/index.xml

فول أحمد العظيم

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.

what is this: this is a dish known as “فول” in arabic (pronounced ‘fool’). it’s a bean dish famous in the middle east as a breakfast or late night snack.

ingredients:

  • 1 (or more) cans of fava beans

  • 1 (or more) cans of sliced tomatoes

  • lemon juice

  • tahina (ground sesame seed)

these ingredients can mostly be obtained at any middle eastern or desi grocery store.

instructions:

  • obtain a pot.
  • open beans and put beans in the pot.
  • add tomatoes to the pot.
  • mix together well.
  • add a little bit of tahina to the pot - enough to make it slightly lighter color, but not too much. maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons at most
  • heat together and mix well.
  • add lemon on top and serve (with pita bread usually).

for an upgraded experience: of course if you want to go all out, try replacing the canned tomatoes with fresh tomatoes, the canned beans with fresh ones that you must first leave in water for some time, and replace the lemon juice with real lemon. experts can try placing the aforementioned mixture with the fresh ingredients into a pressure cooker for better results.

the meaning of the title: the title, which means ahmed’s great fool, is a pun on the arabic comedy movie, “فول الصين العظيم”, in which the main character cooks fool in a cooking competition in china.

introducing waqt.org

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

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.

read 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

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

essentially, it contains two commands -

  1. 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.
  2. 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 :)

update - rather than make my own screencast, i’ve decided to record a set of audio instructions on how to use it.

by the way - if you haven’t used ubiquity before, i highly recommend that you watch this video first. it explains what ubiquity is and gives you an idea of what it is useful for. to put it quite simply, ubiquity is amazing. it’s an indispensable tool for your firefox. watch the video :)

and here is the audio tutorial on the quran plugin for ubiquity.

enjoy!

website changes

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

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

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

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

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.

  • images - copy a set of 604 images to your iphone, with each image representing one page of the Quran. then, when you want to read Quran, you load up the photo viewer and read the pages there. you can find these images in many places. here is one example. this is the best solution for reading the Quran in Arabic if you don’t want to jailbreak your phone.

  • pdfs - in my opinion, the best way to read quran on the iphone (if you have a good pdf viewer). you don’t have to hassle with syncing images, nor do you have to deal with 604 files on your phone that you must go through in order to read Quran. also, pdfs tend to be of higher quality than images. this is the solution i recommend if you have or are willing to jailbreak your phone.

since the first solution is straight forward and instructions for the second solution are available on the link above, i will here outline instructions on how to use pdfs.

first, i need to point something out - you technically don’t need to jailbreak your phone to view the quran pdfs on it - you could download one of the apps in the appstore that views pdfs and use it. however, i’ve tried several of the free ones, and was never satisfied with the speed and performance of any of them. the best pdf viewer i found for the iphone is safari itself. so in order to be able to access these pdfs without a connection, you need to have a webserver running on your phone… and that is why you need to jailbreak your phone :)

preview here are three screenshots of how it looks like: menu quran text quran text (wide).

instructions

  1. jailbreak your phone. on an older iphone, this is easy (install the newest firmware via itunes, then install and run quickpwn). for the 3g iphone, carefully read the instructions on quickpwn’s website, especially if you want your phone to be unlocked and/or are already using it unlocked.

  2. once the phone is jail broken, run cydia. install openssh. then install lighttpd.

  3. when you’re on a wifi network, go to your phone’s settings (from the main screen), click on wifi, and choose the network that you are currently connected to by pressing the blue arrow - note down the value of the ip address

  4. ssh into your iphone as root - in linux or osx, just open a terminal and run “ssh root@[your phone’s ip address]”. on windows, you can do this by downloading putty. the default password is alpine. keep this terminal open for the next step (recommendation - once you’re in, change your password. type passwd and choose something else besides the default. this is for security purposes).

  5. now you can set up lighttpd. download com.http.lighttpd.plist and scp it to /Library/LaunchDaemons (using mac/linux, just do scp com.http.lighttpd.plist root@[iphone’s ip]:/Library/LaunchDaemons). on windows, download winscp, log in (user name root, password is ‘alpine’ unless you’ve changed it in the above step), navigate to /Library/LaunchDaemons, and copy the file over). this file is what will set up lighttpd to start every time the phone is started, and to read the lighttpd.conf from the path below.

  6. download lighttpd.conf and scp it to /etc. this is the configuration file for the webserver.

  7. download the pdfs and web files. unzip them (you’ll get a web directory), and scp this directory to /var/root/Media (so that the files will be in /var/root/Media/web/*). note that if you change this path, you have to edit lighttpd.conf to reflect wherever you put this.

  8. finally, in the terminal you opened in the earlier step, type the following command (this command is what ultimately makes lighttpd start everytime the phone is started): launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.http.lighttpd.plist.

and that’s it… you should be good to go! open up safari and navigate to http://localhost/index.html and enjoy!

known issues

  • when transferring data to and from the phone (via ssh or scp), you want to make sure that you’re on wireless. you may also want to make sure the iphone doesn’t “sleep” so that the connection doesn’t drop.

  • sometimes, when you choose a particular file to read, you get a “cannot connect to server” error - it usually disappears and loads the page before you have a chance to click “ok.”

  • if you turn the iphone off while reading a pdf (or go to the main screen, etc), when you come back to safari, sometimes, the page may appear malformed and not allow you to read. to solve this problem, hit back to go to the index and choose a juz’ to reload it.

suggestions/additions/comments are welcome and appreciated.

update - i’ve been using batoul apps’ quranreader at the recommendation of a friend. it’s $1 in the app store, but well worth it.

so, i am a night owl...

funny. courtesy of tweet o’clock.