Hello Mohammed Sameer, Alaa Abdel Fatah and I went to the Ain Shams University conference about language engineering. We were first there and according to the schedual we were the last before the `holy' lunch break. After several minutes we discovered that there is a computer ready for us to exhibit Arabbix. After an hour or so, the secertary discovered the BIOS password `john'. Anyways, it was powered by a pentiumII 60MB RAM. After several minutes of fiddling, the computer refused to run Arabbix. We attended the morning sessions. They were academic babel in a big freezer room. We were about to start shivering from the A/C! BTW, I finished preparing my slides at 4:00am the same day, woke up at 6:30am. Alaa didn't sleep from the day before. So both of us were two cold and constantly yawning beings. Mohmamed was awake all night burning 10 Arabbix CDs, but he probably didn't feel very sleepy nor cold. I wonder why. Anyways, after the acedemic babel about how they are using statistical spam-filtering-like tools and a couple of other hyper complicated routines for speech recognition. They managed to influence me, as I am of a medical background and know a tiny bit about how probably the mind works, I was convinced that all that speech recognition stuff is going no where. It seemed to me that one day we will find `KISS' written somewhere on our cerebral cortex. Oh, after the academic babel about how they are using blah and blah. Prof. Mohamed Yoness started his part (which is a superset of ours). Two Arabic researches discussed how Arabic is in need to be revived to the levels of the pre-islamic times. And that no matter what, computers will always fail infront the greatness of the arabic language. They went on discribing how untrained translation of any text is incest. That arabic is an untouchable language that should be cryogenically stored indefinitley and only tampered with by super humans (read them). Anyways, my part came to demonstrate `Open Source Arabization Efforts'. Did I say that I was criticized before I start. One of the arabic super humans noted my presentation headline on the projector screen several minutes before I start. Mentioning that it is a racial thing to say Arabization and it should be Arabicization! Stating that Arabizition is related to Arabs and Arabicization is more related to arabic. Oh, well back to my part. Thanks to El Zubeir's Gitex presentation, I stoled about 14 slides of more from it :) -- My presentation will be available publicly for anyone who wants to reuse it. I started, perplexed by the fos7a speaking super humans. I felt I had to speak in 3amia and try to mention technical terms in arabic. Unforunatly, I wasn't very good in the technical Arabic terms. Well, after the slides I rebooted my laptop. Typed the necessary booting parameters to get the recent compaq hardware to boot into linux. And few seconds later Arabbix desktop was shining. Meanwhile, my two buddies managed two answer most of the attacking questions from the arabic super humans on how Arabeyes dared to translate anything without going back to them! Oh, did I say that they criticized the name Arabeyes too. Ofcourse some questions were OK. We finally demonstarted Arabbix and distributed 11 CDs, including my own CD :..( And at one part I demonstrated how DIA supports arabic from months (GTK2) and how Microsoft just anounced in gitex that they have just included arabic support in Visio. At the end we urged them repeatedly to help us and/or ask us more questions on Arabeyes.org and linux-egypt.org. We were willing to continue demonstrating our stuff during the lunch break but the organizers kept pushing people to goto the holy lunch. They even told students to beat it. Thats it, Mostafa Hussein -- ----- Get my public cryptographic key to verify my email from: http://www.geocities.com/whirlpool_98/mykey.txt
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