Alhamdulillaah, nothing can take away from the blessing & joy of being a father, but one of the obvious side effects of having an infant is the drastic change in priorities.  So, naturally, most of my projects have fallen on the wayside.  Even work has suffered.  But, alhamdulillaah, this just means I have to reshuffle schedules and be more prudent about my time usage – I’m still figuring this out.

To help me get back on track, I wanted to revisit a recent post I had made about unfinished projects.  The two projects that I feel I need to put some extra time into, due to their nature, are the AlMaghrib in Malaysia project as well as the Global Homeschooling project/business idea.  The former needs attention because people are waiting on me for further action, while the latter is important because I am convinced it is the future for my family, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Although the other points on the list are quite important as well (and some are, actually, more important), I am choosing these as examples because I think making progress on them is something of a “low-hanging fruit”.  Therefore, I need to make some kind of schedule or plan for getting both of these done.

As for the AlMaghrib in Malaysia project, the first task I really need to push forward is just getting a website up.  This really isn’t hard, especially for someone like me who has dozens of websites floating around the ‘tubes.  However, what’s held this up is that I wanted AlMaghrib in Malaysia’s website to be the first one to utilize my new server completely – not just for the web hosting, but also for DNS as well as e-mail.  Sadly, this condition has meant that I haven’t been able to get things going as straightforwardly as I have in the past.  The good news is I do have DNS working on the new server, but not e-mail.  Therefore, my plan is to just launch the website, which, once done, will also make me become more serious about getting e-mail working on that server as well, in shaaʾ Allaah.  But, “launch” in this context may be rather limited in scope, since one of the first things I want to do is have a mailing list for people to jump onto…sigh.

So, the plan for AlMaghrib in Malaysia is:

1. Just get the website up.  DNS is ready to go.  The website, at this point, is really just going to be a blog, which is more than sufficient for our needs.
2. Once the website is up, get e-mail working on the new server ASAP.  Though this may take a lot of work, that’s fine, because it will also benefit a lot of my other sites, which need the same functionality.

As for the Global Homeschooling project, I’ve already gone ahead and purchase a slew of Islamic homeschooling-related domain names, all of which will point to one canonical website name, which will be the one we advertise.  The rest are there for serendipitous searches and/or hits.  I’ve dragged my feet on this one as well mostly because a lot of the work hinges on my wife’s availability, which, now, is understandably quite limited compared to before the birth of our son.  Still, I don’t really accept that as a valid excuse, because the site really should be ready for her as soon as she is ready, so that she can get started filling out the sites with content (which was how we had divided the initial work).

So, the plan for the Global Homeschooling project is:

1. Finish getting the website components up – blog, wiki, school, & whatever else.
2. Make the various website components ready for my wife to use them easily, without her needing me to fix things here-and-there.

Well, at least now it’s down.  I hope to have some results within a week, in shaaʾ Allaah.

I have the bad habit of starting things and not completing them.  This is bad for numerous reasons, just a few of which I’ll list shortly.  I will warn you now that as this post is meant to help me organize my thoughts, it will list-heavy, as I do find lists and other types of grouping structures to be beneficial and help in making relationships (e.g., database schemes).

I already know that as I type this I will revisit this post in the future as I will be unable, in one sitting, to be think of all of unfinished projects.  Therefore, I will come back and add to the list as I recall more things (and find the time and desire, a rare combination these days, to update the blog).

For

• Unfinished projects tend to clutter your mind
  • I tend to turn to unfinished projects whenever I work (i.e., get paid to do something) and hit a stumbling block.  This severely hinders my progress on work, which ultimately leads to less getting done.
  • Time when I could be brainstorming solutions is usually spent wondering about these myriad unfinished projects, which, lacking much focus, tend to yield few to no tangible solutions.  This includes walking/riding to the masjid, showering, and other activities that tend to leave the brain free and, ideally, well-suited for addressing beneficial thoughts.
  • If I try to focus on something, I can have a hard time preventing my mind from wandering to these unfinished projects.  This is related to the point about work above.
  • It’s just not healthy to have so many things on the mind at once.  There is a point at which the benefit of multitasking is overshadowed by the overhead of just trying to keep track of everything.  It’s not efficient.
• Having so many unfinished projects means that it can be hard to pick just one to work on.
• Playing catch-up may give a false sense of achievement, because the value of these unfinished projects are not equal, and therefore, I may complete one that is really not that important while one that is more valuable was never completed.  Therefore, just trying to clear out the backlog of projects may yield a net result of close to zero.
• There are many more, and I may amend this list in the future as I recall them.

