helw.net

Running Android Auto on an Emulator

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:41:59 +0400

The desktop-head-unit is used for testing Android Auto apps, typically in conjunction with running on a physical device and then running desktop-head-unit --usb. What if we want to test an Android Auto app without a physical device?

The Android Auto version that can be seen on Google Play emulators says that “This app isn’t compatible with your device anymore.” Some time ago, I found a StackOverflow question that is the basis for this post (though this post is updated since things have changed since then).

Compose UI without an Activity

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 14:46:48 +0400

Recently, I needed to add a custom marker to a MapLibre map with the upcoming street name, while respecting various rules (supporting RTL, etc). Inspired by our iOS team, I solved this by writing the street name marker code in Compose, and then taking a screenshot of the Composable on demand and rendering it to the map. This solution worked well, and everything was great until I wanted to show the same markers on the Android Auto map.

Arabic Numbers and Regions

Sat, 31 May 2025 15:26:11 +0400

In Android 16, I noticed that my apps that explicitly tried to show Arabic-Hindi numerals (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, …), were now showing Western numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, …) instead. This happened irrespective of the phone’s primary locale.

Android 15, api 35

Android 16, api 36

Notice how the numbers everywhere are different - on Android 16, everything is using Latin numbers, whereas on Android 15, we’re getting the Arabic-Hindi numerals that we’d expect.

Quick Notes about Edge to Edge

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 15:30:37 +0400

When upgrading an app to target Android 15 (targetSdk 35), edge to edge layouts are enabled by default. While the documentation about doing this for Compose and Views is very detailed and has everything needed for the migration, I want to call out some quick points that weren’t immediately obvious (or that I missed in the documentation the first time).¹

Android 29 and Below

Typically, handling edge to edge is just a matter of targeting Android 35, calling enableEdgeToEdge(), and applying the appropriate insets to the layouts to make things look correct. Setting these insets usually takes the form of:

Pitfalls when working with KMP Strings

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:19:47 +0400

Alternative Title: “One cannot simply use string indices from Kotlin in Swift.”

One of the apps I am working on uses Kotlin Multiplatform for the business logic, and then has a specific Swift UI implementation for iOS and a Compose multiplatform implementation for other platforms. I built a fairly complex search feature that outputs a list of search results, with each result including the indices of the matched substrings to highlight in the text.

Scaling Android without a Monorepo

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 01:37:01 +0400

Abdulahi and I gave another talk this year at Droidcon NYC. This one talks about how to scale Android development without a monorepo. The talk discusses various topics, including:

building an architecture to support an app spread out over many repos
binary compatibility
tooling to understand changes to the dependency tree

The video is here, and the slides can be found here.

Single Gesture Interaction between Multiple Composables

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 23:49:16 +0400

Introduction

Recently, I spent some time trying to replicate a gesture I liked on iOS¹. I had a simple button where, if you long press it, a menu shows up from which an item can be selected. On the iOS app, you could select an item from this menu in a single gesture. By long pressing the button and not letting go, you could drag your finger to the item and select a menu item in one gesture.

Tidbits About Compose Web

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:08:21 +0400

Compose on the web has always fascinated me. It’s always been really cool to take a working application on Android and have it run with minimal changes on various other platforms, including the web. While I’ve written about it in the past and show cased it in talks, it’s always been a toy of sorts for me.

This changed one day when I wanted to write a tool for visualizing some data at work. I decided to write a desktop app, and, I opted to use Kotlin and Compse, guessing it’d be the fastest way to accomplish what I want. After making it work, I started thinking of how I could share this tool with my colleagues. Sharing jars or instructions for building wasn’t as interesting, so what about just sharing a url? This made the utility of Compose for web much more apparent to me.

Server Driven Ui from a Design System

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 23:22:31 +0400

My coworker Abdulahi Osoble and I recently gave a talk at Droidcon NYC about how to use a design system to make building Server Driven UI easier. We go through the motivations and building blocks, along with architectural decisions that need to be made along the way.

The video is here, the slide deck is here, and the accompanying open source repository is here. The repository is my favorite part, since it showcases a fictional micro-design system running on multiple platforms, and showcases Server Driven UI working on all of these platforms with the same source json.

Performance when Scripting with Kotlin

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:42:29 +0400

Not too long ago, I came across Kaushik’s blog post and repo about Kotlin scripting. Around the same time, I was trying to automate a process of cleaning up some images I had. Given a set of transparent pngs, I wanted to find out if the last line was a solid line, and, if so, and if nothing is touching that line, remove it. While typically, I turn to using Pillow and Python for image manipulation scripts, I decided to give writing a Kotlin script a try instead.

Using Compose on the Web without Wasm

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 14:45:54 +0400

At KotlinConf this year, JetBrains announced that Compose for Web will be powered by WebAssembly. The example repository was very compelling, showing that a composable function can now be written on Android and shared across to iOS and web. I quickly got to work updating one of our internal projects to support this and was able to get it working fairly quickly. My coworker, Efeturi, said, “it’s nice but, too bad it’s still in alpha.” Little did I realize that trying to answer that simple comment would lead me to discovering something I never realized before - you can actually use the same Composable functions on the web today without WebAssembly (and thus without the alpha dependency).

Tips for Safely Migrating From Gson to Moshi

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 23:57:03 +0400

Several people have already written about their journey migrating from Gson to Moshi. So why write this post? While migrating a fairly large project to Moshi, my team learned a few things (and came up with a few simple tools) that made it safer and easier to do this migration. Some of these points were either mentioned in passing in the aforementioned articles, or were skipped over altogether, and they are the focus of this post. Consequently, I’ll skip things like the motivation of moving to Moshi, since some of the aforementioned articles cover that pretty well.

Kotlin Multiplatform - Beyond iOS and Android

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:07:37 +0400

A little over a year ago, I gave a talk about building a PrayerTimes mobile application for iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform some time ago. I recently gave a second talk about expanding this application to run on a plethora of other platforms (desktop, web, macOS, Linux, watchOS, iOS using Compose). You can watch it here and see the code on GitHub.

Fixing Build Regressions

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 19:02:29 +0400

In a previous article, I talked about writing profiler-util, a tool I open sourced for visualizing build performance over time for personal projects (it interops the files generated by gradle-profiler and uploads the data to a Google Spreadsheet, along with providing tools for detecting regressions).

I typically run gradle-profiler on my personal projects every handful of PRs, especially those that I expect might affect build speeds (Gradle plugin versions, AGP versions, compiler plugins, etc).

Android Resource Cleanup

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:03:45 +0400

As an Android code base grows and has increasing code churn, unused resources are very likely to exist. While Android Studio has an option for cleaning up and removing unused resources, there are some reported bugs in this functionality that are still not fixed.

I started searching for another solution for finding and cleaning up unused resources in Android projects. I found this project, which has some Python 2 scripts to directly manipulate resources. Since it hadn’t been updated since 2018, I took the liberty to build something based on it, which fixes some of the issues I ran into while using it.

Productive Mobile App Development

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 23:52:29 +0400

I gave a talk at The Assembly in Dubai about tips and tricks for productively building mobile applications. In it, I discuss experimentation, catching issues earlier in CI/CD, multiplatform, and various other topics. Here are the slides.

Visualizing Gradle Build Perf Over Time

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 15:21:09 +0400

Monitoring Gradle Build Speeds for Smaller Projects

Today, there are many great articles and videos about how to optimize Gradle performance for Android builds. Larger companies watch these metrics closely, since build time translates into money. These two comics sum up the situation pretty nicely.

I write and maintain several of my own Android applications. This got me to thinking about my own app build times. I started off using the gradle profiler, as recommended by many of the aforementioned articles and videos (this article gives a nice introduction on how to use the gradle-profiler in the light of Android apps).

Finding out why a Dependency was Requested

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:30:00 +0400

I wanted to write a short post about how to find the reason for a particular version of a dependency to be selected by Gradle.

Today, while building our app, we started getting this error:

The minCompileSdk (31) specified in a
dependency's AAR metadata (META-INF/com/android/build/gradle/aar-metadata.properties)
is greater than this module's compileSdkVersion (android-30).
Dependency: androidx.core:core:1.7.0-alpha02.
AAR metadata file: /Users/ahmedre/.gradle/caches/transforms-3/3a90b660583f6aafd513bafe95732d86/transformed/core-1.7.0-alpha02/META-INF/com/android/build/gradle/aar-metadata.properties.

The error makes sense, but my question was, “who pulls in androidx.core:core:1.7.0-alpha02 - we shouldn’t be using alpha dependencies at the moment, so where is this coming from?”

Building a PrayerTimes App in KMP

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 02:38:57 +0400

I gave a talk about building a PrayerTimes mobile application for iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform. The talk is mostly a live coding talk in which we write a simple PrayerTimes mobile app from scratch. Under the hood, the app is using a Kotlin Multiplatform port of the BatoulApps Adhan library. In addition to the video, you can see the code on Github here, and the (very short, 10 slide) slide deck here.

Aggregating Annotation Processors Across Repos

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 02:54:00 +0400

Note - A plethora of excellent articles and talks describing how to write an annotation processor exist - consequently, this blog post will not talk about the details on how to build an annotation processor. Instead, it addresses a specific case that I had a much more difficult time finding answers for online and a strategy for solving it.

Scenario

Suppose we are shipping an app with multiple libraries pulled from a company Maven repository. Let’s say we want to write an annotation processor that outputs a list of all classes annotated with a certain annotation. In other words, given:

Building a SuperApp

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 21:38:49 +0400

One of the interesting projects I worked on this year was building Careem’s SuperApp. To do this, we combined Careem’s main two applications, the RideHailing application and the Food deliveries application, into a single app. This may sound simple at first, but it is actually an interesting problem with many layers to unravel.

I gave a talk about this at 360|AnDev this year. You can find the slides here.

Multithreading in Kotlin Multiplatform Apps

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:29:13 +0400

update - i did a small presentation about this as part of TouchlabShare - you can watch the video here.

In the past few days, I began looking at multithreading in Kotlin Multiplatform more carefully when I started a new iOS/Android project that I wanted to share business logic for. I realized that, despite understanding the rules of multithreading in Kotlin Native, I didn’t fully grasp the implications thereof. I thought to write this blog post to share what I learned (and as a reference for my future self).

Kotlin Default Interface Methods and Binary Compatibility

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 03:20:39 +0400

TL;DR - adding default interface functions in Kotlin constitutes a source-compatible (but not necessarily a binary-compatible) change.

Whenever I used to run across issues mentioning binary compatibility, I used to always think, “this is super interesting, but that’s for library developers, I don’t have to worry about this while working on apps.” Little did I know how wrong I was.

This is a short story of my first encounter with an AbstractMethodError. But first, allow me to give a brief explanation of the landscape that made this possible.

Your Multiplatform Captain Has Arrived

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:39:19 +0400

I gave a talk at KotlinConf 2019 about what we learned sharing code between iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform at Careem. Here are the slides.

ViewPager2 under the Hood

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 14:51:29 +0400

Today, Google released the first alpha of ViewPager2. I had been looking at the code as it was developed in the Android X repository for a while now, and wanted to write a bit about how it works.

Motivations

ViewPager2 builds on top of the versatile RecyclerView to make ViewPager2 a worthy successor to ViewPager.

Per the release notes, there are 3 major features that ViewPager2 adds:

RTL support - ViewPager’s never natively supported RTL. In order to support it, you’d either have to manually reverse the pages yourself, or use a library that does it for you.
Vertical orientation - while you could always use a RecyclerView or the like to achieve this, you don’t get the snapping behavior out of the box without implementing it yourself.
notifyDataSetChanged now works - the old ViewPager’s notifyDataSetChanged didn’t recreate the page (a common workaround was to override getItemPosition to return POSITION_NONE).

I’d argue that a 4th major feature is the ability to inter-op adapters with RecyclerViews. The replacement for PagerAdapter is now RecyclerView.Adapter, which means that any RecyclerView adapter can just be used as is within ViewPager2. It also opens the door to using the more granular notifyDataSetChanged type functions (notifyItemInserted, notifyItemChanged, etc) directly or via DiffUtil.

Emulator Snapshots Save a lot of Time

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 21:36:26 +0400

One of the features of the Android emulator that I knew about but never used until recently is snapshots. The snapshot feature lets the emulator save its current state (including the state of the file system, installed apps, etc) and lets the developer reload it again at any time.

This feature is amazing for testing upgrades and fixing upgrade related issues. Install the old version of the app, and do any required setup (preferences that need to be set, data that needs to be added, etc). Take a snapshot. Install the new version and test or debug. Need to go back to the old version? Just load the snapshot again and you’re back to exactly where you left off when you took the snapshot.

AppCompat View Inflation

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:51:19 +0400

Today, it’s likely that most newly written Activitys extend AppCompatActivity. The fact that it adds backwards compatibility has made life significantly easier for us as Android developers. Yet, how does it work? Specifically, how does it replace a TextView in a xml layout with an AppCompatTextView? This post aims to do a deep dive into one aspect of AppCompatActivity - view inflation.

Factory2

In Android, we often write our layouts in xml files. These are bundled with our app (converted to binary xml for performance reasons by aapt/2), and are then inflated at runtime by using LayoutInflater.

I See Continuous Improvement

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 23:55:13 +0400

I gave my second talk at droidcon dubai this year with my coworker, Oubai Abbasi. We spoke about the importance of continuous integration on Android, along with some of the nice things that it can help catch and that you can do with it. Here is a link to the speakerdeck.

runtime generics in an erasure world

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 22:02:09 +0400

as we already know, generics in java are a compile time concept to help enforce type safety. during compilation, type erasure kicks in, resulting in the underlying bytecode being free of any generics information.

sometimes, however, we need generics information at runtime (such as when we need to convert a json string into its object form, for example). i was curious, how does this work given that types are erased at compile time? in other words, how does gson’s TypeToken class work?

3 things i learned about rxjava 2 subjects

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 16:59:27 -0800

intro

sometime in late december or early january, i decided to write a blog post per month. since it’s january 31st, i figured i should write about something to avoid dropping the ball so early in the year.

i introduced one of my friends to rxjava 2 not too long ago - his initial reaction was, “what? why would i want this?” - a few days later, it turned to, “hey, this is pretty cool!” - a few days after that, i learned several things from him as he ran into issues while migrating parts of his code.

haramain updates

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 23:06:18 -0800

it’s been a while since i first wrote about Haramain. there have been some pretty massive updates recently that i wanted to briefly write about here.

an app for iOS

i’ve wanted to release an app for iOS for a long time now, and unfortunately never got around to doing so. i thought Haramain was a good candidate to be a first app, and so august 29th of this year, i finally released Haramain for iOS, which is my first iOS app (i’ve played with iOS before on many occasions, but this is the first app that i wrote end to end).

rxjava and a synchronous main thread

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 19:02:06 -0700

not too long ago, someone pointed me to this blog post about keeping your main thread synchronous. it referenced Ray Ryan’s excellent talk about the matter. the talk and blog post lead me to a set of investigations, which prompted me to write this blog post.

quick note: why keep the main thread synchronous

if you are curious as to the kinds of problems that can occur if the main thread isn’t synchronous (or why it’s not synchronous when you use observeOn), see this post about the main thread for a good explanation.

rtl on Android

Sun, 01 May 2016 21:53:04 -0700

i gave my first talk at droidcon sf this year. the talk was about RTL on Android. check it out if you haven’t already (the slides are here).

on LinearLayout measures

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 22:34:30 -0800

seeing that LinearLayout is one of the most often used ViewGroup types in Android development, i wanted to write a little bit about how LinearLayout measures its children (this was also inspired by Sriram’s post about Custom ViewGroups).

tldr; (key takeaways that this post will discuss):

a (non-nested) LinearLayout will measure each non-hidden child either 1x, 2x, or 3x (gone views aren’t measured).
whenever possible, set android:baselineAligned to false, especially when using weights.
in a horizontal LinearLayout with wrap_content height, avoid setting any of the children’s heights to match_parent. conversely, in a vertical LinearLayout with wrap_content width, avoid setting any of the children’s widths to match_parent.

