HRH Prince Turki AlFaisal’s Speech at ANU
Posted by Turki AlFaisal in Khawarizmi Series on June 4th, 2009
Lecture Recording by ANU (MP3, 52.9MB) HH:MM:SS=00:57:48
HRH Prince Turki AlFaisal
Initially, I thank the center for Arab and Islamic Studies and its Director professor Amin Saikal for inviting me to speak to such a distinguished audience at this prestigious Institution: The Australian National University.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There is an Arab proverb which says:
صديقك من صدقك لا من صدّقك.
Loosely translated, it means:
Your friend is he who tells you the truth; not he who tells you what you want to hear. I address this august audience in that spirit.
Why you need an iPhone!
Apple has finally launched its state of art mobile phone device in late June 2007. The “iPhone” or let me just say “all you need device”. iPhone has revolutionized the industry of mobiles and mp3 players. It is all in one device in which you get to accomplish all your tasks; answer all 
our questions and endlessly enjoy your time with a touch on its amazing user-friendly screen. Whether you are interested in organizing your tasks, or a fan of music and videos or enjoy surfing the web; iPhone is all you need. iPhone is an organizing entertaining mobile device that allows you not only call your friends, send messages and share pictures but chat with them for free no matter where they are in the world.
If you want to know a typical day with iPhone please read through the coming lines;
As you wake up in the morning you switch off the iPhone alarm. You wonder what to wear and how the weather feels like outside so you check the weather forecast on the iPhone’s weather forecast application. After that you simply check your email (whether it was your personal or business email). Since you are instantly updated with the latest international and national news you are able to know what is happening in your city and in the rest of the world around you using various news applications on the iPhone. After getting your daily news update its time for you to get yourself busy and check your daily “To Do” list, appointments and meetings on the iPhone (if you were a student you could check your assignments, projects and homework schedule on an iPhone application). Then you are ready to start your daily workout using the Nike training program on the iPhone as you enjoy stretching your muscles you listen to your favorite music on the iPhone’s iPod. After that you use the Meal Planner to select a quick and healthy breakfast. Then you remember you must dress up formally for a presentation; using an iPhone application you get to learn different ways of tying your tie! Because you value time and you want to always be on time you use the GPS application on your iPhone to help you with the shortest route to reach your destination. Later you chat with your friends (who own iPhones) for free to arrange a get together in a new coffee shop that you don’t know its location. Using the map application on your iPhone you easily reach the coffee shop and on time. Impressed with the stylish design of the coffee shop and the tasty coffee you and your friends enjoyed you decide to take pictures using your iPhone to remember this wonderful day. Immediately you upload the pictures on your facebook account to share it with your friends and family. After that you go home to work on an assignment that is due soon suddenly you feel hungry and too tired to cook you use your Dominos iPhone application to your favorite pizza home delivered. Working on your assignment you discover that there is incomplete information which you need to find so you surf the web on your iPhone to find the needed information. Your friend calls you to tell you about an interesting video on YouTube which you immediately check on your iPhone. Then you suggest to your friend watching a movie which you checked its showing times on the Movie application on your iPhone. Then it is time to connect with your family who are overseas using Skype on your iPhone. Your parents inform you that they have transferred money to your account but they are unsure if the transaction was successful or not so you check your bank account using the Bank application on your iPhone.
Before you go to bed you entertain yourself by playing games on your iPhone, writing (or recording) your thoughts for the day on an application and reading a book on the iPhone.
I believe you know now why you need an iPhone!
iPhone is suitable for different people with different needs… it is the phone that everyone needs!
On `The Nature of Order’
Posted by Ziyad Alshaikh in Architecture, Book Review on August 14th, 2009
Cover of volume 4 of `The Nature of Order' by Christopher Alexander.
So what is the nature of `order’?
Perhaps we should start by understanding what `order’ is, before rushing to answer the question. Well, Christopher Alexander for one, was not in rush to answer. In his four volume book titled `The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe,’ Alexander presents an answer which took him 27 years to find/develop.