So, here is the list of my unfinished projects (at least those that I can recall at one point or another).  I am including some thoughts on the different ideas as well.

• Redesign the Audio Islam website
• Write a script to automatically tag all the audio files, especially the ones containing Qurʾān recitation, with reciter & sūrah information
• The Fedora Documentation manpage coverage project
  • This is basically an idea I had related to the Fedora Documentation project to ensure that all executables had an associated man page (manual page, a low-level documentation system for Unix-like operating systems such as GNU/Linux).
  • The first step in this is to canvass the existing packages & executables and see what already has a man page.  I have already started on this, but there is much work left to be done.
  • There are plenty of sources for documentation that can be used as baseline manpages, including the Debian project.  So, this project doesn’t require as much work as it does just coordinating and facilitating.
• A Paltalk replacement
  • Paltalk is a voice conference & chat application (video is also supported, but I don’t care about that right now) that is widely used, but terribly proprietary.
  • My goal is to create or synthesize a replacement for Paltalk using only free software and open technologies
    • The best candidates for this are SIP (for multimedia) and Jabber/XMPP (for text chat).
    • The landscape for software that can do this in a simple fashion is rather bleak, but there are some solutions.
    • I’m currently focused on FreeSWITCH as the SIP server and ejabberd as the chat backend.
    • Linking them such that it will be one service will be quite challenging, and still requires a free software client that has solid support for both SIP & XMPP
      • I’ve been looking mostly at Qutecom, SIP Communicator, and Psi
    • • On GNU/Linux, the Empathy client for the Telepathy framework is outstanding, but, is limited to free-software operating systems.  I think Windows support is a long way out still.
• AlMaghrib in Malaysia
  • I am trying to catalyze the establishment of AlMaghrib Institute seminars in Malaysia (almost surely in Kuala Lumpur, at least at the beginning).
  • I’ve already purchased the domains almaghribinmalaysia.com/net/org, and I just need to get the site setup.
    • To start off, I think just a blog with some information about AlMaghrib is fine.  It can be fleshed-out later.
  • Alḥamdulillāh, there is already a lot of interest both within and without Malaysia.  I have several contacts here that are also excited and may be able to facilitate the first few steps.
    • I see the first step being getting a group of excited & enthusiastic locals to get behind the effort.
    • After that group is identified (and it is really an ongoing process), see about getting the support of existing organizations.
      • From an initial perspective, it seems like this is going to be easy, in shāʾ Allāh.
    • With this support, we will want to schedule some kind of event to gain a wider audience interest.  Something like a conference or teaser seminar, perhaps a week-long program with some of the AlMaghrib instructors.
      • Many of the AlMaghrib instructors are already known or well-known here
      • Having Suhaib Webb might be particularly nice, as his wife is Malaysian.
      • Waleed Basyouni has expressed an interest in coming to Malaysia, and some work is already in progress regarding that, but it may have stalled (temporarily only, in shāʾ Allāh)
      • Yasir Qadhi is another instructor that has some reknown here, apparently (from what I’ve been told).
• HidayahTech
  • My own technology consulting business
  • Although HidayahTech is currently the name of my blog, I have also resolved to use this as the name for my own consulting business.
  • Services will include
    • Audio recording, editing, mastering, and production (I did this, for example, for the Texas Dawah Convention in 2007)
      • I am consider splitting this and other audio-related services into it’s own business, namely, Hidayah Audio
    • Web technologies
      • Hosting (this is generally quite easy)
      • Moodle (an open-source learning mangement system, for putting schools online, for example)
      • Audio services, including hosting my “replacement for Paltalk” solution above
    • Consulting
      • This will include a wide variety of services ranging from system administration, general IT, infrastructure, to web development
      • I may take some partners or hire some friends for this aspect of this business, as I will need help for some points of it
• Global Homeschooling
  • This is my premiere project, if I had to pick one.  I consider this to be something great if I can achieve it, by the Permission of Allāh.
  • To sum it up, I want to develop a system whereby Muslims (and truly, anyone) can homeschool their own children easily.  Homeschooling may be too specific of a term, though, because I want the scale to include a plan that can be implemented by governments.  I would like children, and really anyone, to be able to be educated within their own homes, utilizing the bevy of technology that exists.
  • Technology creates options & opportunities, and this is a belief I take strongly.  Therefore, I think we should utilize it.  I see education as one of the most important investments that can be made, whether it is Islamic or related to the worldly sciences, both of which are important.  I actually believe the distinction to be artificial, but it will take time to get there.
  • So, to put it in a few words, I would like to develop a system of education leveraging technology that is globally accessible allowing education to be released from the confines of school buildings.
• Learn the Python programming language
  • I think learning Python has a high return value on the types of applications I would like to write, including graphical ones.  Also, it is quite the preferred language for many platforms, not the least of which is Red Hat & Fedora.
• Memorize the Qurʾān
  • Please keep in mind that this list isn’t in order of importance…;)
  • I think this is a goal every Muslim should have.  I started this goal, seriously, while I was staying in Egypt with my parents, even semi-regularly visiting the imān of the nearby masjid to review my memorization.  Sadly, since arriving in Malaysia I’ve not really resumed, and I am afraid I may start regressing.  This is the kind of project that can be achieved through a little, regular & constant work every day.  I really should commit to something, even if it is as simple as one āyāh per day.  That would be better than none.