LinearLayout and child measurement

a (non-nested) LinearLayout will end up measuring each non-hidden view either 1x, 2x, or 3x. here are the rules:

intellij structural replace

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 23:48:30 -0800

intellij’s structural search and replace is an amazing feature that can save a lot of time. the value of this feature first hit home in the excellent Android Studio for Experts talk during Android Dev Summit 2015 (excellent video if you haven’t already seen it, btw!)

today, i was trying to replace my usages of android.util.Log.* with Timber. to use Timber, we’d need to manually replace Log.d(TAG, "message"); with Timber.d("message");, and the same for Log.e, Log.w, and so on. there’s also a version of Log.* that takes in an exception as a paramter that we have to keep in mind as well.

quran android no longer open source

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 17:02:37 -0700

update - as of 12/31/2015, i’ve re-open sourced the app after the discussion here.

today is a very sad day for me, since i have finally decided to close quran android’s source code once and for all. throughout the past few years, i’ve come across several examples of people republishing the app with the intention of making money (placing ads on the index page, or, worse yet, on the top and bottom of each quran page while reading). recently, someone brought to my attention an example of someone repackaging the apk and shipping it with malware.

migrating to hugo from hexo

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 15:56:53 -0700

i haven’t written in a long time. it’s not that i have nothing to write about (i actually have a set of post ideas written somewhere), but more of just not having the time for writing.

just yesterday, after seeing a fellow developer’s new blog based on jekyll, i decided to search for a nicer theme for this blog. in the process, i came across hugo, a blogging engine written using go. the two things that interested me the most about it was the fact that it was supposed to be super fast (whereas regenerating files for hexo still took a bit of time), that it was written in go (which i hope to learn one day), and that i found a theme i liked for it. the fact that chrome on the latest el capitan beta doesn’t load my site at all was yet another reason to push me to go for it.

mouse scrolling with RecyclerView

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 21:11:50 -0700

i’ve recently began using RecyclerView in some of my projects, and one thing that stood out as being broken was that mouse scrolling no longer worked. while this is perhaps only a theoretical issue, it is fairly vexing when developing on an emulator, especially while dealing with long lists of data. i’ve opened a bug about it.

this is solved by using onGenericMotionEvent. as per the documentation, “Generic motion events describe joystick movements, mouse hovers, track pad touches, scroll wheel movements and other input events.” for our RecyclerView, we basically have two options - one is to use setOnGenericMotionListener, and the other is to have our own subclass of RecyclerView to handle this.

haramain for android

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 00:19:55 -0700

one of my favorite sites on the web is haramain recordings. haramain recordings posts the latest prayers from masjid al haram and masjid al nabawi on a daily basis (every fajr, maghrib, and isha salah, along with jum3a khutbas, salat al tarawee7, and more).

because i found myself visiting haramain recordings very frequently, i started thinking, “it would be really great if i could access this on my phone…” and so, al7amdulillah, haramain for android was built.

ripples with probe

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:19:57 -0700

today, i was having a discussion with Mostafa Gazar about android animations and his Widgets library, and Lucas Rocha’s probe project came to mind.

i decided to experiment and see if i could use probe to automatically add a ripple effect to a set of views without having to touch existing code. turns out it’s fairly easy to do! i did two separate implementations.

the first image is using Markus Hi’s android-ui library. the second image is using Mostafa’s Widgets.

saudi matches 1.0.1

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 22:44:28 -0700

not too long back, i posted about euro matches. earlier this year, we also pushed saudi matches. it includes a new ui, new features, and so on. saudi matches was done in conjunction with Khalid Sudairy, Bandar Raffah, and Taylor Ling.

you can download it here.

quran plugin for alfred and launchbar

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 01:43:46 -0700

several months ago, i posted a plugin for searching the quran with alfred. i was playing with launchbar 6 recently, and while trying to figure out whether i want to use alfred or launchbar, i decided to write a plugin for searching the quran, with suggestions, for launchbar.

download the launchbar plugin

i also decided to update the plugin for alfred (to have autocomplete). note that the current search api supports in:en (in english), in:tl (in transliteration), etc.

migrating from octopress to hexo

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 20:08:24 -0700

it’s been a long time since my last blog post, but i am hoping to become better about blogging. anyhow, the other day, i found nikola, a python blogging engine. i played with it and thought, “it would be cool to migrate my blog to it.” someone had written a migration script from octopress, and so i played with a migrated version locally.

unfortunately, some things (like pagination) would break the existing model that i’ve been using on this site in the past. so after much searching, i found hexo.

quranicaudio.com web update for ios7

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 23:29:00 -0700

since ios7 brings such a huge change to the ui of ios, i’ve updated the web interface for quranicaudio.com for the iphone. here are the before/after pictures:

this was made a lot easier thanks to ios7 templates. i realize that there is no support for android at the moment, but insha’Allah will hopefully get to this eventually since it is important to do (and nice to have).

quran android 2.4.0

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:52:00 -0700

quran android 2.4.0 should be going live shortly insha’Allah. the most notable changes are tablet support while reading, better images for the s4/htc one, support for multiple sdcards, and various improvements.

euro matches for android

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:00:00 -0700

the latest project i’ve been working on is matches for android, done in conjunction with khalid al sudairy, batoulapps, bandar raffah, and taylor ling. the app is free and can be downloaded from the google play store here.

qamardeen for android

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:47:00 -0700

another thing i didn’t get a chance to write about earlier is the public beta of qamardeen for android. qamardeen is an application that lets you “taste your islam.” i think the official qamardeen page gives a pretty good explanation of what it is and how it is useful.

the android version uses a whole slew of custom views to make the views appear the way they do (while making it easy to manipulate the data). it also uses some open source libraries - mainly actionbarsherlock and achartengine. in addition, it uses a listview with pinned headers similar to the contacts app. you can see the code in use by the contacts app here, or you can read this blog post for more details.

quran android 2.x

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 17:39:00 -0700

quran for android has seen many changes before ramadan in bringing up the 2.0 release. i just wanted to highlight some of them here, seeing as though i have blog posts talking about other releases of quran android.

what’s new?

complete code re-write to make the code cleaner and easier to maintain.
fragment based architecture - pages, translations, bookmarks, etc are all in Fragments, which will make it easier to have a tablet version.
new, improved ui
gapless audio playback support
per-ayah actions (share ayah, show tafseer, etc)
supports versions 2.1+. older versions (1.5, 1.6) still run the older version.

what happened to the source?

we get lots of support emails. one thing we noticed was a few strange emails about “great app, but please remove ads,” and so on. we would always ask these users, “what are you talking about? our app doesn’t have ads! what are you talking about? please send us a link to the app you are using?”

double standards

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:08:00 -0700

tl;dr edition

to any egyptian reading this - vote for whoever you think is best for egypt’s future, but in the process, never forget the importance of respect and character in such difficult times. i find these verses particularly relevant to the situation in egypt today and important for every egyptian to contemplate over (irrespective of who they support in the elections).

i am really saddened by the double standards we are seeing in egypt. we stood in tahrir, had shifts of nightly patrols guarding our homes and suffered a period of instability and turmoil to dispose of a tyrant and bring about better conditions and human rights.

stepping away from google contacts

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:26:00 -0700

in my previous blog post, i briefly talked about syncing an android phone with icloud instead of google contacts. in this post, i’ll talk a little bit about cleaning up your google contacts.

so if you’re like me, you may not be quite ready to erase everything from google contacts (because the implicit result of this is that you will lose google chat access to these people (unless you request permission to chat with them again), and i believe you may also break google plus connections, but i am not certain about that one).

running from google

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:37:00 -0700

google is a great company with useful products. however, due to its very business and monetization strategies, it has slowly lost some of the trust it once had with people. i won’t go into details here since many people have written on this topic in great details.

i think gina summarizes my concern fairly well with this quote:

If you spend as much time online as I do, you can pump a significant amount of personal information into the cloud every day. Think about what percentage of that cloud Google owns. For me, it’s three years of work and personal email in Gmail, years of events in Google Calendar, phone calls and voicemail in Google Voice, documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs, web page viewing habits in Google Reader. To top it all off, Google also has a record of everything I search the web for every day in their logs.

new domain and octopress

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:54:00 -0700

so looking back at it, i’ve been blogging since 2004. unfortunately, as time went on, i have pretty much ignored this blog. so in an effort to start writing more, i’ve decided to make some changes.

first, i’ve switched the domain - if you notice, you’re now on helw.net. this domain is shorter, ties closer to my name, and, most importantly, gives me a good domain for an email address (ahmed@). more on the reasons for that in a future post insha’Allah.

salam, sister siri!

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 02:28:26 -0700

i was inspired by salem’s tweet from yesterday to play around with ios 5 a bit.

i discovered this library, which makes it pretty easy to hook into siri. i found out that a brother (by the name of Bilal Ahmad, may Allah reward him) had beaten me to the idea long ago, however, and made a nice prayertimes extension for siri.

i decided to play around anyway, and not too much later, i had my own version (requiring only one command rather than 2 in brother Bilal’s version). it queries salah.com for its prayer times, and currently only returns isna based times.

quran android 1.6

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:51:43 -0700

bismillah alra7man alra7eem. on february 12th, we released quran android 1.6. this version was mostly intended as a bugfix release, but a few new features got in as well. some notable ones include search, repeat mode for ayahs, night mode for pages, and many bugfixes. it also happens to look nicer on the tablet now, and it works on ics (although if hardware acceleration is turned on, it can sometimes crash on orientation change).

masr merged into whatstheplot

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:56:32 -0700

i decided to merge the old masr.whatstheplot.com entries here into this blog since updating two blogs is more difficult than updating one :)

Insane Game for Android

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:55:40 -0700

just for fun, i had written this (really simple) game for Android not long ago. i decided that i should release it rather than keep it on my hard drive doing nothing. it is really simple, but still, it is fun enough to try :)

if you have an android phone, download it a shot and let me know what you think - and if you have better graphical skills than i do, please feel free to send me some images :P

ramadan kareem!

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:47:13 -0700

ramadan kareem! just for fun, here’s a list of some of the things i’ll be using this ramadan insha’Allah:

quran android - free, open source quran android application.
haramainrecordings - latest mp3s for salah at the haramain (including taraweeh!) these guys are awesome masha’Allah!
guidance for mac - know what time salah is with this useful tool on osx.

i want to remind myself and you guys to keep the ummah in our prayers, especially since many people are undergoing difficulties, war, tyranny, and so on…

core boids

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:05:12 -0700

so it’s been nearly 6 years since i posted here about pyboids… and since i love the idea of the boids algorithm so much (and was trying to play with core animation), i decided to try to write boids using core animation. it’s imperfect, but it works (and, technically speaking, it is 3d, although i don’t really have the functionality to rotate and such to prove it… well, not yet anyway).

death star for android released!

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:10:35 -0700

dstar (well, death star as @wnafee chose to name it instead) is a simple puzzle game from the ti days. i posted a link to an html5 version a few days ago, and today, we’re releasing an ad-supported android version (just for fun). it was done by @wnafee and i.

it’s simple, but challenging - if you like puzzle games, try it out and see if you can beat all the 32 levels! you can find it on the android market.

dstar html5

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 06:38:46 -0700

wanted to play around with html5, so came up with this html5 version of dstar. it’s less than 100 lines of code (not including the levels and simple html). it’s based on the ti and hp48 versions of the same game. this version only has 2 levels. graphics by @somaiagabr.

source code could be better, but you can find the non-minified game logic here and the levels here. if i were to try to optimize this, i would start at the levels, since each level could be represented as 27 bytes (+2 bytes metadata) instead of 108 bytes.

search quran with alfredapp on osx

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:05:51 -0700

if you don’t already use alfred on osx, you really should! it’s a great application launcher for osx. i switched to alfred shortly after quicksilver development stopped (although it is now back again). anyhow, alfred is awesome! the application itself is free (and there’s an option to buy some additional features via the powerpack). according to alfred, on my laptop, “@alfredapp has been shown 2,319 times. Average 13.4 times per day.”

quran android 1.3

Sat, 28 May 2011 03:57:38 -0700

al7amdulillah, quran android 1.3 has been released! new features include improved ui and graphics, better page scrolling, multiple translations, basic search, and more!

download it from the android market or check out the code on github!

updating osx for egypt's dst changes

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:55:23 -0700

as people in egypt know, dst was cancelled in egypt:

“…Egypt’s interim cabinet decided on Wednesday to cancel daylight saving time after a poll posted on its website showed the majority of Egyptians would approve the cancellation.” (via almasryalyoum).

so, what do us apple users do until apple releases a fix? @vodafoneegypt suggested that people switch to the Harare time zone. not my cup of tea. thinking about manually changing your time? bad idea if you have a twitter client.

quran android 1.2

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:31:34 -0700

in case you haven’t seen it, check out version 1.2 of quran android (released on december 23rd). you can see screenshots and a more detailed change log on hussein’s blog.

more features and improvements are in the pipeline. feel free to check out the code on github and let us know if you have any suggestions, thoughts, or contributions!

so i left the country...

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:01:10 -0700

uh… yeah.

so egypt (like many other countries apparently) requires military service from it’s citizens. as a dual citizen, you are exempt from egyptian military service. i won’t get into details of how to prove this and get your military pardon, but let’s just say that it’s a fairly long winded and arduous process (which until now, i am still unable to complete).

there was some uncertainty as to what would happen if i stayed longer than 6 months - some people said, “you need to get your passport restamped (or leave the country) if you are planning on staying longer than 6 months.” others said, “you don’t need to do anything.” i almost followed the latter, until someone advised me to go check just in case, otherwise you could have problems later on. so i went to the passport office in alexandria.

searching the quran on ios

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:31:22 -0700

just for fun, here’s an ios universal version of the quran search application.

screenshots:

ipad: 1 (shown above) and 2.
iphone: 1 and 2.

you can find the source code here (update: added a link to a tar download and removed the code from github since i am not really maintaining this - june 26th, 2011).

searching the quran on android

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:57:33 -0700

just for fun, i hacked together a simple prototype of quran search on android. in reality, it’s more close to the autocomplete transliteration demo that i did some time back. for now, it’s only transliteration search, but later on, it can be expanded to search other languages. ultimately, it should probably be integrated into quran android.

you can find the source here. (update: added a link to a tar download and removed the code from github since i am not really maintaining this - june 26th, 2011).

اللغة العربية في عصرنا الحديث - الجزء الثاني

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:15:36 -0700

here’s the second edition of the list. see if you can translate these to english, and look out for the answers to this list and the first edition of the list soon insha’Allah!

tareeq al bawaba - طريق البوابة
3al-lem el dekka - علم الدكة
bedoon welaya - بدون ولاية
merta7 3al akher - مرتاح على الأخر
3asifat al mokh - عاصفة المخ
o2af ganb - قف جانب
no2tet kasr - نقطة كسر

a taxi driver and du3a2

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:08:45 -0700

i got in a taxi to go a short distance a few days ago. while driving, the man said to me:

you know, today, something strange happened. i just dropped off my nephew to the airport where he’s traveling to qatar. i am subscribed to a “du3a a day by sms” service by etisalat, and i got the du3a while driving him to the airport. so i told him, “read me the du3a,” since i was driving. he read the du3a (which said something along the lines of “astawda3 Allah” (or put as a trust with Allah) my self, my family, my deeds, and so on). the taxi driver continued, “i was shocked - the timing was incredible! it’s as if Allah had that message come today just for him specifically!”

another near death experience

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 11:45:28 -0700

i almost died yesterday… again… sub7anAllah. it was around 1am and i was really tired and sleepy… i was trying to cross the street from the maw2af to get to the other side and find something to ride home. i guess i really wasn’t paying attention and was thinking instead about “what will i take home,” and weighing my options as to what transportation is best to take. i crossed half the street and saw cars coming, but didn’t register that they were flying… so i started crossing the road nonchalantly (mind you, this is a highway-type road) without paying much attention.

free taxi rides

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:46:10 -0700

i stopped a taxi that had just picked up some people and was going the same direction i wanted to go in. he asked the others if he could drop me off on his way to their destination. because i was in a rush, i said, “if not, if you may please just drop me off at the end of the street on your way.”

so i got on, and he shook my hand and said “taqabal Allah mina wa minkum” - i was like, “uhh… thanks, jazakAllah khair” (this wasn’t after a salah time, i wasn’t coming out of a masjid, and it wasn’t the end of ramadan, so i was just surprised)…

transportation mania

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:40:00 -0700

today (well, yesterday actually) - was quite a busy day! within 24 hours, i rode 4 different types of masharee3 (minivans), a bus, a train, an underground train, and a handful of taxis.

some of these minivans are crazy - imagine that when a minivan stops, 20 people run towards it, all trying to get on. time passes and another one comes by and the process repeats. it’s quite possible that you may end up standing inside the minivan, or even end up riding while hanging on to the door.

open 24 hours?

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:42:26 -0700

in egypt, you may encounter stores with large “open 24 hours” signs. don’t believe what you read.

“we don’t accept reimbursements…”

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:12:39 -0700

a few days ago, i had to wake up extra early to go to work, and it so happens that i also ended up sleeping really late that same night. i woke up and was really spaced out.

i went to take a “mashroo3” (minibus) to work. first off, i got on the wrong one (despite me asking, “is this going to x?” and him answering, “no, it’s going to y”). secondly, i was next to the door. “mashroo3 etiquette” mandates that the person by the door closes the door when passengers board or depart the vehicle.

what on earth are you doing here?!

