Alhamdulillaah, phpBB 3.0 Beta5 has been released! They mention in the announcement that they are anticipating the next release to be a Release Candidate, which means we may possibly have phpBB 3.0 final by this Summer, in shaa Allaah.
I have been anxiously awaiting phpBB 3.0 for a loooong time (predating this blog, that’s for sure). Features like sub-forums, UTF-8, and others that make sense for administering a larger forum have been a long time coming, and I have to hand it to the phpBB team - it is not for slacking, they are just so darn thorough. And they are probably dead-set on making phpBB 3.0 rock-solid in terms of performance, security, and stability, so I’m not pushing them to hurry to the final release…I just wish they would hurry to the final release.
My immediate need is for an upgrade for the Columbus Dawah forums, but I am reasonably sure that it won’t be the last forum I am working on, and I always prefer using a free-and-open-source alternative to proprietary and closed-source code.
After a long series of well-meaning but misleading tutorials, Google searchs, and finally, just plain-old reading, I’ve been granted success at connecting seemlessly to my WPA wireless network at home with an ease that rivals Windows’ own wireless setup (that may not be as flattering as my wording has lead you to imply…), alhamdulillaah. Continue Reading »
Alhamdulillah, it appears as though my upgrade to 2.1 went well. I guess I should probably start upgrading my other wordpress sites. One more thing I noticed, is that nested lists seem to be working perfectly in the newly revamped visual editor. This upgrade seems well worth it.
One other minor modification I recently made was the change from the leopard that used to be pictured up at the top in my current theme to something more abstract and non-living. Here’s a snapshot:
It actually started out as an attempt to make a stylized “H” logo (”H” for the Hidayah in HidayahTech - the same kind of idea for the favicon currently on Hidayah Online, only more abstract [did I just use the word "abstract" in two consecutive posts? I think I did...]). When I had made the vertical part of the “H” I was planning on using in Inkscape, I copied-and-pasted a duplicate on itself, and flipped it around 180 degrees. After added a simple gradient to it and redoing the flipping, I more-or-less got what you see above. I like it, at least, and since this is my blog, that’s all that matters!
Other than that, there hasn’t been too many other changes to the site. I still have a huge backlog of incomplete posts in my posting queue waiting for me to make them somehow interesting. I’ll see what I can do to push some of the more interesting ones out.
Somehow I missed the announement of a new release of Wordpress (my blogging software), “Ella”. I don’t know how or why I missed it, all I know is that I have an indescribable urge to upgrade now. I will fill you in on how it all goes. If all you see is a blank page later today, then you’ll have your answer…unless I’ve suddenly decided to go all abstract with my blog.
You: “But Basil, there’s nothing there!”
Me: “It’s there for those who can imagine it’s there…”
So visit back in a short while to further explore my plunge into insanity.
While chatting with a good friend on MSN about a particular forums post, I uttered the following phrase which I found to be very enlightened (and such modesty!):
I was really surprised that their obliviousness would be so obvious…
For background on this quote, the viewer is encouraged to read the entire thread. The quote above was definitely not meant to be offensive in anyway. I just thought the combination of the two ob* words to be rather humorous.
In light of, literally, recent comments, I’ve decided to take a shot at installing Gentoo once again (I can already imagine one person cheering…). One thing that you have to admit is that Gentoo has outstanding documentation. Additionally, the idea of compiling nearly everything from souce, which may seem tedious to some, just seems natural to me - after all, practically all software starts out as source code at some point. And, since I usually have to step away from my computer for hours at a time, long recompile times for new software doesn’t really bother me. The best part is that Portage, Gentoo’s software management repository, seems to be amongst the most up-to-date of all of ‘em, so this means I can almost always be running the most recent, stable version of applications, which is how I generally like it.
As it stands now, I’m waiting for a stage3 Portage snapshot to finish extracting, and I’ll proceed from there. Additionally, I chose ReiserFS 3 as my filesystem - I wonder if this will come back to haunt me later…
