My Master Thesis Proposal

I am currently working on my Master Thesis at IBM Deutschland R&D GmbH, Software Group, in collaboration with Universität Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPVS). As I have been asked multiple times about my topic, I thought of writing this short post with a link to my Master Thesis Proposal page at the university.

Master Thesis title:
Modeling Distributed Applications in a Smarter Home Infrastructure

Ruhestein Ski Trips Videos!!

Since the ski season began on the 27th of November 2010, my friends and I have been skiing almost every weekend as long as the ski lift was open. We go to a small slope in the Black Forest called Ruhestein.

Here are the videos, of two of our days, done by my friend, Erkin.

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!

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!!

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.

Two years in Germany!!!

Six days ago, I marked two years in Germany!!! Specifically in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, in the university campus.

45 km!!

So we finally did it!! We biked about 45 km from the university campus in Vaihingen till Marbach on the Neckar! It was amazing! It's true we are so tired today after this excursion we did yesterday but we really had fun. We stopped in the middle many times; sometimes to eat, others to relax and a time to play Frisbee in a large green area. So if anyone wants to do a biking trip on the Neckar then I would recommend this site about Neckartalradweg or even the book itself. It took about 2 hours and a half biking but in total with all the stops and the way back: 7 hours!! It was really a great Saturday and we hope we do it again!

Last Sunday's (22.02.2009) Shooting

So as I said in my previous post, my first shooting experience was so great that I decided to continue going every Sunday I can. Last Sunday was the eve of one of my final exams but I still went with some friends. To my surprise, I was worse than in the first time, or at least that's what I felt. Still we had fun and they made us see a guy shooting fire pistol, making that cloud of black powder again! My friends also tried shooting air pistol but I didn't try, I stayed with my air rifle. Anyways I am getting ready now to go so I hope that today I'll perform better than last time...

Beautiful Sunday!!

Yesterday was great!!

I woke up, had breakfast with my friend and then we both left to take the bus till a place where someone was supposed to pick us up. So this someone, which we had never met before, picked us up and drove us till a Shooting Club!! There, he took us for a tour, explaining each part of the club and then head to the 10 meters air rifle competition shooting range. He gave each one of us an air rifle and taught us how to use it. It was the first time for me to ever hold such a weapon! :D He then gave us 500 pellets, some different targets and left us enjoy shooting! Honestly, I thought I would feel bored after like 1 hour of shooting or something.. but the truth is that, it was so amusing that I didn't feel the time! He was always there behind us, giving us advices and some security tips. After a while, he took us to see some fire arms! The guy there showed us how he loads his rifle, with black powder and a bullet and then he even gave us the chance to shoot once! It was amazing! You sit there, holding the rifle, wearing safety glasses and those ear plugs for the sound, you begin to concentrate on the target and then u touch the trigger and boom.. there's black powder all over the air forming a cloud in front of you and you can barely see the target that is 50 meters away! Really feel you are in a movie! :D It was really like a once in a lifetime trial! After this adventure, we came back to our toys, as my friend called them after trying the fire ones, and kept shooting being very excited after trying the fire arms. I shot around 90 pellets in around 2 hours! Below are the targets I used so you can see the improvements during the day. First I began with the easy one which consists of 5 targets together so that wherever you find your air rifle pointing, you can shoot. Then at the end I tried the competition one, which is only one target in the middle! This target's diameter is 45.5 mm, imagine it 10 meters away!! The funny thing is that even as my first time, I still could get some with score 9! After having enjoyed shooting, we went to the so-called "Big Boss" of the shooting club to pay for our day. His reaction was as follow, "Didn't you have a Beautiful Sunday, then no need to pay!". :) Then the trainer's son, which is the one who drove us to the club, drove us back all the way to our dorms! After this really nice time, we are planning to keep regularly going!

Seminar Report and Presentation

So today I had to present my Seminar presentation which consisted of explaining and presenting the report I previously wrote during the semester. The report was a resume of a collection of many papers about Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for Video Multicast. The seminar was titled as Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems: Modern Group Communication Mechanisms, supervised by Dr. Boris Koldehofe, under the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Universitaet Stuttgart. So this seminar first began by selecting a topic, which in my case was: MANETs: Multicast Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc networks. Then lots of papers had to be read and relevant information had to be written in a 10 page report. Afterwards, a 45 mins presentation had to be presented, explaining to an audience what your topic and report was about, then followed by a 15 mins discussion with questions and answers. It was the first time for me to present such a long presentation.. and it took plenty of time to organize it to fill the time I was given.. but I would like to say that it went good in a certain way!

If we go more into details about the presentation, well, it first began by an introduction about MANETS (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks). The definition of MANETs was given, some applications were stated, along with some problems and constraints. Then the reason why multicast is important in MANETs was said. After this introduction, a section was made about multicast overview. In this overview, the definition, some applications, requirements or constraints and problems about video multicast were stated. Then a comparison about multicast tree and mesh approaches was discussed where their definitions, advantages and disadvantages and an example protocol using each one of them were given. Afterwards, the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) and the Multicast Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocols were explained in details, giving examples, pros and cons for each one of them. Finally a new routing protocol: Multiple Tree Multicast Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (MT-MAODV) was presented with an example to clarify it and some evaluations.

I think I learned a lot from this seminar and maybe my work can help someone so feel free to check it out! :)

N.B. The presentation was done using MS PowerPoint because some effects were not well displayed using OO Impress, so I would advice to open the ppt file with MS PowerPoint.. Sorry for any inconvenience..

ATDS - Seminar Report

ATDS - Seminar Presentation

New Beginning, New Goal!

New Beginning, new goal! That's what is running through my head when I think about my admission in INFOTECH, Universität Stuttgart, Germany. Studying this Master program after having finished my Bachelor Thesis also in the same university, makes me familiar with the ambiance of the life here. So I really hope that I can do something good with this opportunity I am living now.

Also what made me back to post on my blog.. well today while going back home after some Christmas Gifts shopping trip, I met a colleague also studying the same Master program. Talking together, I discovered that he knew some info about me due to the fact that he checked my blog! I was really surprised! I thought that having left Cairo and the people I knew there, no one would be checking my blog anymore, but well, actually people were checking it! So knowing this fact, I decided to go back to my room and directly post a new post! Good encouragement!

Stuttgart and OpenGrafik..

Being in Stuttgart, Germany now and working on my Bachelor Project: OpenGrafik makes me in mood to get back to my blog and my posts. Life is nice here and my dorms are so near to my institute which makes life easy. Everything being calm, with a big forest beginning by a beautiful lake just behind my dorms, giving a great ambiance for enjoying, watching movies, listening to music and coding. Just the right place to be for this project. Hope will come out with something of good value at the end of my stay here!