helw.net

i guess this can’t be considered backbiting, since i am not going to mention any names here. but today, something happened that really made me upset. i was working on some sites with someone, and he uses dnsmadeeasy for their dns (an excellent service, bt…

i never really used this until i ran into this article by accident, but it’s fairly cool… so: echo {one,two}.sh outputs: one.sh two.sh this means that you can, as the article says, do something like this: cp /etc/apache2/httpd.conf{,.bak} to backup your…

i guess since it’s already been made public on techcrunch, i can post about this here… but yes, y!

so i usually bookmark things both on del.icio.us and on myweb2, especially because myweb’s search is a lot better than del.icio.us’s at the time being. so i had a bookmarklet that would bring up both save dialogs and i would save in both. recently, i tried

i guess i may just be going through some weird phase in life, but here’s what’s on my mind this morning at 2:30 am… for some things, right and wrong are undoubtedly clear. but for others, how do you really know?

maybe out of sheer boredom, or too many nerdy thoughts always going through my head, or just to find a good use for the domain, i’ve started a humorous (so claim those who read it) blog about youth and the problems they face in looking to get married (bas…

“the way of the Prophets is a difficult path to follow - they were all hurt and slandered by their people, and while they could have retaliated, they didn’t. but we have to do our best to follow it…” this is roughly what someone i really respect told me t…

this past weekend, ustaz amr khaled visited us here in the bay area. he came to jum3ah at mca. it was really a surprise to me (i knew he was giving a talk the following day, but i didn’t know he’d come to jum3ah). i felt extremely happy when i saw him, and

my name was mentioned on the messenger blog in this post - check it out.

i hate to say it, but i love google documents. i never thought i’d use it, but man, it has made my life a lot easier for so many things. the sharing feature is especially nifty (and probably accounts for 90+% of the reasons that i have to use it).

just experienced my first earthquake. i was pulling up at the parking lot of the masjid for isha, and i waited a second to shut the engine off and i was like “why is my car shaking like that?”

finally, after several years, i beat xenosaga (i ordered it november 19th, 2004 - almost 3 years ago…). i just could never bring myself to finish it (then again, WoW did come out around that time in 2004) until today (finally). and, while i hadn’t played…

sort of late for this, but eid mubarak!

keeping the seo statements from the previous post in mind, audio.islamicnetwork.com has become http://quranicaudio.com/ – it is now running on lighttpd (rather than apache - by the way, so far, i really like lighty masha’Allah) and al7amdulillah, so far,…

i never really used to think about the importance of seo until recently. i always figured that, “hey, these are just my sites, only my friends read them, or they spread by word of mouth, etc” and never bothered doing anything with it. however, after actua…

source: xkcd.

today, during blizzcon, blizzard announced a new WoW expansion, “wrath of the lich king.” i haven’t played WoW in over 1.5 months now (i canceled my account and unsubscribed to wowinsider and other WoW rss feeds so i don’t get tempted, but… i don’t know a…

a long time ago, when facebook opened its api, i wrote a Quran application for facebook [see my previous post, here]. however, it was a hack, wasn’t fully featured, it didn’t look great, and, most importantly, it wasn’t put on the facebook application dir…

so last thursday, i had the fabulous idea of purchasing an iphone, especially being that i was already in a cingular 2 year contract. so i picked up the 4gb model. after having used it for nearly a week now, here are my thoughts: pros the screen is amazin…

someone from the yahoo maps team did this last hack day (a month+ ago), but for whatever reason, it hasn’t been released by yahoo yet. very useful feature imho (basically, you can drag and drop on the map to change the route, so if you want to avoid a par…

many times, i find myself having to scrape a website for any particular reason. now a days, if i need to do it, i’d probably do it with some version of mechanize (www::mechanize in perl, hpricot in ruby, etc). when i was looking for a bug in one of the sc…

i figured i’d play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but… it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let

this is off the hook!

today, i wanted to try out my test arabic gtk program to see if behdad’s new changes to pango magically fixed the renown arabic shaping issue [in short, it had nothing to do with it]. anyway, i discovered that i needed to install libquran, and to make a l…

one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there’s way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.

