Fedora 9 – Why it’s so awesome

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for…

Tapeless HD camcorders

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is…

Hello Fedora Planet & People!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Hello!  I know I’ve already had a few posts show up on the Planet already, but I wanted to at least acknowledge the fact that I am now, as opposed to having been previously not, a member of Fedora Planet! I am an avid Fedora user – I have been using Fedora…

Fedora 9 Preview released

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora 9 Preview has been released to the torrents! You can grab ’em here: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Shell History Meme

I got tired of seeing everyone on the planets (Fedora & Gnome) showing-up in Liferea doing this, and I was left out.  So here’s mine from work: [basil.gohar@escapdv01 ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head 265 ll 210 cd 101 time 86 dbrestore 79 exit 28 su 24 vi 18…

Family blog

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Last week my wife & I have decided to start our own family blog to track family’s Islamic development.  As a result, I will most-likely be posting my personal- and family-related musings over there rather than here, allowing HidayahTech to remain more tech-oriented.  That doesn’t mean there will be a complete dearth…

WordPress 2.5

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.5 has been released.  I’ve upgraded my personal blog (this site), the Columbus Dawah blog, and my new family-development blog (more on that later, in shaa Allaah). WordPress 2.5 (Brecker, apparently), is chock-full of new features that I cannot hope to explain in one short post here, so I’ll invite…

WordPress customization

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Yesterday I had a implement a small, custom template for WordPress. As a result, I had a chance to see the innards of WordPress in a way I never really did before. Let me just say that now I’m really excited to actually go through and write my own custom theme for…

My projects running on free software (and how to better integrate them)

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Software that is free from proprietary restrictions (a.k.a, free-and-open-source software, which I will refer to as simply “free software” for the rest of this post) has become exceedingly important in my life for both philosophical as well as practical reasons. Not only do I truly believe free software to be inherently better…

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…

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…

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…

fuse-sshfs – mounting a remote location using SSH with FUSE

SSH is a time-tested, powerful, and generally outstanding utility for connecting two systems in a secure and efficient manner. Enabling anything from simple command-line access to full X Window sessions, it would appear there is almost no limit to what SSH can do. Reading on will only affirm this assertion, as two open-source projects –…