الْحَمْدُ لِلَّه, Fedora 16 has been released!  You can read the full release notes or just go straight to the torrents for downloading.  See the release announcement after the fold…

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 16 (“Verne”). For detailed information, see the release notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_Notes/

Fedora is a leading-edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. Fedora 16 brings exciting new features for desktop users, for system administrators, and for developers. Highlights of these features can be found below. If the mere mention of Fedora 16 is all you need, download options can be found at:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Dedication

During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored The C Programming Language, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.

A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you, Dennis.

What’s New in Fedora 16?

For desktop users

A journey to the center of the desktop:

• GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment, brings new features, including:
  • System Settings gains an “Online Accounts” panel, which provides a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.
  • A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy, Evolution and the new “Online Accounts” settings panel
  • A new document management application provides a simpler alternative to traditional file management for both local and “in-cloud” documents.
• KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop environment, brings substantial updates, including:
  • DigiKam 2.0 adds face detection and recognition, geotagging and more.
  • An updated Plasma Workspaces window manager (KWin) makes KDE better suited for mobile devices, and also adds improvements for desktop users.
  • A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating systems to select the OS to boot next.

For developers

Twenty thousand lines in C:

• Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including Unicode 6.0 support.
• GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing with the C internals of GCC.
• D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.

For system administrators

Around the world in eighty columns:

• GRUB2: This leap forward allows better configuration options and better support for non-x86 architectures.
• New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000, providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.
• Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.
• ext4 driver mounts ext2 and ext3: Fedora 16 uses the ext4 driver to mount ext2 and ext3 file systems, reducing the size of the kernel code.
• Improved virtualization tools:
  • Fedora 16 provides improvements to virtual networking, making large deployments easier.
  • Virt-manager guest inspection is a unique-to-Fedora tool allowing read-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry.
  • Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.

This is only a taste of what is included in Fedora 16. A more detailed list can be found at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList

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.

Moodle 2.0 brings an incredibly wide range of new features and capabilities that further extend what is possible.  I personally have worked on some of the new features in a minor capacity – both in submitting bug reports as well as helping to implement some milestones in line with what we needed at work.

Moodle is used on countless sites to provide education and share knowledge in every corner of the world.  So, congratulations to the Moodle team and to the world for this great step forward!

الحمد الله, and finally, I upgrade my blog to WordPress 3.0.1.  With two boys, our own apartment, full time work, and a few other things (including some motivation issues) I am finding it hard to keep up old habits, despite a desire to continue doing so.

Finding my blog so outdated, though, I wanted to take a step to rectify that, and since HidayahTech is currently running on my ancient server alfaatihah.hidayahonline.net (it’s the first server I ever leased…got it back in August 2004), maintaining software on here is growing more-and-more painful.  I greatly want to move all my sites over to my new server, zaytoon.hidayahonline.net (the current home for Audio Islam, as many of the other sites I host), but that task, too, is proving to be long-running, without only little bits of progress here-and-there from time-to-time.  I suppose that is a topic for another post.  At least HidayahTech is finally a part of the modern era once again!

الحد لله, on Friday, the 11th of Shaʿbān, 1431 (23rd of July, 2010), at 12:40 AM local Columbus time, Allāh blessed us with a healthy, 6 lbs, 14 oz blessing that we’ve named عبد الله (ʿAbdullāh), which, in Arabic, means, “slave of Allāh” (Allāh being the proper name of God).  For the very same reason we’ve named our first son ʿAbdurraḥmān, we chose this name for our second son, in reference to the following ḥadeeth of the Messenger of Allaah, salallaahu ʿalayhi wa sallam:

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Book 025, Number 5315:
Ibn Umar reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: The names dearest to Allah are ‘Abdullah and ‘Abd al-Rahman. (link)

Both mother & new son are doing very well, walḥamdulillāh.  The birth of Abdullah was a bit special as we chose to have him delivered at home (i.e., a home birth), and that turned out to be an excellent and blessed decision, alḥamdulillāh.

Note: I strongly apologize for the delay in announcing this birth.  Please forgive us and do not let it detract from your duʿaaʾ for him. No special reason for the delay except that I wanted to have this post ready first.