Note: This is for future reference as I try to make some progress on an old project.  I do not think the last value is a default for Fedora, but rather, something added later.  If someone knows otherwise, please correct me!

Update: I’m starting to dislike fixed-width templates…corrected the last $PATH value so it will fit on my blog without overflowing into CSS “Elsewhere”.

Update 2: Ahhh!  WordPress!  WYSIWYG, not WIWIWYG (What I Want is Why You Get)!

For a long time now I’ve been wanting to setup an LDAP back end for various Hidayah Online Network resources, especially the Columbus Dawah project.  This has become particularly pressing as the Columbus Dawah website has three primary public services – the blog, the forums, the school.  Additionally, in the future I want to roll out webmail (publicly) for volunteers & administrators within the project.  The problem with running these disparate services is that they all have their own authentication built-in, which means someone needs to register on each site independently to access any services that require one to be logged-in.  Therefore, a system that would unify user authentication for all services (i.e., LDAP) would save a lot of hassle for both the users and myself.

Native support

Naturally, the first challenge is preparing the different software packages that run the various parts of the Columbus Dawah website for utilizing LDAP for authentication purposes.  The relevant bits of software are WordPress for the blog, phpBB for the forums, & Moodle for the school.  Additionally, I will use RoundCube for the webmail, but since it will act as an LDAP client, it will not need any special setup on it’s own – the back end IMAP e-mail server (Dovecot) will be the one that interacts with LDAP.  That will be described in another post, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Of these mentioned bits of software, it appears that only WordPress comes without some kind of native LDAP support.  While this will be a challenge moving forward, one plug-in exists that at least offer some support, but I’m not sure if it’s updated for the latest version(s) of WordPress.

Structure

Although I haven’t finalized it, there is definitely the hope that I can use LDAP for authorization as well as authentication.  While authentication would allow me to let someone login to the site, authorization would allow me to give different users different levels of access.

For example, let’s say we have a simple organization that has three “ranks” of members – member, volunteer, & officer (this is roughly based on the plan I am working on for Columbus Dawah).  Furthermore, we want to grant different levels of access to the site’s resources depending on a user’s rank.  For a regular member, we would like to allow to him to login, post to the forums, post comments on the blog, and enroll in courses in the school.  For a volunteer, we would like to add to that the ability to have an e-mail account.  Finally, for officers, we would like them to have access to make blog posts and create & edit courses in the school.

Authentication alone would only allow us to grant or disallow access site-wide using one account.  Authorization gives us that additional feature of granularity to allow access to some or all of the site based on permissions.  LDAP supports all of this, but it is up to the underlying software to enable such features through LDAP authorization in a way that makes sense for the application.  As all the aforementioned applications have a concept of groups or roles with different sets of permissions or capabilities, and as I intend to utilize such features as the project grows, the ability to authorize users as well as authenticate them is tantalizing at the very least, and down right essential the more I think of it.

