Archive for the 'Free Software' Category

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Freedom is for the people

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog):

michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School.

But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments.   Please take some time and read those first, and then come back here.  ;)

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Posted by Basil on Aug 28th 2008 | Filed in Education, Fedora, Free Software, GNU/Linux, Society, Technology | Comments (0)

Naïve integer primality calculator in PHP

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.
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Posted by Basil on Aug 24th 2008 | Filed in Development, Fedora, Free Software, Fun, GNU/Linux, PHP | Comments (0)

Kuala Terengganu beach & “island”

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"

Posted by Basil on Aug 20th 2008 | Filed in Free Software, Malaysia, Media, Travel | Comments (0)

Audio Islam now running on lighttpd

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.

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Posted by Basil on Aug 16th 2008 | Filed in Audio Islam, Design, Development, Free Software, GNU/Linux, PHP, Projects, Technology | Comments (5)

Time Lapse Barrage

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.

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Posted by Basil on Jul 29th 2008 | Filed in Free Software, Fun, Malaysia, Media, Technology | Comments (0)

Nokia plans to buy Symbian, open OS

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.

Posted by Basil on Jun 26th 2008 | Filed in Development, Free Software, Technology | Comments (0)

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States