"Price of Sex" by Chakarova: A slam on the face of humanity in the 21st century

First, I have noticed the title on my twitter time line as the movie will be screened by the Us Embassy in Ottawa. First of all, I want to disregard this line because I thought it is just some scam.

After giving it a second thought, I was wondering why the US embassy will be screening such a movie?
Then I have decided to see its trailer and read about this documentary.

In simple words, it is a shame on humanity that human trafficking is six times larger than the slavery trafficking across the Atlantic in the dark ages.

Following their stories from their virgin home to their prostitution residency was awful. People are so dump and have very tough hearts. Why? All for the money. This is the dirtiest money that can be ever collected. The woman is always the weaker link. They wanted her to abuse her further. This industry is huge and much larger than everything you can think of.

The Price of Sex is a rare glimpse into the lives of sex-trade workers and human-trafficking from Europe to the Middle-East. The film unmasks the dangers and corruption involved in the sex-trade industry, as well as the fear, shame and anguish felt by millions women who are forced to sell their bodies for sex.

What is your experience with Magento Open Source e-commerce?

Someone posted this question on Linkedin
Is it suitable for large corporation to build multiple websites? And what are the pro's and the con's? Think of cost, application services, development, etc.

Here is my answer for that:
There are several versions of Magento. Magento Community, Magento Enterprise and Magento Go.

Cost wise, the community edition is the best but you lack the support. For a corporation, the Enterprise edition is the best with $1,000/month for a good support.

What differentiates Magento is its interoperability with various back office systems (natively or via other bridging tools). In addition, Magento is getting the defacto for corporate e-commerce as it scales up well (with extra cost for scalable license) and it is search engine friendly.

Other pros are related to development cost and graphical layout. It is one of the best within the upper end e-commerce packages.

Some of the Con's is the limited access to licensed developers (which is being solved right now by the new certificate system). The classes are free for a while during the beta stage.

Another risk arise from the fact that Magento depends on other tools for the connection with back-office inventory (SAP for example). There are various tools to connect but most of them are being developed out of the Magento Eco-System hence their maintenance is an issue.

Finance Islamique: Special Purpose Vehicule (SPV) for a car rental agency

ACME, une agence de louer des voitures, a deux choix pour le levé de fond islamique. D’un cote tous les investisseurs peuvent être des actionnaires. S’il y a des petits investisseurs, ils peuvent acheter des sukuk de murabaha sans être des copropriétaires — avec d'autres actionnaires — de la totalité de cette SPV.

En tous cas, cette opération a besoin de deux entités corporatives pour être en conforme parce que les ressources doit échanger les mains. En Islam, le transfert de fonds seulement est considéré comme un prêt. Les deux corporations sont :

1. Véhicule à usage spécial (or SPV) : ACMEFinance
2. La société : ACME

Dans cette proposition, on peut trouver les détails des ces deux opérations. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-fzoKQ2dab037dEqUUwRuN9hU5ERP6kODXln_q-CdAU/edit)

Soap Business plan Example

Genesis Soaps Inc., located in Montreal, Quebec, is a start-up wholesaling business specialized in importing natural soaps and repackaging them for sale in specialist helath shops and specialized drugstores chains across Quebec. The business would be established to offer hand-made natural soaps to a growing clientele looking for chemical free personal care products for either daily usage or skin treatment. The firm would specialize in the following products:

1. Extra virgin olive oil soaps (solid, liquid, several fragrances)
2. Glycerin soaps (solid, liquid)
3. Black seed soaps (solid, liquid)
4. Black seed oil and cream

Genesis Soaps Inc. has its warehouse and office in West Montreal and plans to rent another warehouse in the same area.

This business plan is for demo purpose only. It does not really reflect the reality of this business. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yFJNunQm1kQi7im-CPSrqL9ZEY9l58NhOpBONnu7eLw/edit

For more information, contact me.

My story with http://www.proveyourworth.net/

There was a little nice test on that site back in 2006. I did not need the job back then but I wanted to prove my net worth for the sake of coding. 


I spent few hours on this test but the result was really good. The guy emailed me back for an interview and mentioned in the email that this was one of the neatest code that they have got out of few thousands. 


I did not continue to the interview as I did not need the job back then and I was moving from programming into Finance.


It is another nice memory and I would like to share my code with those old PHP nerds who would like to read some // 2cents.