Fedora Directory Server

The specific LDAP server I intend on using is the Fedora Directory Server (website).  First and foremost, naturally, it’s open source.  And, the fact that I’m choosing an LDAP server that is related to the Fedora Project really should come as no surprise to anyone with even the slightest familiarity with this blog.

However, FDS is also quite an advanced LDAP server, supporting a slew of enterprise-level features while, according to most accounts, being reasonably easy to work with.  Therefore, it is quite a good choice, and may very well be the best one.  Time will tell how close to the truth that statement is.

What’s next?

So, what’s next?  Well, the most glaring obstacle right now is that I have zero experience working with and/or configuring an LDAP server, so I’m going to start by just playing around with the protocol and see if LDAP will work as smoothly as I hope it will.  If I feel comfortable enough with that, then my first foray into LDAP will likely be to configure my new e-mail server to use it as a backend.  That should prove to be quite interesting, moving forward.  So, stay tuned and I’ll do my best to keep things updated!

Alhamdulillaah, following a recommendation from a close friend, I decided to start leasing a server from 10TB.com for Audio Islam.  As the name implies, they are big on bandwidth, which is exactly what Audio Islam needs.  Needless to say, I’m thrilled at having a new beefy server to play with and to meet the current & future needs of this food of the Islamic audio-consuming masses.  And the best part is they installed Fedora for me!  How awesome is that!

Read on for the specs & details on the transition.

The plan I got (accurate to the time of this posting, at least) is really impressive, maa shaaʾ Allaah.  The catch for all of this value is minimal support.  Alhamdulillaah, with more than 5 years of managing GNU/Linux boxen, as long as I have a remote reboot, I think I’ll be fine, in shaaʾ Allaah. 

Hardware specifications

The specs for the new server:

• Single Quad Core Xeon 3220 – 2.40GHz
• 4GB of RAM
• 250GB of disk space
• 1Gbps (!) network connection
• 10TB monthly bandwidth limit
• $199/month

The specs for the old server were quite modest in comparison:

• 2.4GHz Celeron (single CPU, single core )
• 1GB of RAM
• 80GB of disk space
• 20Mbps network connection
• No monthly limit
• $239/month

Bandwidth

It should be quite obvious to see why I had little hesitation in the upgrade.  A 20Mbps connection without a monthly limit can yield a theoretical monthly throughput of 20Mb/s * 3600s/hr * 24hr/day * 30day = 6.48TB.  Interestingly enough, last Ramadhaan, Audio Islam did nearly 6TB – so it was just the right time to move on as well.

Of note is that it may be that the connection on the old server might have been limiting the speed of downloads at the peak times.  Therefore, with a 1Gbps connection (that’s fifty times faster than the old server), we may just see some surprises in the coming months.  I may have to instill some artificial bandwidth throttling if I do not have another solution (say, a second server).  We’ll just have to see…

Fedora

The most exciting part for me is that they were more than happy to install the latest release of Fedora (9) for me, which is the same operating system I have running on my laptop.  Fedora is a great distribution for running a server on, and it makes me want to help out with the proposal for a Server Special Interest Group (SIG) within the Fedora Project, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Some people may hold the opinion that a server distribution should be on a more stable platform than Fedora, because Fedora is a cutting-edge distro, running the latest releases of software generally.  I won’t argue that point, but I will also say that running the latest stable release of software brings advantages that are not available to someone running older releases of software, especially server software.  Being that Fedora has a huge & helpful community around it with many already using Fedora in a server configuration, any problems encountered will also be well supported by others like myself, in shaaʾ Allaah.  So I am not concerned in running bleeding-edge stable software on a server, which is just what Fedora provides, alhamdulillaah.

If all goes well, I may have reason to get a second server from 10TB for some business I am undertaking, in shaaʾ Allaah, and with Fedora 10 scheduled to be released in a few days, in shaaʾ Allaah, I am looking forward to running it as well.  Crazy?  Perhaps.  But I’m loving it!

Cacti

Wait, what?  Yes!  My same friend referenced above also showed me Cacti running on his server.  I immediately feel in love with it and got to work setting things up.  See for yourself.

To put it simply, Cacti is a PHP/MySQL-based tool that, when running, monitors & produces information graphs for servers, mostly communicating through SNMP.  I have it setup for my three current servers (soon to be two, in shaaʾ Allaah).

