Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, while reading about integers and, subsequently, prime numbers last night, I decided the time had come for me to write a primality calculator in PHP.  The test I use in my implementation is about as a naïve as one can possible get, but it was fun, nonetheless.

Interestingly enough, I discovered that there already exists a primality calculator for *nix-based systems - primes.  It comes with the bsd-games package for Fedora.  I assume the same is true for other distributions.  Mine isn’t quite as fast yet…but it does accept, optionally, one or two arguments. If there are two arguments, then it will calculate all primes starting from the first going until the second. If there is only one argument, it will calculate from PRIME_START (defined to be 2) through to the largest integer PHP can handle on your platform (usually the maximum value of a signed int on your machine).

There are loads of potential optimizations that can be performed, and this was just something written on a whim as a proof of concept. It seems to be accurate, however. The code, released under the GNU GPL v. 3.0, can be found below.
Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I was able to take some pictures on the beach near our home here in Kuala Terengganu (KT).

Beach Panorama

Kuala Terengganu "Island"

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam.  Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve returned “home” to Kuala Terengganu (KT), which is my wife’s hometown, and I’ve taken it to be my home-away-from home.  It’s a beautiful place, especially because we actually live in a kampung, or village, not to far away from the main part of KT.  Additionally, compared to Kuala Lumpur (KL), the air here is so much cleaner, fresher, and easier to breathe, alhamdulillaah.

I haven’t gone anywhere notably picture-worthy yet, but I hope I will get a chance to soon, in shaaʾ Allaah.  The weather today (after a fierce storm last night) is outstanding, and made me want to shoot some photos with a crystal-clear blue sky background.  Maybe another time…;)

If you want to see some photos of KT, just view the Malaysia category and there are plenty in previous posts.

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery.  You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of video.

He’s released a few videos that are freely available that are samples of what the entire program entails.  I found the one entitled “Three POWER Principles of Filmmaking” to be quite refreshing in how simple, yet effective, such techniques can be.  Even more beneficial is that the tips he provides, while framed around the production of video media, are general enough to be beneficial in almost any context.

Give his site a check-out and leave some comments as he’s very keen on getting & responding-to feedback from his visitors & members of his program.

Disclaimer:  Belal is just my friend - I am neither associated with Message Mastery nor am I enrolled in the program…yet.

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now.  And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share.

The sheer amount of work to upload these and present them in anything close to an appealing way through WordPress has made me decide that I am going to seek an alternative method for disseminating the videos.  I am hoping I can leverage my Gallery installation, in shaaʾ Allaah, but it’s support for alternative media types has not impressed me to date.  And don’t even dare suggest that I use a Flash-based solution…

Read on for the feature presentation(s)!  As usual, make sure to get a copy of the free-and-open-source VLC player if you don’t have it or another media player that can play Ogg Theora videos.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year.  If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system will be free from proprietary encumbrances.

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here.  Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme.  These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind.  Click the link to see them!

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, after finding the wpLicense WordPress plugin on the Creative Commons website, I’ve been able to completely license all my work released through my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.  This means such world-changing works as my essay on Social Networking & online projects, my tirade against anti-userism, a heart-warming story of love, loss, and & hard disks, the possible (at least, then) merger of Yahoo! & Google, natural sounds recorded with my H4, and many other things.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I am back in Malaysia, which means I am also back with my wife.  Words cannot express how much joy the two of us are experiencing being together once again.  More than six months have passed since we’d been together the last time.  In case it is not obvious, the reason we are not yet able to live together permanently is due to the fact that the U. S. Citizenship & Immigration Services has not yet approved the petition for my wife’s immigration visa, and thus, I cannot legally bring her into the country.  Therefore, until such a time as the petition is approved (and the NVC approves the visa, and my wife passes the interview) in shaaʾ Allaah, we will face challenges to living together permanently.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.

I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects.  However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on a particular drive (!).  The drive in question happened to have only one FAT32 partition, so I suspect it may have had something to do with it, as using another drive for both input & output would generally work flawlessly.  The particular action I was trying to perform was to encode a sequence of rather large JPEG files (3072×2304) into a single video file using the outstanding (but still somewhat experimental and/or unstable) FFV1 lossless codec.

So, I visited the ffmpeg website and looked at some of their bugs, but didn’t see anything related to this.  Then, after seeing some of their pre-bug report checklist, I decided to check the version of ffmpeg I had on the system, and found it to be from March.  So, I pulled-down a fresh copy of their trunk via subversion and ran configure & make (I did not run make install).  Running the resulting ffmpeg binary from this compile run worked perfectly, alhamdulillaah.

The lesson is, if you’re running into a bug with either ffmpeg or any other package, then give a shot at running the latest code, if available.  It may seem like common sense, but I had underestimated just how easy it would be.  Surely, other packages may not work as simply, but it really was a piece of cake in this case.  Now I guess I need to learn how to package RPMs so I can help out the Livna project to get this latest code into their repository, which I also understand is not simple task, as many other projects rely on ffmpeg…

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!

One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time - i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.

Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).

Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

Continue Reading »

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 9 is officially released! At least, the official torrents are available. The main site doesn’t seem to be updated yet, but then again, it’s not 10 AM, either. I’m grabbing the x86_64 DVD build on one server and the i386 on the other, so I hope to be seeding by midday.

Update: The Fedora Project site now reflects the release.  I should really be getting back to work now…

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9’s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community.

The following is pretty-much ripped from the wiki. The witty banter is added by me. Also, I know I’m not the first (actually, I hope I’m quite close to the last) to have done one of these things. What follows are the features that I consider to be cool and important, but this list is obviously by no means exhaustive or even appropriately representative of Fedora 9. It’s simply a list of what I think will make Fedora 9 so awesome, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Okay, that should be enough flame retardant for now…onwards!

Continue Reading »

Note to self: If I want my blog posts to show up in an aggregator, make sure to give the admin the right link first…

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

The command you want is mogrify.

Continue Reading »