Updated to WordPress 2.8.2

Bismillāhir Raḥmānir Raḥīm Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve just successfully upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.8.2, along with several other blogs that I maintain.  I’m really looking forward to the merger of WordPress & WordPress-MU, which, ideally, will make managing multiple WordPress sites on the same server easier to deal with, in shāʾ Allāh.

Getting back on track

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, nothing can take away from the blessing & joy of being a father, but one of the obvious side effects of having an infant is the drastic change in priorities.  So, naturally, most of my projects have fallen on the wayside.  Even work has suffered.  But, alhamdulillaah, this just means I…

Unfinished Projects

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I have the bad habit of starting things and not completing them.  This is bad for numerous reasons, just a few of which I’ll list shortly.  I will warn you now that as this post is meant to help me organize my thoughts, it will list-heavy, as I do find lists and…

$PATH in Fedora 10

[basilgohar@beta ~]$ echo $PATH /usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin\ :/home/basilgohar/bin Note: This is for future reference as I try to make some progress on an old project.  I do not think the last value is a default for Fedora, but rather, something added later.  If someone knows otherwise, please correct me! Update: I’m starting to dislike fixed-width templates…corrected the…

screen is my new best friend

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Note: This is a post I started writing back in November, but only got around to updating now. Alhamdulillaah, I cannot believe I’ve lived for so long without knowing about screen (Wikipedia article).  To put it as simple as possible, think of screen as a “tabbed” interface for terminals/shells.  This is a…

LDAP for authentication back end

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem For a long time now I’ve been wanting to setup an LDAP back end for various Hidayah Online Network resources, especially the Columbus Dawah project.  This has become particularly pressing as the Columbus Dawah website has three primary public services – the blog, the forums, the school.  Additionally, in the future I…

Concatenating compressed files

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I have my new server (aalimraan.hidayahonline.net – the one hosting Audio Islam) setup to log web accesses each day to its own file which is then bzip2-compressed.  This is convenient for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I can easily access statistics for each day by processing the appropriate file. B, I can…

WordPress 2.7 released!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.7 has been released!  Hit the link for all the releasy goodness. I’ve upgraded my personal blog, and I’ll take care of the rest in due time, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Upgrading with SVN is always recommended. Happy blogging!

rTorrent let me down :(

For seeding the Fedora 10 release, I am using rTorrent on albaqarah & aalimraan (my two fastest servers), but I had to fall back to using the standard bittorrent client on alfaatihah because rTorrent isn’t available for its platform (RHEL3) – at least, not through yum nor up2date.  rTorrent is great, in general, but it…

Blog almost certainly 100% compliant now

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, after loading up all blog-post pages (i.e., going to the bottom of each page and clicking for the next page), I’ve fixed all old posts that had HTML errors (according to the HTML Validator Firefox plugin). This actually is a relief for me because amongst the major reasons I enjoy using…

New server for Audio Islam

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, following a recommendation from a close friend, I decided to start leasing a server from 10TB.com for Audio Islam.  As the name implies, they are big on bandwidth, which is exactly what Audio Islam needs.  Needless to say, I’m thrilled at having a new beefy server to play with and to…

Naïve integer primality calculator in PHP

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, while reading about integers and, subsequently, prime numbers last night, I decided the time had come for me to write a primality calculator in PHP.  The test I use in my implementation is about as a naïve as one can possible get, but it was fun, nonetheless. Interestingly enough, I discovered…

Audio Islam now running on lighttpd

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam.  Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.

Message Mastery by Belal Khan

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery.  You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of…

Nokia plans to buy Symbian, open OS

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year.  If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system…

Blog now completely Creative Commons-licensed

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, after finding the wpLicense WordPress plugin on the Creative Commons website, I’ve been able to completely license all my work released through my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.  This means such world-changing works as my essay on Social Networking & online projects, my tirade against anti-userism,…

ffmpeg from svn

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects.  However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on…

Fedora 9 seeding stats

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day – at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

Fedora 9 is gold!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 9 is officially released! At least, the official torrents are available. The main site doesn’t seem to be updated yet, but then again, it’s not 10 AM, either. I’m grabbing the x86_64 DVD build on one server and the i386 on the other, so I hope to be seeding by…