Server naming scheme for the Hidayah Online Network

Incidentally, with the growing number of servers within the Hidayah Online Network I decided that I needed a naming scheme.  My oft-referenced friend elected to use the names of cities of importance within Islaam – so he named them makkah, madinah, etc.  Another one of my friends has opted for the names of historic battles in Islamic history – so badr, uhud, etc.  After consulting with my wife, I decided on something even better – the names of the chapters (suwaar) of the Qurʾaan – so my first server (formerly just called “The Hidayah Online server”) has now become alfaatihah.hidayahonline.net.  My second server (formerly just called “The Audio Islam server”) is now, for the remainder of it’s life within the Hidayah Online network, albaqarah.hidayahonline.net.  And, the newcomer, if you haven’t guessed, is called aalimraan.hidayahonline.net.

I have a sense of sadness that, within two weeks, the name albaqarah is going to have to be retired.  Therefore, I may rename aalimraan to albaqarah, as the server is really replacing the old one in purpose, and also, I would hate to see the name of one of the greatest suwaar of the Qurʾaan be abandoned, albeit for a very arbitrary purpose.

Also, as should be obvious now, I decided that the formerly unused domain name, hidayahonline.net, will be the administrative name for everything related to the network itself.  hidayahonline.org will remain the Islamic portal.  This leaves hidayahonline.com, which I may retain for commercial services should that opportunity arise (and arise it may yet, in shaaʾ Allaah).

Conclusion

I think that pretty-much wraps-up what I’ve wanted to discuss over the past couple of weeks regarding the Audio Islam migration.  Alhamdulillaah, it went very smoothly, and working with a very powerful server on a super-fast connection has been most enjoyable, even though I’ve been undergoing some bandwidth trials myself (the current connection is 64kb/s symmetric DSL – something I didn’t even know existed before).  We should have a more reasonable connection restored within a few days, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Look, in the future, for some significant updates for Audio Islam, including the years-overdue upgrade to the CMS.  Now that the server is running Fedora, I have even less excuses, as everything I need is conveniently packaged already!

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.

The desire to upgrade Audio Islam has been around for a long time, and I still have many more changes, particularly in relation to the code, that are pending.  But I decided to focus on performance due to the vast surge in visitors that will come during the month of Ramadhaan, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Therefore, I had to polish some things, upgrade others, and in some cases, fundamentally change them!

Prior to today, Audio Islam was running a typical LAMP setup – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database server, & PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.  Also typically, at the behest of the PHP developers, my Apache HTTP server was configured to operate in prefork mode, which, to put it simply, causes the web server to assign one process per web request.

For a site like Audio Islam, where currently the programming logic is rather limited and the bulk of the action involves downloading of large files, the cautions that call for using the prefork mode, as opposed to the more performant multi-threaded worker mode, are less urgent, so I opted for the more efficient mode due to Audio Islam’s need for very high concurrency on rather modest server hardware.  I’ve had to set the maximum number of clients in my webserver to over 700 and also offset the more popular mode of download to be FTP just to keep the website accessible, so I am very keen to seek out as much optimization as I can until I can move to another server that will sustain the site as well as this one in terms of bandwidth (currently, 20Mbit/s unmetered is keeping the site afloat, alhamdulillaah).

However, here is where the multi-threaded madness of PHP reared its ugly head.  In truth, I am not entirely sure that I can lay the blame solely on PHP here, but as PHP is not generally multi-threaded enabled and intends to stay that way, I don’t feel so keen on removing them from the blame completely, either.

Before going further, here’s a summary of the specific versions of each package (before/after)

• Apache HTTP Server: 2.2.0/2.2.9
• MySQL database server: 5.0.16/5.0.67
• PHP Hypertext Preprocessor: 5.1.6/5.2.3

As I install all my servers from source on my aging Red Hat platform in order to get the latest versions easily, that means I have the pleasure of compiling all my packages from source (I haven’t figured-out how to make my own RPMs yet…).  So, my first step was to compile Apache HTTP server, ensuring I enabled the worker MPM mode to enable multi-threading (a simple mistake I noticed when I saw the config summary included the old prefork MPM).

