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…

HTML Slidy: Slide Shows in XHTML

Dave Raggett, one of the original developers of the HTML spec (and the one whose guide I first studied to learn HTML), and the original author of HTML Tidy, an HTML cleanup utility, has written a utility called HTML Slidy which is an outstanding tool for creating pure, XHTML standards-compliant & semantic web-based presentations.

Testing from within Fedora Core

I’m posting this entry from within my Fedora Core desktop (on my laptop, to be more precise). It successfully detected my blog via XML-RPC, so I can only assume it’s going to work. I guess you can all just leave some comments about how the formatting is. It feels kinda weird, though…I can’t even see…

FairTest – working against standardized testing

I work at a company that is involved in providing consulting services to K-12 educational organizations (that is, schools). My officemate gets the pleasure of writing & rewriting our testing coding, which basically handles the testing & test scores of students.  Therefore, it should be no surprise (or, well, at least only moderately surprising) that…

LinuxBIOS

Is there anything Linux can’t do (other than take over the desktop market, that is…*ducks*)? http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page I meant to post this a long time.  I guess I was planning on fleshing out the two lines above a bit more but I decided to go ahead & just post it anyway, just to trim down my…

Computer temperature

I’ve ordered 4 case fans from Newegg, because ever since I’ve closed-up my case (a gift from an old friend), the noise level is actually higher as the CPU fan is spinning faster to keep it cool now that it’s closed. I figure adding a few larger fans will help keep the internal temperature lower…

Andrew Tanenbaum’s website

Whilst browsing Slashdot today, I came across a post describing yet-another-computer-science debate. This one in particular is regarding the debate regarding microkernels versus monolithic kernels in operating system design. The players: Andrew Tanenbaum & Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is, of course, the original writer & maintainer of the Linux kernel, while Tanenbaum is the author of…

Continuous Integration

I came across a link to this article describing some good development practices & procedures from an announcement on the Tigris project site. I’m posting it up here so I don’t forget about it. I’ll try and offer a better write-up and/or analysis when I get some time (most likely outside of work hours). Feel…

PHP, PEAR, & Zend Framework coding standards

I’m all for standardization and standardizing procedures for long-term efficiency. However, up until now, where there were no “official” standards for something, I would make up my own or imitate what I thought was the nicest. One place where I’ve done just this was with regards to my coding styles for PHP – I had…

Implementing PHP Iterators – The Beginning

One of the new features that came with PHP 5 is the ability to implement Iterators. Implementing one of your objects as an iterator essentially allows you to treat it as a standard array. By default, without adding any additional code, you can enable iteration over a regular objects variable members. So, for example, if…

Mediawiki 1.6 (& 1.6.1) released

Mediawiki 1.6 has been released! Why is this so important? Why, because both HidayahWiki & Encyclopedia Islam are powered by it! Oh, and I think there is this other site that uses it too…