الحد لله, Allāh has granted me tawfīq to donate to Wikipedia.  I wouldn’t mention this except for the fact that I hope others, upon reading this, might give it consideration when they otherwise would not have.  A donation to Wikipedia is tax-deductible, so you can save on your taxes or get more back on them (depending on your situation).  Ultimately, though, the reason why projects like Wikipedia and related Wikimedia Foundation projects should be supported are as I described in my comment upon donating:

Wikipedia and its related projects represent an ideal world where knowledge & information are not controlled to give power only to the few, but rather, they empower the many, ultimately benefiting the world as a whole.

So, if you have the ability, then I strongly encourage you to take the time out to donate to help support Wikipedia and its sister sites.

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.

First, the hidayahonline server (seeding the x86_64 DVD ISO file):

And second, the audioislam server (seeding the i386 DVD ISO file):

Although the audioislam server has twice the tubeage of the hidayahonline server, it is also the one more heavily loaded due to AudioIslam.com. So, they both ended-up serving around 32GB of data to the Tubes before I disconnected them for the day.

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 midday.

Update: The Fedora Project site now reflects the release.  I should really be getting back to work now…

Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9′s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9′s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community.

The following is pretty-much ripped from the wiki. The witty banter is added by me. Also, I know I’m not the first (actually, I hope I’m quite close to the last) to have done one of these things. What follows are the features that I consider to be cool and important, but this list is obviously by no means exhaustive or even appropriately representative of Fedora 9. It’s simply a list of what I think will make Fedora 9 so awesome, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Okay, that should be enough flame retardant for now…onwards!

Unified Dictionary Support

This feature is really nice because I tend to use words that aren’t in the stock dictionaries of Pidgin, Firefox, or OpenOffice.org, including transliterations of Arabic that I frequently throw into the mix (already, above, there are two examples). So, I frequently have to add these customized spellings and/or rarer words (or just plain preferred spellings) to the existing dictionaries numerous times. Fedora 9 now unifies these dictionaries so I should, technically, need only one. Awesome!

Ext4 Filesystem Support

Ext4 is the successor to the successful stable ext3 filesystem. Personally, I’ve been using this on both a fresh install of the Fedora 9 Beta and Preview releases, and I have not had any problems. On top of that, I have actually seen some significant performance enhancements, particularly when dealing with both very large as well as large numbers of files. Of course, ext4 has a laundry list of features to it, so don’t just take it from me, check it out!

Note: As the Ext4 filesystem is not nearly as long-in-the-tooth as ext3, you may consider not using it if you have only one copy of data on the filesystem. I feel comfortable and confident about using it for myself, but as people tend to be very conservative when it comes to their choice of filesystems for good reasons, just consider reading-up on it before you commit to it. And when you do, you’ll probably also think it’s awesome!

Firefox 3

Firefox has long been the poster child for the positive impact that a free and open source model can have on software. Taking the world by storm, Firefox has given a good knock to the stalwart of the Internet Age, Internet Explorer 6, and has driven innovation on the Web to new heights, not the least of which is driving Microsoft into releasing newer versions of Internet Explorer at a previously unheard of pace just to keep up with the pace of the Web.

Firefox 3 delivers yet another knock-out blow with amazingly enhanced performance (especially under GNU/Linux), excellent features (like the…wait for it…AwesomeBar…), and all-around slickness such as better cross-platform native integration (don’t think about the logic of that for too long…it’s good, trust me…).

It seems like Firefox is still in Beta for now, but as I’ve been using Firefox since version 0.7, I’ve grown accustomed to the stability that comes with the positive & productive attitude of release early, release often.

(Mandatory “awesome” reference can be found two paragraphs above.)