My configure command was as follows:

./configure --enable-modules=all --enable-mods-shared=all --with-mpm=worker

This went along very well. My next step was to compile MySQL, as I needed access to the client library in order to compile PHP with support for the database backend.  Note that the coming of PHP 5.3 should obviate this as it will feature a native MySQL driver for PHP which shares the same license as PHP, which sparked the whole problem of the separation between PHP the MySQL client library.

Before I show the MySQL configure command, let me present the PHP one:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql --enable-zip

This is a pretty basic PHP configuration script, rather slim, but sufficient for what I needed.  However, the configure script complained about a missing library for MySQL named “libmysqlclient_r”.  I looked for it on my system, and while I found it, it was the wrong version.  This is when I realizzed that I had to enable the thread-safe client in MySQL.  So, I did this, using this configure command:

./configure --enable-thread-safe-client

After a rather lengthy make & make install process, PHP was still complaining.  I looked for libmysqlclient_r and found it, but PHP still kept complaining that it wasn’t under “/usr/local”.  It didn’t matter that I explicitly instructed it to look at the install directory of my MySQL installation.

Anyway, after spending several hours trying to figure this out by researching online and trial-and-error, I decided enough was enough, and I was going to follow PHP’s recommendation of running it under FastCGI.  However, I do not have a lot of experience getting Apache to run under FastCGI.  Morever, as I didn’t need Apache’s power & flexibility for Audio Islam, I decided now was the time to go where I’ve wanted to go for a while – to host Audio Islam using lighttpd.

lighttpd (pronounced lighty) is a lightweight yet powerful HTTP server that is designed for low overhead and high performance. Despite these goals, it still hosts a slew of features that sufficed it to be the backend for Audio Islam, alhamdulillaah.  Once I realized that I was going to go through with it, I stopped all my efforts at getting Apache HTTP working and focused on installing lighttpd.  Amazingly enough, I discovered that the latest stable version, 1.4.19, was already available via yum for RHEL4!  I quickly went ahead and install it and its fastcgi module.  And, a short while later, after some configuration, I had Audio Islam up-and-running on lighttpd!  Alhamdulillaah!  It was rather surprising to see how it worked perfectly out of the box once I redirected it to my newly-fastcgi-compiled PHP.  For reference, here’s the final configure command I used for compiling PHP to ultimately work on lighttpd:

./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-discard-path --enable-force-cgi-redirect --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --enable-zip

The first three arguments are from the lighttpd documentation, and the rest are what I wanted in the first place.

So, there you have it! Audio Islam is now running on top of lighttpd, alhamdulillaah.  In shaaʾ Allaah this setup will enable the server to sail through Ramadhaan far smoother than previous years.  I guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks, in shaaʾ Allaah.

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.

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.

This license covers all original work by me posted to this blog, including literature & multimedia (audio, video, & images).  For attribution it is sufficient to link back to the post containing the content on this site.  Since I have chosen the Attribution ShareAlike license, this means I simply want to be credited for my work and I would like that any derivative work using my own work also be shared in a similar way.  I would not mind if someone makes derivative works (keeping in mind the above two points), and if someone makes money from using my content, so be it!  Feel free to share some of the wealth with me if you are so inclined, but that is not a condition. 

So, at long last, my blog content is shared appropriately.  Let the creativity flow!

UPDATE: I fixed some typos and clarified the language I used for describing the terms under which I am licensing my work.

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.

First, the hidayahonline server (seeding the x86_64 DVD ISO file):

And second, the audioislam server (seeding the i386 DVD ISO file):

Although the audioislam server has twice the tubeage of the hidayahonline server, it is also the one more heavily loaded due to AudioIslam.com. So, they both ended-up serving around 32GB of data to the Tubes before I disconnected them for the day.

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.

Background

I have long had a passion for audio – be it with regards to editing, recording, production, or even creation. And, given my other passion for Islamic education, it should come as no surprise that I like to work on recording, producing, and making-available quality Islamic recordings for the benefit of everyone. Thus, ever since I first attended the Texas Dawah Convention, I knew that I wanted to be involved, at least with the audio aspect. This desire became even stronger as the Convention has had some troubles make the recordings from the previous years widely available.

