Wikimania 2008

For the second time I am in the bidding team for the wikimania, I think we are close to win it this year. The bidding team (except me) did a great job during the last few days. Africa should get its turn to host this event. South Africa has its own problems, and don't forget what is going with the World Cup as they didn't start yet to prepare for the event..

New Task - الباز أفندى

I have a new Project as assignment...
A huge data for Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, which I should manipulate and categorize, create metadata, then finally create launch a site to browse the documents..

Whenever I look at the boxes at my disk I remember the Arabic old movies, where we used to see an employee handling tons of papers in front of him in a caricature profile for Egyptian employee. There is also a well known character who appeared in the movie "Ebn Hameedo" played by Tawfik El-De'n known as "El Baz Afandy". :)) he was a skilled employee, pretending the knowledge of everything while he has not gotten any certificates...

Actually I like the task...I find it has some kind of challenge... It tests how much you can handle these docs, how much you can be organized, knowing where a specific document can fit, and how you can make good procedures to organize the structure of such data.
Well, I guess It is a new kind of experience.

VISTA.....

As a new developer in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, I should get a tour to VISTA(Virtual Immersive Science and Technology Applications). Bibliotheca Alexandrina is the first to provide researchers with such advanced visualization tools (in the middle east of course I mean). The VISTA is also known as CAVE (Computer Aided Virtual Environment).

It displays 3D stereoscopic images generated from a PC cluster, on four 10-ft × 10-ft vertical walls and the floor. The cluster is Five workstations linked together. The four projectors used in the VISTA render 1400 × 1050 pixels each and have a very bright light output rated at 7200 ANSI lumens. this can be very good for simulating real phenomenon. There are a lot of applications applied to Vista concerning Aero Dynamics, Chemistry, Medicine..etc.

One of the applications, which I see it quite impressive, is a 3d chart visualizer. It gives you a nice feeling that you are running on the axis, or between the points of the plot.

Actually, I have no pics for the VISTA.... but i can give you an approximation...
imagine the Gapminder in 3D effect.. That's wt u get when you use the VISTA_3dCharts.