weather perfect for walking

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?

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.

the paneer machni i make at home (courtesy of the teachings of one famous achinb) comes out reddish/orangish after adding the shan masala… so does the paneer/chicken machni you get at restaurants in the east coast… so what’s up with that?

at mca...

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

welcome to the hotel california...

… such a lovely place

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

a slice of binary cake

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

courtesy of rlo (tm).

windows vista

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.

another thing i discovered (while trying to download the patch for WoW, admittantly :)) was that vista cuts the network device off if you’re using too much bandwidth (its a torrent download weighing around 600 mb) - to the extent that you can’t ipconfig /renew (you can /release, but you can’t renew) – and things stop working. i am sure my network connection was working because i was using the net on my other computer just fine. until i rebooted, i couldn’t use the internet at all.

finally, my 2005fpw was detecting as a “generic pnp monitor,” and i failed to get the driver correctly installed for it, and, as a result, i couldn’t play WoW in widescreen mode. oh and microsoft sql server management studio express wouldn’t install on vista either.

anyway… although most of the issues above are fixable by some set of obscure settings in msconfig and other places, i switched back to xp for the time being for a smoother gaming experience. i also gave office 2007 beta a whirl, and although its pretty different (no menus really, just a tab structure), it seems to be pretty nice. i like its built in “export to pdf” feature, but i heard they were forced to drop it.

namazTime anonymous svn

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).

the version in subversion also links against libitl, so it is no longer bundled within the app. finally, a todo list is included for people interested in helping out.

namazTime 0.9

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.

on the todo list is to fix any bugs (please comment if you find something amiss), add some sort of alarm feature (to play the athan, for example), provide translations (arabic especially), and maybe port to windows and osx.

if you try it, please leave your comments. thanks! wsalams.

goodbye, WoW

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

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.