The Convention itself is outstanding, and I strongly encourage everyone to attend it if you can – whether or not you are Muslim, it provides an excellent place where someone can learn about the proper understanding of Islam free from extremism, misguidance, and distortion. Naturally, those are based on my own opinions, and everyone is entitled to their own about whatever they like, I suppose…regardless, it is held every year in late December. Details can usually be found on their website as Winter approaches.

First Contact

Back to the point, I had a golden opportunity to pursue the desire to become more involved with the Convention itself. It just so happened that Shaykh Waleed Basyouni, the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, was holding an AlMaghrib Institute seminar (Rays of Faith) in Columbus, Ohio (Qabeelat Hayl). As I was the coordinator for the class, I was blessed with extra time with the shaykh, so I approached him with a bold proposal. Being that he was the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, I proposed to him to hand over audio recording & production entirely to me for the then upcoming convention. I knew it was more-or-less a shot in the dark, but he respectfully listened to me in full, giving me more than a generous portion of his time given that he was heading back home soon afterward.

Pleasantly enough, and after a series of e-mails & phone conversations, Shaykh Waleed took me up on my proposal, which I was wisely discussing as a prospect with a close friend & future partner the whole time. As such, we were mentally prepared with the idea that we’d have actual work to do during the convention.

Preparations

As much as one prepares for a task, it’s amazing how many aspects can still come up and leave one shaken and struggling to stay standing. To be honest, it is in management of this kind – preparing for the logistics of something hands-on – that I tend to be rather weak. Alhamdulillaah, my friend and business partner came to the rescue and prepared, more or less, the entire plan for how the work needed to be broken-up, divided, and thus organized so that it could be managed in a reasonable way. Without his sheets, plans, and equipment labeling, the task would have been an operational nightmare.

Part of our charter for the audio work was to purchase a variety of recording equipment, most of which would be used for the many coming years, in shaaʾ Allaah. Consequently, once again, my friend showcased his business prowess, and was able to secure the best pricing for the majority of the equipment and supplies we needed. The biggest challenge here was my procrastination and that of others, through miscommunication, which resulted in us spending way more money than necessary for some basic items (e.g., CDs, labels, and some equipment).

Showtime!

Once we got to the site, we had very little time really to spend with the volunteers we’d be given to be our runners. It was somewhat of a challenge to divide the work up amongst them – we had 8 total (a 9th came in midway through the convention, alhamdulillaah). Each had their own level of skills, be it technical or otherwise, that we had to balance and find out. What was most troubling to me was that, despite the sheer amount of work involved, frequently the volunteers found themselves without anything to do simply because we didn’t know how best to divide up the work. Again, and I will continue pointing this out through the post, my partner-friend really took to managing the volunteers and ensuring they were kept reasonably busy with productive things while also ensuring they weren’t overworked and could attend the parts of the convention their really wanted to.

To their credit, the volunteers, in general, all performed outstandingly, maa shaaʾ Allaah walhamdulillaah. Given that there were three straight days of seminars, sometimes 6 at the same time, the fact that we had only a few really major mistakes (including one lecture that was a complete write off, unfortunately) is really a testament to their hard work and willingness to pull through some tough schedules we’d made for them. Jazaakum Allaahu khayr!

To Be Continued…

While this wraps-up the general procedure for everything, I have intentionally left the technical side out as I am going to focus on that in a dedicated post, including possibly mentioning a near disaster that was narrowly avoided due to the Mercy of Allaah in answering my supplications. See you then!

Software that is free from proprietary restrictions (a.k.a, free-and-open-source software, which I will refer to as simply “free software” for the rest of this post) has become exceedingly important in my life for both philosophical as well as practical reasons. Not only do I truly believe free software to be inherently better in every way for humanity than proprietary/closed-source software, but I have become increasingly incapable of working with non-free software. Now that free software solutions run the gamut of nearly everything I have a need for, I have all but eliminated non-free software from my essential stack. Having said that, I have a special interest in web-based free software as this particular realm of software has become crucial not only to myself, but to nearly all projects in which I am involved.

Across several of my projects, most of which have yet to really take off, I have been able to fulfill all online needs using free software exclusively. Whether it is Wordpress (Columbus Dawah, AbuHurayrah.com, this site), phpBB (Columbus Dawah forums), MediaWiki (Encyclopedia Islam), or Moodle (Columbus Dawah School), there is a free software application ideally suited to the project’s needs. And if one application doesn’t fit perfectly, I have the source code, so I can extend it or modify – or better yet, someone else probably already has!

