Merry Christmas!

To Everyone, Merry Christmas 2010!! :)

Chicken Breasts with Tomatoes and Mozzarella

A delicious classy dish that even gives a tasty sauce to be poured on pasta or rice.

Ingredients:
- 4 boneless chicken breasts (700 g)
- 8 tomato slices 1/2cm thick
- shredded Mozzarella
- shredded Gouda
- 1/4 cup hot water
- 3 medium sized garlic cloves chopped
- 1 bay leaf (Laurel)
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp vinegar
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- a pinch of sugar
- salt
- pepper
- rosemary
- thyme
- oregano
- basil
- dry parsley
- powder chili


Step 1:
In a bowl, mix the garlic, bay leaf, oil, vinegar, lemon juice, sugar, salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, dry parsley and powder chili.

Step 2:
Pour mixture on chicken breasts and marinade for 6 hours minimum or over night.

Step 3:
Put the chicken breasts into a baking dish, pour on them the remaining mixture from the marination and the hot water.

Step 4:
Cover with aluminum foil and put in oven on 225 degrees C (435 degrees F) for  35-40 mins or till the chicken breasts are tender.

Step 5:
Take out from the oven, remove the cover, then put 2 slices of tomatoes on each chicken breast. On the tomatoes put some shredded Gouda and on top of it add some shredded Mozzarella so it covers the Gouda cheese.

Step 6:
Put back in oven without cover on 225 degrees C (435 degress F) for 10-15 mins or till the cheese colors.




Step 7:
It can be served with pasta, rice or vegetables. The sauce in the baking pan can be used to give a nice taste to the pasta or rice.

Bon Appetit! :)

A funny statement said by graduate students' supervisors

The problem with graduate students, in general, is that they have to sleep every few days.

Source: http://slashdot.org/ 

Geek & Poke: Christmas For Geeks

Funny one for Christmas! :D

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/12/christmas-for-geeks.html

Sucre à la crème au sirop d'érable - Fudge cream with maple syrup

Sucre à la crème is a French Canadian (Québecois) sweet popular for Christmas time especially when some maple syrup is added to it!

Here is what you will need to have approx. 36 tablets:
- 400 ml cream 35%
- 450 ml (400 g) brown sugar
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 8 tbsp maple syrup (optional: just to add a Canadian/Christmas flavor/sensation to it, but it tastes great without it as well)




Step 1:

In a saucepan (large enough as it rises and becomes almost double when it boils), mix all the ingredients together.






Step 2:
Put on high heat and mix well till you get a color similar to the picture.

Step 3:
Let it boil while still mixing. In the beginning you will get a color similar to the picture.






Step 4:
Lower the heat, almost to medium, and let it boil while stirring from time to time for approx. 20-25 minutes.





Step 5:
Test if it is ready by letting drops fall from the stirring spoon. If the drop freezes/hangs on/from the spoon then your mixture is ready.






Step 6:
Take the mixture off the stove top and using a mixer on high speed, beat the mixture well till it has a consistency similar to the picture. Just don't let it cool because it will become hard and you won't be able to pour it in the pan/mold. 

Step 7:

Have approx. a 20x20 (area around 400 square cm) pan/mold ready with baking paper.







Step 8:
Pour the mixture into the pan/mold while it is still warm.

Step 9:

Flatten the mixture in the pan/mold and let it cool.






Step 10:
After it is completely cooled down, cut it into small squares. The mixture should give around 36 squares.





Enjoy it and Merry Christmas! :)

Geek & Poke: How to handle a NPE

Nice one! :D

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/12/geekpokes-list-of-best-practices-today-how-to-handle-a-npe.html

Amazing Mix between Music and Humor

This amazing mix between music and humor is partially based on the "I will survive" song and is starring Igudesman and Joo with Kremer and Kremerata.

My sister arrived to Germany!

Saturday, the 7th of August 2010, my sister, Youstina, arrived to Germany! As her plane was landing in Munich, Andrew and I went to pick her up there. Unfortunately, her plane was arriving so early in the morning, that Andrew and I had to begin traveling from Stuttgart the day before so we can be at the airport in time. This trip took around 9 hours, even longer than her trip to come from Cairo to Munich! Wasn't so pleasant.. :D Also after all this trouble, we arrived to her 1 hour after she was already out of the terminal gate! But she said she didn't get bored.. :P

So we were so happy to see each other, and she was so excited about her trip! We then stayed for that day in Munich to visit a bit around. We first left her luggage in the Hbf station and went to Marienplatz. There we got to see the famous Rathaus, walk through the nice streets of Munich's down town, passed by HB, rubbed the lion's nose as the tradition says that you would come again if you do and visited Theatinerkirche. We then took a big walk into the Englischer Garten where we saw some people surfing in a narrow river passing inside the garden! This was amazing to watch! We were by then very hungry, so we went back to HB where we had a nice beer and we ate some Bavarian dishes. After eating and drinking, comes the sleeping effect! We really couldn't do anything anymore and we were very tired. So we walked back to Marienplatz were we saw the famous clock of the Rathaus ringing and rotating showing this cavaliers story. We then went back to Hbf where we picked up her luggage and headed back to Stuttgart.

So it was a nice day after all, even though we were really tired by the end of it!

