, installing, watching the differences.

Jay and Mozilla QA team were thinking about enhancing their WordPress site and requested help from volunteers. I suggested they use Drupal and even installed and hosted them a copy of Drupal to play with. I answered some of their questions and gave some ideas. After couple of weeks they announced they have chosen Joomla over Drupal. I do not believe this is the best idea out there. Joomla is still not on par with Drupal and Drupal is going to shine and dominate with the release of Drupal 5.0 which is in beta phase now.

Hi People, It's now a week or something since the release of the rivals: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The death match continues with both browser vendors throwing the latest master pieces from their forges. I took a sort of good tour with both browsers: Firefox 2.0 on my SuSE Linux 10.1 over the flagship KDE 3.5.5, and Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (and that's forced from Microsoft).

Finally, I had the opportunity to introduce some quick intro about the web and some of my concerns, ideas and knowledge to audience of a seminar held at OpenCraft's head quarters.
The atmosphere was, as usual, very friendly and very nice. For those who attended and those whom I was unlucky not to meet I post the seminar summary.

Web Standards Seminar

Since the early days of CMS, I went through developing to and based on many CMS starting from EZ Publish, XOOPS, PHP Nuke, PHP Website to Mambo. I liked Mambo to the extent that I once started a small project in Mambo Forge to localize Mambo for Arabs. I must confess that when I first heard of Drupal it was in a real hurry thus I didn't take much time to 'study' Drupal.

I was doing some very basic stuff with my Apache 2.2 (which is running on my work SuSE 10.1 box): I was creating symbolic links for some folders. Things were supposed to go smooth and fine but this didn't happen. Instead, Apache refused to follow the symbolic links! I quickly checked /etc/apache2/httpd.conf but everything was fine: Options Indexes FollowSymLinks I craweled Google for an hour but all posts told me I'm not missing anything.

After some long time, I finally was able to contribute something to Drupal, which is Juventus Theme. I still have some few ideas for Drupal modules and themes thus I think this won't be the last thing I can do for my dear Drupal.

I had a CRM project and vTiger was chosen to be the solution to build over. vTiger is really delivering a good functionality though the code is a mess in some modules. Anyways it was requested to have custom fields for users and it took few hours of work to have this done. I hope you enjoy this contribution.