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! :)