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:58:45 -0700

i took a metered cab in cairo to the train station a few days ago. the driver and i started talking, and amidst our discussion, i told him that i lived in the us for the greater part of my life. he asked, “what on earth are you doing here?” in other words, “who in their right mind would come here when they have the option of living in the us?”

google walking directions im egypt

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:39:36 -0700

it’s nice to have directions (walking and navigation) in egypt - quite useful (albeit imperfect).

sheikh-ul-masha'Allah

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:50:31 -0700

in the words of wael:

“he is sheikh-ul-mashaAllah.”

suhur...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:47:49 -0700

عسل و طحينه

ramadan in egypt – first impressions

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:59:13 -0700

salam 3alaikum -

first off, belated ramadan mubarak. i wanted to take a moment to write a bit about ramadan here in egypt.

the first note is that about the ambiance and overall mood - apartment buildings, masajid, and streets are all decorated for ramadan. cans of pepsi contain “ramadan mubarak” messages.

for those in the us, think of the overall ambiance around christmas time - it’s the same here during ramadan. in addition, you hear Quran almost everywhere you go - taxis and busses (which usually are either playing quran or music) are mostly playing Quran. the masajid are a lot more full. you’ll see people on trains reading Quran to pass time.

city cab is garbage...

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:10:17 -0700

i spent the night at my aunt’s house in cairo yesterday, and had a ticket for the 8am train to alexandria. i figured, “rather than hassle with n different modes of transportation, especially while fasting, why not call city cab?”

city cab (aka cairo cab) is a “professional” cab service, similar to what we have in the us. i called last night around 1am and asked for a cab to the train station to pick me up at 7am, figuring it’d be good to give myself some extra time (just in case).

quran android released!

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 02:49:12 -0700

ramadan kareem! just in time for ramadan, we’ve released the first version of Quran Android. download it and let us know what you think! the source code is on github.

"tomorrow is friday..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:01:35 -0700

(well, in reality, today is friday). in santa clara, sheikh mohamed used to give a short 3 minute reminder after isha on thursdays. each time, this reminder would start with the phrase, “tomorrow is friday,” after which he would remind us the virtues of salah on the Prophet (ﷺ) on fridays and would mention something from his sunnah.

one of the most beautiful du3as i used to always hear sheikh mohamed say was:

what on earth, etisalat?

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:34:57 -0700

#!/bin/sh
APP_NAME="Etisalat_3.5G_USB_Modem"
APP_PATH="/Applications/Mobile Partner.app"

sudo chmod -R a+rwx "$APP_PATH"

chmod -R a+rw "/usr/local/"

the above code snippet is from the first few lines of one of the etisalat 3g usb modem’s postinstall script on osx - seriously, why chmod -R a+rw "/usr/local/"? no one uses /usr/local except etisalat?

the modem is a huawei e1550 hsdpa usb stick.

update (june 16, 2011) - @AhmedElGamil sent this post to @EtisalatMisr over twitter, and they said they would forward it to the responsible team insha’Allah. you can see the conversation on twitter here.

mesh awel mara nerkabooha...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:02:40 -0700

something interesting always happens whenever i make the trip from alex to cairo. the past two times i went, i encountered some sort of major discussion over the fare of the mashroo3 (micro bus).

during the first incident, i was leaving from sidi gaber - as those in alex may know, how long it takes to fill the mashroo3 depends on what time you leave (esp since sidi gaber doesn’t have as much traffic to cairo as ma7atet masr does). anyhow, after waiting ~45 minutes and finally having enough people to be ready to go, the man announces that the charge will be 25le (the normal is 22). people were outraged and argued, etc - mainly because of the chicanery involved (waste 45 minutes of our time and then tell us that you’re charging more, so we either go ride another bus (and wait another 45 minutes to save 3le, or we deal with it and pay)).

a guide to mobile internet in egypt

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:22:50 -0700

in the us, you can have an unlimited data plan with most of the mobile carriers (well, there’s now a 200 mb (or 2gb) cap on at&t (depending on how much you pay)). since i didn’t use my phone for tethering in the us, my monthly usage usually didn’t exceed 200mb/month. coming to egypt, i hoped to have mobile internet (to be able to get emails as they come, etc). here’s what i found:

there are two types of people in this world

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:06:37 -0700

there are two types of people in this world… masha’Allah (points to those i know), and astaghfurAllah (points to self).

what do you name your computers?

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:43:02 -0700

my machines typically have had some sort of video game related (and specifically, rpg related) names.

some names i’ve used in the past:

meribia - a town from the lunar rpgs
weltall - a “gear” name from xenogears
termina - a city from chrono cross
zanarkand - a city from ffx
dalmasca - a city name from ffxii
lab32 - a location from chrono trigger

the machine names in bold are in-use as of this post’s writing. some of these were actually named for a reason - termina was named because it’s a linux box (ie a linux termina-l), for example, and zanarkand was named because it was a far away city (and the laptop traveled far away from home). interestingly enough, zanarkand actually refers to “zanarkand ruins,” a place left in ruins in ffx. by mere coincidence, this happened to also become the fate of that laptop.

i attended the writing of a book...

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:37:44 -0700

yesterday after 3isha (friday) i attended the “writing of a book” (katb kitab, aka “nikkah,” aka “marriage contract,” aka “engagement”) of one of my friends (mahmoud) here in alexandria. the gathering was done at masjid 3omar ibn al khattab in alexandria. a few brothers gave short talks (islamic in nature - one brother was telling the unmarried people to “not worry about resources and get married because Allah provides” and quoted the hadeeth, etc), one brother read some Quran (some verses from surat al nur in 2 qira2at), etc.

khutbah with sheikh 7atem

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:17:57 -0700

my 5th khutbah in alexandria was with sheikh 7atem farid. sheikh 7atem is famous for his beautiful recitation of the quran. it is said that during ramadan, an incredibly massive number of people come and pray taraweeh behind him, especially on the 27th night of ramadan. i attended the khutbah at masjid bilal, which is a very short walk away from the mediterranean sea and is right next to san stefano.

khutbah from masjid al salam

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:02:20 -0700

masjid al salam is the masjid next to the place i am currently staying. most of the people who go there are the people who live or work in assid, where the masjid is located. i am not sure if the masjid has a full time imam or not, because the same subset of n people always lead the salah - some are good, some are okay (in terms of qira2a, etc - not that i am one to judge).

setting up a blackberry dev environment under linux

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:53:20 -0700

i recently had to look at the blackberry sdk for something. to my disappointment, the blackberry sdk is only available for windows - no linux or mac versions in site. my first attempt was to run a windows vm under virtualbox, but that brought my system to a screeching halt.

so i started doing some research (see sources at the bottom of the post) and found an easier way. i did this all under ubuntu linux (lucid).

weather: alexandria versus cairo

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:05:40 -0700

versus

sufi sufi, where's your kufi?

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:47:29 -0700

an interesting thing happened a few weeks ago… i was walking with my friend heading to the excellent restaurant, dahab. on the way, we heard the adhan for maghrib and decided to stop and pray. we saw a sign for a masjid, so we started walking in that direction. to my surprise, as we closed on the masjid, i saw a brother with a big beard walking in the opposite direction - away from the masjid.

dude, give the electricity a break!

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:17:23 -0700

electricity is human too, you know. it works really hard, so it deserves a break. let the people walk up n flights of stairs (where 0 > n > 14) in the pitch dark. i asked someone at a store, “why is the electricity cut off in this entire area?” he said, “because the circuits get hot, so they turn off the electricity in one area for 1-2 hours every period of time to give the circuits a break.”

a story from the second khutbah

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:15:13 -0700

today is friday… and in just 2 hours, i’ll be attending my 5th khubah here in alexandria insha’Allah. unfortunately, i only mentioned 2 of the prior khutbahs in a previous blog post, and still haven’t talked about the other two yet.

so the 2nd khutbah i attended in alexandria was also at masjid al hedaya. the sheikh was visiting the masjid and gave a good khutbah about the tafseer of surat al 7ujurat.

اللغة العربية في عصرنا الحديث

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:15:58 -0700

over a year ago, my ex-roommate and i published a link, entitled “Lughat ul Arabiyya fi asrina” - today, over a year later, i am happy to announce a new set of words and phrases to add to the given list. most of these, mind you, have come up in the past 5 weeks in which i’ve been in egypt (i don’t take all the credit - this list was devised by my friends and i). so without further adieu, here is the list:

الشيخ الدكتور شهاب الدين محمد أبو زهو

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:34:32 -0700

when i came to alexandria, one of my newly made friends suggested that i come with him for jum3ah rather than go to the masjid near my home, and offered to pick me up - may Allah reward him!

my friend picked me up, and together we went to masjid al hedaya, located close to the hedaya medical facility on the path of the tram. the masjid had two people outside sitting with a huge box of clear plastic bags for people to put their shoes in. after the prayer, people would return those bags to the people outside for use the following week. the masjid is a nice masjid with no cell phone reception - apparently because they installed a reception-blocking device in there.

names in alexandria are… eccentric.

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:16:02 -0700

place names in alexandria are eccentric to say the least. many places here have names that are not arabic in any way possible. here are some examples:

abou quer - you can see this famous and large road on the map in the previous post. because egyptian slang has the qaf switched with a hamza, it ends up being pronounced as “abou ear” - the only arabic part about that is the “abou” (father of).

alexandria

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:30:16 -0700

on may 17th, 2010, i left for alexandria. comparing it to cairo, girls seem to be slightly more conservative (in terms of the way they dress), people seem more religious (at least in terms of “outwards” religiosity - there are more bearded men to be seen on the streets), the weather is much nicer, and it’s a lot less crowded. after nearly a month of being in alexandria, i definitely can say that i like it better than cairo!

first khutbah this trip: cairo

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:25:46 -0700

the first khutbah i attended in egypt this trip was in cairo a few days after i arrived. i decided not to go to the “zawya” (literally means “angle,” refers to a small masjid underneath an apartment buildings) near where i was staying and instead decided to go to the bigger masjid (near a really big church in the area).

i don’t remember what the khutbah was about - but what i do remember is being surprised at the usage of words like “neela” and “balawi” during the khutbah…

thoughts on cairo

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:33:28 -0700

i’ve been in egypt for a little over a month now. i spent the first week of my time in cairo. the following are a list of things i noticed during that first week (which should not have been surprising to me, having been to cairo many times in the past, but i guess i forgot).

in cairo, many times, i would say salam to people and would get no reply. maybe this was because the area i was in had many christians and staunch christians tend to not like to answer the salam greeting because some of them consider it a religious greeting.

عسل وطحينة

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:03:35 -0700

i wanted to write about my experiences in egypt, and so i started a new blog (i decided not to write those posts here because they’re not highly technical or programming related (or geeky)). you can find it at masr.whatstheplot.com.

before i left california...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:29:39 -0700

“you never know how much stuff you have until you have to move” - this is a common saying that you’ll hear people say when they are about to move from one place to another and see the hassle of transporting all this stuff.

for me, since i didn’t know how long i would end up staying in egypt, “moving to egypt” meant that i had to virtually empty my apartment in california. of course at this point i had three options - 1. take everything with me - being an international flight, a limit of two bags, etc, this was impractical. 2. put stuff in storage - possible, but do i really need this stuff, and is there anything worth putting in storage? or 3. take what you need up to the limit and get rid of the rest.

the aftermath of the accident

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:59:13 -0700

during the accident mentioned in the previous post, the laptop was in the trunk on the far left side (the place that took the impact from the truck hitting it). when i returned home, i found that my macbook had become officially paralized (the screen was cracked, so light would come out from the screen, but you couldn’t see anything. also, the laptop can no longer sit properly and the casing was deformed). miraculously, al7amdulillah, it did not die. it still had full cognitive abilities (with much trouble, i was able to finally get ssh and vnc access to the machine to get my data off of it).

a near death experience

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:49:47 -0700

on monday, june 7th, myself and two brothers needed to go to the smart village in the morning and come back to alexandria in the afternoon. we rented a “limo,” (which is just a normal rental car with a driver) to take us, wait for us, and bring us back. we left early in the morning, finished our work, and left cairo to go home a few minutes after maghrib.

introduction

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:57:04 -0700

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم،

there are fobs and there are abcXs… being born in cairo and raised in the us, i happen to be neither and both at the same time.

this blog is entitled “عسل و طحينه” - the name was inspired by “عسل اسود” (molasses), a new movie (which i still haven’t seen) for ahmad helmy documenting an egyptian american’s attempt to move back to egypt after living in the us for years. “عسل و طحينه” is an (awesome) egyptian dish in which you put tahina on top of molasses and eat it with bread. the word tahina itself also means “hard, strenuous work or effort,” which i figured may add to the meaning as well.

desktop screenshot for february 2010

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:08:18 -0700

full size

here’s a screenshot of my linux box taken on february 25th, 2010. click the image above for the full sized view. linux desktop running openbox, a bunch of transparent urxvt terminals, cairo clock, and trayer (with banshee, pidgin, transmission, pino, dropbox, guake, and tomboy running).

i recently finished watching the old star trek movies, hence the star trek influenced desktop. and, of course, here’s the problem with teleportation.

google buzz - friend or follow

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:21:03 -0700

i like the site for twitter, ‘friendorfollow,’ which tells me who i am following and isn’t following me back, who are following me and i am not following back, and so on. given that i got access to google buzz today, i decided to write a little script to help me determine the breakdown of my friends (specifically, who i am following and isn’t following me back, since the rest of the information is easy to read off of the website anyway).

so sick of farmville...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:38:50 -0700

wanted to take a short break, so i decided to take out 20 minutes and write a silly song about farmville (it’s a rip off of ne yo’s “so sick” song). note that the lyrics (and thus the mp3) are in pre-alpha (and are not likely to see any future revisions).

audio version

lyrics:

gotta change the favorites i have, for the new design in store, cuz right now i really can’t, take it any more, and i know it makes no sense, cuz my farm is nice fo’ sure, but i can’t wait for gas anymore.

salam, android!

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:01:23 -0700

after the nexus one came out, i became a little more interested in android. while i had written a simple ‘salam world’ app some time ago, i figure it would be nice to delve a little deeper and try to write something remotely useful.

so without further adieu, introducing a (very simple) quran for android:

source code on github

for the most part, android is fairly fun and easy to develop for. however, one of the most frustrating parts is the extremely limited memory for apps. since apps can’t be on the sd card (due to some security issues), you are limited to the very small amount of memory on the device. consequently, in order to display the images for the quran in this app, the app must download the data to the user’s sd card.

so long, yahoo!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:59:22 -0700

on july 19th, 2006, i posted my first blog post from california. i moved there to start a new job at yahoo! ~3.5 years later, it was time to go, and so at this point, i am officially a non-Yahoo!

what’s next? i don’t know yet, but i am both excited and optimistic about the future. insha’Allah khair. maybe it’s not a bad time to give a startup a shot…

a little rhyme about makkah

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:19:35 -0700

mok and i were chatting about makkah on im and we brought back a very old habit of ours from the days of highschool and college - rhyming about any and everything. so without further adieu, here’s a snippet from our im conversation:

omer: makkah makkah, i love u like i love my motha you are a city like which there is no otha above u the angels do hover

quran jetpack script

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:21:13 -0700

so i had a little bit of time before i depart on my journey for hajj, so i wanted to play around with the firefox jetpack extension a little bit. so without further adieu, this post is here to introduce a simple quran plugin for jetpack :)

what is it this is a quran script for jetpack, a plugin for firefox which allows customizing the browser just through javascript.

when you are typing in a textarea (in wordpress, gmail, google talk, etc), if you highlight any text in the format of sura:ayah (ex 1:1) and right click on it, you will be given a menu that allows you to replace that with the actual verse (in arabic, transliteration, or translation).

thoughts before hajj

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:16:30 -0700

so i was sitting on a plane in san francisco awaiting the departure of my flight to atlanta, from where i will insha’Allah be leaving for hajj. the captain mentioned something about a leak that they have to fix, so i figured, “why not write a blog post on my phone in the meanwhile?” (the plane took off and i realized i had more stuff to add and edit, so the in-airplane mobile blogging commenced on land and in the air).

rtm versus toodledo

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:40:44 -0700

last year, i signed up for a 1 year subscription to rememberthemilk. now that it has expired, i’ve started wondering whether i should re-subscribe or switch to something else (toodledo appears to be a popular option).

so i made a toodledo free account and imported my tasks from rtm - fairly straight forward and easy (although i had to re-tag and group everything, but no big deal). i tried using both of them for a few days together, and here are my thoughts:

subqueries make life easy

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:35:50 -0700

often times while working with databases, you find the need to do some simple tasks (adding a column and populating it with a value from another table, etc). rather than write a script to do this, use mysql’s native subquery (and temporary table) functionality - it makes life much easier.

consider the case where you have two tables:

mysql> describe colors;
+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| id    | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| color | varchar(10) | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

and

my previous keyboard

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:54:33 -0700

[center]note the v, n, and m keys (or lack thereof)[/center]

finally replaced my keyboard with a new one :)

quran plugin updated for ubiquity 0.5

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:55:08 -0700

i’ve done a quick port of the quran ubiquity plugin to work under the new version of ubiquity (0.5). as you may know, ubiquity 0.5 and beyond use a new parser (parser 2) that isn’t compatible with the old parser (parser 1 for 0.1.x versions of ubiquity).

you can get it here. make sure to select “automatically update this feed” so that you get any updates i may get around to making.

