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the first khutbah i attended in egypt this trip was in cairo a few days after i arrived. i decided not to go to the “zawya” (literally means “angle,” refers to a small masjid underneath an apartment buildings) near where i was staying and instead decided…

i’ve been in egypt for a little over a month now. i spent the first week of my time in cairo. the following are a list of things i noticed during that first week (which should not have been surprising to me, having been to cairo many times in the past, but

i wanted to write about my experiences in egypt, and so i started a new blog (i decided not to write those posts here because they’re not highly technical or programming related (or geeky)). you can find it at masr.whatstheplot.com.

“you never know how much stuff you have until you have to move” - this is a common saying that you’ll hear people say when they are about to move from one place to another and see the hassle of transporting all this stuff. for me, since i didn’t know how…

during the accident mentioned in the previous post, the laptop was in the trunk on the far left side (the place that took the impact from the truck hitting it). when i returned home, i found that my macbook had become officially paralized (the screen was…

on monday, june 7th, myself and two brothers needed to go to the smart village in the morning and come back to alexandria in the afternoon. we rented a “limo,” (which is just a normal rental car with a driver) to take us, wait for us, and bring us back. we

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم، there are fobs and there are abcXs… being born in cairo and raised in the us, i happen to be neither and both at the same time. this blog is entitled “عسل و طحينه” - the name was inspired by “عسل اسود” (molasses), a new movie (which

full size here’s a screenshot of my linux box taken on february 25th, 2010. click the image above for the full sized view. linux desktop running openbox, a bunch of transparent urxvt terminals, cairo clock, and trayer (with banshee, pidgin, transmission,…

i like the site for twitter, ‘friendorfollow,’ which tells me who i am following and isn’t following me back, who are following me and i am not following back, and so on. given that i got access to google buzz today, i decided to write a little script to…

wanted to take a short break, so i decided to take out 20 minutes and write a silly song about farmville (it’s a rip off of ne yo’s “so sick” song). note that the lyrics (and thus the mp3) are in pre-alpha (and are not likely to see any future revisions).…

after the nexus one came out, i became a little more interested in android. while i had written a simple ‘salam world’ app some time ago, i figure it would be nice to delve a little deeper and try to write something remotely useful. so without further adi…

on july 19th, 2006, i posted my first blog post from california. i moved there to start a new job at yahoo!

mok and i were chatting about makkah on im and we brought back a very old habit of ours from the days of highschool and college - rhyming about any and everything. so without further adieu, here’s a snippet from our im conversation: omer: makkah makkah, i…

so i had a little bit of time before i depart on my journey for hajj, so i wanted to play around with the firefox jetpack extension a little bit. so without further adieu, this post is here to introduce a simple quran plugin for jetpack :) what is it this…

so i was sitting on a plane in san francisco awaiting the departure of my flight to atlanta, from where i will insha’Allah be leaving for hajj. the captain mentioned something about a leak that they have to fix, so i figured, “why not write a blog post on…

last year, i signed up for a 1 year subscription to rememberthemilk. now that it has expired, i’ve started wondering whether i should re-subscribe or switch to something else (toodledo appears to be a popular option). so i made a toodledo free account and…

often times while working with databases, you find the need to do some simple tasks (adding a column and populating it with a value from another table, etc). rather than write a script to do this, use mysql’s native subquery (and temporary table) function…

[center]note the v, n, and m keys (or lack thereof)[/center] finally replaced my keyboard with a new one :)

i’ve done a quick port of the quran ubiquity plugin to work under the new version of ubiquity (0.5). as you may know, ubiquity 0.5 and beyond use a new parser (parser 2) that isn’t compatible with the old parser (parser 1 for 0.1.x versions of ubiquity).…

inspired by the blog of sy and my previous roommate (who makes a mean paneer btw), i decided to start posting my chef de jour recipes for the benefit of all the bachelors out there. unfortunately, i don’t cook as much as i should (but i have been fairly l…

today, i took the arabeyes php extension of itl, the yahoo geocoding api, and the geonames api and put together waqt.org. it’s a fairly minimalistic prayertimes site. the code is available on github. note that the calculation method is currently hardcoded…

about two years ago, i posted about sheikh mohamed’s amazing fajr marketing tshirt. today, i am posting about the latest tshirt in the collection - read, understand, and practice quran. sheikh is currently in egypt visiting his family and will go and make…

updated and released the first version of the quran ubiquity plugin!

