platters!

platters!!!

this is my favorite zabihah place to eat in nyc. fawaad introduced me to it a while back, and i think that despite the fact that its quite far from where i live, i still go there pretty often. i went there this weekend, and i also saw the new 5th avenue apple store from outside, which definitely looks really cool!

actually, there’s one really interesting thing about platters which always strikes me as interesting - its on a corner with at least 2 other street vendors nearby (that you can see while standing in line at platters) – and although the food at those tastes very similar to that of platters, platters has all the customers and people whereas the other ones generally don’t. its like a sign of how Allah gives rizq to whomsoever He wills, such that two nearly identical places selling nearly identical food are there, one getting lots of customers and the other getting almost none…

iconv, vim 7

iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful: _ iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file_

i’ve been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they’ve made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be… there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you’re set.

you can see a screenshot here.

interview, yahoo mail beta, etc

yesterday, i got in on the yahoo mail beta by using the tricks mentioned on several web sites. i like it actually, despite the fact that some of the people commented on some of those sites saying its nothing compared to gmail… i think yahoo did a good job, and it certainly is a lot better than the hotmail beta in my humble opinion which barely works under firefox…

this morning, i read an interesting interview with marc allen. i don’t really know who he is, just that he’s a multi millionaire… he makes some interesting points throughout the interview… the three points that struck me the most were: 1. with regards to money, he says, “It is a very, very good servant but a terrible master.” 2. he says that you should save at least 10% of your salary monthly, and save more if you can. he says that once you’re able to live off 90% of your salary, save another 10% and give it in charity, saying that those two steps are “great keys to a better life and a better world.” 3. he says that all it takes to becoming a millionaire today is intention.

i also like his work schedule… 4 days a week, not going in to work before 11, taking mondays off, dedicating sundays for family, etc…

overall, i was just impressed by his way of thinking about money as a utility, as something that can improve society. i wish someone would tell this man about islam and its teachings with respect to money, people, and societies. the interview is a great read overall.

rapdizzle

fo’ shizzle my nizzle rapdizzle – lol i was talking to my boy OK and he got me in a rapping mode… so i started this codeish rap, first line of which is inspired (ripped) from eminem, and dumped it in achinb’s gtalk window… so per his suggestion, here it is..

my code is like a dagger with a jagged edge, to push your computer over some big ledge, java, python, and php, easy stuff compared to c, and then there are kids who do ajax, simple little javascript hacks, these script kiddies have no clue, holding UIs together with glue.

other folks code in c# better play a violin and drop that harp, i don’t wanna care about what ms did, or on which big company google may bid.

on second thought, i think i’ll stop it here and won’t post the rest :p

difference between italians and europeans

this funny video reminds me of arabs… :)

technology, languages, and y3k

the past 2 days at work, i’ve had some interesting happenings… yesterday, i met my egyptian friend and coworker who works here with me too, and, when he asked how i was doing, i said, “el7asharat wel saraseer metala3een 3aynee” (which roughly means, ‘insects and roaches are giving me a hard time’) – he said, “oh, you’re one of those guys! just like these other guys who are like, ‘senna zar2a’ for bluetooth” :p i practiced it on some germans in broken german too, ‘hast du blau tzan on dein komputer?’ – hehe.

i guess what’s interesting though is that in pretty much all languages, all the technical terms are in english. it sounds really funny to say ‘senna zar2a’ or ‘blau tzan’ for bluetooth and ‘saraseer’ or ‘7asharat’ for bugs… why though? hehe i guess in arabic, some people call the internet, ‘alshabaka,’ which literally means ’the net’ (like a fishing net) – (by the way, why don’t they say ‘3esh el3enkaboot’ or something? (spider web)). but yeah, most people call it, “el net” – ’el’ being the.

as for y3k… so today, i introduced a y3k in the source code to our application. i asked my project lead and such if it was okay, and they said, “no one will be using our software until then.” – basically, i had a list of files, *strTIMESTAMP.ext – and i wanted to delete them all, but i don’t want to delete *str.ext itself – just the ones with a timestamp. so because the delete method doesn’t take in a regex (so i can’t pass in *str+.ext), i had to find another solution.

the easy way (which i didn’t want to do because i am lazy) is just copy *str.ext if it exists to something else, do the delete, and copy it back. but instead, i opted to do delete str2, which means in the year 3000, our software will stop deleting its temporary files… i might go back and fix it later after fixing the other important bugs…

update: i found a much easier fix – use str?.* instead since ‘?’ is supported :)

sergeant!

i am in the top 2000 pvp players on silverhand! w00t! i am now a sergeant, 1704th place on silverhand :) not bad for the first week of serious pvping :p

wow reader

i installed wow reader - cool stuff, though i think it can be improved (automated somehow? i still have to do a /wver to get it to load, but… yeah). here is my first and most leveled up character’s stats :) i should probably put this on the sidebar of my blog somewhere… what would be really nice is also a time tracking thing that looks at /played… hehe except then people would know how much i play ;)

my guild members and i were experiencing some major lag in the game, so we started to quote movie phrases, replacing random words with the word lag… the best one was, “with great lag comes great latency…” :)

so, in the words of another guild member, i am lagging out.

yahoo rocks

i am starting to really like yahoo. besides having a good taste and aquiring del.icio.us (no pun intended ;)), they released a pretty neat user interface library, which contains some utilities for web development with ajax and such. i glanced at it a bit, looks really cool and plan on playing with it later on. best of all, its open source!

by the way, if you don’t have a del.icio.us account, get one now! here is my del.icio.us (i still need to integrate it into this blog at some point). for those who haven’t used it, del.icio.us is a (social?) bookmarking service - you can look at mine for an example. i have a button in my browser, and whenever i come across an interesting link, i click it to add that particular site to my del.icio.us.

amazing television commercial

this is one of the best islamic reminders i’ve seen in the form of a very short television commercial (you can right click and do save as if just clicking it doesn’t work). if you don’t speak arabic, the verses being recited are in surat al-qiyama (75:26-35). the text at the end reads: “اقم صلاتك… قبل مماتك” - which means, “establish your prayer… before your death.”