Alhamdulillaah, phpBB 3.0 Beta5 has been released! They mention in the announcement that they are anticipating the next release to be a Release Candidate, which means we may possibly have phpBB 3.0 final by this Summer, in shaa Allaah. I have been anxiously awaiting phpBB 3.0 for a loooong time (predating this blog, that’s for…
Category: Development
Hardware, software, & personal development
Upgrades & Updates
Alhamdulillah, it appears as though my upgrade to 2.1 went well. I guess I should probably start upgrading my other wordpress sites. One more thing I noticed, is that nested lists seem to be working perfectly in the newly revamped visual editor. This upgrade seems well worth it. One other minor modification I recently made…
WordPress 2.1 released
Somehow I missed the announement of a new release of WordPress (my blogging software), “Ella”. I don’t know how or why I missed it, all I know is that I have an indescribable urge to upgrade now. I will fill you in on how it all goes. If all you see is a blank page…
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…
The heroic story of the recovery of a crashed laptop with a corrupted hard drive
A close friend of mine contacted me about a week ago regarding a problem with his laptop. He has an HP tablet PC, and he had inadvertently allowed the laptop to run the battery down completely. When he tried to turn it back on, he was greeted with a message of doom: NTLDR is Missing…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
Outstanding CSS Zen Garden page
While at work “working” today, I came across what I feel is arguably the most beautiful design yet for the CSS Zen Garden demonstration site.
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…
MySQL Server, Apache HTTPD, PHP, & Subversion source configuration & installation
I have my webserver (at the time of this writing, the one on which this blog is posted) configured rather nicely, however, as with everything that accumulates over time, it’s current state is a combination of quite a lot of trial-&-error sessions that would be really hard to duplicate the first time I tried to…
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…