HidayahTech

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Hello!  I know I’ve already had a few posts show up on the Planet already, but I wanted to at least acknowledge the fact that I am now, as opposed to having been previously not, a member of Fedora Planet!

I am an avid Fedora user - I have been using Fedora somewhat since FC5 and regularly since FC6.  I run Fedora on my laptop (which I am using to compose this post), on my main PC at home, and also at my workstation at work.  I won’t go into why I love Fedora (and free software in general) too much here, but I guess that fact is obvious given the circumstances under which you are reading this.

I’ve considered joining the Fedora Planet for a while as a decently high percentage of my blog posts are related to Fedora and Free Software in general, with the rest being related somehow to technology, society, community projects, and/or religion.  Only my “Fedora” category is subscribed to on the Planet, but you’re all more than welcome to puruse my blog if any of these other topics interest you at all.

Incidentally, I will do my best to not spam my Fedora category with topics that would not be of general interest to those subscribed to a Fedora blog aggregator.

As for my own involvement with Fedora, I really am best categorized as a user and an advocate, more than anything else.  I am hoping that in the near future my contributions can go beyond mere evangelization and bug reporting into actually bug fixing and contributing.

As for myself, what may interest most of you is the fact that I am a web developer.  I work primarily in the classic LAMP stack, with the majority of my work comprising writing PHP & working with MySQL.  I’m trying to broaden my horizens somewhat, including learning Python so I can start writing some useful GUI applications or even basic scripts that can be rolled out to a large number free software users.  We’ll see how that develops.

Finally, I love comments and constructive discussions.  My blog is ad-free, does not link to google-analytics, and I host it on my own dedicated server, so jumping to my site should be reasonably painless.  I value a quick-loading site as much as the next guy.  Thanks for reading, and here’s to the start a beautiful friendship!

P.S.  If you see any non-English on my site, it’s likely to be Arabic.  I have a terms page that has translations of some of the more common phrases I tend to use in my normal speech.

Wow!

I don’t think it helped that I posted a link to a download from my server, either…

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Introduction

Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.

The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts - management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to - knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.

Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.

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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora 9 Preview has been released to the torrents! You can grab ‘em here:

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

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I got tired of seeing everyone on the planets (Fedora & Gnome) showing-up in Liferea doing this, and I was left out.  So here’s mine from work:

[basil.gohar@escapdv01 ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

265 ll

210 cd

101 time

86 dbrestore

79 exit

28 su

24 vi

18 ssh

17 ping

16 less

“dbrestore” is an alias for a script I use to…well..restore DBs.  One that is not on here that was the first time I ran the script is my “search” alias, which is a wrapper for find & grep that searches the contents of PHP files (since that’s what I spend all day working on).

I’ve even added a GNOME category.  Maybe after this I’ll start posting more Fedora- & GNOME-related topics, and increase my chances of getting listed in the planets…

I’ll update with my home laptop & PC results after I get home tonight, in shaaʾ Allaah (notice I’m using “ʾ” to mark an Arabic hamzah in my transliteration…more on that later…in shaaʾ Allaah…;) )