uber rain, etc

today, it rained like insanity. like seriously. so it rained all night and stuff and in the morning it was fine. so i went to work, and, just out of cautiousness, i took my umbrella. when it came time to leave, i was amazed - it was like pitch black outside and it was raining insanely.

so then i started driving home and the exprience was simply horrible. traffic was the least of problems… the water in some places was so high up, it felt that i was driving a boat rather than a car. i had my wipers on max speed, and it was still kinda hard to see. even more so, as i would drive, big splashes of water would come from both sides of my car. but al7amdulillah (all praise and thanks be to God), we made it home safely.

i haven’t done any coding for the past few days, or anything really note worthy either. so that’s all for now!

beautiful weather

the weather today was absolutely incredibly amazing. so i played basketball. and then i came home and was hungry. so i took a shower. and then i cooked dinner - chicken fingers/strips… and rice… and heated some vegatables (fasolya bayda - black eyed peas without a black eye) that my mom had given me before i left a month ago… and that is all.

oh and today (thursday) marks 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day of being here.

google code jam frustration

i am so frustrated right now, i feel like yelling and screaming, etc, except that i can’t because mansoor’s asleep and the neighbors are too…

sooooo… something makes me decide to sign up for this google code jam 2004 competition… bad idea.

so it was 2 problems for the 1st round (i guess there was a challenge round or something too but i dunno, 2 problems basically, and you had an hour to do both of them).

really cool problems too mind you…. especially the second one. the first problem gave you a “map” consisting of you and enemy targets, and you had to return an array of the distances of the enemies to you.

the second problem was awesome – given a rock that drops in a pond of water, you always have this “ripple effect” – so given an array of such rocks, and assuming that ripple in any one spot is additive (and that the effect of a rock begins at time 0 as its weight and decreases as the time increases), what is the largest ripple value in a particular pond?

the first one took me a while even though it was easy, especially since i misread part of the problem and proceeded to waste about 15 minutes first trying to figure out how to get an ArrayList to sort in java, and then writing my own quick bubble sort algorithm when i didn’t have to.

the second problem (the big one, 1000 points) is what REALLY frustrated me. due to the great amount of time spent on the first problem, i had about 25 minutes to do this problem (minus however long it took me to read it and figure out what to do). if i had about 30 more seconds, i would have done it right… i found out my mistake 30 seconds after i submitted it – rather than do:

for (i=0; i<arr.length; i++)
   for(j=0; j<arr[i].length;j++)
      // code goes here

i instead did…

for (i=0; i<arr.length; i++)
   for (j=0; j<arr.length; j++)
       // code goes here

thus throwing all my answers off, thus kicking me out of the competition, thus making me uber frustrated because i knew how to do it and did it right even with the limited time remaining… it was just one silly error. the sad thing is, i found this same exact error three lines lower and i didn’t see this one three lines above until it was too late…

i guess i do admit it was pretty fun… but nonetheless, i am upset, and as thus, i am going to sleep now…

namazTime 0.3b for linux

peace. people with linux and gtk2 can download the 0.3 beta version of namazTime. its pretty much functional (although it doesn’t make athan yet). please do consult the (very short) readme before attempting to run it.

and most importantly, please leave me some feedback, bug reports, etc. wa jaza Allah al-mu2mineena (wal mu2minati) khairan.

prayertime app update, etc

peace… i pretty much finished the linux gtk2 version of the prayertime application… all i am missing is 2 things - a nice icon for the tray, and adding notification (ex. athan or a dialog box when a prayer time comes about). there’s also one little bug i am trying to fix, i am not sure if its an itl bug or if its a bug in my code, so insha’Allah going to try to figure that out…

i got my copy of the mono developer’s notebook today. at an uber short glance, it seems pretty cool…

bookpool rocks for technical books… their prices often times beat amazon’s and their shipping prices seem pretty reasonable (i got 2 day shipping for just under $5).

halo rocks. even if its sold by microsoft. that is all for now…

a tiny bit of code...

peace. i started playing with the excellent ITL libraries today. my hope is to write a simple application that just sits in the system tray and gives a simple listing of when the salat times are.

as you can see, its in uber beta stage right now. insha’Allah the plan is for gtk2 and windows versions; and then insha’Allah i’ll try to fix up my broken gdesklet.

picture credits, etc

peace. first off, i want to just point out that not all the pictures on the photos page are pictures that i took. for instance, most of the moving to penn pictures were taken by jawwad, so i wanted to give him credit here.

i have more gmail invitations if anyone wants any – everytime i give some out, they give me more invitations again…

about blog comments, i got my first piece of “comment spam” a few days ago – essentially, i got an email asking me if i wanted to authorize a fishy comment… and sure enough; it looked like it was generated by a script or something; similar to those spam emails. so maybe since no one comments (except like one person who posts his own little blog under mine), i should remove the commenting ability off the site…

anyhow, that’s all for now.

isna trip and photo galleries

peace and greetings. before i start talking about my isna trip, for those in a rush, i finally got around to putting up my picture galleries on my website. gthumb is a really nice program, i used it to both get the pictures off my camera and to generate the albums. very nice.

anyhow, on to the isna trip. so this year could really be considered my first year going to isna trip, although it wasn’t. i went to the chicago isna a long time ago with my family, but i am too young to remember much of anything; except that i stayed with the little kids, went to the sears tower, and got an autograph from the famous egyptian reciter, sheikh muhammad jibreel.

so this year is the first year that i was really old enough to be aware of what’s going on and such.

the first thing i want to discuss is the lectures. first and foremost, i was very pleasantly surprised to see sheikh mokhtar maghrawi there – i love that shiekh. and, amazingly enough, he remembered me and took me by the hug when he saw me – may Allah bless him and his family and grant them eternal happiness in this life and in the hereafter.