after having pretty much the same theme since the launch of the site, i’ve switched to the excellent iNove wordpress theme. i’ve also cleaned up some links and replaced the previous code highlighter with the very nice syntax highlighter evolved plugin.

i recently decided to move my tech tips microblog to identi.ca (the original copy was on jaiku), as i felt it was a little more befitting, actively developed, etc (although jaiku is now open source). anyway… so i wanted to migrate my posts over - so i wro…

i usually start my weekdays by listening to the excellent bbc global news podcast. in today’s episode, bbc’s owen bennett-jones interviewed an idf spokeswoman regarding israeli troops’ admission to gaza abuses. i decided to cut it out and provide it here…

do you watch anta ambooba in tha3lab al nar?

a long time ago, when i got my iphone, i realized that it would be nice to be able to read the quran on my phone. what i wanted was a way to read the arabic text on the phone (page by page, not ayah by ayah). anyhow, i’ll outline the solutions i’ve found…

funny. courtesy of tweet o’clock.

today, i felt like playing some more with ubiquity, which i had installed for a while now but had not played around with sufficiently. i decided to try to write a simple plugin that will search the quran for a particular set of words. to do this, i felt o…

for some (crazy) reason, i decided to try out the g1 after reading gina’s article and finding a good deal on craigslist. the summary is - i think i am going to sell it and keep my iphone :) thoughts so far: it’s nice to have a keyboard - but something doe…

important update (august 5th, 2009) - so i realized that some of the results here (specifically, the java lucene ones) were incorrect. the reason is because as is mentioned on the lucene wiki, the first search has to initialize the caches. as thus, the re…

it’s been a while since i last posted… i guess microblogging (twitter, brightkite, etc) have sort of gotten the majority of my posts, and i’ve neglected the blog. the main reason i like the blog is it’s interesting to look back and see what i was writing…

so i went through and tried to back-tag all the posts on the site… more difficult than it sounds, especially since i was at a loss as to how to tag some of the things (especially in a consistent manner). i am not showing a tag cloud yet, but maybe soon (t…

generally speaking, my set of mp3s is very well tagged. for my personal mp3s, i used to exclusively use easytag to tag them, and now i use a combination of easytag and amarok (which is totally awesome by the way!)

so i was working on some code in which i needed to know whether or not it was dst for a given country and/or timezone or not. luckily, with php5.2, some sparsely documented (yet very useful) classes were introduced - a more thorough documentation can be f…

thanks to the iwphone wordpress plugin, the blog now looks a lot better on the iphone!

i always used to get upset when i send a message or set a status on an english site in arabic, only to have the punctuation all messed up. well, thanks to two unicode control characters, \u200e and \u200f (for ltr and rtl, respectively), i can finally go…

i just beat quake4 (played the whole game under linux). fun!

woot!

woot!

i’ve been dual booting my gentoo box with windows vista 64 for my occasional bouts of gaming… but yesterday, i decided that despite microsoft ending it’s support for xp sometime this year, that i am better off running xp for gaming than vista. so i downgr…

yahooza linked two funny articles about the whole y!

so i spoke with the bro about the dns thing, and it seems as though i jumped the gun a little. in summary, what he told me is that another islamic site did a dos attack on his site due to the fact that there were non-muslims allowed on the forums and such,

launched my second facebook app: sublime rhymes!

so there’s a bunch of speculation about y!

just a quick update - the brother emailed me and gave me access to the dns servers that the sites are now looking at. so within a few days insha’Allah, the old urls should work again. al7amdulillah. that having been said, i am still going to try to normal…

amazing… i came across people asking about islam on y!

today, i discovered that the quranapp i’d written for facebook has been broken for some time now (mainly due to the changed notification apis, which affects both notification sending and invites). so i’ve finally updated it and it properly works again. i…

continuing the trend from yesterday and posting more about annoying things (tm), my friend pointed out that in the awstats report for one of my sites, i had a very abnormal number of reported bandwidth downloads for one of the days (~3tb, when i usually a…