Gvfs

One of the beauties that Gnome has brought for us is the outstandingly flexibly and featureful Gvfs. Continuing in Gnome’s tradition of just pushing forward to improve the desktop experience, Gvfs offers a new virtual filesystem interface that allows amazingly easy & flexibly file-level access to myriad new platforms, be they of a network, device, or other type of nature. Read the link to the Gnome website for specifics about this nifty new feature.

jigdo

As one of the mirrors of the Fedora Unity Re-Spin project, I’m sort of proud of this one, even though, aside from hosting, all I’ve really done is impeded the progress of releases by asking inane questions at inappropriate times (note to self: check release schedules before hounding people for assistance). It is largely through the work of the fine folks at Fedora Unity that jigdo has now become a mainstay in the Fedora distribution model.

So why should anyone bother with jigdo when there’s already BitTorrent? I used to wonder the same thing, but then I used jigdo for the first time. To vastly over simplify it, with Jigdo, one need only download the bits they are lacking in order to get a full ISO, be it DVD or CD. So, if you already have a Fedora 9 Beta or Preview release, using Jigdo, you’d need only download the packages that have been updated since then.

Contrast this with BitTorrent, where one would need to download the entire ISO, regardless of what bits you may already have of a previous release. Yes, BitTorrent is peer-to-peer and jigdo isn’t (at least, not yet?), but you still have to download the whole 3+GB worth before you have something to install. Jigdo can save you a lot of bandwidth if you already have a previous release available, whether as an ISO file or burnt directly on a disc.

On top of that, if used intelligently, a widespread adoption of jigdo as a distribution method would also alleviate the burden of hosts from having to hold large ISO files which are really just composed of myriad packages already present on the mirror. As a host myself, I think that is just awesome!

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Jigdo for getting Fedora, check out Fedora Unity Jigdo howto.

KDE4

Although I do not use the KDE aside from a few choice apps, I think it would be rather rude and inappropriate to neglect the awesome efforts of the Fedora KFE SIG in making Fedora 9 the first major distribution release to feature KDE4

As I am not as familiar with this awesomeum as I am others, I will leave the absorption of the full details as an exercise for the reader (note: their release annoucement page is…yes, that’s right…awesome…).

PackageKit

It has been called the OPMtRTA (perhaps only by me). I’ll admit that PK has had it’s growing pains, but I have to say, Richard Hughes (and anyone else?) has done an awesome job pulling this one together. I think this is something that necessarily will have to continue to evolve as the scope of PackageKit is just amazing. How far it’s come is even more so, and I am really looking forward to seeing where it goes and what innovative solutions are found for the plethora of problems present with package procurement (okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch, I know…).

I would like to take this time to say that Richard has one of the fastest turnaround-times I’ve seen in any kind of a project, whether it is related to bugs, features, or implementation. And, given the amount of heat that’s been thrown his way, his demeanor has always been calm, collected, and courteous (that one was better, wasn’t it?).

100% Free and Open Source

This isn’t new…it’s always been there. Yes, Fedora, by directed and intentional policy, is a 100% Free and Open Source GNU/Linux distribution. While it is possible to get non-free bits into it, you’ll not find one shipped with it. I think this is, by far, the greatest feature of Fedora (at least, as an OS – I consider the community to be the best part of Fedora in general). Take us back a decade or two, and who would have thought that such a functional and polished product could exist free from the enslaving shackles of proprietary softare? Alhamdulillaah!

So, there you have it! A quick view of the upcoming Fedora 9! I’ll be doing my best to mirror the torrents of Fedora, both the i386 and x86_64 releases, in shaa Allaah. Please feel free to share your own comments and experiences with Fedora 9 and/or free-and-open-source software in general!

Wow!

I don’t think it helped that I posted a link to a download from my server, either…

Introduction

Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.

The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts – management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to – knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.

Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.

Background

I have long had a passion for audio – be it with regards to editing, recording, production, or even creation. And, given my other passion for Islamic education, it should come as no surprise that I like to work on recording, producing, and making-available quality Islamic recordings for the benefit of everyone. Thus, ever since I first attended the Texas Dawah Convention, I knew that I wanted to be involved, at least with the audio aspect. This desire became even stronger as the Convention has had some troubles make the recordings from the previous years widely available.

