Seeking Director of Engineering role

I wanted to reach out and leverage my network in pursuit of my next engineering leadership role. The ideal role, and one where I feel I can contribute the most value, would be one that would allow me to leverage my 20 years of web application development in the traditional backend LAMP stack (think PHP-…

Moodle 2.0 released!

Alḥamdulillāh, Moodle 2.0 has been released! This is important for a lot of reasons, amongst them being that I work with Moodle on a day-to-day basis in my daytime job, and I use it on some of my own sites.  However, most important is the fact that Moodle provides a platform for education that is…

Unfinished Projects

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I have the bad habit of starting things and not completing them.  This is bad for numerous reasons, just a few of which I’ll list shortly.  I will warn you now that as this post is meant to help me organize my thoughts, it will list-heavy, as I do find lists and…

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…

Naïve integer primality calculator in PHP

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, while reading about integers and, subsequently, prime numbers last night, I decided the time had come for me to write a primality calculator in PHP.  The test I use in my implementation is about as a naïve as one can possible get, but it was fun, nonetheless. Interestingly enough, I discovered…

Audio Islam now running on lighttpd

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam.  Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.

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…

phpBB 3.0 Beta5 released

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…

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…

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…

Zend Framework

My supervisor brought to my attention the Zend Framework – an interesting PHP-powered answer to Ruby-on-Rails.  The Zend Framework seems to espouse the MVC design pattern.  It looks really interesting & is worth another look here shortly.  I’ll follow-up & let you know what I find out.