so while there, i attended 3 lectures for sheikh mokhtar. the first was talking about the tongue and how a muslim should use his tongue. in brief summary, it discussed how we talk a lot, and that if we were to use our arms the way we use our tongues, we wouldn’t be able to move our arms from how tired they would be. so he stressed on how the more we talk, the more likely we are to say things that we shouldn’t say. he also discussed how one should be very careful as to what they say and how they say it, along with the fact that we should be very tolerant and lenient. ultimately, he said, as a general rule, that a scholar taught his student that “when you are in a situation where you feel like speaking, then force yourself to remain silent. and when you are in a situation where you don’t feel like speaking, then and only then can you speak and answer.”

his second lecture was on the ears and eyes and how these are a gift from Allah and how we should be careful in the way we use them. the main point that stuck in my mind now was the fact that he swore that even the stealing of a small glance at something that we shouldn’t see or listening to a small sound that we shouldn’t listen to can change the state of our heart. and i think that sentence speaks for itself, and many of us know that this is true if we reflect on our lives and times when we’ve seen this happen to ourselves as well.

sheikh mokhtar had another lecture on a followup topic to the above two topics, but it was packed full and they wouldn’t let me in… but the third lecture of his that i attended was a fiqh q&a lecture given by him and the president of isna. essentially, he gave a nice introduction which was, in my opinion, the most important part of the talk. essentially, the question being posed was, “do laws (specifically the laws of Islam) change over time as there people change, or do the laws stay constant even as the people change throughout time?” – and his answer was no, the laws of Islam do not change over time; however, you cannot take that part of the answer alone. he goes on to explain that there are 5 major important principles that are the reason behind all laws - life, mind, faith, property and family/honor (not in order). certain things that are prohibited are always and will always be prohibited - for example, stealing. other things, however, that are prohibited can be legal only in a situation of must in which one of the five principles will be violated. the example he gave was that if you were in a desert and are dying of thirst, and stumble across an oasis but its owner isn’t there, then you can drink just enough so that you remove the threat to the principle (life, in this case), and then wait till the owner gets back and pay him for whatever food or water you took without his permission. so basically, certain prohibitions can’t and won’t change because of the inherit reasons behind why they are prohibited, whereas other things can be temporarily made legal in the case that one of those 5 principles is being violated. sorry, my explanation isn’t all that great, but i tried.. hehe.

i also went to another fiqh lecture by another shiekh who discussed some of the tradeoffs of following only one set mathhab versus following parts of the mathahib versus not following a mathhab at all… pretty interesting stuff, i should read up a bit more on this.

what else… ah, it was the first time i heard sheikh hamza yusuf speak in real life. my thoughts? first and foremost, he’s a very good speaker (as in style, etc). i know that some people have their doubts about him based on some comments he made a few years ago, but i think that ultimately, each of us is a human being, which means we are all going to make mistakes from time to time… i think overall, his speeches are excellent in that it seems that the american public would be willing to listen to him if for no other reason than the fact that they can relate to him.

the first big talk he did was about islam and its state in the world now; how the Prophet (peace be upon him) set strict rules for jihad in which he ordered the companions not to kill women and children; and how, as thus, many of the events being attributed as “islamic extremist actions” today have nothing to do with islam. his second talk which i attended was a largely history filled talk (there was some history in the first talk too). he talked about the fact that islam was on the mind and tongues of our founding fathers; how clauses in the constitution were made with muslims in mind (for example, there was, at some point, a debate of using “Jesus” in place of “God” – but the idea was left out for muslims and jews and others). he also said that napolean’s napoleonic code was heavily influenced by maliki fiqh, which is pretty interesting…

two other scholars i got to hear this time around that i really loved – one was sheikh suhaib webb – this sheikh is amazing because of how he talks – he’s a convert from 10 years ago, and was one of the msa folks, so the way he talks is a way that youth can relate too. in summary, he’s awesome.

and finally, last but far from least, sheikh muhammad alshareef. this guy is also awesome, he has an amazing way of talking and is very interesting. i bought two of his cds before i left, “when wolves become shepherds” and “the mountain pass.” i think someone told me that he runs the al-maghrib islamic forums, i think i am going to join these at some point insha’Allah. the cds and stuff are done by eman rush.

so that was the lectures in a nutshell. a cracked nutshell. yeah. oh and the reciter, mu7ammad jibreel, was there this year too – i didn’t get his autograph this time around though…

so the lectures were one of the best parts of the whole trip. in addition to the lectures, i got to see many of my friends, many of whom i haven’t seen in a while, and many of whom i won’t see for a while due to the fact that they are studying abroad as well. so that was awesome.

of course every such program has its advantages and disadvantages. the disadvantages… well, lets just say that naseeb.com helped make the disadvantages several folds worse. no further explanation necessary.

overall, i think its a good idea and there’s a lot one can potentially benefit by going, but it all depends on one’s intentions. personally, i don’t plan on going back until i am married, insha’Allah.

that’s all for my long rambly blog entry of the day - peace out.

6 gmail invites

peace. i got 6 gmail invites, if you want one, leave a comment with your name and email address, first 6 comments get it.

pictures of various trips and things coming soon (tm). insha’Allah.

el update

greets… i got my digital camera working in linux and got the pictures off of it; along with getting a whole bunch of pictures from jawwad. so i am planning on putting up a picture gallery on this site sometime soon insha’Allah (with God’s willing).

windows almost messed up my linux yesterday: i was trying to create a blank partition, and it renamed my primary linux partition from /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hdb3… so, of course, the system didn’t boot…

anyway… that’s all for now. i’ll post up some pictures sometime soon insha’Allah.