The Convention itself is outstanding, and I strongly encourage everyone to attend it if you can – whether or not you are Muslim, it provides an excellent place where someone can learn about the proper understanding of Islam free from extremism, misguidance, and distortion. Naturally, those are based on my own opinions, and everyone is entitled to their own about whatever they like, I suppose…regardless, it is held every year in late December. Details can usually be found on their website as Winter approaches.

First Contact

Back to the point, I had a golden opportunity to pursue the desire to become more involved with the Convention itself. It just so happened that Shaykh Waleed Basyouni, the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, was holding an AlMaghrib Institute seminar (Rays of Faith) in Columbus, Ohio (Qabeelat Hayl). As I was the coordinator for the class, I was blessed with extra time with the shaykh, so I approached him with a bold proposal. Being that he was the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, I proposed to him to hand over audio recording & production entirely to me for the then upcoming convention. I knew it was more-or-less a shot in the dark, but he respectfully listened to me in full, giving me more than a generous portion of his time given that he was heading back home soon afterward.

Pleasantly enough, and after a series of e-mails & phone conversations, Shaykh Waleed took me up on my proposal, which I was wisely discussing as a prospect with a close friend & future partner the whole time. As such, we were mentally prepared with the idea that we’d have actual work to do during the convention.

Preparations

As much as one prepares for a task, it’s amazing how many aspects can still come up and leave one shaken and struggling to stay standing. To be honest, it is in management of this kind – preparing for the logistics of something hands-on – that I tend to be rather weak. Alhamdulillaah, my friend and business partner came to the rescue and prepared, more or less, the entire plan for how the work needed to be broken-up, divided, and thus organized so that it could be managed in a reasonable way. Without his sheets, plans, and equipment labeling, the task would have been an operational nightmare.

Part of our charter for the audio work was to purchase a variety of recording equipment, most of which would be used for the many coming years, in shaaʾ Allaah. Consequently, once again, my friend showcased his business prowess, and was able to secure the best pricing for the majority of the equipment and supplies we needed. The biggest challenge here was my procrastination and that of others, through miscommunication, which resulted in us spending way more money than necessary for some basic items (e.g., CDs, labels, and some equipment).

Showtime!

Once we got to the site, we had very little time really to spend with the volunteers we’d be given to be our runners. It was somewhat of a challenge to divide the work up amongst them – we had 8 total (a 9th came in midway through the convention, alhamdulillaah). Each had their own level of skills, be it technical or otherwise, that we had to balance and find out. What was most troubling to me was that, despite the sheer amount of work involved, frequently the volunteers found themselves without anything to do simply because we didn’t know how best to divide up the work. Again, and I will continue pointing this out through the post, my partner-friend really took to managing the volunteers and ensuring they were kept reasonably busy with productive things while also ensuring they weren’t overworked and could attend the parts of the convention their really wanted to.

To their credit, the volunteers, in general, all performed outstandingly, maa shaaʾ Allaah walhamdulillaah. Given that there were three straight days of seminars, sometimes 6 at the same time, the fact that we had only a few really major mistakes (including one lecture that was a complete write off, unfortunately) is really a testament to their hard work and willingness to pull through some tough schedules we’d made for them. Jazaakum Allaahu khayr!

To Be Continued…

While this wraps-up the general procedure for everything, I have intentionally left the technical side out as I am going to focus on that in a dedicated post, including possibly mentioning a near disaster that was narrowly avoided due to the Mercy of Allaah in answering my supplications. See you then!

Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.5 has been released.  I’ve upgraded my personal blog (this site), the Columbus Dawah blog, and my new family-development blog (more on that later, in shaa Allaah).