I’m currently in the planning stages of massively integrating, as much as one person can, four major pieces of online free software – Wordpress, phpBB, Moodle, & MediaWiki – such that they will all share the same authentication backend. Better yet would be a way to actually & truly integrate all four together. While it is true that all four actually overlap somewhat with one-another (and some, like Moodle, actually have features of all the other three), I believe that each of these applications does at least one thing far better than the others. For example, Wordpress is the unmistaken champion of blogging, while phpBB (especially now that version 3.0.0 has been released as of the end of 2007) is simply outstanding for forums & community sites, and nothing else comes close to what Moodle can do for an online learning environment and placing a curriculum online. As for MediaWiki – one word – Wikipedia.

The goal of integrating these sites is such that I would like to build a truly cohesive community environment that utilizes the strong points from each of these separate applications, but without making my site’s visitors and project members feel like they have to deal with multiple sites. So, one possible solution is a single sign-on for all the different applications. There are a few different ways this could be done, either via a hack, a 3rd-party authentication system (e.g., OpenID, LDAP authentication backend), or truly integrating the different applications into one unified package. As all the different apps have their own custom authentication systems, it is not trivial. But, since they are free software, it’s trivial for me to actually begin such a project. I don’t have to talk to anyone, get anyone’s permission, or work out strange and complex cross-licensing deals with myriad exceptions and/or restrictions. This, my dear readers, is what is meant by “free as in freedom”.

As it’s late now, I don’t want to start the tangent of actually how I intend to do this, as I haven’t really thought it out too much, but I am leaning heavily on an LDAP-based solution, as it is something I believe is natively supported by all four applications, and many others (should I desire to add another app to the mix – like, say, Roundcube).

• Ability to record to an uncompressed or losslessly-compressed format with reasonable quality
• USB mass storage-class device (for drag-and-drop between the device and any computer with a USB port)
• Ability to play, at least, MP3 as well Ogg Vorbis-formatted files
• Reasonable amount of storage capacity

The iHP-120/H100 was the only PAD™ on the market at the time that met all of these requirements. After acquiring it, I discovered that, not only did it meet these requirements, but it did so with flying colors, mā shā ’Allāh. I thought I couldn’t be happier with the device. This proved to be true until I discovered Rockbox. After loading Rockbox onto my PAD™, I was in an entirely new world of bliss. Not only did I get the warm-&-fuzzy feeling of using a free-&-open-source product on my PAD™, but Rockbox took away the built-in limitations that came with my PAD™ – most importantly, the time/size limit of any single recorded file (in WAV format). A later revision of Rockbox introduced the ability to record directly to a WavPack format, which meant even greater space savings and fewer disk writes – theoretically, this could save additional battery power, but I never evaluated whether or not this was truly the case. But I digress…

The majority of my usage of my PAD™ was in playback – either lectures, Qur’ān recitation, or previously-recorded sessions (could be either of the previous two examples). Other than playback, I have used my PAD™ to master many live recordings. Many, many recordings that I’ve posted online, either on this or other sites, have been recorded through my PAD™, and there remain many more that I have yet to post (though they are mostly of me, and therefore, have dubious value…).

After all this gushing, surely you can imagine my chagrin when I first started to experience drive-based errors on my PAD™. Though they were fleeting and infrequent at first, they unnerved me. The frequency of these drive errors increased with time until it actually prevented me from using the device altogether, and even being able to turn it off became an exercise in precisely timing a hard reboot along with hitting the power button as soon as the PAD™’s firmware could receive commands but before it had a chance to attempt to read the disk. This culminated in the PAD™ becoming utterly unusable. My heart sank.

After a few attempts at trying to manually re-seat the disk drive (after hunting for the right-sized Torx screwdriver), I realized that perhaps it was time to move up in the world of PAD™ recording. Therefore, recently, I have come across several devices that may possibly serve as a replacement to my PAD™ in the capacity of its usage as a recording device, mainly for spoken events, such as lectures or Qur’ān recitation (e.g., during tarawīḥ). The results of my ongoing search for a replacement to my PAD™ can be found in an upcoming post, in shā ’Allāh.

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.