today, i went to the supermarket to buy some stuff, and i picked up a 12 pack of pepsi on the way out. when i looked at my receipt, i noticed that there was an additional tax of $0.48 for the pepsi, separate from the overall tax at the bottom (not sure if…

i’ve recently been playing more and more with ruby and i really like it. at the same time, i’ve been loving launchy, an open source application launcher for windows (currently using it on my work laptop). since i love launchy so much, i started to wonder,…

this video from steve jobs’ stanford commencement speech (2005) was pretty good: in addition, the following videos are worth watching (in my opinion): killing us softly - an excellent talk about how today’s advertising schemes are harmful to women and to…

i have a qualm with today’s traffic lights… sometimes, they are absolutely ludicrous and preposterous. you would think that with today’s sensor technology and stuff, you’d be able to drive and not wait at lights at all, especially really early in the morn…

in most cases, i find that i am much more effective than a spam detector in figuring out what’s spam and what’s not just by looking at the subject line (and, in extreme cases, at the sender as well). in very few cases does one have to open the email to be…

i love sheikh mohammad, the sheikh of mca. i also love his amazing marketing skills in bringing the youth to fajr. check out this picture of the t-shirt he gave me: i love the “and smile” part - and i love how he signed his name at the bottom :)

why would you ask a question like this unless you’re just asking for trouble?

blizzard put up the armory for WoW character stats - i like this a lot better than allakhazam because now i don’t manually have to run a tool to update my character stats - plus the interface is much nicer :) so i updated the links on the side… that having

so i usually always pop my gmail mail, especially after i heard the paranoia about how google was closing accounts at random and people were losing insane amounts of email. but recently, i suffered a hard drive reformat (courtesy of windows, which attempt…

my own tea company?

so countless times have i heard people talking about how san francisco is so hilly… when people would ask me, i’d say, “sure, its hilly” - but seriously, how was i to know?

this is insane - they won’t let me take my cologne on a plane because its not in a ziplock bag, but scorpions are okay?

blizzard people are signing copies of burning crusade ~5 miles from my house… so very much tempted to go, but i can’t imagine waiting a day in line to get one of 4500 copies… and besides, if it takes lines from 6 am to get one of 4500 copies, it’ll be so…

i’ve gotten used to using google reader for my rss feed reading. one of the nice features is the ability to share interesting items. i decided that i might as well start using this. here is my shared items page, and here is the atom feed. i’ve also added a

after much trouble to get things to install, my home machine is now up and running with gentoo 64!

yes, yes, i said a continent per day… but alas, i got busy and there is only so much time and so many continents… (i am not really visiting all the continents, i’d just like to think so :)) i am currently writing this from qatar. i was in uae earlier (both

surprisingly, it seems quite a bit more liberal than the us… but then again, i feel the same way when i go to the airport in germany or france. with respect to absurd security measures, the airport here only allows one carryon bag - unlike in the us where…

muslim nobel prize winner, muhammad yunus, was the target of one of yahoo’s advertising campaign’s for answers - i am happy to have a question of his on the site :)

according to this article, the average person spends 17.12 years of their life watching tv. amazing… (yes, yes, i know - i spend at least double that in front of a computer :p)

مسلسل قوي بجد و راءع حال الدنيه يحزن - اءول ايه بس - اللهم احفظنا واحفظ شباب و بنات المسلمين… امين update - try pasting that into google translate and see what it says… apparently, “ameen” translates to secretary and google doesn’t like egyptian slang…

so i went to visit my parents over this past break… while leaving, i had 2 small bottles of cologne and a stick of deodorant in my bag. at the airport, they of course saw these in my bag, and the man took them out. he said, “you can only have these with y…

i am not one to criticize anyone as i have my own huge list of faults, but some actions of some people really really get on my nerves. i don’t understand the following categories of people: the provincial people - those who are so set in their own thoughts

now switched wordpress to use a more readable url format for permalinks rather than the classic ?

thanks to a friend from college (thanks dude), i got on the burning crusade beta. i transferred rad over and played some… looks uber promising, albeit rough around the edges, but i guess that’s why they’re not releasing it until mid january… man playing on

so i saw this article on y!