Requirements Churn
Posted by csrins in Requirements, Software Engineering on July 31st, 2009
This entry was originally published at : http://csrins.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/dealing-with-requirements-churn/ The text of the entry is reproduced below in full.
Often software development begins with a concept, an idea, a mere verbalization of an intangible. This is followed by a concerted effort to nail down the requirements for the proposed system.
Requirements are seen as a formal necessity for flagging off the development effort.
Usually, a formal requirements statement is approved for conversion into design. In many instances, where the problem domain is novel or fast-paced, the software effort runs into hurdles due to either late-breaking or rapidly-changing requirements. Or the requirements might evolve blazingly fast due to timeline pressures.
This is requirements churn.
The causes for the high rate of change of requirements pose a serious problem to the maintainability of the development effort. It becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that the code base is in sync with the requirements and design models (the boundaries between these two often becoming blurred). This is greatly exacerbated by traditionally elaborative software development processes which posit many implicit implementation assumptions during the coding effort — assumptions which are neither documented in the design nor in the requirements. This is not due to a lack of trying on the developers’ part. In the world of vastly complex enterprise software development, sourcing changes back to the design and requirements models may sometimes entail a substantial investment of effort and resources.
Project documentation and maintenance is not child’s play.
With translational and model driven development, the compiled executable system is deemed an immutable. Changes are mandated to be sourced to the requirements and design models. This ensures that the rationale for design and implementation decisions is captured as information and knowledge, and helps avoid the anachronistic misstep between requirements and implementation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Computers doing chemistry
Posted by bandar in Scientific Computing on May 29th, 2009
Theoretical chemistry has been one of the area that attracted a significant interest since the last century. It can be defined as the branch of chemistry that employs physical and mathematical concepts in explaining or predicting chemical phenomena. The application of quantum mechanics to understand the electronic behavior of atoms and molecules is one of the examples. Along with the well development of the theoretical chemistry, the revolution of computer technology in the 1940s and 1950s introduced a new field called “Computational” chemistry.
Computational chemistry is simply the application of chemical, mathematical and computing techniques to solve interesting chemical problems. Mainly, there are two purposes for running a calculation:
(1) studies to rationalize some experimental data.
(2) studies to predict characteristics of a molecule or atom before running the actual experiments.
For instance, calculations can be performed to find out the electronic structure, geometry optimizations, energy and transitions, electron and charge distributions, reaction’s kinetics and thermodynamic calculations.
One of the methods that is widely used by computational chemists is Density functional theory (DFT). This calculation can be performed on computers to determine the molecular electronic structure with high accuracy for little computational cost.
Currently, software packages are available and very sufficient where some include many methods to cover a wide range while others for specific application. In the group where I am doing my research in, we use the Amesterdam Density Functional (ADF) package, developed by Barends and others, to optimize the geometry and to characterize the lowest-frequency allowed single photon transitions.
Welcome to Techno
Posted by Ziyad Alshaikh in Techno on May 27th, 2009
So what is Techno anyway! Well lets start from the start as they say. A meeting at the Computer Science department at ANU started everything, may be not everything, but for sure something. It was Saad Alshawaf (The Saudi Student Canberra Club president, SSCC for short) and I (Ziyad Alshaikh, for long); both of us were envisioning a scientific community of sorts, and it was about computer science. One thought led to another, and we decided that the best way to get the ball rolling is to get other people involved. We already had some students involved in the SSCC, so we formed a committee of eight graduate students who worked with us to form the vision of this community and its goals (lets leave details for later). The result is Techno, a multidisciplinary blog about technology.
We call our community the Saudi Computer Science and Applications League (SCSAL, pronounced `SKZAL’), which Techno is a part of. Part of the role of Techno is to reflect on the activities run by SCSAL in the Canberra academic community. We have students who talk about their work between themselves in the SCSAL community, but write about it in Techno. It is that simple, but that’s not the whole story. Lets leave more for later.