//***********************************************************
//***********************************************************
// Script name: prove_your_worth_code.php                   *
// Version: 1.0                                             *
// Coder: Bilal Abdul Kader                                 *
// Date: October 29th, 2006                                 *
//                                                          *
// This script automate the submission of a mixed form      *
// (strings + files) to the ProveYourWorth website.         *
//                                                          *
// It emulates the browser using CURL library for PHP, the  *
// same task can be done using fsockopen and Snoopy.        *
//                                                          *
// The first task is to open the form in order to get the   *
// PHPSESSID and any other cookies. Then the code emulates  *
// the form submission and send it to the server again.     *
//                                                          *
// I kept the code to a minimum as it is a PROOF OF CONCEPT *
// only.                                                    *
//***********************************************************
//***********************************************************
//
// Get the cookie of the site first
// The script should fetch the index page
// in order to get the cookie(s)
// Apparently the site sets the PHPSESSID cookie only
//
//
// Define the curl handler
//
$my_curl_handler = curl_init();
//
// The web site to fetch
//
$url = "http://www.proveyourworth.net/index.php?p=begin&mistake=little";
//
// Add the URL operator
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
//
// Handle the cookies of the site in order to send it later on
// the tmp folder is used on Nix machines or temp on Windows
// Add an agent header line
// Add a referer header line
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "c:\\temp\\cookie.txt");
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "c:\\temp\\cookie.txt");
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-AU; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0");


//
// Follow any location HTTP command if any
// It seems that redirection is not used on this page
// However, this is kept for portability
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
//
// Return the trasnfer as part of the return value in curl_exec()
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//
// Execute the command and get the html page that has the forum
//
$htmlPage=curl_exec ($my_curl_handler);
//
// Parse the page in order to get the new hash key
//
preg_match("/\bhash\b\" value=\"(.*)\"/i",$htmlPage, $matches);
$myHashKey = $matches[1];
// echo "Hash Key is: $myHashKey
";
//
// Other action can be added here to check if the curl has
// got the correct page. This can be done using the
// $headers variable (For example $headers['url'])
//
//*******************************************************
//
// Now start the actual work to automate the form
// submission and to send the fields and the files
// fsock or Snoopy is not that hard to implement
// However, I prefered to use curl this time
// The other two implementations are as hard.
//
//*******************************************************
//
// Change the URL that the form should be submitted to
//
$url="http://www.proveyourworth.net/?p=auto_submit";
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
//
// Now change the CURL operating model to POST (not GET)
// Regular HTTP POST (application/x-www-form-urlencoded)
// Add the new URL to send the form to
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
//
// In case the form action need a valid referer to work
//
curl_setopt($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.proveyourworth.net/index.php?p=begin&mistake=little");
//
// Build the data for the form
// I am using hard coded data in here for simplicity
// However, dynamic data can be easily incorporated
//
// Select the files to attach
//
$cvFile = "cv";
$sourceFile="prove_your_worth_code.php";
$myFormData = array(
"form_id"=>"job",
"name"=>"Bilal Abdul Kader",
"email"=>"bilal@brightvision.net",
"about"=>"Simple, I have a love affair with PHP and Programming in general. The puzzle was nice and tricky. I have emulated other more complex forms in real time.",
"incoming_file"=>"@$cvFile.doc",
"incoming_source"=>"@$sourceFile.txt",
"hash"=>"$myHashKey",
"Submit"=>"Submit"
);
//
// Build the form data now
//
curl_setopt ($my_curl_handler, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $myFormData);
//
// Send the POST request and store the resuts in myResults
//
$myResult=curl_exec($my_curl_handler);
//
// In case of error during the submission
// Show the error.
//
echo curl_error($my_curl_handler);
//
// Otherwise, show the return of the form
//
echo $myResult;
//
//
//
?>

Crazy parking tickets in Montreal

You think that the parking service in Montreal got better with automation?
I am not sure but I know for sure that the parko-meter guy wants to finish his book of tickets no matter how.

Last June, I was parking in downtown Montreal and I have paid my parko-meter fees at 12.54 pm. However, the smart guy gave me a parking ticket three minutes after 12.57 pm?

What is the value of the machine he is using then?
Why did they invest all of this money into the parko-meters then?

I have complained about that but no-one answered so far.

Why I stared Concordia Classifieds (http://www.con-ads.com)?

I joined Concordia University in January 2004. I could not book an apartment before leaving Lebanon because Concordia did not have a well developed medium for online classifieds. Thousands of International students suffered from this fact. The idea of http://www.con-ads.com  emerged from the need of Concordia students for a classifieds ads system similar to other universities in Montreal, namely McGill and UQAM. The majority of university students need to rent an apartment, buy or sell used gadgets, look for a part-time job, offer his/her tutoring services or have a peer’s advice.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G6sUIq_xLwuGQlqimLyx61SeodkcO3E43IZi8rzp1xQ/edit