Note 2: You can see the announcement for our first son here.

Note 3: You can see the birth of ʿAbdurraḥmān noted here.

A few days ago, Matt Lee of the Free Software Foundation had asked in the #theora IRC channel for help in making a DVD of the Patent Absurdity documentary.  Several people volunteered to help, and I was one of them.  I discovered later that this was related to the “Who should see Patent Absurdity?” campaign of the End Software Patents project (an initiative started by Brad Feld, I just discovered!).

Incidentally, we all ran into different kinds of problems, doing what should have been a rather simple task.  The sources of the problems ranged from simple bugs to rather weird video formats.  In this post I will discussed the various issues that I personally encountered and how, alhamdulillaah,  was able to overcome them.

The most straightforward way to make the video was to take an already decent-quality clip, the 1080p-resolution Ogg Theora clip from the Patent Absurdity website, and just run that through ffmpeg with the ‘-target ntsc-dvd’ option to get a DVD-compatible MPEG-2 video stream.  While this did actually produce a compliant video stream that I could burn to a DVD, the resulting video actually had some audio synchronization issues as well as some other problems related to ffmpeg’s handling of Theora’s drop frames (segments of video that are basically empty frames because the data does not change at all).  So, the resulting video was unacceptable.

My next attempt was to actually go from the original source material that Matt had provided some folks over at Xiph.  What’s interesting is that the format was a very odd, 1280×1080 resolution, 4:2:2 chroma-sampled DV-encoded video with a display aspect ratio of 16×9 – that was 25GB in size..  The only application that actually supports this format is ffmpeg, which means, also, it’s more widely supported than one might think.  It’s still an oddball format, though.  So, I ran it through ffmpeg with the same target settings as above.  However, ffmpeg’s ntsc-dvd target does not change the chroma sampling format of incoming video, so it produced MPEG-2 video that had 4:2:2 chroma.  I’m not sure if that’s even valid for MPEG-2, but it’s surely not valid for a DVD.  So, I manually specified the proper chroma sampling using ‘-pix_fmt yuv420p’ (this means planar 4:2:0 chroma sampling).

Sure enough, this produced a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 video stream, but with one problem.  The aspect ratio was not preserved.  This resulted in video that was squashed horizontally.  And, try as I might, nothing I could do with ffmpeg with the MPEG-2 video stream from this point on could correct the aspect ratio, and using a utility, such as mpgtx, to fix it, would make it incompatible with DeVeDe, the application I’m using to master the DVD Video itself.  So, I had to do an intermediate step.

I deduced that the problem was rooted in too many transforms being required at the same time.  Part of the problem may very well have been my own inexperience with ffmpeg as well, as perhaps someone may be willing to clarify via comments.  Regardless, I decided to tackle the problem by doing the steps separately – rescale the video & resample chroma as one step, and then do the MPEG-2 encoding via DeVeDe, which will know how best to make DVD video it finds agreeable.  So, starting with that mutant DV video source clip, I extracted the audio out into a FLAC file (the source was 48k/16b/s PCM, so very high quality).  Then I worked on the video – I scaled it down to 720×480 with a 4:2:0 chroma sampling but with an aspect ratio of 16×9, and I encoded it with the lossless FFV1 codec developed by the ffmpeg developers themselves.  This gave me a 7GB AVI file – not small, but far more manageable than the original 25GB source file.  I downloaded that locally, and then I attempted to remux the video & audio back into the same file.  And this is where the next issue occurred.

I first noticed the problem on my server, where I attempted this technique first – that is, remuxing the FFV1 AVI with the FLAC audio into another AVI file, this time with combined video & audio.  I noticed my server started to lag tremendously, and even my rsync download of the video to my PC at home had halted (at more than 90%, no less).  I managed to kill the ffmpeg process, and upon inspection of the load of my server, it had apparently jumped up to 30 or so during that time.  I was confused, but I didn’t piece it together yet.