WordPress 2.5 (Brecker, apparently), is chock-full of new features that I cannot hope to explain in one short post here, so I’ll invite you to visit the link above to see the new stuff.  Of specific interest to me is the new photo gallery feature, which I hope to be trying out soon, in shaa Allaah.

Coinciding with the upgrade to 2.5, I’m also trying-out a new theme for my blog.  Comments are most welcome!

However, I have been itching for another server, if nothing else to but to try out some new administration plans I have.  And this caught my eye.

(Yes, that’s all I wanted to say…)

With both search-engine/portal giants buying up practically every little dot-com that seems to have a snowball’s chance of catching some large userbase (hey, readership of esteemed techno-religio-socio blog basilgohar.com is up to…what, three, maybe four these days…Yahoogle! beware!), it really is only a matter of time before both Yahoo! & Google’s lustful eyes turn towards one-another and start to ponder about the forbidden fruit that is a merger the likes of which JPMorgan Chase would be envious. Let’s examine them briefly:

Yahoo!

From the beginning, Yahoo! has been the site to go for both for Internet indexes as well as a powerful search engine. Early on, Yahoo! entered into the game of content hosting, providing portal services much akin to AOL and other dedicated online services solely through free Internet access. Yahoo! was also an early player in the free web-based e-mail game, a service whose home page is still, according to Alexa, is the most visited site (take that as you will). Yahoo! continued in the content-provider as well as social networking role by adding games, their own messenger service, and a host of other self-hosted features, including Yahoo! small business. Not being content with their own flesh-and-blood offerings, Yahoo! pioneered the surge of Internet dot-com baby adoptions, including Geocities, del.icio.us, and Flickr. And Yahoo!’s appetite for fresh dot-com blood seems nowhere near sated as the recent acquisition of MyBlogLog tells us.

Google

The Google story is very much a reflection of one of the tenets of the Unix philosophy – do one thing and do it well. If you’re having trouble figuring out what that one thing is, I can only assume you must be reading this in the form of a print out or between two covers of a book, perhaps archived for the future generations (i.e., you) as an example of how opinionated people used to make their points without having to listen to someone talk back. But, to cut straight to the matter, Google more-or-less perfected the concept of the Internet search engine, at least in our current time.

No one “Yahoo!’s” something. I’ve yet to hear someone “live.com” a topic. It’s unlikely someone has uttered, “You know what, maybe you should Altavista that”. But who with a computer has never Googled something? The simple yet complete answer is “no one”. Don’t believe me? Google it…

However, Google was not immune to dot-comsumptionitis, and it too began to feel the hunger for fledgling dot-coms just entering their prime. No other incident exemplifies this than the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube. What is even more amazing about this than almost all of Yahoo!’s cannibalizations is the fact that Google already had a great video browsing site. However, Google’s video site, though excellent, lacked an essential feature of YouTube – a community. And it is here where Google really decided they wanted a piece of the content pie.

But, Yahoo! has too large a head start in the content bakery for Google to catch up in the same game. Google’s strengths have been, and likely always will be, their skill at making existing information available to the world (one of their founding principles – another one has something to do with being evil…). The lesson both have to learn is, really, one they’ve always been teaching everyone else – where you find yourself short, buy someone else who does it better.

How long, therefore, will it be before Google & Yahoo! take one last, long glance into one-another’s eyes and utter those words both have sought out for years – “I do”?

Ironically enough, I had already started writing this blog post before seeing that Jeremy Zawodny had already started speculating about Microsoft purchasing Yahoo!.  Frankly, I think Yahoogle! sounds much cooler than “Microsoft Search!”.

And one final disclaimer: though I honestly think that a merger between Google & Yahoo! is extremely likely in the future, I wrote most of this after 1AM, so it should be taken in the spirit of fun & humor, and not as business advice or speculation.  If you do something based on this post bad, I cannot be held liable for it.  If you do something good based on this post, my cut is 10% (I’m talklin’ to you, Yahoogle!).