فول أحمد العظيم

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:06:02 -0700

inspired by the blog of sy and my previous roommate (who makes a mean paneer btw), i decided to start posting my chef de jour recipes for the benefit of all the bachelors out there. unfortunately, i don’t cook as much as i should (but i have been fairly lucky in terms of the output of my few attempts). so perhaps documenting my experiences as a master chef will help me to stop slacking and cook more.

introducing waqt.org

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:01:06 -0700

today, i took the arabeyes php extension of itl, the yahoo geocoding api, and the geonames api and put together waqt.org.

it’s a fairly minimalistic prayertimes site. the code is available on github. note that the calculation method is currently hardcoded to use the isna method, but this is fairly easy to change.

amazing quran marketing

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:07:07 -0700

about two years ago, i posted about sheikh mohamed’s amazing fajr marketing tshirt. today, i am posting about the latest tshirt in the collection - read, understand, and practice quran.

sheikh is currently in egypt visiting his family and will go and make 3umrah insha’Allah… the bay area really isn’t the same without him. may Allah accept from them and grant him and his family the very best and bring them back safely - ameen.

quran ubiquity plugin

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:29:12 -0700

updated and released the first version of the quran ubiquity plugin! you can go here to install it.

essentially, it contains two commands -

search-quran - takes a parameter of what to search for and will show the results that match that particular query. hitting enter will bring up the search results page.
get-ayah - takes a parameter of which ayah (ex 2:2) and an optional parameter of the language/translation you want the ayah in (in english - muhsin khan, for example - note that ubiquity will provide suggestions for these). hitting enter will insert the text into the selection space.

this is uber-useful for muslims imho :p perhaps i will try to provide a screencast later on that shows how to use this for those who are still afraid to try it :)

website changes

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:18:29 -0700

after having pretty much the same theme since the launch of the site, i’ve switched to the excellent iNove wordpress theme. i’ve also cleaned up some links and replaced the previous code highlighter with the very nice syntax highlighter evolved plugin.

migrating jaiku to identi.ca or twitter

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:33:28 -0700

i recently decided to move my tech tips microblog to identi.ca (the original copy was on jaiku), as i felt it was a little more befitting, actively developed, etc (although jaiku is now open source).

anyway… so i wanted to migrate my posts over - so i wrote a php script to do it (it assumes your jaiku is public and reads it without hassling with oauth).

<?php
$sleepTime = 5;
$jaikuSource = "http://username.jaiku.com/json";
 
$mode = 'identi.ca';
$baseStatusUrl = 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json';
 
// thanks, php-twitter
if ($mode == 'twitter'){
   $baseStatusUrl = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';
   $headers = array('Expect:', 'X-Twitter-Client: ',
      'X-Twitter-Client-Version: ','X-Twitter-Client-URL: ');
}
 
$ctr = 0;
$entries = array();
 
print "destination account username: ";
$username = trim(fgets(STDIN));
print "password: ";
system('stty -echo');
$password = trim(fgets(STDIN));
system('stty echo');
print "\n";
 
$done = false;
$params = '';
while (true){
   $count = 0;
   $posts = fetchUrl($jaikuSource . $params);
   $json = json_decode($posts, true);
   $stream = $json['stream'];
   $lastEntry = null;
   foreach ($stream as $entry){
      if (isset($entry['comment_id'])) continue;
      $lastEntry = $entry;
      $count++;
      $entries[$ctr++] = $entry['title'];
   }
   if ($count == 0) break;
   $lastPostTime = $lastEntry['created_at'];
   $ts = split('-', $lastPostTime);
   $hd = split('T', $ts[2]);
   $min = split('Z', $ts[4]);
   $gmtime = gmmktime($hd[1], $ts[3], $min[0], $ts[1], $hd[0], $ts[0]) - 1;
   $params = "?offset=$gmtime";
}
 
for ($i = $ctr-1; $i>=0; $i--){
   $params = array('status' => $entries[$i]);
   if ($i != ($ctr-1)){
      print "sleeping $sleepTime seconds\n";
      sleep($sleepTime);
   }
   twitterApiCall($baseStatusUrl, $params);
   print "updated status to: " . $entries[$i] . "\n";
}
 
function fetchUrl($url){
   $ch = curl_init($url);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
   $resp = curl_exec($ch);
   curl_close($ch);
   return $resp;
}
 
function twitterApiCall($url, $args = null){
   global $username, $password, $headers;
 
   // thanks, php-twitter
   $ch = curl_init($url);
   if (!is_null($args)){
      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $args);
   }
   if ((!empty($username)) && (!empty($password)))
      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ':' . $password);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
   if (!empty($headers))
      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
   $resp = curl_exec($ch);
   $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
   curl_close($ch);
   if ($info['http_code']!=200)
      print "error - got an http code of: " . $info['http_code'] . "\n";
}

make sure you edit $baseStatusUrl and $mode as necessary. enjoy!

bbc interview with idf spokeswoman

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:57:48 -0700

i usually start my weekdays by listening to the excellent bbc global news podcast. in today’s episode, bbc’s owen bennett-jones interviewed an idf spokeswoman regarding israeli troops’ admission to gaza abuses. i decided to cut it out and provide it here for you to listen to.

audio

is it just me, or do these people seem heartless? anyway, you can download the original podcast here.

arabish

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:43:58 -0700

do you watch anta ambooba in tha3lab al nar? click here for a list of funny, literal arabizations done by my roommate and i.

reading quran on the iphone

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:43:50 -0700

a long time ago, when i got my iphone, i realized that it would be nice to be able to read the quran on my phone. what i wanted was a way to read the arabic text on the phone (page by page, not ayah by ayah). anyhow, i’ll outline the solutions i’ve found here along with my preferred solution and how to set it up.

options

quran applications in the app store - there are a few in the app store, but only one version of iQuran is free. it shows you the text (ayah by ayah, however), has translations, and audio.

so, i am a night owl...

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:56:10 -0700

funny. courtesy of tweet o’clock.

ubiquity rocks!

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:23:05 -0700

today, i felt like playing some more with ubiquity, which i had installed for a while now but had not played around with sufficiently. i decided to try to write a simple plugin that will search the quran for a particular set of words. to do this, i felt obliged to expose an api for the alpha version of quranicrealm first, which was good because i needed to do it eventually anyway.

thoughts on the g1

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:14:35 -0700

for some (crazy) reason, i decided to try out the g1 after reading gina’s article and finding a good deal on craigslist. the summary is - i think i am going to sell it and keep my iphone :)

thoughts so far:

it’s nice to have a keyboard - but something doesn’t feel right about it. i can’t quite put my hands on it yet.
no arabic fonts in the browser, and no arabization!! :( iphone doesn’t have it either, but third party solutions (iphone islam) exist that work very well.

faster and better text search

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:54:04 -0700

important update (august 5th, 2009) - so i realized that some of the results here (specifically, the java lucene ones) were incorrect. the reason is because as is mentioned on the lucene wiki, the first search has to initialize the caches. as thus, the results aren’t accurate. this seems to be very true. for example, if i run a test query, discard the results, and then run the real query, results for the three classes of queries are now 17, 8, and 4 ms respectively, which is very comparable (if not sometimes better) than that of sphinx. i will probably need to re-run this benchmark to do a better job of giving the backend systems a level playing field to test on.

pseudo back from hiatus

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:24:33 -0700

it’s been a while since i last posted… i guess microblogging (twitter, brightkite, etc) have sort of gotten the majority of my posts, and i’ve neglected the blog.

the main reason i like the blog is it’s interesting to look back and see what i was writing about n years ago. it just serves as a good documentation. twitter/brightkite do the job as well (esp with uploading pictures to brightkite on the go and tagging location), but the blog allows me to be less concise.

back-tagging the site

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:20:37 -0700

so i went through and tried to back-tag all the posts on the site… more difficult than it sounds, especially since i was at a loss as to how to tag some of the things (especially in a consistent manner). i am not showing a tag cloud yet, but maybe soon (tm).

i’ve also added links to my twitter and flickr in the sidebar. i guess i should start looking into some wordpress plugins at some point in the near future for some of the stuff in the sidebar.

simple is beautiful - command line id3 tagging

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:45:52 -0700

generally speaking, my set of mp3s is very well tagged. for my personal mp3s, i used to exclusively use easytag to tag them, and now i use a combination of easytag and amarok (which is totally awesome by the way!)

but sometimes, i have to mass edit id3tags for mp3s on the server, and i don’t have the luxury of using such gui tools for the editing. as thus, i’ve been mainly using id3v2 within some perl scripts to tag mp3s. this turns out to work great, but i also wanted to be able to add album art to the mp3s from the command line.

dealing with timezones in php

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:26:29 -0700

so i was working on some code in which i needed to know whether or not it was dst for a given country and/or timezone or not. luckily, with php5.2, some sparsely documented (yet very useful) classes were introduced - a more thorough documentation can be found here.

so let’s say i want to know whether or not egypt is in dst right now or not… so first i need to know what zoneinfo file egypt uses (for egypt, it’s simple, but this trick is useful for more obscure places, like “isle of man,” for example):

whatstheplot: iphone edition (tm)

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:18:25 -0700

thanks to the iwphone wordpress plugin, the blog now looks a lot better on the iphone!

speaking of the iphone, i am really disappointed at the notion that the long awaited sdk coming out on 3/6 will potentially be locked down. i guess we can’t know for sure until the announcement on thursday, but i personally have gone ahead and re-jailbroken my phone, courtesy of zibri’s ziphone.

unicode control characters

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:42:57 -0700

i always used to get upset when i send a message or set a status on an english site in arabic, only to have the punctuation all messed up. well, thanks to two unicode control characters, \u200e and \u200f (for ltr and rtl, respectively), i can finally go from writing:

يحيى الإسلام!

to writing:

يحيى الإسلام!‏

much better :) thanks goes to this wikipedia article and adil allawi, whom i first heard about this from.

beat quake4

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:57:37 -0700

i just beat quake4 (played the whole game under linux). fun!

2008 africa cup winners: egypt!

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:38:15 -0700

woot! egypt won the 2008 africa cup of nations! beautiful game, i only saw the last 20 minutes, but those were the 20 minutes that mattered. beautiful assist by zidane in a crazily intense moment, passing to abu trayka who scored :) incredible work of art!

i am not a big fan of sports, but this was one game i had to watch :) second cup win in a row, the last being against the ivory coast in 2006.

yahoo!: "sorry, microsoft!"

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:39:15 -0700

woot! word has it that monday, yahoo will write a “sorry” to microsoft. now let’s just hope they don’t get rid of our search advertising (and, therefore, search in general) to google… as i mentioned before, the best option here is to tough it out this period of time, and things will come back up.

in lolcat terms, courtesy of the flickr anti-microsoft group: this picture is awesome :)

windows downgrade

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:35:24 -0700

i’ve been dual booting my gentoo box with windows vista 64 for my occasional bouts of gaming… but yesterday, i decided that despite microsoft ending it’s support for xp sometime this year, that i am better off running xp for gaming than vista. so i downgraded vista 64 to xp 32. i think i made this decision after seeing this article on slashdot.

more on the yahoo stuff

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:34:27 -0700

yahooza linked two funny articles about the whole y! ordeal… i especially like the first one, and the second one is funny too but has bad language, so if it offends you, consider yourself warned:

torn between two lovers
translation from pr-speak to english [of selected parts of jerry’s memo]

on a more serious note on the same subject, the techcrunch article, “decision time for yahoo,” is a more serious (and perhaps realistic) analysis of the situation. until i read this article, i never really knew that there could be lawsuits for violation of fiduciary duty (which basically entails that you look out for your shareholders before looking at your own interests).

update on the dns situation

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:12:46 -0700

so i spoke with the bro about the dns thing, and it seems as though i jumped the gun a little. in summary, what he told me is that another islamic site did a dos attack on his site due to the fact that there were non-muslims allowed on the forums and such, which some of the people from the other site didn’t like. he didn’t know about this until dnsmadeeasy contacted him, and said he had 48 hours to take the site down or pay the overages. so he said that within 6 hours, the site was taken down.

sublime rhymes for the times

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:57:17 -0700

launched my second facebook app: sublime rhymes! still a little rough around the edges, some things can be a little more intuitive, but for now, i am going to sleep :)

yahoosoft...

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:39:13 -0700

so there’s a bunch of speculation about y! being bought out by microsoft. while i have no idea what will end up happening, i think that at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.

when you’re low enough in the food chain (a “peon,” in warcraft2 terminology, part of the work force), you wake up in the morning and mutter, “ready to work,” and go and do whatever they tell you to do. then at the end of the day, you get your check. whether that check is from y! or microsoft, does it really matter? not really…

update on domains and dns

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:33:05 -0700

just a quick update - the brother emailed me and gave me access to the dns servers that the sites are now looking at. so within a few days insha’Allah, the old urls should work again. al7amdulillah. that having been said, i am still going to try to normalize all the quranicrealm traffic to go through searchquran.net.

y! answers used for spreading islamic knowledge?

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:52:28 -0700

amazing… i came across people asking about islam on y! answers before, but never upon a muslim asking a question about islam on answers until right now. i was doing a search on google for “arabic tirmithi” and came up with several questions on y! answers, including this one about shopping du3a2s, asked on y! answers malaysia. even more interesting is the fact that there’s a category for ramadan under holidays and it’s full of questions by muslims (i mean, after all, it is y! answers malaysia, right? :)).

behind the times...

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:32:00 -0700

today, i discovered that the quranapp i’d written for facebook has been broken for some time now (mainly due to the changed notification apis, which affects both notification sending and invites). so i’ve finally updated it and it properly works again.

i actually kind of like their changes - their new invite form and friend selector are pretty simple to use and are very feature full (not to mention well documented), and not having to catch return types from sent messages and forward to a confirmation page is always a very nice thing (tm).

illogical downloading...

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:10:17 -0700

continuing the trend from yesterday and posting more about annoying things (tm), my friend pointed out that in the awstats report for one of my sites, i had a very abnormal number of reported bandwidth downloads for one of the days (~3tb, when i usually average under 50gb per day for that particular server). of course this is unrealistic (and, in fact, impossible, because the box is on a 10mbps connection, which would mean no more than ~108gb/day…).

angry at inconsiderate people...

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:51:09 -0700

i guess this can’t be considered backbiting, since i am not going to mention any names here. but today, something happened that really made me upset.

i was working on some sites with someone, and he uses dnsmadeeasy for their dns (an excellent service, btw). as time went on, i made my own sites that were in some way affiliated with this individual. he insisted i use his dns account, gave me the username and password for it. this was more than a year and a half ago.

nice bash tip

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:32:20 -0700

i never really used this until i ran into this article by accident, but it’s fairly cool…

so:

echo {one,two}.sh

outputs: one.sh two.sh

this means that you can, as the article says, do something like this: cp /etc/apache2/httpd.conf{,.bak}

to backup your apache conf. cool huh? the article has more details and such, but that’s just a summary.

y! answers dev to be in europe

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:49:33 -0700

i guess since it’s already been made public on techcrunch, i can post about this here… but yes, y! answers development is moving to europe. we already had some developers there, but now it will be driven entirely out of europe.

as for the us developers, we were all moved onto another project. while this is a change that i personally welcome (it’s nice to have something new to work on every once in a while, esp if you’re currently in a lull with what you are doing), it is kind of sad because answers was sort of like a child to many of the developers. although i wasn’t there from the very beginning of its initiation, i was there early enough and for long enough to feel this way.

myweb maxed out

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:05:49 -0700

so i usually bookmark things both on del.icio.us and on myweb2, especially because myweb’s search is a lot better than del.icio.us’s at the time being. so i had a bookmarklet that would bring up both save dialogs and i would save in both. recently, i tried to bookmark something, and got:

i guess it maxes out close to 5000 bookmarks…

questions...

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:40:23 -0700

i guess i may just be going through some weird phase in life, but here’s what’s on my mind this morning at 2:30 am…

for some things, right and wrong are undoubtedly clear. but for others, how do you really know? two extremely good people with two extremely good (albeit different) view points can really leave you in the middle, unsure of what the right answer is.
why is it so easy to hurt someone you care about accidentally?

girls down the street from you

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:11:42 -0700

maybe out of sheer boredom, or too many nerdy thoughts always going through my head, or just to find a good use for the domain, i’ve started a humorous (so claim those who read it) blog about youth and the problems they face in looking to get married (basically some of my theories about the whole marriage process).

you can check it out here.

update - i closed it down :)

when character really shows...

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 01:53:31 -0700

“the way of the Prophets is a difficult path to follow - they were all hurt and slandered by their people, and while they could have retaliated, they didn’t. but we have to do our best to follow it…”

this is roughly what someone i really respect told me today after he was cursed out for no reason. while he could easily have hit the guy or cursed him back out, he kept silent. the whole time i could see him on the verge of snapping, but he managed to keep his cool.

a thought...

