(Belated) Marriage Announcement

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Putting aside for now the minor detail that it actually happened over six months ago, I just wanted to announce as far-and-wide as possible that Allaah has blessed me, Basil Mohamed Gohar, with marriage to Nor Sallsabil binti (daughter of) Abdul Razak.  Our marriage took place after `Ishaa’ (evening prayer) on May…

Fedora 8 rox

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I just cannot get over how amazing Fedora 8.  I will be the first to admit, however, that a large part of that perceived greatness is due to the ATI 8.42 drivers that finally make using an X1600 or similar series of graphics cards tolerable on a GNU/Linux setup, walhamdulillaah.  However,…

Back from Malaysia

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve returned safely back from my outstanding and wonderful trip to Malaysia. In all truth, I did not really want to, and I miss my wife terribly. However, Allaah knows better what’s best for us, fa sabrun jameel.

Floating Masjid of Kuala Terengganu

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem One of the beautiful sites in the city of Kuala Terengganu, the hometown of my wife, is the Floating Masjid, pictured below: We prayed `asr here a few days back, and naturally, having my camera with me, I snapped a few pictures. Click on the image above to go to the gallery…

Malaysia – Part Deux

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem   Alhamdulillaah, I’ve arrived safely in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. The reason for being here, obviously, is to visit my wife as we have yet to receive the green light regarding her immigration. Right now I’m in KLIA, just relaxing and waiting for my next flight, which will take me…

What is this?

After the end of The Code of Scholars, when I came home and returned my laptop back to its natural position next to my couch (which is where I also sleep), I found this frighteningly intriguing little thing:

Trying out blog applet in Fedora 8

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’m trying out the gnome-blog utility again inside of Fedora 8. I had a bit of a challenge at first because when I tried to input my blog URL, it was trying to force the directory to be */wordpress/, which is not how my blog is setup. Alhamdulillaah, once I figured-out I…

Discontinuing with DiscoverULife for now

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Well, my wife & I have decided, both mutually and with the guidance of istikhaarah, that we’re going to discontinue our participation with DiscoverULife for the time being. We both stayed in for exactly one month, which was always intended to be an evaluation period. As it turns out, given our current…

Natural sounds with the H4

As alluded to in a previous post, I needed to find a replacement for my iRiver iHP-120. I ended up splitting my needs into getting two replacements – one device to replace the recording needs, and another to replace the playback needs. After some intense & extensive research, I decided on getting a Zoom H4…

Benefits & Lessons We Learn from the Lives of the Prophets

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem One of the requirements for the exam for the last AlMaghrib Institute seminar, Rays of Faith, held here in Columbus, was to write a one-page essay on the topic, “Write one page about the benefits and lessons that we learn from the lives of the Prophets OR chose one Messenger and write…

100% Fedora 7 installations

Note: This post was originally written several weeks ago, and I’ve just been lazy in finishing it. I’ve been Alhamdulillaah, with my move to Fedora 7 on my workstation in my workplace, I am now running Fedora 7 on 100% of my machines (excluding my Linksys router and iRiver, which are running OpenWRT & Rockbox,…

Getting serious with DiscoverU

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem When Muhammad Alshareef started his DiscoverU program, I honestly was not very interested.  In fact, in one of his early marketing e-mails, I informed him of my dislike for the manner he was approaching, because it was so much like other self-help or marketing programs.  It was, more-or-less, off my radar for…

Dearly Departed

Those that know me well know that there is one device in my possession that I hold high above all others – namely, my iRiver iHP-120 (renamed to the H100 later). When I purchased it in the Summer of 2004, it was one of the few products that had the features that I desperately sought…

WordPress Gallery 2 plugin

Update: I’ve since deactivated the WordPress Gallery 2 plugin.  I am just keeping this post up for archival purposes. For a while now I’ve been maintaining a media gallery, but I have not been giving it a lot of attention. Today, however, after upgrading to the latest version of my gallery software as well as…

Using find & grep to search subversion working copies

Alhamdulillaah, I was able to write a very simple bash function that will efficiently scan an entire directory tree for files which contain a string and display those lines, along with line numbers, and highlight the searched term in the terminal. The result can be found below: function search { time find . -name ‘.svn’…

Tutorial series – X/HTML Design Tips

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’m going to start a new, easy-lifting tutorial series that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It’s focus will be useful exploitation of the X/HTML standard for marking-up your pages in an elegant yet standards-compliant way. I will make an attempt to reference other excellent sources that exist throughout the…

Fedora 7 Test 3 released

Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 7 Test 3 has been released. Torrents are available. I have both the Hidayah Online as well as Audio Islam servers in the torrent swarm for the 64bit DVD isos (hey, I have two 64bit rigs, only my laptop is stuck in the 32bit world). I’ll try to leave them seeding for a…

The server itch is back

Before I begin, let me say that my current hosting setup with The Planet is extremely satisfactory, alhamdulillaah.  I have two servers (referenced here & here), one (Hidayah Online) with a monthly bandwidth cap 1500GB (very high, given the 10Mbit pipe), and the other (Audio Islam) with a 20Mbit/s unmetered connection (much more expensive, but…

PHP 5.2.1 upgrade + Gallery2 installation

The two aren’t really related, but they happened at the same time, so why not blog about both? I had been meaning to upgrade my server’s installation to the latest version of PHP for a while (well, about since I’d heard of the new release, to be precise). I’ve also wanted to install a web…