The geek week

This week I am in Seattle, Washington attending the TechReady 3 event. This is a semi-annual conference for all microsoft field employees(Technology Specialists, Consultants, Technical Account Managers, Premier Engineers) to know about the new products. Seattle is a really nice place, beautiful weather, very lively city with lots to do. The event is, of course, huuuuuuuge; over 5000 attendees from all over the world and with hundreds of sessions. The organization is amaaaaaaaaazing; hotel bookings, meals, online schedule builder, online session evaluation forms, recreational events,...unbeleivable.

The Land of Aphrodite

As per the greek mythology; after a peculiar event happening between the gods, the waves of the see began transforming into a figure. The woman who was created was more beautiful than any the whole world had ever seen. The place where the foam woman chose to come forth was the island of Cyprus.

Today, I am returning back to Amman after a 4 weeks business stay in Cyprus.
Landing at Larnaca airport on May 20th; the first thing I noticed was the smell of the sea in the air. This nice smell that comes with the sea breeze in all the Mediterranean countries. The second nice thing I noticed was that the people working in the airport passport control, were a bit more welcoming and chillaxed than the employees of this job in the other countries I have seen. Rikos (Microsoft Cyprus Taxi Driver) was waiting for me at the airport. We went to get in the car, and as soon as we reached it. I found him coming to my side and handing me the car keys !!! After getting over the first few moments of surprise, I looked inside the car form the side where I was standing and I found the steering wheel !!!! They actually drive on the left side of the road in Cyprus!!!! After laughing with Rikos and going to the other side of the car, I thought that this country will still have a lot left from the days of the British occupation and that proved to be right many times later.

Nicosia (the capital were all the businesses are) is 50 KMs from Larnaca. The road is nice and scenic and the people are overall a bit laid back in this country, so driving is not a stressful, adrenaline producing process like in other places. I had researched a little about the country but wanted to make sure of one thing from the taxi driver...the population :) Turned out that what I read was true and the whole island is inhabited by just 700,000 persons !!!

The language spoken there is Greek (with the Cypriot dialect). Having learned Coptic language at church very early on, I could read the words fairly ok (but not understand anything of course). All Cypriots understand English, but most of them have a heavy accent speaking it. I was staying at a hotel in town center for the first 2 weeks. It was nice to go for a walk after work everyday and watch the people having a coffee or a drink at the numerous open air cafes and restaurants of Makarios avenue (Makarios was the name of the first president after the independence so you find the main road in every town called Makarios avenue :) ).

The currency is CYP which is worth a bit over 2 USD. The price of everything here is almost double Dubai (except for drinks, half Dubai :)). Pork Souvlaki(grilled pork chops in pita bread with salad) is the popular sandwich here which I relied on as one of the daily meals.(Like Beirut's grilled chicken in Dubai and Shawerma Reem in Amman :) )

I managed to go Aiya Napa for the first weekend. I heard a lot about the place and thought I go check out it myself. Guys, this is the wildest place ever. This is a beach town with mostly British and some Russian tourists. The beaches are amazing, the weather is perfect, the water is clear, jet-skis, banana boats, parasailing, Bungee jumping everywhere and even live DJs playing on the beach (and Foam Party on Sunday). In the night, there is one street with tens of open air clubs next to each other. These work from 11 pm to 2 am then the crowd goes to the indoor clubs which open from 2 till 7 am (and all is full). It is unbelievable !!!!

There are some beautiful but quiter beaches in Lemasol as well. There is also a mountain close to Nicosia called Trodos mountain where you can get a look at the old villages and the farmer's life style(but unfortunately my camera's battery died and the charger was in Amman :) )

3 Months with MCS

Today marks exactly 3 months of my joining MCS. Oh boy...does not time fly when you are too busy...
I feel like I actually need to pause my life for a few days and take a break of this big challenge that I chased so badly...Don't get me wrong, No complaints at all, I just need to get some sleep(with all the afterhours of preparation and administrative tasks a consultant needs to do apart from his normal, customer facing, 8 working hours; I barely get 4 hours of sleep on weekdays). I would like also to take some time to reflect on that past period(I am trying to do a bit of that here on this posting)

So far all my engagements have been partner training and workshops. I have to say this was a very wise decision from my boss. He hit quite a few birds with one stone by doing that. Trainings are considered low risk engagements, so even if I screw up, then the worse that could happen would be a bad feedback from the partner. On the contrary, if those engagements were real projects or Proof of Concept pilots, and things went wrong, then we could loose a deal or even worse...a customer. I need to say also that these engagements had helped me to improve many parts of my myself which I thought needed some work, but never really got real life situations to help on that before joining MCS. For one thing, I am now totally over my stage fright; I can talk to groups of people for days now :) My presentation skills are better also I guess, but most importantly I think, is the ability to become a people's person, to know how to build relationships with everybody, from junior developers to CIOs of companies of different nationalities . For e.g. anyone who has worked in that field will tell you that having a demo fail or a lab not work in front of your students is not an uncommon thing, but one lesson I have learned is that if you have established this personal relationship with the people then basically they will forgive you for that, and you might still actually get good feedback as well :).

As for the travel, unfortunately I missed a couple of role trainings that I was supposed to attend since my work permit was delayed a lot in Jordan, and without that I couldn’t apply for any foreign Visa. However, fortunately the guy in the Cypriot embassy was so nice to give me the visa to Cyprus without requiring that. I have been in Cyprus for the last three weeks delivering trainings to partners here as well. Cyprus is a nice place (I will definitely put a separate posting about this trip, with pics ;) ) but to stay for 4 weeks completely alone is nothing easy at all. I managed to make some friends after the first couple of weeks so at least I don’t eat dinner alone on the weekends now.

