pango issues, etc

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:

i went to houston last weekend. pretty nice, the only notable thing is that all the traffic lights are sideways. that and our flight to got delayed for such a long time because the gas truck ran out of gas [or, as we were to later discover, “broke down”]. thank God i didn’t have a connecting flight… anyways… that’s all for now.

last week...

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.

also last week, i installed 1gb ram in my mac mini. opening the mini wasn’t too bad, but closing it was pretty bad. but i managed to do it without scratching it up, al7amdulillah. now everything seems to run a lot smoother.

i also took a little glance at an objective c tutorial. it seems as though you can write osx cocoa apps either in objective c or in java, and that there’s some means of bridging between the languages as well. pretty neat, but haven’t actually written any code with it yet.

i went apartment hunting this weekend… found nothing yet…

but anyway, that’s all for now.

what is taqwa

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

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:

today was a pretty uneventful day… i spent most of the day id3 tagging my mp3 collection and did nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting. switched my ipod to hfs rather than fat… which means now i have to sync it on my mac and only on the mac. but i have no problem with that at the moment. finally got the firmware on it upgraded too.

anyhow… that’s all for now. ** update [4/11/2005 @ 11:05 am]:** made the image smaller so it doesn’t make the layout on planet arabeyes look bad.

sweet weather

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

ff7 advent children looks pretty sweet, i prolly wanna see it when it comes out. there’s also going to be a katamari damacy 2 coming out. katamari damacy is one of the strangest games i’ve played, but still a pretty neat game.

anyways, that’s all for now.

path to utopian cooking

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

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

namazTime 0.4 and prayertime desklet 0.4

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.

click here to download the 0.4 version of the prayertime desklet.

click here for the latest 0.4 version of namazTime.

btw, all this stuff only works on linux. i guess i should try to get windows and osx versions running at some point as well…

walsalam 3alaikum.

martial arts

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

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.