After the FFV1 AVI file had finished downloading to my PC (I had to restart the rsync, but thankfully, I had [and usually always] used the –partial-dir parameter to save partial downloads for just such an occasion), I attempted the same remuxing operating on my PC.  Less than a minute later, I noticed that my PC had frozen.  I knew it was still working because the hard drive was thrashing, so I attempted to SSH in to my PC from my laptop, which I happened to have handily next to me.  After wait for about 1/2 an hour for the connection to establish and actually be able to get the system to respond, I discovered that ffmpeg’s memory usage had jumped up to 1.3 GB.  And, as my PC has only 2GB of RAM and I had numerous bloaty apps open already (Thunderbird, Firefox, Konversation, Pidgen, Gwibber, and, of course, Gnome itself), this mean the system had run out of memory and was thrashing the swap file.  I managed to killall -9 ffmpeg, and that brought the system back to the land of the living.  I inquired on #ffmpeg why this might have happened, and the response I got was that ffmpeg doesn’t like FLAC in AVI.  So I tried other container formats – Matroska & NUT, notable.  They both exhibited the same problem, but I was able to kill ffmpeg in a similar fashion much more swiftly.  I decided to just suck-it-up and converted the FLAC to WAV and ffmpeg muxed that without any difficult whatsoever.  My PC didn’t even break a sweat.

As a side note, following some additional advice from #ffmpeg, I used mkvmerge to mux the FFV1 AVI file with the FLAC audio file, and it worked, but it lost the aspect ratio.  I tried to manually specify the aspect ratio, and it gave very odd numbers that were, perhaps approximations of 16×9, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I stuck with FFV1 & raw PCM audio in AVI.

Finally, I can jump into DeVeDe and attempt to make the DVD.  As I am quite pedantic about quality (in case you haven’t gathered that by now), I chose the best quality options for encoding the DVD video that DeVeDe gave me – highest rates for audio & video and two-pass video encoding.  Matt had specifically said he didn’t want any menu for the DVD – he just wanted it to play, so I removed all menu options.  The whole mastering & encoding process took abut an hour and a half, according to what DeVeDe reported at the end, but I just slept through that (I had stayed-up all night, partially because of this, but not solely so).  I burnt the ISO that it generated onto a DVD-RW, tested it on different systems (Fedora & Windows), including a consumer DVD player, and, alhamdulillaah, it worked beautifully everywhere I played it.

So, there you have it – the trek to make a DVD about the problems caused by software patents completely with free software.  It was a fun experience, and I’m glad that I was able to help with getting this important message out.  In shaaʾ Allaah this will have a positive impact on patent reform and strengthen the arguments against the enforcement and even existence of software patents.

Assalaamu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve had much of a presence in the Blogoverse, and part of that is due to just not having the desire to go through, login, and making a post through the traditional WordPress administrative interface. However, until now, I still have not found a blogging client with which I’m totally satisfied. So, I’ve decided to go ahead and give lekhonee another shot.

One aspect for which I have not made an opinion yet is that the interface is basically plain text, and it allows you to post in raw HTML, which isn’t terrible. However, having a rich-text editor really isn’t that difficult to add, so, I’ll just have to see if it’s worth it or not. So, let’s see how it works-out.

رمضان 1430 مبارك

الحد لله, it’s Ramadhaan once again!  Granted, I’m a bit late, but I posted elsewhere in a more timely fashion, so I guess I have some kind of an excuse.  ِAnyway, while this is definitely a month most noted for the abstention of Muslims from food & drink, in reality it is so much more than that.  It is the opportunity to really get yourself into less of a worldly mindset and focus on our goal – Jannah.  So, I ask Allaah to grant us the ability to seek out the full reward of this most blessed month and grant us the fullest extent of His Mercy, Forgiveness, and freedom from the Hellfire.

