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…

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…

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…

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…

New server for Audio Islam

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, following a recommendation from a close friend, I decided to start leasing a server from 10TB.com for Audio Islam.  As the name implies, they are big on bandwidth, which is exactly what Audio Islam needs.  Needless to say, I’m thrilled at having a new beefy server to play with and to…

Blogging with BloGTK

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem So now I’m trying with BloGTK. Review points: Good Has a GUI for text alignment Supports category selection for post (but see below) Not so good Does not support WordPress natively Does not support multiple categories per post No HTML highlighting in posts No inline spell-checking So, between Drivel & BloGTK, Drivel…

Trying out drivel

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’m trying out Drivel, which is a blogging client that comes with Fedora. Due to the recent lack of updates to my blog while I’ve been abroad, I’ve realized that I need an easier way to get some of the quicker updates posted more easily. So, we’ll try out some of these…

Freedom is for the people

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog): michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School. But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments.   Please take some time and read…

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.

Time Lapse Barrage

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now.  And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share. The sheer amount of work…

Nokia plans to buy Symbian, open OS

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year.  If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system…

More time-lapse fun

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos. I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.

ffmpeg from svn

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects.  However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on…

Time-lapse photography with CHDK

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake! One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts…