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Author: Basil
High Dynamic Range photography
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve just managed to produce my first HDR (high dynamic range) image the results of which I’m pleased with. Once again, I have CHDK to thank for enabling this feature easily.
$PATH in Fedora 10
[basilgohar@beta ~]$ 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…
March of the Ants!
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem As bugs are normal around the house here in Malaysia, I have just gotten used to them for the most part. Yes, the wall next to me is a veritable graveyard for mosquitoes, but most other insects don’t bother me much, alhamdulillaah. This includes ants. Ants are usually very benign, they mind…
Reorganized blog categories
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I just finished re-reorganizing my blog categories after pondering the difference between tags & categories. Incidentally, I will attempt to start using tags on my blog posts as well. Subsequently, I will be recategorizing a lot of posts that are categorized in both a category as well as its parent, since that…
Alexandria balcony panorama
60 Minutes segment on apartheid in Israel
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/23/60minutes/main4749723.shtml#ccmm Watch at the link above for a bold & frank look at the living conditions of the Palestinians under apartheid in Israel, specifically in the West Bank. Interesting to note is that the story only mentioned the West Bank. Keep in mind when viewing their situation that Gaza is far, far worse off due…
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…
En route to Malaysia
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, my wife & I are en route to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we’ll be staying one night with her brother & his family before continuing on our way to home in Kuala Terengganu, in shaaʾ Allaah. Right now we’re in the Kuwait International Airport, and, alhamdulillaah, they have free wifi throughout…
Flock of Seabirds
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, from our apartment in Alexandria, Egypt, we have an outstanding view of the Mediterranean Sea on clear days. On foggy days, we’re treated to an eery sight where the sea is ambiguously “missing”. One of the amazing sights I discovered while looking over the sea was the hypnotizing landing sequence of…
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…
International Year of Astronomy 2009
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured an announcement for the International Year of Astronomy. This alone would be noteworthy enough, but they also have a downloadable trailer (warning: contains some music, but it’s not prominent until the end). This is great for geeks, and especially video geeks like Belal & me…
Hunspell & enchant dictionary/spell-checking file locations
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, while waiting for an answer an #fedora for the question of where the custom spellcheck files for hunspell, the unified spellchecking engine for Fedora 9 and upwards, reside, I discovered that they are stored in .config/enchant, which isn’t very intuitive, but makes sense after discovering that enchant is related to the…
Unmatched search folder in Evolution
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve (finally!) installed Fedora 10 on my laptop, but it’s not been without its bumps. I cannot blame this on Fedora 10 nor the anything else related to the release. But, in the end, I don’t have a DVD to install from, only the LiveCD (which I booted from my SD…
Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not India’s 9/11
Arundhati Roy, in an article for the Guardian out of the United Kingdom, has written a deep, insightful, and thought-provoking article analyzing the circumstances and the context surrounding the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For a non-Indian like me, most of what she writes is very fresh & new, revealing currents in the Subcontinental social…
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!
Fedora 10 released
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 10 has been released! Torrents are available. I have all of my servers seeding now (including the newest one). Read up on the new features to find out what’s new. Well, what are you waiting for? Just go download it already! If you don’t want to use the torrent (although…
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…