hitchhiker's guide, ruby mozembed

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

i finally got around to reading the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. really funny book. maybe i will try to read the other books at some point.

i played around some today with ruby-gnome2 bindings. all i can say is wow. the website documentation is incredible, and you can do so much in so little code. i played around some with ruby-gtkmozembed, and in a few lines of code, you basically have a fully functional web browser.

require 'gtkmozembed'

class Main
   def initialize
      Gtk.init
      window = Gtk::Window.new
      window.resize(800, 600)
      window.title = "ahmed's google test"

      browser = Gtk::MozEmbed.new
      browser.chrome_mask = Gtk::MozEmbed::ALLCHROME
      browser.location = "http://www.google.com"
      browser.signal_connect("title"){ window.title = browser.title; }

      window << browser
      window.show_all
      window.signal_connect("destroy"){ Gtk::main_quit }
   end
end

Main.new
Gtk.main

that’s all for now.

some islamic poetry

here’s some islamic poetry i came across in a lecture by sheikh muhammad al-shareef:

_ la dara lel mar2ee ba3d al mowtee yaskonoha illa alatee kana qabl al mawtee yabneeha fa2in banaha be'7ayrin taaba maskanahu wa in banaha be sharin, ‘7aba baneeha _

roughly… there is no home for a person after he dies to live in, except the one he was building before he dies, so if he builds it with khayr/good deeds, his home will be beautiful, but if he builds it with the sin/disobedience, its builder will be in trouble.

_ a6a3see al ilaha wa anta tuzhiru 7ubahu hatha la 3amree fel qeyasu badee3u in kana 7ubaka sadiqan la a6a3tahu inna al mo7iba leman yu7iba mo6ee3u _

roughly… how can you disobey Allah (SWT) and claim that you love Him, this is a very strange and unique way of understanding, if your love of Allah (SWT) were true, you would have obeyed Him, for verily the person who loves someone will follow them.

first bugzilla bug

at the suggestion of behdad off the arabeyes-developers list, i’ve posted my color and arabic shaping frustrations [along with the code] on gnome’s bugzilla.

hopefully someone can point me in the right direction…

emperor under wine

emperor works great under cedega - i beat one level with it :)

from dual to single boot

i’ve always dual booted windows and linux even though linux was my primary os [i am currently running gentoo, its great!]. but finally, today, i’ve deleted the xp partition and am now running 100% linux. i may get vmware so i can play around with visual studio if i want to write some windows apps, but i think the days of dual booting are over for me, at least for now.

pyboids!

greets. so these few days, i’ve been playing around with the boids algorithm, trying to write a simple implementation. i finally succeeded in doing so, in python, in under 125 lines. its pretty simple though but really cool.

boids is a “distributed behavioral model,” representing how birds fly or fish swim or whatnot. that link is a pretty good discussion of the algorithm, and this page has some pseudo code for the algorithm.

the really cool thing is how changing the rules really affects where the objects go. so for now, my implementation uses pygame and uses boxes rather than birds.

here is a picture:

oh yeah! and i am posting using drivel! - it seems to works great!

over 2 decades of h4x0r1n6

my friend and i’s conversation about my birthday:

(00:17:27) e_jive: so how young are u ?

(00:17:30) e_jive: lol

(00:17:37) ahmed: celebrating over 2 decades of elite code!

(00:17:43) e_jive: lol

(00:17:46) e_jive: true

(00:17:52) e_jive: so are u a guru now?

(00:18:00) e_jive: u know 2 decades is a lifetime

(00:18:25) e_jive: especially considering u came out of the womb with a laptop and a palm pilot :)

WoW under linux

woohoo, got world of warcraft running in linux! it worked, for the most part, under wine [w/o sound]… it works a little better under cedega [sound, a little better of a frame rate], but i am running it on cedega using d3d rather than opengl… whenever i try to run it on cedega with opengl, cedega dies. not sure why.

the game is surprisingly playable from the little bit i played. i had to turn the settings down [they were all the way at max in windows and i was still getting better frame rates than in linux]. now i get decent frame rates even outside [i tested it in auberdine and the wetlands, but i have not yet ventured to ironforge around the auction house to see what happens there].

the only kind of annoying thing is that right clicking is a tiny bit lagged… not quite sure why. i want to follow up with these cedega people and find out why i can’t run it in opengl mode, maybe it’ll be a little faster that way even.

irregardless, i am pretty happy it works well enough to play :) and i am pretty surprised that the free wine actually ran it with very little effort. woot!

dvorak

jawwad - after reading the nice comics at http://dvzine.org, i bit the bullet… and, as a result, i am typing this post at the amazing rate of roughly 2 wpm…

pango issues, etc

greets… so the pango team [owen in specific] were really helpful in the past in helping fix the arabic tashkeel problem [where tashkeel on characters causes random spaces in the text]. luckily, this is fixed now. (interestingly enough, firefox for windows is broken in this respect, and, in linux, if you don’t compile with enabling pango, its broken there too… but it works on osx out of the box).

i ran into another little issue and was wondering if anyone knew how to get around this [and i emailed owen taylor in the meanwhile]. basically, the issue arises that when you insert html tags in the middle of a word, the state information of the parser is lost… as a result:

i went to houston last weekend. pretty nice, the only notable thing is that all the traffic lights are sideways. that and our flight to got delayed for such a long time because the gas truck ran out of gas [or, as we were to later discover, “broke down”]. thank God i didn’t have a connecting flight… anyways… that’s all for now.