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 from writing:
يحيى الإسلام!
to writing:
يحيى الإسلام!
much better :) thanks goes to this wikipedia article and adil allawi, whom i first heard about this from.
i just beat quake4 (played the whole game under linux). fun!
woot! egypt won the 2008 africa cup of nations! beautiful game, i only saw the last 20 minutes, but those were the 20 minutes that mattered. beautiful assist by zidane in a crazily intense moment, passing to abu trayka who scored :) incredible work of art!
i am not a big fan of sports, but this was one game i had to watch :) second cup win in a row, the last being against the ivory coast in 2006.
woot! word has it that monday, yahoo will write a “sorry” to microsoft. now let’s just hope they don’t get rid of our search advertising (and, therefore, search in general) to google… as i mentioned before, the best option here is to tough it out this period of time, and things will come back up.
in lolcat terms, courtesy of the flickr anti-microsoft group: this picture is awesome :)
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 downgraded vista 64 to xp 32. i think i made this decision after seeing this article on slashdot.
yahooza linked two funny articles about the whole y! ordeal… i especially like the first one, and the second one is funny too but has bad language, so if it offends you, consider yourself warned:
translation from pr-speak to english [of selected parts of jerry’s memo]
on a more serious note on the same subject, the techcrunch article, “decision time for yahoo,” is a more serious (and perhaps realistic) analysis of the situation. until i read this article, i never really knew that there could be lawsuits for violation of fiduciary duty (which basically entails that you look out for your shareholders before looking at your own interests).
if it weren’t for this, i would have to think that yahoo’s decision would be easy - be patient and the storm will pass.
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, which some of the people from the other site didn’t like. he didn’t know about this until dnsmadeeasy contacted him, and said he had 48 hours to take the site down or pay the overages. so he said that within 6 hours, the site was taken down.
when he came to renew, he found the $8000 bill, and he was emailing back and forth with them about this (as it seems that they made a mistake with what had happened in the system etc). so he decided he’d switch dns for the time being (and he forgot that i had some of my sites hosted on the same dns server with him). they said they’d investigate and contact him back, and, until now, they didn’t, and he’s still in the process of trying to get this resolved.
given the sort of not-so-positive tone (if not negative or anti-islamic, even) of the dude on the phone “oh, this was the guy who was involved in dns attacks with islamic sites,” versus me knowing my brother, i tend to believe the brother more than this dude. at the same time, the brother should have remembered the important services that i had hosted on there as well, because that is a responsibility and trust.
in any case, all is good now al7amdulillah and am just posting this as a clarification to my earlier post about the same subject.
launched my second facebook app: sublime rhymes! still a little rough around the edges, some things can be a little more intuitive, but for now, i am going to sleep :)
so there’s a bunch of speculation about y! being bought out by microsoft. while i have no idea what will end up happening, i think that at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.
when you’re low enough in the food chain (a “peon,” in warcraft2 terminology, part of the work force), you wake up in the morning and mutter, “ready to work,” and go and do whatever they tell you to do. then at the end of the day, you get your check. whether that check is from y! or microsoft, does it really matter? not really…
that having been said, i’d choose to develop under linux/bsd using open source technologies over windows development any day.
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 normalize all the quranicrealm traffic to go through searchquran.net.