Counter Strike evenings

Sometimes, the urge to play some computer games just show up. As Andrew says, I also believe that playing with some friends is always much fun compared to playing against some computer bots. For this, we ask some of our friends to join and then we have a nice group to play counter strike with and kill some hours in the evening! So if you live in Stuttgart, have some time to kill, like playing computer games and want some company, don't hesitate to join our evenings! :)

Rock Fabrik Ludwigsburg

So if you are into Rock/Hard Rock music, there is a famous and nice disco in Ludwigsburg, few stations away from Stuttgart Stadtmitte, the Rock Fabrik disco. On Friday night, they have this "Thank God it's Friday" program in which they play Modern Rock. The entrance fee is only 4 € and they open from 21.00 to 05.00. It is kind of a nice, especially if you enjoy dancing on this music genre!

Installing Flash 10.1 in Firefox on Linux

Here are the steps to install Flash 10 or 10.1 in Firefox on Linux (Tested on the SUSE Linux distribution):

1. Open Firefox and in the address bar type: about:plugins
2. If you find any "Shockwave Flash" plugin then you need to uninstall it first, this link can help.
3. If you don't have Flash installed or if you uninstalled it, then download the .tar.gz for Linux from the Adobe Flash Player download page here.
4. Once it is downloaded, browse to its location and extract it using this command from a terminal for example: tar -zxvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
5. You should find a libflashplayer.so file.
6. Close all instances of Firefox opened.
7. Using a root terminal, browse to the libflashplayer.so file location and move it to /usr/lib/browser-plugins/ using this command from a terminal for example: mv libflashplayer.so /user/lib/browser-plugins/
8. Now reopen Firefox and you should have your Flash installed successfully. To verify that, you can type in Firefox's address bar: about:plugins and make sure that you now see "Shockwave Flash 10.1" with the enabled column saying "yes".

Hope this is helpful for the people finding the libflashplayer.so file after extracting the .tar.gz and don't know what to do with it nor how to continue their installation!

Google Zurich's Retreat

I had the opportunity to go for a 3 days retreat, from 28th till 30th of June 2010, in Google Zurich, Switzerland, as stated in this post (Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship EMEA 2010). It was a wonderful experience. The retreat was really organized in a fascinating way! We had some technical lectures, some career panels, some workshops and talks, a Google offices tour, some free time to visit the city itself, tasty food inside and outside the office, a stay in a fancy hotel and we also had to present one of our projects in a poster show. We were a big group and being part of this big network of students studying the same field as yours is a great plus! I would definitely encourage every female student studying a technical subject out there to apply for the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship next year! Good luck! :)

Egyptian Stall in Pfaffenhof Sommerfest

Every dormitories on Universitaet Stuttgart campus have a Sommerfest in the beginning of the summer. In each of these, students can rent a stall place and offer whatever they like. Our Pfaffenhof Sommerfest was on the 15th of June. Andrew, Garamoun and myself decided to try renting a stall for this fest and see how it turns out. It was a spontaneous decision as we just decided the night before the fest! As we three are Egyptians from origin, we came out with the idea of offering some Egyptian sweets called "Zalabiya" or "Zalabia" or another name is "Lo'met El Ady" or also written "Lo2met Ady" and some fries. I hope that everyone, that tried and tasted our Egyptian sweets, enjoyed it! :)

End of Internship

Today was my last internship day at IBM Deutschland R&D GmbH - IBM Software Group.

I have been doing this internship for 9 months, 6 of which were considered as a mandatory internship and 3 as a voluntary one. During the whole period, I have been working in the same department which was about industry solutions.

The internship was just great! I really got to learn lots of new stuff and gain more skills. IBM, being an international company, gave me the chance of meeting great people and making very nice friends from several countries. I am really satisfied from the outcome of this internship and it was a pleasure for me to work with these outstanding mentors and department/team colleagues. Thank you for the amazing internship you made me have!!

Reservations Done!!

So I finally made it! My reservations for my long waited trip, with my sister, to our old friends in Canada is finally done! I finalized all the tickets details and I got the confirmations on all the flights!! It's an amazing feeling!

I have been living in Montréal, Québec, Canada, the first half of my life. I have friends there that I have stayed in contact with but that I haven't seen for 10 years!! I have always wanted to go back and visit, but I was always ending up with the family decision of visiting a new country rather than going to the place we already know by heart. This is sure a good point because you get to see new famous sightseeing around the world, new cultures that enriches you, etc. But at some point, you get the urge of going back to the place where you feel that you belong, this place that took a big part of your life and where lots of memories were made. So now, I decided it was time, especially that my childhood best friend, Sara, is getting married!!!

I just can't wait to get there! Visiting all the old places again, reviving the old memories!! I have this big feeling about this trip I have been waiting for, and I will do my best to make it turn out even better than what I expect!!

Würzburg Trip

Würzburg is a nice small city in the Franconia region belonging to the Bavaria state. It is famous for its wine that is bottled in a strange bottle shape for wine (it is not the normal tall bottle usually used for wine). It is said to be the thing to buy from there! The Würzburg Residenz is also pretty fascinating! This was a trip with AEGEE Stuttgart. It was a funny one. Below you can find a panorama picture taken by Andrew along with some other pictures of the trip.

Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship EMEA 2010

I have been notified that I have been selected as one of the Finalists in the "Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship: Europe, the Middle East and Africa 2010". This is a great award that I would not have been able to apply for without the help, encouragement and recommendation letters of some special people. I would like, thus, to show my gratitude to Rita and Mounir, my parents, Youstina, my sister, Andrew and Ereen, my dear friends, Birger Boyens and Volker Fricke, my internship mentors at IBM. I wouldn't have made it without your help!!! Thank you so much! :)

I have a new Baby Cousin!!! :)

My uncle just had his first baby, a cute little boy! His name is Marc! :)