One week in Amman

It has been a week now since I came to Jordan. Amman is a different kind of city than the ones I have seen before. It is a bit like Cairo but much smaller, less crowded and people actually stop at traffic lights, and it is a bit like Beirut but much less things to do, however it is a pretty decent place and people are very nice,
But they don't seem to go out much. It was Thursday yesterday and when we were driving to one of the clubs here at around 10 pm, the streets were almost empty !!! (But fortunately the club was full ;)). It is also the kind of place where you run into people on outings and in supemarkets as the options are not really that much.

Anyway, I guess this will be very suitable for me considering the amount of time I need to put in the job. I have been working 12-14 hours daily this week to finish the new hire web-based training courses for my role as well as some eLearning material, discover the huge internal CorpNet and familiarize myself with the unbelievable number of abbreviations used everywhere. Week 1 training courses are amazing. They get you completely soaked in the Microsoft culture and tell you everything you might ever need to know from the details of the company business units to the phone numbers of the preferred hotels worldwide !!!

I feel like a kid who was given the keys to a big toy store :)

Doing it @ Microsoft

It is my third day now in Microsoft Amman. As tough as it was to leave Dubai and my friends there as optimistic as I am now to have taken this decision. I arrived to Amman airport on march 8th at around 3:00 pm, reached the office by 4:00 pm to find my manager just returning from a meeting and flying back to Beirut (MS east Mediterranean HQ) in an hour. He still managed to sit with me, brief me up about urgent matters related to my joining and arrange for my flight to Beirut the next day. I then met some of the team members in Amman office, and met the rest on the next day before flying. They are all very nice people. They managed to get me a mobile phone line with international and roaming services before I flew to Beirut which saved my neck twice afterwards. I reached my hotel in Beirut on march 9th by 8:00 pm and was planning to go to Downtown, have dinner and then get a drink at a club or something, but the next thing that actually happened after taking a hot shower at the hotel was waking up early the next day :) I must have been really tired.
The Beirut office is in a nice location in Martyrs Square, so having arrived very early, I took the chance to get a frappuccino in Starbucks (the only place that was open at 7:30 am :)) before I headed to the office. The lady at the reception desk opened the security lock of the glass door for me to enter before I even clicked the bell and after finding out from my accent that I am Egyptian, was trying to talk to me in Egyptian accent all the time :) I then met the HR manager who actually conducted a couple of interviews with me before I joined and she showed me an email that my manager had sent with the activities plan for that day I was going to spend at the Beirut office. I was introduced to the team there, and they were all very nice people as well. I was informed about the forms I need to fill, the paper work I need to submit and was shown the systems I will be using for my work, for my career development and given a briefing about the business cycle of my position. I really wish I could speak about this in more details but I am sure it is confidential, however I just want to say: THESE GUYS HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING AND THERE ARE ALWAYS PEOPLE WORKING TO IMPROVE IT. I also got the feeling of being overwhelmed as I found out about what I need to know, what I will need to learn and how busy everybody is. I am sure it will be challenging but I am loving every single moment of it...

Dubai 2005 Motor Show

When you sit inside a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Ducati, an Aston Martin and an SLR McLaren in less than an hour, that's really something !!!!

Microsoft Interview questions for SDET position

This was really a painful period but I have to say it was a great experience.

The first step is the phone interview which is like an initial screening for candidates before the real face-to-face interview.

Below are some of the questions I got there:
- How many lines of code you wrote in the past year?
- Why do you want to join Microsoft?
- What's your favorite MS product? how can you improve it?
- How do you update yourself?
- What is the last topic you read about or taught yourself that was technical but not related to your work/study?
- What is your strongest programming language?
- What are your strongest Computer Science areas?
- How does the CLR handle memory management?
- What are Namespaces?
- How are errors handled in .NET?
- What is "foreach"?
- What is the "friend" keyword in C++?
- Define a pointer.
- Define a function that takes a variable by reference.
- What are virtual functions? How does the compiler handle them?
- What is a "critical section"?
- Test a stack.
- Riddle

Two weeks later the FrontBridge team came to dubai and I went to the real interview. 5 interviewers, 45 minutes each and 15 minutes break. You only get to the forth and fifth interviews if they are satisifed with your performance in the first three. The most interesting interview was with the Program Manager, James Hamilton, an absolute genius.

Testing questions:
- How do you go about UI Testing?
- Test a function that takes an integer and a string of multiple words and rotates the words of the string by the specified number.

The code and algorithms questions I got are posted here

And no, I didn't get the job :-)

Formatting sql numeric values for display in crystal reports

If you are using Crystal Reports that comes with Visual Studio .NET 2003, and you are using the DataSource for the report as a datset, then you must have run into the bug that it only accepts un-typed datasets (an object from System.Dataset). If you try to bind to a typed dataset, you get this wierd schema error. This is all fine still unless you have float values in your table, this will be displayed very strangely in your crystal report (something like 1.2300000000e+03 for a value of 123, which of course looks terrible). Now if you were to use a typed dataset with this column defined as double the problem will be gone, but since you can't, you have to solve this problem on the database level itself. A very useful sql function of code can be found here. To call it in a query, it will look like this select [xNumberFormat]([MyTable].[MyColumn], ''#########.000'') as [MyColumn] from [MyTable]
Happy Programming !!!!