الحد لله, I am trying more-and-more these days to practice writing Arabic with actual Arabic letters rather than using cumbersome transliterations.  This is partially due to my father’s abhorrence of transliterating Arabic, lest the skill to actually write Arabic in Arabic be lost.  I agree with him, and besides, it’s a great way to learn the language and get used to using it.  So, as much as possible, I’m going to try to start using more-and-more Arabic, where appropriate, in my typing, by using the actual Arabic letters, إن شاء الله.  If anyone has any questions about what a particular Arabic phrase is, then please post your question.  I will try to include a simple glossary.  Some autolinking would be great, too…let me look for a WordPress plugin for that…

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve decided that, after upgrading WordPress, I should do a little housekeeping.  As usual, I find a list best presents the ideas I wish to express:

• I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.2 (mentioned here).
• I fixed some posts that had some typos (I usually am good about this, but these had slipped by).
• I deleted some links that really weren’t relevant to me anymore (i.e., Ruby on Rails) and I added some new ones.
• I changed to a new theme (comments welcome!).

I’d like to elaborate a bit more on the last point above, since it merits some discussion and the action is rooted in something I care about deeply.

Previously, for quite some time, I’ve been using the theme “Vidiyal“.  I’ve actually stuck with it for quite some time because of it’s simplicity, elegance, & beauty (in my eyes, at least).  However, a post by the author of the theme really made up my mind for me.  To put it shortly, despite the obligation to release derivative works of WordPress, such as a theme, under the GPL (as that is what WordPress is licensed under), he insists he does not have to.  I’m not so concerned with the legal issue, to be honest, but the insistence not to release the code as free software is what unsettled me.

To be honest, I didn’t really check before using the theme, and I guess I didn’t really care before this.  But now that the issue has been brought to my attention, I have to stick with what I believe is right.  So, I’ve stopped using all non-free (as in freedom) themes, and will only use themes that I know are free software.  I feel this is the better way to go.

I do hope that Sadish and others see that free software, both practically and, more importantly, fundamentally, are important concepts for protecting our freedoms as human beings.  Software freedom is something we should stand up for, and not tolerate being abused or disregarded.

So, with that, I close my rant and resume pretending to be productive.

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.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve discovered a new WordPress blogging client packaged with Fedora – namely, Lekhonee. There aren’t a lot of formatting options, but it appears you can post using HTML, so that’s a plus, I think. Let’s see how it goes.

Innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raajiʿoon.  Verily we are from Allaah, and verily unto Him we shall return.  Shaykh Abdullah ibn Jibreen has passed away.  Muslim Matters has some additional coverage, including some kind words by Shaykh Abu ʿAmmaar Yasir Qadhi, who had the occasion to meet the shaykh several times.

Whenever the news of the death of one of the scholars reaches me, I always remember the following hadeeth from Saheeh Muslim:

Book 034, Number 6462:

‘Abdullah b. ‘Amr b. al-’As reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: Verily, Allah does not take away knowledge by snatching it from the people but He takes away knowledge by taking away the scholars, so that when He leaves no learned person, people turn to ignorant as their, leaders; then they are asked to deliver religious verdicts and they deliver them without knowledge, they go astray, and lead others astray.

May Allaah protect us from the dangers of ignorance and following the ignorant.

Assalaamu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh

Innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raajiʿoon.  Our sister, Marwa Sherbini, was murdered in Germany as a consequence of wearing her hijaab, a style of dress fulfilling the commandment of Allaah for women to cover themselves appropriately when outside of their homes.  Muslim Matters has a story covering this great issue: Marwa Sherbini: The Hijab Martyr.

Without a doubt, her death is shocking and tragic, and the circumstances surrounding her being slain can only be described as bizarre, and nothing should take away from this.  And yet, the true tragedy is the impotence of the Muslim world in its response.  I am not casting-aside the unity this has brought, for example, amongst the Egyptian bloggers.  But is all that we can do nowadays is protest verbally?  Long gone, it seems, are the days when the Ummah had real men leading them, ones that would send an army to the borders of the disbelieving lands because a Muslim woman was slapped, let alone murdered.

I know that Allaah will Remember our sister, “Shaheedah Hijaab”.  And yet, are we really getting the lesson at all ourselves?  May Allaah Guide us all and Help us all.

Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.8 has been released!  Grab it from the downloads page or upgrade, like I do, via SVN.

Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora Project has released Fedora 11!  You can get the torrents and/or check out the new features!

