We have done enormous efforts for renew our web footprint and now we have stuff that CAT never had, like the central authentication and social networking but with no result on the activity meter.

Currently almost nobody is visiting our website and no activity is being done except for the projects which are terribly slow because no serious contributers are around, so let’s think for a moment, what will happen if we gave up and stopped H4ck3rZ? Will you even notice?

Sowarna Project (means ‘Our Photos’) is a project that tends to solve this particular problem and we have started thinking about the definition of the problem and ended with several spectacular solutions that we are about to implement, we have started the project and it now has its own website ‘http://sowarna.cat-hackers.net‘

We are working on documenting every technical aspect so you can easily jump-in and start writing code with us in this amazingly interesting project. We have also got some partial sponsorship from B-Virtual (an emerging leader in cloud storage) so our project can get decend cloud hosting.

Development is done in Python, so if you are interested in python and want to hack some code, please don’t hesitate to contact us and/or join the mailing list. (all information can be found on the project website)

السلام عليكم و رحمه الله

سؤال بجد هايجنني “ليه؟”

• ليه كل محاولات انعاش الفريق بتفشل؟
• ليه كل الناس بتبقى متحمسه جدآً و هي بتسمع و لما بيتطلب منها حاجة بتنام و تهرب؟
• ليه الناس مش حاسه ان ده عمل تطوعي و له ثوابه و صدقه علم و بتحس ده في شنطه رمضان؟
• ليه الناس كلها بتحب الشغل اللي مافيهوش مخ؟
• ليه الموقع بقاله اكتر من اسبوعين محدش حط عليه حاجه؟
• ليه انا لسه موجود بحاول مع اني مش شايف نتيجة على الموقع؟
• ليه الشباب اللي في الجامعه مشغول في اجازته انه يدّي دورات و يعمل مواقع و مش بيدي اي وقت للشغل هنا لوجه الله؟
• ليه الشباب مش بياخد الفرصة انه يتعلم و يسأل عشان ينافس زمايله اللي بره مصر؟
• ليه لما سألت الناس في مقابله من كليه حاسبات عن Big Oh كلهم اجمعوا انهم اخدوها في سنه تانيه و برضو اجمعوا على انهم مش فاكرين اي حاجه عنها؟

Click here to view the embedded video.

HTML 5 video allows us to stream standard video format Ogg Theora  (ogg) and we are now publishing all H4ck3rZ videos directly from our servers to you using the new HTML 5 standards <video> tag element.

We hope you appreciate our efforts to support and embrace the standards even if not all browsers support it at the moment.

Snow Stacks

Snow Stack new 3D CSS Visual Effects demo using pure HTML, WebKit’s 3D CSS Effects extensions and JavaScript. In a little while we will not need flash any more, with HTML 5 released an implemented in most decent browsers andCSS extensions like snow stacks rolling out.

Some comments on this:

• State changes are handled via CSS.
• Snow Stack’s 3D transforms, transform and opacity animations all run on the GPU. Layout and networked image loading happens on the CPU.

Currently you can’t demo this on web browsers except safari built on Apple’s Snow Leopard [still a developer's beta]. So instead you can watch this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sowarna is a distributed photo storage system that intends to replace any desktop photo organization software by a distributed server/client photo storage system. The system should be super fast and highly scalable over multiple storage nodes in several locations with redundancy and high availability features.

We started the project and the project is going to be written in python with the probability of having some parts written in ‘C’ for maximum performance and efficiency.

We have started a google code project http://code.google.com/p/sowarna and we are waiting for your contribution, we have plans to have sowarna integrated with SCMP using the external API of SCMP.

you can start contacting us on the google group sowarna-devel for development questions and suggestions.

We in H4ck3rZ have spent sometime thinking about that and studying how to stop falling into the same problems and how to engineer a system that is really scalable without the loss of users information that is the most precious piece of our software and we could really design a system that can fix most of our problems in a granular manner, so we can fix things as we go and with minimum users intervention. But because we are engineers and our H4ck3rZ community is engineering community, we decided to share you some of the internals and details of what we have done.

The Ancient Problems

For long long time a faced a problem that we didn’t learn from it, that’s having accounts of our members stored inside the system and we didn’t feel the problem until we faced the problem of migration from drupal to phpBB and the booming fact is that migration might not be possible and people have to register again, we also had a mailing list that had its accounts stored in it and it’s a completely isolated island and we had no easy way to check if both systems are in-sync or not. More problems was arisen when we started the foundation system because each foundation started building its own website and again we lost the user base and people started new registrations on each website independently and moreover people used several e-mails and usernames and that was really a hit because now you cannot identify people by username anymore a good example is that I used the username h4ck3r in H4ck3rZ Foundation online systems while I use the username ‘linuxawy’ in PixiCat and please don’t ask me why

Because H4ck3rZ is the largest foundation in its users base and because we used to had alot of online systems (blog (WP), phpBB forums, DokuWiki as a wiki engine and more)  we had a serious problem of integrating those things together so you can have a single identity over everything, and because we are engineers we started thinking about a generic solution that could solve all CAT identity problems, thus we started the cat-identity project and we didn’t find enough volunteers to work with us to work on that project but we decided that we should restart this project again and we will do this very soon isA.

H4ck3rZ have learned the lesson and now we have migrated to a single identity server with LDAP backend that we use to authenticate all of our web and online systems and that will include our project SCMP that we are about to launch the alpha version soon and now we you will enjoy having a single username and password to login to all of our systems and our future systems and no need to worry about that anymore, so probably we won’t lose our users base anymore

Availability problems

Because all of CAT websites were hosted on a single server, there were an availability problem and thus we had to move to another server to allow sort of high availability solution of one server failed and now we have designed a distributed infrastructure that allows us to split our services over multiple server without any effect to the user experience and seamlessly sessions will transport to the new server but we didn’t actually use it yet as we are still out of funding and we use our personal funding to run those servers.

We are happy about what we did and we now can host hundreds of websites and blogs of our users on our very own servers with a single sign on between those blogs and single identity and we wanted to share the experience with you.