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:46:26 -0700

this past weekend, ustaz amr khaled visited us here in the bay area. he came to jum3ah at mca. it was really a surprise to me (i knew he was giving a talk the following day, but i didn’t know he’d come to jum3ah). i felt extremely happy when i saw him, and started thinking about what i would say if i could get to talk to him.

he gave a brief 1 or 2 minute talk in english - i was happy that he said our masjid was like a “hug” and that it felt different than any of the masajid he’d seen in europe. i think i had a smile on my face the whole time.

on the y! messenger blog

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:37:35 -0700

my name was mentioned on the messenger blog in this post - check it out.

google documents

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:36:22 -0700

i hate to say it, but i love google documents. i never thought i’d use it, but man, it has made my life a lot easier for so many things. the sharing feature is especially nifty (and probably accounts for 90+% of the reasons that i have to use it).

earthquake

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:52:23 -0700

just experienced my first earthquake. i was pulling up at the parking lot of the masjid for isha, and i waited a second to shut the engine off and i was like “why is my car shaking like that?” – i took my foot off the brake and my car was still shaking. i got out of the car, walked away from it, puzzled at the shaking (the whole time i thought it was the car, i didn’t realize it was the ground).

beat xenosaga, now back to WoW

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:03:51 -0700

finally, after several years, i beat xenosaga (i ordered it november 19th, 2004 - almost 3 years ago…). i just could never bring myself to finish it (then again, WoW did come out around that time in 2004) until today (finally).

and, while i hadn’t played WoW since 6/15, i’ve reactivated my account. no, not addiction, just boredom, that and some of my work colleagues playing. but hey, what else do you do when you live thousands of miles from family? go figure.

eid mubarak, wordpress 2.3, etc

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:08:28 -0700

sort of late for this, but eid mubarak! just upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.3, i guess i’ll have to look into going back and tagging some of the old posts at some point in the future (tm).

in unrelated news, one of my coworkers pointed out the applegeeks lite comic to me. one of the writers of this comic is muslim, and he had some pretty funny comics, especially around eid time. here’s one for kicks:

quranicaudio.com redone!

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:56:38 -0700

keeping the seo statements from the previous post in mind, audio.islamicnetwork.com has become http://quranicaudio.com/ – it is now running on lighttpd (rather than apache - by the way, so far, i really like lighty masha’Allah) and al7amdulillah, so far, things look good.

quranicaudio.com is one of the web’s largest (if not the largest) collection of cd quality downloadable quran mp3s (and some oggs). check it out!

importance of seo

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 01:15:27 -0700

i never really used to think about the importance of seo until recently. i always figured that, “hey, these are just my sites, only my friends read them, or they spread by word of mouth, etc” and never bothered doing anything with it.

however, after actually taking some time to search for some of my sites, i realized how important seo is for attracting traffic and for “branding.” despite the suboptimal state of seo on this site, i must say that i have definitely gotten pretty lucky in this regard for this site [most of this has to be credited to wordpress]. on some of my other sites, however, i wasn’t so lucky…

it's compiling!

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 07:34:32 -0700

source: xkcd.

nooooo! another WoW expansion! :/

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:10:42 -0700

today, during blizzcon, blizzard announced a new WoW expansion, “wrath of the lich king.” i haven’t played WoW in over 1.5 months now (i canceled my account and unsubscribed to wowinsider and other WoW rss feeds so i don’t get tempted, but… i don’t know anymore… :p) hopefully insha’Allah i’ll manage to stay strong :p

lessons learned through writing a facebook app

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:04:38 -0700

a long time ago, when facebook opened its api, i wrote a Quran application for facebook [see my previous post, here]. however, it was a hack, wasn’t fully featured, it didn’t look great, and, most importantly, it wasn’t put on the facebook application directory. sometime later, someone launched a Quranic Verses application - it was much nicer, more feature rich, and, most importantly, it was in the application directory.

feeling a bit competitive, i spent most of my past weekend rewriting, adding viral features suggested by my friends, and polishing the app. after three days of hard work, i finally launched. its been one day now since i launched, and here’s what i learned:

my thoughts on the iphone

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 01:34:03 -0700

so last thursday, i had the fabulous idea of purchasing an iphone, especially being that i was already in a cingular 2 year contract. so i picked up the 4gb model. after having used it for nearly a week now, here are my thoughts:

pros

the screen is amazing.
it has wifi.
safari on it is awesome.
the whole means of navigation (zooming with your two fingers in safari and google maps) is off the hook.

tweaking your driving route using google maps...

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:12:22 -0700

someone from the yahoo maps team did this last hack day (a month+ ago), but for whatever reason, it hasn’t been released by yahoo yet. very useful feature imho (basically, you can drag and drop on the map to change the route, so if you want to avoid a particular road, you can).

scraping websites...

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:49:38 -0700

many times, i find myself having to scrape a website for any particular reason. now a days, if i need to do it, i’d probably do it with some version of mechanize (www::mechanize in perl, hpricot in ruby, etc). when i was looking for a bug in one of the scrapers i’d written a long time ago, what took me by surprise was that i’d written a lexer to do it.

quran facebook application

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 01:29:29 -0700

i figured i’d play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but… it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature suggestions.

you can test it here: http://facebook.cafesalam.net/quranapp.

zomg lolcats ftw!

Tue, 29 May 2007 00:58:46 -0700

this is off the hook!

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
	AWSUM THX
		VISIBLE FILE
	O NOES
		INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

they actually have a few test interpreters for it and more examples here.

scratching my head over a c problem...

Thu, 17 May 2007 00:25:51 -0700

today, i wanted to try out my test arabic gtk program to see if behdad’s new changes to pango magically fixed the renown arabic shaping issue [in short, it had nothing to do with it]. anyway, i discovered that i needed to install libquran, and to make a long story short, my test program, which used to work before, segfaulted. i ran gdb and valgrind only to find the segfault happening within libquran at the closing of the configuration file (noting this libquran code hasn’t been changed in 3 years now).

arabic answers rip off

Mon, 14 May 2007 19:59:37 -0700

one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there’s way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.

taxes on softdrinks... what next?

Mon, 14 May 2007 06:00:03 -0700

today, i went to the supermarket to buy some stuff, and i picked up a 12 pack of pepsi on the way out. when i looked at my receipt, i noticed that there was an additional tax of $0.48 for the pepsi, separate from the overall tax at the bottom (not sure if it is included in the overall x% tax that you pay at the end or not, but regardless, it is more).

ruby and rcairo

Wed, 09 May 2007 01:28:51 -0700

i’ve recently been playing more and more with ruby and i really like it. at the same time, i’ve been loving launchy, an open source application launcher for windows (currently using it on my work laptop).

since i love launchy so much, i started to wonder, “why not write something similar for linux?” - now i know one will say that deskbar does the job, but its not quite the same. so anyway, because i wanted transparency and so on, i decided to look into cairo, and the rcairo ruby bindings.

some neat videos

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:44:41 -0700

this video from steve jobs’ stanford commencement speech (2005) was pretty good:

in addition, the following videos are worth watching (in my opinion):

killing us softly - an excellent talk about how today’s advertising schemes are harmful to women and to the society in general (pictures of ads included, so muslim guys may just want to listen rather than watch).
don’t buy stuff you can’t afford - a short, yet hilarious, snl skit.

a qualm...

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:35:51 -0700

i have a qualm with today’s traffic lights… sometimes, they are absolutely ludicrous and preposterous. you would think that with today’s sensor technology and stuff, you’d be able to drive and not wait at lights at all, especially really early in the morning or really late at night… but unfortunately, this is not the case.

one of the traffic lights very close to my house is totally insane. its at a major intersection across a railroad track. during normal hours, if you miss it, you may wait 2 and a half minutes to turn at it. if you are unlucky and a train happens to pass, you miss your next turn most of the time, therefore resulting in one having to wait about 5 minutes if not more to make a left turn at that light. consequently, people just drive to the next light and make a left and/or u-turn from there.

on email spam...

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:38:48 -0700

in most cases, i find that i am much more effective than a spam detector in figuring out what’s spam and what’s not just by looking at the subject line (and, in extreme cases, at the sender as well). in very few cases does one have to open the email to be sure.

recently, i got this email (twice) on my y! mail account (which, by the way, will soon offer unlimited email storage). i wasn’t totally sure by just looking at the subject and sender (although the last name was pretty fake), so i opened it - i was pretty surprised at a few things in the email (a spin-off of the classic “millionaire bank account” email).

amazing fajr marketing

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 03:12:44 -0700

i love sheikh mohammad, the sheikh of mca. i also love his amazing marketing skills in bringing the youth to fajr. check out this picture of the t-shirt he gave me:

i love the “and smile” part - and i love how he signed his name at the bottom :)

some people are just fishing for trouble...

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:18:58 -0700

why would you ask a question like this unless you’re just asking for trouble?

blizzard's WoW armory

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:31:58 -0700

blizzard put up the armory for WoW character stats - i like this a lot better than allakhazam because now i don’t manually have to run a tool to update my character stats - plus the interface is much nicer :) so i updated the links on the side…

that having been said, i haven’t had much of a chance to play in the past month or so… my main is still only 60 :p

popping a subset of gmail messages...

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 12:29:23 -0700

so i usually always pop my gmail mail, especially after i heard the paranoia about how google was closing accounts at random and people were losing insane amounts of email. but recently, i suffered a hard drive reformat (courtesy of windows, which attempted to format my entire hard drive rather than a partition because my hard drive was over 160 gb and win2k can’t read more than that, so it named the drive corrupt), i only had email up through the 4th of january popped from my gmail account.

ahmad tea

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:14:37 -0700

my own tea company? nah, that’s just my distant cousin, ahmad with an a… he makes good tea though ;)

hills of san francisco

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 20:07:36 -0700

so countless times have i heard people talking about how san francisco is so hilly… when people would ask me, i’d say, “sure, its hilly” - but seriously, how was i to know? the only two places in san francisco i had visited were the airport several times and pier 39 once…

but things finally changed… this week, i made a trip into downtown san francisco. and man, when people say its hilly, its really, really hilly! while driving up and down the roads, i couldn’t help but remember roller coasters… the hills up were crazy steep, and when you got to the top, you had to keep driving a bit in order to actually see in front of you.

scorpion on a plane?

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:03:30 -0700

this is insane - they won’t let me take my cologne on a plane because its not in a ziplock bag, but scorpions are okay?

burning crusade midnight signings

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:14:15 -0700

blizzard people are signing copies of burning crusade ~5 miles from my house… so very much tempted to go, but i can’t imagine waiting a day in line to get one of 4500 copies… and besides, if it takes lines from 6 am to get one of 4500 copies, it’ll be so crowded that i can’t imagine it being worth going… then again, it could be nicely ebayable… shrugs

my bigger debate is, “to buy it, or not to buy it…”

google reader shared items

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 17:12:43 -0700

i’ve gotten used to using google reader for my rss feed reading. one of the nice features is the ability to share interesting items. i decided that i might as well start using this. here is my shared items page, and here is the atom feed. i’ve also added a link to the side of the page.

64 bits!

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:24:01 -0700

after much trouble to get things to install, my home machine is now up and running with gentoo 64!

qatar...

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:13:37 -0700

yes, yes, i said a continent per day… but alas, i got busy and there is only so much time and so many continents… (i am not really visiting all the continents, i’d just like to think so :)) i am currently writing this from qatar. i was in uae earlier (both in sharjah (al-shariqa) and dubai). sharjah reminds me of egypt a lot except for the number of desis and the traffic laws/driving patterns. dubai on the other hand could very well be a city in the us. the cost of living there seems to be very expensive - the price that you pay in the us is the price you pay in dubai, despite the fact that 1 dollar is ~3.6 dirhams. some places are even more expensive - a cup of coffee at starbucks, for example, was 12 dirhams, or roughly $3.33.

london...

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 02:19:28 -0700

surprisingly, it seems quite a bit more liberal than the us… but then again, i feel the same way when i go to the airport in germany or france. with respect to absurd security measures, the airport here only allows one carryon bag - unlike in the us where we can carry a carry on and a “personal item” - they said if you’re a lady and have a purse, you have to put it in your bag or check it in… ludicrous.

muhammad yunus on y! answers

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 02:22:22 -0700

muslim nobel prize winner, muhammad yunus, was the target of one of yahoo’s advertising campaign’s for answers - i am happy to have a question of his on the site :)

amazing...

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:18:27 -0700

according to this article, the average person spends 17.12 years of their life watching tv. amazing… (yes, yes, i know - i spend at least double that in front of a computer :p)

مسلسل حضرة المتهم ابي

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:56:07 -0700

مسلسل قوي بجد و راءع

حال الدنيه يحزن - اءول ايه بس - اللهم احفظنا واحفظ شباب و بنات المسلمين… امين

update - try pasting that into google translate and see what it says… apparently, “ameen” translates to secretary and google doesn’t like egyptian slang…

ludicrous airport policies

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:44:16 -0700

so i went to visit my parents over this past break… while leaving, i had 2 small bottles of cologne and a stick of deodorant in my bag. at the airport, they of course saw these in my bag, and the man took them out. he said, “you can only have these with you if you have them in a transparent ziplock bag.” i am like, “uh.. i don’t have one.” he’s like “sorry, then you can’t take them unless you check your bag in.” so i asked him, “do you have any bags?” - and he replied, “sorry, we don’t provide bags.” so i lost 2 very nice small bottles of cologne (the alternative was to miss my flight because i was already running late)…

people will just be people?

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 23:01:44 -0700

i am not one to criticize anyone as i have my own huge list of faults, but some actions of some people really really get on my nerves. i don’t understand the following categories of people:

the provincial people - those who are so set in their own thoughts and ideas (without any basis) and you can never ever convince them of anything besides what they think is true. the best example of this that i can think of is when people outside of america have this idea that america is “heaven on earth,” that life there is really easy, that people have money falling out of their pockets, and so on. they refuse to believe anything else. these people often miss out on seeing a great number of blessings that they have that people living in america lack for example.

better permalinks

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 23:22:04 -0700

now switched wordpress to use a more readable url format for permalinks rather than the classic ?p=### style urls. thanks abu hurayrah!

burning crusade beta

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 02:44:07 -0700

thanks to a friend from college (thanks dude), i got on the burning crusade beta. i transferred rad over and played some… looks uber promising, albeit rough around the edges, but i guess that’s why they’re not releasing it until mid january… man playing on a pvp server has a totally different feel than playing on an rp server :)

muslim feminist quran tafsir council!?

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 02:35:10 -0700

so i saw this article on y! news about muslim feminists in new york wanting to start a quran interpretation council - their goal being to break streotypes involving terrorism and women being oppressed in islam.

i don’t know why, but something strikes me as odd about this… “muslim feminists” might be the start of oddity - islam is the first religion that gave women rights and elevated women to a status that is many times higher than that of men. the examples are innumerable, but just one example is that one of the top narrators of ahadeeth who taught the great men of the ummah and whom many of the great scholars took their knowledge directly or indirectly was sayida 3a2isha (ra).

new boards and ps3 lines

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:11:53 -0700

i am/was kind of surprised to see a whole bunch of random people sitting in front of frys when i went there this morning. at first, because of their dress and appearance, i thought maybe they were homeless people or something sleeping in front of the store. later in the day when i saw the same scene at another store, i realized that these were the people sleeping in front of the store to get their hands on one of the first ps3s…

WoW as a really bad paying job...

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:00:51 -0700

i was looking on ebay, where you can sell your WoW characters for an amount depending on the type of gear and money they have. so glancing at some of the previous auctions, rogues seem to go between $150 and $500, depending on how tweaked they are.

so guestimating rad to get ~$200 (i think that’s a safe guess based on his not-so-uber uberness), and estimating about 34 days of /played time on him, that’s 816 hours for about $200… which is less than a quarter per hour!!! in 1938, that was minimum wage (although that was equivalent of about $3.22 in 2005). but now, minimum wage is about $5.15, which means WoW pays less than 1/20th of the current US minimum wage.

over 1k bookmarks

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:46:18 -0700

my del.icio.us account (and hence my myweb2 account) has reached over 1000 bookmarks… like whoa.

islamic advice from sheikh google

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:24:24 -0700

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!

عيد مبارك

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 23:43:32 -0700

eid mubarak to all - may Allah accept our deeds during this month - ameen.

2005 census: us marriage rates down

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:56:38 -0700

[The findings] indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

this is really sad.

so small, part 2...

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 23:22:54 -0700

in light of the previous post, i saw an amazing 7 minute astronomy video on youtube (or should i say ‘gootube’?) talking about how tiny the earth really is.

these days, during ramadan, i’ve heard people quote a hadith several times that i hadn’t remembered hearing before that is really quite spectacular - the rough meaning based on what i remember is (i could have forgotten - i tried to find out which hadith book this came from but couldn’t find it, if someone can point me to where i’d really appreciate it), “the worldly heaven in comparison to the second heaven is like a ring in a desert, and the second heaven to the third is like a ring in a desert, and the third to the fourth is like a ring in a desert, and the fourth to the fifth is like a ring in a desert, and the fifth to the sixth is like a ring in a desert, and the sixth to the seventh is like a ring in a desert, and the seventh to the kursiy is like a ring in a desert, and the kursi to the 3arsh (or throne) of Allah (SWT) is like a ring in a desert.”

so small...