(Sorry for the rather uninspired & lazy post…I usually like to share more details, but I’ve got work to do…;) )

Alhamdulillaah no one was injured in the dramatic collapse of the roof of the Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin stadium in nearby Gong Badak here in Kuala Terengganu.  It is only about 10 minutes away from where we live here in KT, and in fact, it’s on the way from our place to downtown.  Therefore, I took the opportunity to snap some pics over a couple of days.  You can find more pics in the gallery, including several panoramas.  I’ve also taken some HDR pics, but they are not processed yet.  Patience is beautiful. 

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 have to reshuffle schedules and be more prudent about my time usage – I’m still figuring this out.

To help me get back on track, I wanted to revisit a recent post I had made about unfinished projects.  The two projects that I feel I need to put some extra time into, due to their nature, are the AlMaghrib in Malaysia project as well as the Global Homeschooling project/business idea.  The former needs attention because people are waiting on me for further action, while the latter is important because I am convinced it is the future for my family, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Although the other points on the list are quite important as well (and some are, actually, more important), I am choosing these as examples because I think making progress on them is something of a “low-hanging fruit”.  Therefore, I need to make some kind of schedule or plan for getting both of these done.

As for the AlMaghrib in Malaysia project, the first task I really need to push forward is just getting a website up.  This really isn’t hard, especially for someone like me who has dozens of websites floating around the ‘tubes.  However, what’s held this up is that I wanted AlMaghrib in Malaysia‘s website to be the first one to utilize my new server completely – not just for the web hosting, but also for DNS as well as e-mail.  Sadly, this condition has meant that I haven’t been able to get things going as straightforwardly as I have in the past.  The good news is I do have DNS working on the new server, but not e-mail.  Therefore, my plan is to just launch the website, which, once done, will also make me become more serious about getting e-mail working on that server as well, in shaaʾ Allaah.  But, “launch” in this context may be rather limited in scope, since one of the first things I want to do is have a mailing list for people to jump onto…sigh.

So, the plan for AlMaghrib in Malaysia is:

1. Just get the website up.  DNS is ready to go.  The website, at this point, is really just going to be a blog, which is more than sufficient for our needs.
2. Once the website is up, get e-mail working on the new server ASAP.  Though this may take a lot of work, that’s fine, because it will also benefit a lot of my other sites, which need the same functionality.

As for the Global Homeschooling project, I’ve already gone ahead and purchase a slew of Islamic homeschooling-related domain names, all of which will point to one canonical website name, which will be the one we advertise.  The rest are there for serendipitous searches and/or hits.  I’ve dragged my feet on this one as well mostly because a lot of the work hinges on my wife’s availability, which, now, is understandably quite limited compared to before the birth of our son.  Still, I don’t really accept that as a valid excuse, because the site really should be ready for her as soon as she is ready, so that she can get started filling out the sites with content (which was how we had divided the initial work).

So, the plan for the Global Homeschooling project is:

1. Finish getting the website components up – blog, wiki, school, & whatever else.
2. Make the various website components ready for my wife to use them easily, without her needing me to fix things here-and-there.

Well, at least now it’s down.  I hope to have some results within a week, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve successfully loaded the Fedora 11 Beta Live CD onto an SD card.  This allows me to boot directly from the card using my USB card reader, much as if it were a USB key/flash drive.  In short, after a few attempts, everything just works.

The few attempts mostly related to loading the Live CD image onto the SD card, as my flash memory reader is somewhat fussy and I was experimenting with different filesystems – my preference being to use a free software filesystem before using one of Microsoft’s.  I was able to do this using the ext2 filesystem (no need for journaling on a Live USB key, right?), as I have no need to store anything else on it.  Incidentally, I created an overlay image for persistence, so any changes made to the system while running should be saved and persist between reboots.  We’ll see how that works.

One of the driving factors for getting the Fedora 11 Beta Live image working is because I want to give my father, who just recently purchased a new netbook (Lenovo), a nice tour of a recent version of Fedora.  A Live USB version would be ideal for this.

Update: I’ve since gone ahead and installed Fedora 11 Beta on my laptop, as well (from the DVD install, though).

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