My GSoC Proposals

When I first applied to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) , I didn’t know how to write a proposal and what it should look like , I did some research here and there and managed to work something out , so I decided to put them online to help would-be GSoC students , My proposals are considerably long compared to other proposals I have seen online, also proposals are usually written with minimal formatting or even in plain text , no fancy formatting is required (Unless your mentoring organization mandates it)

Bear in mind that different mentoring organizations have different requirements for their proposals , this should be your #1 priority, but almost every organization will require you to have a list of deliverable and a plan with timeline.

These proposal were both submitted to Joomla! in GSoC 2008 and 2009 and were accepted

Both documents are under CC Attribution (Just mention the source in references)
GSoC 2009 Proposal (PDF)
GSoC 2008 Proposal (Plain Text)

Hope this helps someone.

Changing Firefox 3.5 default search engine

For some reason my Firefox default search engine has been set to “Microsoft’s Bing” search engine, I wanted to set it back to the default “Google”, so this is what I did after some research

I accessed the config url “about:config” from Firefox and modified the following values


browser.search.defaultenginename : Google
browser.search.defaulturl : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=
keyword.URL : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=


I Passed!

It’s been almost 5 month since my proposal for GSoC was accepted, I’ve learned alot in these concentrated 5 months about Mootools and J! 1.5 , I was introduced to many interesting people, Coping with College and GSoC was a bit challenging specially that I have classes during summer but things worked out well.

Final evaluation results has been announced a few hours ago, and I passed! , Which means I’ll be getting *The* T-shirt and the certificate Insha’Allah , Yaaay!

hmmm.. that’s all, I’ll go get some sleep :)

استعمال جوجل كقاموس عربي-انجليزي

الفكرة ببساطة تعتمد على جوجل و موقع Answers.com , لاحظت أن صفحة التعريف بأي كلمة بموقع Answers.com تحوي قائمة بمعنى تلك الكلمة بلغات متعددة , فيمكن استعمال هذه الخاصية كالآتي

Google Query:

site:answers.com كلمة عربية

سيقوم جوجل بالبحث في موقع Answers.com عن “كلمة عربية” وسيعيد قائمة بالصفحات التي تحوي تلك الكلمة و التي ستكون في الأغلب الصفحة التي تخص هذه الكلمة بالموقع و تحوي معنى الكلمة بالانجليزية

استخدمت هذه الخاصية للتوصل لمعنى كلمة “كوسى” في اللغة الانجليزية

site:answers.com كوسى

كيف تستعمل محركات البحث

لاحظت أن الكثير من زملائي في كلية الطب وغيرها يواجهون مشاكل في إيجاد ما يريدونه باستخدام محركات البحث بالاضافة الى عدم فهمهم لبعض مبادئ التعامل مع شبكة الإنرنت, لذلك بدأت و زميل لي في الكلية في كتابة ملخص يحوي معلومات عن كيفية استخدام محركات البحث بشكل فعال بالإضافة الى أشياء أخرى.
ملاحظة: الملف يستهدف في الأصل طلبة الطب ولذلك قد تصادف القارئ بعض الأمثلة ذات العلاقة بالعلوم الطبية وان كانت لن تعوق فهم محتوى الملف.
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Google is indexing flash files!

I’ve just came to notice that Google is actually indexing swf files,that is, it is parsing the text found within the file, It seems that this feature has been around for a while now, Think of all the wonderful things you can do with that, like fetching flashy illustrations for a hard to “visualize” subject like DNA synthesis through Google.

Maybe Google is not going “deep” within the file but I think the current “depth” is quite sufficient.

You might find these queries interesting

Astigmatism filetype:swf
Loop of henle filetype:swf