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:57:56 -0700

we are so small… reminds me of this verse (3:191)…

الذين يذكرون الله قياما وقعودا وعلى جنوبهم ويتفكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطلا سبحانك

nice nasheed on youtube

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:17:36 -0700

one of my friends told me about this nice nasheed video (islamic song) on youtube - interestingly enough, i saw it being played on tv while i was flipping through the channels the following day… and i made a youtube account so i can use the favorites list and added it as my first favorite on there :) by the way, who sings this, does he mean mishari rashid?

edit - i was going to put a direct embedding of the video here, but seems as though i have to jump through some hoops to get wordpress to do this. so the video link is here.

discovering non whats the plot plots...

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:59:20 -0700

(translated into normal english, the title would read, “discovering the things that have happened and/or the news in places other than this weblog”).

so for the longest time, i’ve been using bloglines… a while back, i gave google reader a shot, but it was totally unusable. finally, a few days back, they released a new, much nicer version. so much so that i would say i easily prefer it to bloglines… the new google reader solves the main issue i have with bloglines - that once you’ve read the feeds, you can’t ever see them again and they’re gone forever. it also adds some nice new features (starring, and the public watchlist are really neat features). and the new ui is awesome…

more on the moonsighting issues...

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:13:00 -0700

so much stuff about these calculations – yesterday, mansoor posted a link to what sheikh 7amza yusuf had to say about the fiqh council decision. today, sas sent me a link to dr. zulfiqar ali shah’s 60+ (!) page paper supporting the calculation theory. in sas’s words, and i quote:

“ok basically i saw the video and was very upset since he broght nothing from the quran and sunnah and went against what i thought were clear texts… its AMAZING how much proof they brought like fiqhi and responses and clarifications - its out of this world… the arguments are so amazing dude - this is islamic scholarship (contempoary) at its finest man..”

رمضان كريم

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:17:12 -0700

ramadan kareem to all! i am so glad that the moon was actually seen in some places, otherwise i was going to have a hard time deciding whether to fast on saturday with the masjid or on sunday… this, of course, didn’t stop some people from deciding to fast sunday anyway :)

by the way, mansoor pointed me to this video on the isna page where dr. muzammil siddiqi talks about the reason for the fiqh council’s decision. good watch.

new domain!

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:12:43 -0700

the site can now be accessed at whatstheplot.com. going to slowly phase out piousity insha’Allah (piousity.net 301 redirects to whatstheplot.com, so there should be no broken links). anyone have a good idea for a new secondary title? the old one was “the latest plot at piousity.net,” but that doesn’t really apply anymore…

i need to find another good theme for this site or make a new one for it at some point…

freaky...

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:31:15 -0700

someone sent this link to one of the mailing lists i read. man is that scary… if you search for yourself and it doesn’t find you, try searching for your parents or your friends’ parents…

on moonsighting for ramadan...

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:02:44 -0700

our masjid here announced the dates for ramadan and 3eid being this saturday (9/23) and monday (10/23) respectively. this is based on the fiqh council of north america’s decision to use calculation to determine the dates for ramadan and 3eid.

something about this struck me as odd, determining the dates of both ramadan and 3eid this far in advance. i used to think that basing the moonsighting off of calculations was a good thing, until i found out that calculations could be wrong. i found this out when i read sheikh isam’s excellent answer to this question on islamicnetwork (link courtesy of OK, jazahAllah khair).

namazTime update

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:44:23 -0700

soner eker emailed me some beautiful graphics and a redone ui for namazTime, so i redid the ui based on what he sent me. you can see the screenshot here.

a neat tip for gmailers

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:54:14 -0700

this is a priceless tip that could prove useful to some of the gmail users out there…

about the facebook feeds...

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 20:50:32 -0700

today, the facebook “gets a facelift,” in which they add feeds and such. here’s a screenshot.

so as you can see from the screenshot above, it basically gives you detailed information about almost everything that all your friends are doing - you know when someone has added a friend, joined a group, left a group, changed his or her status or profile, and so on.

while facebook was never really that private (any of your friends could look and see these changes if they wanted to, but it would take time and effort), i think that this will cause me to be a bit more cautious about what i change and when i write on people’s walls and so on. in some ways, i can see how this may increase interaction (if you’re just logging on real quick to check messages, you may see a friend’s update that may cause you to react in some way (post a message, etc), which you otherwise may not have seen), but at the same time, i can see how it would cause people to be cautious.

pier 39

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 03:15:50 -0700

my mom came to visit me for the break, so being that it was her last full day, i took her to pier 39. really nice place, beautiful view. i stayed up till 3 am playing with flickr and uploading some pictures there and playing with geotagging and all. neat stuff :) i was a little irked at the fact that my camera’s date has been off by a few days, resulting in the pictures having wrong dates…

google encourages people to swim...

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:13:43 -0700

i found this picture the other day… pretty funny, the poor guy has to swim to get to his destination.

how the years go by...

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:51:01 -0700

2002 was only 4 years ago… its unbelievable how time flies, how things change, how many things, people, and memories we remember and how many we forget… sub7anAllah… its amazing how many memories come back when seeing pictures or watching movies…

reminds me of this verse (18:49):

و وضع الكتاب فترى المجرمين مشفقين مما فيه و يقولون يا ويلتنا ما لهذا الكتاب لا يغادر صغيرة و لا كبيرة إلا أحصاها و وجدوا ما عملوا حاضرا و لا يظلم ربك أحدا

a quranic aim bot

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:32:18 -0700

so i was a little bit bored today, and i wanted to write a simple quranic aim bot just for fun… so i took a look at Net::Oscar off cpan and at a sample bot, wrote a sample alpha api to allow searching over quranic realm, and the result:

(02:06:20) ahmed: 3:1

(02:06:21) chisaikaruma: match: ayah=“1” Transliteration: Alif-lam-meem Sahih International: Alif, Lam, Meem.

(02:06:23) ahmed: say if you love Allah

(02:06:24) chisaikaruma: match: sura=“3” ayah=“31” percent=“100” Transliteration: Say (O Muhammad SAW to mankind): “If you (really) love Allah then follow me (i.e. accept Islamic Monotheism, follow the Quran and the Sunnah), Allah will love you and forgive you of your sins. And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.” English: Qul in kuntum tuhibboona AllahafattabiAAoonee yuhbibkumu Allahu wayaghfirlakum thunoobakum wallahu ghafoorun raheem

some people frustrate me...

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:26:48 -0700

while working on y! answers, i sometimes go to the homepage and have a particular question catch my eye. sometimes, i can’t help but wonder, “what are these people thinking…”

here’s one recent example: . can a muslim be a good american? – totally ridiculous question, read it through and you’ll see what i mean. the guy lists a bunch of stereotypes and unresearched ideas to reach a conclusion at the end that:

its just a crayon...

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:07:01 -0700

“imagine yourself in this situation… imagine that you’ve just gotten onto a bus. a few people got on before you, and a few people get on after you. after a while, the bus stops, and a man and 2 young kids get on the bus. the kids start running around and bothering the passengers, taking people’s hats and hitting the people on the bus and so on. the man, presumably the father, sits there staring into space seemingly not caring about what his kids are doing… now imagine yourself in this situation… how will you feel?”

lebanon video

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 23:59:46 -0700

this 9 minute video is sub7anAllah. its george galloway in a skynews interview about the invasion of lebanon. worth watching.

sometimes...

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 03:54:06 -0700

sometimes, magnifying the small things people may do for you and forgetting all what you’ve done for them can cause you to shoot yourself in the foot…

sometimes, if you’re too nice to people, they won’t hesitate to take advantage of you…

sometimes, people will make false assumptions based on some set of appearances, and no matter what evidence you may bring them to show them that they are wrong, they will never accede to your explanation…

save lebanon!

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:36:00 -0700

i couldn’t find a better way to word it than my dear brother’s words:

As the Israeli oppression spreads beyond their own supposed borders, it does not seem that there is any intention to cease their attacks on innocent civilians, Muslim, Christian, and otherwise. This kind of oppression is unprecidented in that it is being condemned by the entire international community, yet no serious action is being taken.

please visit http://www.saveleb.org to find out how you can help, or other such organizations such as life and islamic relief. finally, let us all try harder to keep our brothers and sisters in our prayers, because this is the least we can do.

weather perfect for walking

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:07:54 -0700

so aside from this weekend (which was insane – temperatures here reached 104 this weekend, but i hear this only happens for 2 weeks in the summer after which the weather becomes normal again), the weather has been incredible this week. sure, its a little warm during the day, but after 3asr time, the weather becomes nice and cool, as if it were fall. the weather is so nice that it just feels wrong to be inside, so you find yourself walking outside, and you see tons of people walking outside too…

where is the machni?

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:00:52 -0700

i’ve gone to at least 3 desi places since i’ve arrived here. and i’ve noticed one thing… the east coast “machni” dishes and the west coast ones are different.

i asked for “chicken machni” (more commonly known as ‘buttered chicken’) at 3 different places - place #1 gave me something that looked similar to chicken machni but didn’t taste anything like it. i tried at place #2, and they gave me something that tasted like chicken machni but looked different (brownish sauce rather than a reddish/orangish oily sauce). i tried asking at place #3, and they said, “it’s sort of chicken machni but not really” – so i said, “well wait, do you have paneer machni?” – the said, “yeah” – and i got a paneer machni dish that tasted like paneer machni but looked like cholay.

at mca...

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:52:32 -0700

sheikh muhammad jibreel’s brother leads fajr at mca (the masjid close to my apartment). how cool is that?

welcome to the hotel california...

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:53:11 -0700

… such a lovely place

(so it seems after only one day of being here…)

a slice of binary cake

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:58:40 -0700

about a week early, i got this binary cake slice.

courtesy of rlo (tm).

windows vista

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 15:00:29 -0700

recently, microsoft had a public beta out for vista beta 2 available for download… having my linux partition as my major partition and windows xp installed for gaming purposes (cedega is great, but i find that games like WoW run much more smoothly in windows), i decided to try to replace xp with vista just to check it out.

for starters, it looks really nice… the visual effects and stuff are nice. however, its flaws quickly became apparent - first and foremost, the whole “security by prompt” concept is ridiculously annoying – essentially, even if you are an admin, you are asked before almost anything happens - if i try to do any file operation, especially under program files (i am talking about creating directories, or deleting shortcuts off the desktop for applications just installed), i get security warnings that “this could be a security hazard, would you like to continue?” not only were they simple warnings, the whole screen would fade out and just bring up the one pop up box.

namazTime anonymous svn

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 20:36:14 -0700

just put up an svn repository for public access. you can access it here, or to obtain the latest code, just do:

svn co http://piousity.net/namazTime

thanks to mohammed sameer’s suggestions, i made several changes. the version in svn is different than the release mainly because now, rather than manually make calls to libglade for loading objects from the xml files, i use the default build stuff generated by glade. while this will make a few things easier (adding translations later on, for example), i am not quite sure if i did everything right, but it seems to work so its fine for now (i am mainly unsure with respect to how to get the widgets, because the lookup method requires a parent widget which sometimes i don’t have available, so i just made the main window global, and just destroyed the auxillary windows when they are closed and reopen them).

namazTime 0.9

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:54:15 -0700

i’ve fixed some of the distribution issues with the last version of namazTime, and so here it is, namazTime 0.9. it’s still linux only at the moment, and it needs a notification area - most window managers either have this (gnome, kde, xfce, fluxbox), or you can get a program to handle this for those that don’t (i currently use trayer under openbox).

to bring up the prayer times, you click the icon in the notification tray. hitting x or reclicking the icon reminimizes it into the tray. to change the timings and such, right click the icon. you can find a screenshot of the program in one of the older posts about it on this weblog.

goodbye, WoW

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 21:10:09 -0700

today, i closed my WoW account. for good measure, i also deleted my characters before closing the account. this way, i can be sure that i don’t go back. awesome game, but its too addicting and wastes too much time.

building scalable websites

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:53:22 -0700

i ordered the new o’reilly book off amazon, “Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications.” its written by cal henderson, one of the guys behind flickr. i’ve read a little bit and so far it seems to be pretty good.

platters!

Mon, 22 May 2006 10:43:37 -0700

platters!!!

this is my favorite zabihah place to eat in nyc. fawaad introduced me to it a while back, and i think that despite the fact that its quite far from where i live, i still go there pretty often. i went there this weekend, and i also saw the new 5th avenue apple store from outside, which definitely looks really cool!

actually, there’s one really interesting thing about platters which always strikes me as interesting - its on a corner with at least 2 other street vendors nearby (that you can see while standing in line at platters) – and although the food at those tastes very similar to that of platters, platters has all the customers and people whereas the other ones generally don’t. its like a sign of how Allah gives rizq to whomsoever He wills, such that two nearly identical places selling nearly identical food are there, one getting lots of customers and the other getting almost none…

iconv, vim 7

Wed, 10 May 2006 00:42:21 -0700

iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful: _ iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file_

i’ve been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they’ve made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be… there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you’re set.

interview, yahoo mail beta, etc

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:22:19 -0700

yesterday, i got in on the yahoo mail beta by using the tricks mentioned on several web sites. i like it actually, despite the fact that some of the people commented on some of those sites saying its nothing compared to gmail… i think yahoo did a good job, and it certainly is a lot better than the hotmail beta in my humble opinion which barely works under firefox…

this morning, i read an interesting interview with marc allen. i don’t really know who he is, just that he’s a multi millionaire… he makes some interesting points throughout the interview… the three points that struck me the most were: 1. with regards to money, he says, “It is a very, very good servant but a terrible master.” 2. he says that you should save at least 10% of your salary monthly, and save more if you can. he says that once you’re able to live off 90% of your salary, save another 10% and give it in charity, saying that those two steps are “great keys to a better life and a better world.” 3. he says that all it takes to becoming a millionaire today is intention.

rapdizzle

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:52:54 -0700

fo’ shizzle my nizzle rapdizzle – lol i was talking to my boy OK and he got me in a rapping mode… so i started this codeish rap, first line of which is inspired (ripped) from eminem, and dumped it in achinb’s gtalk window… so per his suggestion, here it is..

my code is like a dagger with a jagged edge, to push your computer over some big ledge, java, python, and php, easy stuff compared to c, and then there are kids who do ajax, simple little javascript hacks, these script kiddies have no clue, holding UIs together with glue.

difference between italians and europeans

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:49:58 -0700

this funny video reminds me of arabs… :)

technology, languages, and y3k

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:38:31 -0700

the past 2 days at work, i’ve had some interesting happenings… yesterday, i met my egyptian friend and coworker who works here with me too, and, when he asked how i was doing, i said, “el7asharat wel saraseer metala3een 3aynee” (which roughly means, ‘insects and roaches are giving me a hard time’) – he said, “oh, you’re one of those guys! just like these other guys who are like, ‘senna zar2a’ for bluetooth” :p i practiced it on some germans in broken german too, ‘hast du blau tzan on dein komputer?’ – hehe.

sergeant!

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:09:09 -0700

i am in the top 2000 pvp players on silverhand! w00t! i am now a sergeant, 1704th place on silverhand :) not bad for the first week of serious pvping :p

wow reader

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 01:23:45 -0700

i installed wow reader - cool stuff, though i think it can be improved (automated somehow? i still have to do a /wver to get it to load, but… yeah). here is my first and most leveled up character’s stats :) i should probably put this on the sidebar of my blog somewhere… what would be really nice is also a time tracking thing that looks at /played… hehe except then people would know how much i play ;)

yahoo rocks

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:03:19 -0700

i am starting to really like yahoo. besides having a good taste and aquiring del.icio.us (no pun intended ;)), they released a pretty neat user interface library, which contains some utilities for web development with ajax and such. i glanced at it a bit, looks really cool and plan on playing with it later on. best of all, its open source!

by the way, if you don’t have a del.icio.us account, get one now! here is my del.icio.us (i still need to integrate it into this blog at some point). for those who haven’t used it, del.icio.us is a (social?) bookmarking service - you can look at mine for an example. i have a button in my browser, and whenever i come across an interesting link, i click it to add that particular site to my del.icio.us.

amazing television commercial

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:31:23 -0700

this is one of the best islamic reminders i’ve seen in the form of a very short television commercial (you can right click and do save as if just clicking it doesn’t work). if you don’t speak arabic, the verses being recited are in surat al-qiyama (75:26-35). the text at the end reads: “اقم صلاتك… قبل مماتك” - which means, “establish your prayer… before your death.”

day of 3ashoora

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:03:39 -0700

tomorrow (thursday) is insha’Allah the 10th of muharram. just a reminder to myself and any muslims reading this to fast insha’Allah. the day of 3ashoora is the day in which Allah saved Prophet Musa (Moses) (AS) and the children of Israel from Pharaoh, and it is also the day in which Prophet Nuh’s (Noah’s) (AS) arc reached saftey. the reward for it is expiation for sins of the past year insha’Allah.

the danish cartoons

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:38:03 -0700

greets. so i have not written anything on the subject, but i’ve been reading the opinons of others (ayman’s, for example) and the news and such, and i finally thought to post some thoughts here.

note, however, that this post is influenced by amr khaled’s message to the world about the danish cartoons, which i highly recommend everyone (muslim or not) to read (or, if you understand arabic, to listen to or view).

memory stick, anyone?

