The Analemma Project

A recent APOD entry showed a simulated photograph of the relative path of the Sun in the Martian sky, a phenomonon known as an analemma. On another entry linked from the first, I found yet another link to a site called The Analemma Project. This is a fascinating article describing one student’s attempt to create…

Texas Dawah Convention 2006

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve really been enjoying my stay down here in Houston for the Texas Dawah Convention (TDC). Without a doubt, the lectures, workshops, and other programs are all very beneficial, but what I continue to value the most is the new relationships that I am able to forge as well as taking back the fond…

Duck and Cover redux

With much appreciation to Andrei (I make it sound like we’re on a first name basis) and his linkblog, I would very much like to share with you the reason I was laughing hysterically at work today. Reminds me of the hype about duck-and-cover in case of a nuclear holocaust. I say, if you see…

Fedora Core 6 & ATi Radeon x1600 AGP finally working

Alhamdulillaah, through some diligent searching and more than a few unnecessary steps, I was able to get my not-bottom-of-the-line ATi Radeon x1600 AGP video card working reasonably well on Fedora Core 6. Sadly, this series of discoveries happened after I had decided to resort to a complete wipe/reinstallation. However, the decision to hose the old…

Fedora Core 6 running at work

I just got through installing Fedora Core 6 (x86-64 of course!) at work, and alhamdulillaah, the installation went through without a hitch. However, as my workplace is primarily a Microsoft shop, I couldn’t just hose my old WinXP installation, so I needed to do a dual-boot setup. So, while yumex is running in the background,…

phpBB 3.0 Beta3 released!!!

Alhamdulillaah, the final release of phpBB3 approaches ever nearer with the release of Beta3. I’ve always been an avid phpBB fan, and although I was the friendly admin of a vBulletin 3-powered forum for well over a year, phpBB has always been my choice when it came to deploying my own bulletin board sites for…

Upgrading to FC6 – Aftermath

Well, the upgrade is done, and while there didn’t seem to be any unrecoverable issues, I can also say that I’m less than impressed with how the upgrade recognized the system after I ran the install DVD. However, I am also more than willing to give excuses given that I tend to munge up my…

Upgrading to FC6

I’m going to try to upgrade to Fedora Core 6 right now, in shaa Allaah.  I’ll let you all know how it went.  I usually prefer to install OSes from scratch, but in this case, I’m just going to give upgrading and try and see what happens.  If worse comes to worst, then I’ll just…

Fedora Core 6 announced

Fedora Core 6 final has been released, and torrents are up! You can read the announcement, see the release summary, or just go straight to the torrent page. This release is called Zod, but we can forgive them for that, because amongst other things, this release should have Eclipse 3.2, which means I can finally…

Classic Gaming – BBS Doors/Games

Procomm Plus Terminal *beeeeeeee-tshshhhhhhh-khkhkhkkhkhkh* Connected at 9600 bps to Pyro VBBS I can only wonder how many times the above (or whatever the equivalent was…my memory is fuzzy, at best) information flashed on my family’s Casper 14-inch monitor in the early 1990s (of course, back then, it would have just been “90s”, when we were…

Anti-userism (part 1?)

I’m sure many others have already editorized about the issue, Anti-userism is a constant & growing problem facing consumers & users the world over. What I mean by anti-userism is the trait that software, hardware, & service companies have of putting the user or consumer last when it comes to priorities, in particular, in relation…

A Saturnian eclipse

Astronomy Picture of the Day rarely ceases to amaze me, and a few days back one image earned its place as my desktop background. If, at first glance, one is shocked at how unreal that image looks, then rest-assured that it is enhanced for contrast. However, the unaltered image, shown below, is hardly any less…

Relocated HidayahTech

It’s been long on the to-do list, but I’ve finally relocated HidayahTech from http://tech.hidayahonline.org over to my personal webspace at https://blog.basilgohar.com, blowing away just about any hint of anonymity I may have carefully accumulated over the past years.  This is the new home for HidayahTech and, as a result, I am intending on making it…

Server bandwidth usage comparison – Ramadhaan case – part 2

So, I finally completed the transition from the “dinky” 10Mbps choke hold that was the Hidayah Online server to the mammoth, unmetered 20Mbps Grand Canyon that is the Audio Islam server. I achieved this merely by redirecting all download links to their appropriate locations on the remote server. This way, all old links to the…

Earth – say “Cheese!”

A beautiful shot of the Earth from the orbit of Saturn, the seventh planet in the Solar System. Visit the APOD page to find out more about this and other amazing photos of our universe.

Server bandwidth usage comparison – Ramadhaan case

Alhamdulillaah (all praise is due to Allaah) for the arrival of yet another Ramadhaan! Amongst the points people look forward to in Ramadhaan are the abstaining from our physical desires during the daytime, the togetherness with family & friends, the greater boost in faith manifested in extra worship, and surges in bandwidth usage…

Stupidity vs. Villainy

I came across a quote that I just had to share. It was first referenced in a comment to a Slashdot story about a suspected spammer’s technique of “untraining” spam filters by sending “normal” text. The wikiquote page has some interesting variations, of which I found the following to be the most quaint: You have…

Mac Rumors site ramps-up for WWDC 2006

My supervisor (both he and my officemate use Macs – my supervisor has one of the newer Core-based iMacs) informed me about the WWDC conference going on today. The MacRumors site is also featuring some spiffy web-tech related improvements to handle the surge in traffic they normally get during these kinds of presentations. I guess…

When extraterrestrial planetary storms (almost) collide

Found via APOD (click on image for full size or go to original APOD page). The two largest storms on Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, came very close to colliding and possibly merging. The picture was just too compelling not to include here. Incidentally, I’m starting to think I need to rename…