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:05:04 -0700

i can’t really say i saw this one coming… but uh, memory stick, anyone?

random engadget links

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 14:39:01 -0700

first, there’s this weird pedant which blocks electromagnetic fields, and, as a bonus, also blocks negative thoughts!? rather odd…

second, there’s this honda accord that drives itself. not that i would not have expected this to happen, but just kind of neat to see it happening. i wonder if 20 years later, we will all have automatically driven cars that drive on special roads at crazy high speeds and with no errors… i guess it would be kind of like your own personal train that can switch tracks intelligently and take you from any one point to another…

happy new year - 1427 AH

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:22:01 -0700

kol 3am wa antum bekhayr. (transliteration will have to work until i can go home and type it in arabic :)).

green tea, microsoft keyboard

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:16:10 -0700

not that the two aforementioned subjects have anything to do with each other, but i figured i’d combine them in one posting anyway… so yesterday was my first real venture into green tea - i mean, seriously, how could i not try it when the back of the tea bags (which are provided free for employees to drink during the day, along with a whole slew of different other kinds of teas, coffee, and soda) reads: “Indulge in the soothing ritual of Bigelow Green Tea and discover a tastier, cleaner, smoother cup of tea that is high in antioxidants, and has no calories, carbs or fat. It’s a whole new dimension in green tea enjoyment!” – actually, i only just read the back today. the real reason i tried green tea again (which, by the way, doesn’t appear anything close to green to me) was because my throat was bothering me… and i realized its not too bad actually.

i want this checkbook!

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 09:07:02 -0700

despite the fact that i pay almost all my bills online and barely ever write checks, i’d love to have the katamari checkbook… or, as the author pointed out, a debit card would be quite nice… but for some reason, i can’t see wachovia giving out katamari debit cards :)

why world of warcraft is like real life

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:45:29 -0700

world of warcraft, the popular mmorpg by blizzard, despite being over a year old, still has millions of subscribers. i’m still subscribed now (although i did quit for a few months). what i realized, however, is that with few exceptions, the game is highly repetitive and is usually played as a means of escape into a fantasy world (or, as some people claim, as a means of socializing).

but i discovered that WoW isn’t all that different from the real world - you can eat and drink in both - you can get sick, you can get disease… you can be well rested, or you can suffer from fatigue. if you try to swim across the ocean, you die from fatigue. rather than airplanes, we have gryphons or hippos. your deeds earn you a reputation with the cities and communities you work for - helping the community earns you a good reputation, whereas killing its people or harming them earns you a bad one.

namaztime development

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 21:36:05 -0700

i’ve done some work on namaztime. i made a few improvements to the interface and to the calculation algorithm, and hopefully fixed some bugs.

insha’Allah hope to release sometime soon, just got a couple more things that i want to get done for this release, a couple of small things to fix, etc…

eid mubarak!

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:05:49 -0700

salam 3alaikum… this post comes from our reporter in cairo. man sub7anAllah, this is the first 3eid i spend in cairo. i woke up, as usual, to the fajr athan. i got up, prayed, and went back to sleep, only to wake up a little later to the loud speakers broadcasting the people saying, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, la illaha illa Allah… Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar.. wa lillahi al 7amd…”

مصر

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 15:17:48 -0700

my flight to مصر is in 4 hours insha’Allah. i’ll be back friday insha’Allah. its short, but on the bright side, i get a few days off of work and i get to celebrate eid there insha’Allah. eid mubarak to all in advance.

three books, wp 2.0, etc

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:37:26 -0700

peace… i installed wordpress 2.0 (actually, its been installed for a few days now, i installed svn version right before it came out because the download link was broken). as you can see, no asthetic changes here… but the control panel is much nicer… really beautiful. in addition, i installed a plugin (spam karma 2) to deal with the comment spam… so far so good, lets see how it fairs over the next while.

moved to dreamhost!

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 01:08:46 -0700

greets… i’ve just moved the site to dreamhost. i have been using shieldhost for a while now because it is rather cheap. but recently, i’ve been irked with some of the things they’ve done (i had another domain hosted there too which i was pretty sure was set to auto bill my credit card every quarter, but then they stopped billing me and stopped the service, claiming that i didn’t pay… well yeah, you don’t charge me, i don’t pay…), and sometimes, i just couldn’t access it…

come again?

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 18:55:37 -0700

a long time ago, when i still used to use xmms, there was this nice plugin called Repeat It! that let you say, “repeat this song between this and this times forever.”

i found myself missing that feature today… unfortunately, i don’t have xmms installed and don’t want it installed because i now like the gtk2 based mp3 players, like beep for example.

but because beep is being rewritten as bmpx, i figure rather than porting the plugin, i can just write a much simpler command line version based on the existing plugin that works with beep.

del.icio.us

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:34:59 -0700

mmm, delicious! this thing is pretty cool, i wish i’d known about it before…

random stuff

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:38:44 -0700

my desktop is sorta dying… everytime i reboot, it kinda sits there doing nothing, and i often have to shut it off and turn it on for it to work (sometimes more than once). when it does decide to come on, i often get a message about “dram timing is loose” - not sure if this means my ram is going bad or if my board is going bad… either way, its not good news.

php doesn't take "ﻻ" for an answer?

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:25:05 -0700

peace… one interesting observation i came along is the treatment of “ﻻ” (which you get by pressing b on a qwerty keyboard) in php… for whatever reason, if someone enters it into a form for example and you try to get the value of the first character of the string, you get 0. oddly enough, this works fine for any other arabic characters typed in. any ideas on why this would happen?

!عربى

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 01:07:31 -0700

لقد عزمت النية ان اتعلم كتابه العربيه على الكمبيوتر إن شاء الله.

eid mubarak, a 'WHAT' prayer service!?, etc

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:48:50 -0700

eid mubarak to all… eid mubarak :) big arguments, like every year, about when eid is, when we can and when we can’t have eid, some people want others to fast 31 days because they think its impossible for the moon to be seen today… but anyhow, i looked online at a lunar calendar and it says that the new moon is tonite, which makes eid tomorrow, so whatever man… that’s what my masjid is doing, that’s what a lot of people are doing, and al7amdulillah, that’s what i am doing. its not worth such a big fight, argument, and controversy as far as i am concerned.

speaking lion

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:14:40 -0700

this video is totally sub7anAllah-inducing. you may have to right click and “save target as” to get it to download.

hitchhiker's guide, ruby mozembed

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:09:10 -0700

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

i finally got around to reading the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. really funny book. maybe i will try to read the other books at some point.

i played around some today with ruby-gnome2 bindings. all i can say is wow. the website documentation is incredible, and you can do so much in so little code. i played around some with ruby-gtkmozembed, and in a few lines of code, you basically have a fully functional web browser.

some islamic poetry

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 21:52:19 -0700

here’s some islamic poetry i came across in a lecture by sheikh muhammad al-shareef:

_ la dara lel mar2ee ba3d al mowtee yaskonoha illa alatee kana qabl al mawtee yabneeha fa2in banaha be'7ayrin taaba maskanahu wa in banaha be sharin, ‘7aba baneeha _

roughly… there is no home for a person after he dies to live in, except the one he was building before he dies, so if he builds it with khayr/good deeds, his home will be beautiful, but if he builds it with the sin/disobedience, its builder will be in trouble.

first bugzilla bug

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:14:47 -0700

at the suggestion of behdad off the arabeyes-developers list, i’ve posted my color and arabic shaping frustrations [along with the code] on gnome’s bugzilla.

hopefully someone can point me in the right direction…

emperor under wine

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 21:56:12 -0700

emperor works great under cedega - i beat one level with it :)

from dual to single boot

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 23:20:16 -0700

i’ve always dual booted windows and linux even though linux was my primary os [i am currently running gentoo, its great!]. but finally, today, i’ve deleted the xp partition and am now running 100% linux. i may get vmware so i can play around with visual studio if i want to write some windows apps, but i think the days of dual booting are over for me, at least for now.

pyboids!

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:08:19 -0700

greets. so these few days, i’ve been playing around with the boids algorithm, trying to write a simple implementation. i finally succeeded in doing so, in python, in under 125 lines. its pretty simple though but really cool.

boids is a “distributed behavioral model,” representing how birds fly or fish swim or whatnot. that link is a pretty good discussion of the algorithm, and this page has some pseudo code for the algorithm.

over 2 decades of h4x0r1n6

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:27:13 -0700

my friend and i’s conversation about my birthday:

(00:17:27) e_jive: so how young are u ?

(00:17:30) e_jive: lol

(00:17:37) ahmed: celebrating over 2 decades of elite code!

(00:17:43) e_jive: lol

(00:17:46) e_jive: true

(00:17:52) e_jive: so are u a guru now?

(00:18:00) e_jive: u know 2 decades is a lifetime

(00:18:25) e_jive: especially considering u came out of the womb with a laptop and a palm pilot :)

WoW under linux

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:15:48 -0700

woohoo, got world of warcraft running in linux! it worked, for the most part, under wine [w/o sound]… it works a little better under cedega [sound, a little better of a frame rate], but i am running it on cedega using d3d rather than opengl… whenever i try to run it on cedega with opengl, cedega dies. not sure why.

the game is surprisingly playable from the little bit i played. i had to turn the settings down [they were all the way at max in windows and i was still getting better frame rates than in linux]. now i get decent frame rates even outside [i tested it in auberdine and the wetlands, but i have not yet ventured to ironforge around the auction house to see what happens there].

dvorak

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:29:48 -0700

jawwad - after reading the nice comics at http://dvzine.org, i bit the bullet… and, as a result, i am typing this post at the amazing rate of roughly 2 wpm…

pango issues, etc

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:29:12 -0700

greets… so the pango team [owen in specific] were really helpful in the past in helping fix the arabic tashkeel problem [where tashkeel on characters causes random spaces in the text]. luckily, this is fixed now. (interestingly enough, firefox for windows is broken in this respect, and, in linux, if you don’t compile with enabling pango, its broken there too… but it works on osx out of the box).

i ran into another little issue and was wondering if anyone knew how to get around this [and i emailed owen taylor in the meanwhile]. basically, the issue arises that when you insert html tags in the middle of a word, the state information of the parser is lost… as a result:

last week...

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 11:40:35 -0700

peace. err, its been a week since i posted last.

so i found an awesome masjid not too far from where i live now. 23 acres of land, they have a school (not sure how big the school is or to what grades/levels, etc), a gym, basketball court, soccer field, etc. the founder is a very well educated guy [according to the (website)]. i heard him speak because he came to the masjid which i go to for jum3ah and he gave a really nice khutbah about the ornaments of this life.

what is taqwa

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 10:03:03 -0700

peace… i forgot to post this earlier, but this is a pretty neat definition of taqwa that was told during the khutbah this week.

al-taqwa hiya al-‘7awf min al-jaleel, wal 3amalu bil tanzeel, wal rida bil qaleel, wal isti3dad leyawm al-ra7eel.

approximately, this means… taqwa is the fear of the mighty, and following the revelation, and being content with what is little, and preparing for the day of departure.

i should try to type that in arabic just to see if wp supports it at some point.

a cool weekend

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 22:59:24 -0700

peaces… this weekend was pretty adventure filled… friday i watched sin city, but didn’t quite get understand why it had such crazy high ratings…

saturday went to nyc with achin, salman, and mansoor… went to ground zero, jefferson heights [desi town (tm)], and walked around times square. ate at platters and “king king kabab king.” pretty fun trip. saw some cool performances on the subway…

met a lebanese guy making paintings on the sideways with spray paint cans – he was making these paintings really fast, and they were really awesome looking… and he was charging $20 each. i had to have one… and everyone with me bought one too. here’s how mine looks like:

sweet weather

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 22:27:04 -0700

pieces. had some amazing weather these past two days – i went to work without a jacket today for the first time in several months! so beautiful.

fawaad had a pretty neat quote up as an away message the other day that i liked, so i figured i’d share it.

“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind. " - Leonardo da Vinci

path to utopian cooking

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 21:47:59 -0700

peaces. i made kosharee today!! anddddd, it was amazing! seriously, amazing! [well, the lentils didn’t cook too well, but besides that small fact, it was amazing :)].

i saw fight club friday night, pretty neat movie. salman came yesterday from ATLs, chilled with him, batra and babar some. today, went supermarketing and did some amazing cooking.

oh i played with ant some too, its pretty neat.

well, that’s all for now.

saboon rocks

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:09:59 -0700

saboon is cool. i like it so far. saboon, saboon, saboon. back to washing services…

namazTime 0.4 and prayertime desklet 0.4

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:24:25 -0700

salam 3alaikum. as requested, i’ve updated the prayertime desklet to be compatible with the latest gdesklets. it now relies on libitl 0.6.4 and itools-0.6.2, which can be obtained from the arabeyes itl page. hopefully this should fix some of the problems people were having earlier. i’ve tested it under gdesklets 0.34.2. an old but accurate screenshot can be found here.

while i was at it, i also updated the namazTime software to also use the latest itl code and improved the image installation issue somewhat [now the software just assumes a /usr/local based install]. namazTime is a gtk2 based tray program for telling salat times. (there’s an old but fairly accurate screenshot in this post.

martial arts

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 23:05:12 -0700

peace ppls. “kbaj” just sent me this url – this guy is totally incredible so it seems from the preview i saw: http://www.ongbakmovie.com/

that’s all for now. peace outs.

life update

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 21:29:40 -0700

greets… oh so last weekend, i moved out of babarstan and into batrastan. so far its going well, the place is pretty clean and i am pretty much settled in. but yeah, i don’t like moving…

oh and i am going to atlanta tomorrow insha’Allah. its been almost two months now…

peace outs.

blog upgraded to wp1.5

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:13:54 -0700

i upgraded the blog to wp1.5. and, as a result, my old theme needs to be ported over.. but i think i am just going to stick to the default for now since it looks really slick… that is all.

broken palm pilot

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:08:20 -0700

so i turn on my palm pilot this morning to see this:

i have no idea how this happened…

a moving story of tawbah

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:23:15 -0700

pieces. so i was listening to a lecture about tawbah [repentance] by amr khaled [http://www.amrkhaled.net] from the series of “isla7 al quloob,” or fixing/purifying of the heart… and in one of those lectures was, what i felt, was a really moving story.

the story was that of malik ibn dinar, who is one of the imams or leaders of the tabi3een who was known to be very pious.

but malik ibn dinar didn’t start off as a pious man. malik ibn dinar tells his story. he says that he began his life as a drunk person, as a disobedient person, as a person who would eat other people’s rights, as a person who was so bad that people would avoid him because of how bad he was.

the weblog is back!

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:59:41 -0700

hellos ladies and gentlemens, the websites is back ups. indeeds. that is all.

sixers and nuggets, etc

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:45:49 -0700

greets. i went to my first real nba basketball game today. it was pretty boring at first, but the last 2 quarters were pretty interesting because the 76ers made an insane comeback against the nuggets.

my keyboard is… bleh. so the first keyboard stopped being very responsive with some of the keys, and so i bought a cheap one. the geniuses who designed it put a hibernate, sleep, and off buttons right on top of the plus key. so naturally, while you are playing games and stuff, its really easy to hit the key and shut the system off or put it to sleep, which is very frustrating.

urdu poetry, arabic analysis, and the mufti's comments

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 23:28:17 -0700

peace. oh yeah, if you’re looking for the important [time worthy] summary of this blog post, then here it is – “this post is a total waste of time – but best of luck to my friends who are taking finals!”

anyway (for those of you who have time to waste), so one of my friends had this as an away message:

“Pyar huwa ikraar hua hai, pyar se phir kyoon darta hai dil? kehta hai dil, rasta mushkil, pyar ki hai kahaan manzil?”

gt rap

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:10:05 -0700

changing topics from the previous umm… interesting comments to the previous post, here was something i wrote up. i was gonna record it too but then i didn’t feel like it. but yeah. peace outs.

a few years ago in senior year i had a confusion and a bit of fear where should i go to university would it be emory umich or GT

not sure and having no real clue i chose GT as the thing to do and as a cs major i began my school thinking coding is fun and cool

its going to be a long week...

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 23:12:47 -0700

peaces. came back from the trip yesterday (sunday nite around 9ish). the traffic coming back was insane for part of the way (130 miles in 4 hours…). but al7amdulillah we made it back in ~14 hours.

the sky was really beautiful. i was driving around the close of 3asr and entrance of maghrib time, and man it was beautiful. it was like there were all these shades of blue that were coming together in some places. in other places, you could see what looked like a rainbow, but it was just because of how the different colors merged in layers and stuff. too bad i left my camera here though.

going home!

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 07:11:26 -0700

peaces. insha’Allah am leaving for home in a few hours - not too excited about the 12 hour drive, but its worth it :) hope everyone has a wonderful break insha’Allah!

national [egyptian] treasure

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:18:14 -0700

i saw national treasure today. it was pretty okay, not amazing, but fun and entertaining. i guess i should say i saw it yesterday since today is not today anymore and today is now yesterday. err, something like that, i am going to sleeps.

peaces.

beautifocity, etc.

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:54:24 -0700

xdesktopwaves (http://xdesktopwaves.sourceforge.net) is really nice – totally incredible. it overlays your root background and as you move your mouse or windows, they act like boats moving through water and make ripples on the desktop. really neat!

been playing through kingdom hearts… about 6 hours through it… while i had my doubts at first, i think its pretty good so far… i also ordered a copy of xenosaga off amazon.com - it was on sale and free shipping… plus i had a gift card from my little brother for eid (thanks rami!) so i ended up charging like $0.76 to my credit card for the game… it’ll be pretty funny if that’s all i buy on the card this month and i have to write a check to the credit card company for $0.76…

blog updates

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:07:07 -0700

peace. made a bunch of updates and changes, both internally and externally. most notably:

removed the pictures and audio for now.
one can no longer comment on entries that are more than one week old.
added the weblog categories on the side bar.
minor cosmetic changes to the side bar.
now using the iG syntax highlighter for syntax highlighting code.

more updates later.

blog spam

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 03:33:14 -0700

peace.. so i neglected the blog for a few days, and i come back and find a huge number of casino ads on my site. so i installed the wpblacklist plugin; hopefully it should take care of it… more updates later.

google sets

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 01:23:02 -0700

this is really neat: google sets.

try putting in these words in the first and second box to see google’s piousity:

“fajr” in box 1, “zuhr” in box 2. “shahada” in box 1, “salat” in box 2. “ramadan” in box 1, “shawwal” in box 2.

i am sure there are more but… feel free to post them in the comments. dang, that’s awesome :)

blasphemy of ignorant fools

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 08:25:37 -0700

good morning, sign this petition.

i read the book’s review on amazon just to be sure before signing the petition, and all i can say is that i am aghast that such a person can be so blasphemous and say these kind of things. what an ignorant person…

i was going to continue on with this post explaining why the above sentence is true, but i think i can write a long essay defending points about this, and now’s not the time…

random updates

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 23:44:46 -0700

greets, peace, etc. today, i decided to upload the nasheeds i have produced over time to this webpage. they’re all in the new “audio studio” section on the webpage. and yes, they’re not great nor listenable-toable, but they’re there to induce (slight) laughter. there are still some other things i want to upload to this page, but it’s a matter of time…

it was sooooooo cold today! [i learned that my camera does some cool stuff today when i looked at the book to find out how to get the camera to automatically take this picture after 10 seconds… i want to take some pictures!].

nostalgia and the onion

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 23:58:57 -0700

ramadan here is not the same as it is in atlanta… i “felt” ramadan a lot more in atlanta than i do here - besides being more excited about everything in general (iftars, tarawee7, etc), i also felt more motivated overall. ramadan here just isn’t the same – it really doesn’t even compare.

but its not just ramadan that isn’t even the same… its really everything. life in general doesn’t compare to what it was back home in atlanta… everything is totally different now.

ramadan kareem!

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 22:34:06 -0700

insha’Allah we’re starting our fasting tomorrow (10/15). more updates later…

random

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 22:31:51 -0700

peace. not much going on here. i posted some of the pictures i took in atlanta up, but i ended up deleting some of them on accident. so there are only a few on there, but you can see them on the photo galleries.

google launched sms.google.com - seems like something pretty useful and neat.

gmail rocks - i still got some invitations if anyone wants one.

i upgraded to the newest wordpress version that was released yesterday…

its friday!

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 11:32:00 -0700

peace.. today is friday. not just is friday special because of its religious implications, but also because its the end of the week. and, best of all, because today, after work insha’Allah, i am going home! al7amdulillah :)

i miss my family and friends, so i am really looking forward to going home. now if only the clock would move faster…

uber rain, etc

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:33:16 -0700

today, it rained like insanity. like seriously. so it rained all night and stuff and in the morning it was fine. so i went to work, and, just out of cautiousness, i took my umbrella. when it came time to leave, i was amazed - it was like pitch black outside and it was raining insanely.

so then i started driving home and the exprience was simply horrible. traffic was the least of problems… the water in some places was so high up, it felt that i was driving a boat rather than a car. i had my wipers on max speed, and it was still kinda hard to see. even more so, as i would drive, big splashes of water would come from both sides of my car. but al7amdulillah (all praise and thanks be to God), we made it home safely.

beautiful weather

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:37:31 -0700

the weather today was absolutely incredibly amazing. so i played basketball. and then i came home and was hungry. so i took a shower. and then i cooked dinner - chicken fingers/strips… and rice… and heated some vegatables (fasolya bayda - black eyed peas without a black eye) that my mom had given me before i left a month ago… and that is all.

oh and today (thursday) marks 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day of being here.

google code jam frustration

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:09:52 -0700

i am so frustrated right now, i feel like yelling and screaming, etc, except that i can’t because mansoor’s asleep and the neighbors are too…

sooooo… something makes me decide to sign up for this google code jam 2004 competition… bad idea.

so it was 2 problems for the 1st round (i guess there was a challenge round or something too but i dunno, 2 problems basically, and you had an hour to do both of them).

namazTime 0.3b for linux

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 22:30:37 -0700

peace. people with linux and gtk2 can download the 0.3 beta version of namazTime. its pretty much functional (although it doesn’t make athan yet). please do consult the (very short) readme before attempting to run it.

and most importantly, please leave me some feedback, bug reports, etc. wa jaza Allah al-mu2mineena (wal mu2minati) khairan.

prayertime app update, etc

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:33:04 -0700

peace… i pretty much finished the linux gtk2 version of the prayertime application… all i am missing is 2 things - a nice icon for the tray, and adding notification (ex. athan or a dialog box when a prayer time comes about). there’s also one little bug i am trying to fix, i am not sure if its an itl bug or if its a bug in my code, so insha’Allah going to try to figure that out…

a tiny bit of code...

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 23:57:58 -0700

peace. i started playing with the excellent ITL libraries today. my hope is to write a simple application that just sits in the system tray and gives a simple listing of when the salat times are.

as you can see, its in uber beta stage right now. insha’Allah the plan is for gtk2 and windows versions; and then insha’Allah i’ll try to fix up my broken gdesklet.

picture credits, etc

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:39:40 -0700

peace. first off, i want to just point out that not all the pictures on the photos page are pictures that i took. for instance, most of the moving to penn pictures were taken by jawwad, so i wanted to give him credit here.

i have more gmail invitations if anyone wants any – everytime i give some out, they give me more invitations again…

about blog comments, i got my first piece of “comment spam” a few days ago – essentially, i got an email asking me if i wanted to authorize a fishy comment… and sure enough; it looked like it was generated by a script or something; similar to those spam emails. so maybe since no one comments (except like one person who posts his own little blog under mine), i should remove the commenting ability off the site…

isna trip and photo galleries

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 22:25:22 -0700

peace and greetings. before i start talking about my isna trip, for those in a rush, i finally got around to putting up my picture galleries on my website. gthumb is a really nice program, i used it to both get the pictures off my camera and to generate the albums. very nice.

anyhow, on to the isna trip. so this year could really be considered my first year going to isna trip, although it wasn’t. i went to the chicago isna a long time ago with my family, but i am too young to remember much of anything; except that i stayed with the little kids, went to the sears tower, and got an autograph from the famous egyptian reciter, sheikh muhammad jibreel.

6 gmail invites

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 23:49:59 -0700

peace. i got 6 gmail invites, if you want one, leave a comment with your name and email address, first 6 comments get it.

pictures of various trips and things coming soon (tm). insha’Allah.

el update

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:48:21 -0700

greets… i got my digital camera working in linux and got the pictures off of it; along with getting a whole bunch of pictures from jawwad. so i am planning on putting up a picture gallery on this site sometime soon insha’Allah (with God’s willing).

windows almost messed up my linux yesterday: i was trying to create a blank partition, and it renamed my primary linux partition from /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hdb3… so, of course, the system didn’t boot…

life's lessons learned the hard way

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:04:04 -0700

peace… its been a while since i’ve updated, but that’s really due to a great number of things, from some games (late july/early august), to a shift to a new phase in life (moving, etc), to a bit of illness, so its been hard to find time to update till now.

i just got out of the hospital yesterday. to make a long story short, i went out with my friends to try this turkish restaurant - most of us ate this one side dish, and all of us who did got sick. my friends who got sick had to drive 800 miles home while they were sick, which is really horrible… i got sick pretty bad to the extent that i was hospitalized for a few days… i am still recovering now, but am feeling a lot better, al7amdulillah (thanks to God).

game stuff

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 02:55:48 -0700

i beat grandia 2… excellent game, i liked it… i also just started ffx. seems pretty cool so far..

i did have a tad bit of productivity despite the gaming though… i played around a bit with jpgraph, pretty nice for making graphs on the fly in php.

that’s about all for now though…

license, project done, etc

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 02:28:22 -0700

so the other day (tuesday to be exact), i went to get my license renewed, and ended up waiting in line for more than 4 hours! i learned (albeit a little too late) that one can renew their license online – but you have to apply at least 60 days before… i guess i’ll try to remember that for the future.

it was pretty cool though - i ran into one of the teachers from highschool, and was able to find out what all my other teachers did. i haven’t visited in a long time, maybe i will consider visiting sometime..

project practically done!

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 00:23:36 -0700

peace. at last, i am done with the code for the project. i am almost done with the report, as soon as i finish it, i’ll post a page here with screenshots of the project in action and the code. (this is at my professor’s request, i am not a nerd, i wouldn’t have put it up here otherwise… err… i guess my writing code on my free time (the slippy game, for example) disproves that… oh well)… more updates soon (tm) [insha’Allah].

project update, etc

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 01:46:21 -0700

greets… i spent the majority of the weekend writing code for my project… seemingly, however, no matter how much i write, or no matter what i do, i always realize or discover that i forgot something else and have to go back and fix it or account for it… not to mention that some of the stuff just takes forever… bleh.

i came across some interesting stuff today while reading /. - the first is a story of a one year old pakistani baby who got an eye transplant. pretty amazing.

spiderman 2...

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 01:51:29 -0700

… is an awesome movie.

an aim-less attempt...

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 01:44:27 -0700

effective tomorrow, july 1st, 2004, insha’Allah (with God’s willing) i am going to attempt to remain off aim. the reason: i have less than a month left for the end of the semester, and i need to finish up my project… otherwise, really bad things could happen.

so i suggest that if you actually read this site (or want to read it) that you bookmark it or memorize the address or something because you won’t be able to get it from my profile (unless of course i break down and log on, but i am hoping that won’t happen).

exhibit your rappin' rhymin' skills

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 01:07:37 -0700

based on the crazy slew of comments on the other posts, i came up with the idea of this thread…

basically, anyone who wants to participate should comment with a rap or rhyme of sorts, and ppl can reply back with their own raps and rhymes and yeah…

i just think it could be interesting… if people participate…

slippy now in early beta stage

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 23:40:50 -0700

greets! did some more work on slippy today. the game works and is totally playable. the things left to do are: 1. save the state and load it up when the program starts and ends, 2. add some menu items to allow someone to jump to levels they’ve beaten, reset levels, and give instructions on how to play, 3. test some more.

i’ve redid the graphics (well, i took the graphics from the ti86 version for the black and white one, and just added color for the color one). the problem is, when i embiggen the graphics, it ends up looking really bad (like the previous post’s screenshot).

productivity in the wrong place?

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 02:18:42 -0700

greets… so rather than work on my school work like i should be doing, i got carried away messing around with palm programming… after finding a really nice palm programming tutorial, and downloading some open source examples (the boulderpalm source was really helpful) and finding my really old calculator stuff, i started to write slippy for the palm…

i got the first level to draw and revamped the graphics from the old one, although the coins, the penguin, and the non-solid ice need some work… if anyone wants to help me make graphics, email me or im me and let me know.

more email stuffs, kernel 2.6, etc.

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 03:50:02 -0700

greets. so on the current thread of email and such, i read two interesting things on /. - the first is the fact that yahoo and hotmail put gmail messages directly to bulk mail… i am not sure if this refers to any emails or just to invites, i have yet to test this. if anyone can confirm or deny this, please post a comment.

secondly, hotmail is supposedly going to up their quota to 250 mb, seeing that yahoo’s upped to 100 mb. this is supposed to happen sometime soon i guess… the article is here.

two new cats

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 00:44:11 -0700

less than a week after sufi left the residence, she was replaced with two cats, whom my brother decided to name “peach” and “mango” – not quite sure why.

i guess that’s all for now…

webmail, etc

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 16:13:44 -0700

argh, yesterday was quite a day. first off, i deleted all the numbers on my palm pilot accidently (i hard resetted the palm, and thought that when i sync it, the program would send the contacts and calendar info back to the palm… but i was mistaken). so after spending time and restoring an old backup and updating it, i then proceeded to accidently delete my entire mp3 collection. argh.

sufi is gone, beat ff9

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 03:45:28 -0700

greets. no more sufi cat for us, we decided to give it away because its deaf and it walks kinda funny too. go figure.

i beat ff9! awesome game! i guess i can finally try to be productive and do the school work that i’ve been putting off.

that’s all for now…

new sufi on the block

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 00:59:41 -0700

we got a cat! i think my little brother and i have unanimously decided to name him sufi.

update - its actually a “she,” not a he.

get some jeans at the mall

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 02:01:46 -0700

a picture is worth a thousand words…

el road trip

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:45:30 -0700

peace and greetings all. so over the break, mansoor and i went on a road trip up north. we stopped in the suberbs of penn, dc, and virginia. here is a list of interesting things we came across…

a short movie of our trip i got a canon powershot digital camera about a month back, and i was finally able to use it. i made a short movie of us driving at night. note the effect that the street lights have on the movie. (and yes, i realized (after the fact), that there is no way you could have a flash running while taking a movie clip, but i mean some kind of lighting is nice… then again, its a camera, not a camcorder..)

highway insanity, heros

Fri, 28 May 2004 04:48:21 -0700

greets… today, i was heading towards tech around 11:30 am, and as soon as i got off the highway, i saw a whole bunch of traffic. i thought to myself, “odd, its way past morning rush hour” - and while i was still on the ramp, i saw all these people u-turning off the highway and back up the ramp… so i did the same and took the highway from a few exits down by cumberland. i later found out that there was a man threatening to jump off the windy hill bridge, and i guess he did :-/ its pretty sad… God doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle and tolerate…

apple, brittney, and wealth

Sun, 23 May 2004 03:20:13 -0700

greets all. so yes, i guess as one of my respected friends pointed out, i need new entries to get more interesting responses… maybe… just maybe… i’ll try posting semi-controversial things and see what happens…

anyhow, you can learn quite a bit of random stuff from tv… i was flipping through the channels and learned two interesting facts. first, i learned about this interesting trend of celebrities naming their children weird names… one actress named her daughter “apple” – i ran a google search, and i found out that names get much weirder than that – there’s a couple who named their son “pilot inspektor,” and there’s also a couple who named their son “audio science,” and yet another couple who named their son “moon unit.” based on this trend, i guess when i have a child, i’ll look around the house and the first thing i see is what i’ll name my child after… i do have to say though, one of the actors, rob morrow, named his daughter tu, making her name tu morrow… i think that’s pretty neat.

the weather is crazy hot

Fri, 21 May 2004 17:35:49 -0700

need i say more?

babar's wedding pics, p-p-p-powerbook, etc

Tue, 18 May 2004 23:02:59 -0700

greets. not much going on, i beat ff6, now on to ff8… anyways… mansoor just got a shieldhost account too, and put his wedding pictures up! you can find them at mansoorbabar.com.

if you want to read something pretty funny (at least look at the pictures if you don’t want to read it), check this out - the story of the P-P-P-Powerbook.

today i also fixed the rendering of the site in internet explorer. okay, that’s all for now. oh and thanks to mansoor for leaving the first comment on my page :)

website up!

Mon, 17 May 2004 22:57:01 -0700

greets! finally, at last, i was able to put the new site up! it wasn’t a fun experience (initially, i designed and tested the site on my home box with pyblosxom, only to find out that it wouldn’t work on the hosting site, so after sending a request for support, i decided to try to “port” my work over to wordpress rather than wait for them to get back to me); but its done.