الحد لله, on Friday, the 11th of Shaʿbān, 1431 (23rd of July, 2010), at 12:40 AM local Columbus time, Allāh blessed us with a healthy, 6 lbs, 14 oz blessing that we’ve named عبد الله (ʿAbdullāh), which, in Arabic, means, “slave of Allāh” (Allāh being the proper name of God).  For the very same reason we’ve named our first son ʿAbdurraḥmān, we chose this name for our second son, in reference to the following ḥadeeth of the Messenger of Allaah, salallaahu ʿalayhi wa sallam:

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Book 025, Number 5315:
Ibn Umar reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: The names dearest to Allah are ‘Abdullah and ‘Abd al-Rahman. (link)

Both mother & new son are doing very well, walḥamdulillāh.  The birth of Abdullah was a bit special as we chose to have him delivered at home (i.e., a home birth), and that turned out to be an excellent and blessed decision, alḥamdulillāh.

Note: I strongly apologize for the delay in announcing this birth.  Please forgive us and do not let it detract from your duʿaaʾ for him. No special reason for the delay except that I wanted to have this post ready first.

Note 2: You can see the announcement for our first son here.

Note 3: You can see the birth of ʿAbdurraḥmān noted here.

A few days ago, Matt Lee of the Free Software Foundation had asked in the #theora IRC channel for help in making a DVD of the Patent Absurdity documentary.  Several people volunteered to help, and I was one of them.  I discovered later that this was related to the “Who should see Patent Absurdity?” campaign of the End Software Patents project (an initiative started by Brad Feld, I just discovered!).

Incidentally, we all ran into different kinds of problems, doing what should have been a rather simple task.  The sources of the problems ranged from simple bugs to rather weird video formats.  In this post I will discussed the various issues that I personally encountered and how, alhamdulillaah,  was able to overcome them.

The most straightforward way to make the video was to take an already decent-quality clip, the 1080p-resolution Ogg Theora clip from the Patent Absurdity website, and just run that through ffmpeg with the ‘-target ntsc-dvd’ option to get a DVD-compatible MPEG-2 video stream.  While this did actually produce a compliant video stream that I could burn to a DVD, the resulting video actually had some audio synchronization issues as well as some other problems related to ffmpeg’s handling of Theora’s drop frames (segments of video that are basically empty frames because the data does not change at all).  So, the resulting video was unacceptable.

My next attempt was to actually go from the original source material that Matt had provided some folks over at Xiph.  What’s interesting is that the format was a very odd, 1280×1080 resolution, 4:2:2 chroma-sampled DV-encoded video with a display aspect ratio of 16×9 – that was 25GB in size..  The only application that actually supports this format is ffmpeg, which means, also, it’s more widely supported than one might think.  It’s still an oddball format, though.  So, I ran it through ffmpeg with the same target settings as above.  However, ffmpeg’s ntsc-dvd target does not change the chroma sampling format of incoming video, so it produced MPEG-2 video that had 4:2:2 chroma.  I’m not sure if that’s even valid for MPEG-2, but it’s surely not valid for a DVD.  So, I manually specified the proper chroma sampling using ‘-pix_fmt yuv420p’ (this means planar 4:2:0 chroma sampling).

Sure enough, this produced a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 video stream, but with one problem.  The aspect ratio was not preserved.  This resulted in video that was squashed horizontally.  And, try as I might, nothing I could do with ffmpeg with the MPEG-2 video stream from this point on could correct the aspect ratio, and using a utility, such as mpgtx, to fix it, would make it incompatible with DeVeDe, the application I’m using to master the DVD Video itself.  So, I had to do an intermediate step.

I deduced that the problem was rooted in too many transforms being required at the same time.  Part of the problem may very well have been my own inexperience with ffmpeg as well, as perhaps someone may be willing to clarify via comments.  Regardless, I decided to tackle the problem by doing the steps separately – rescale the video & resample chroma as one step, and then do the MPEG-2 encoding via DeVeDe, which will know how best to make DVD video it finds agreeable.  So, starting with that mutant DV video source clip, I extracted the audio out into a FLAC file (the source was 48k/16b/s PCM, so very high quality).  Then I worked on the video – I scaled it down to 720×480 with a 4:2:0 chroma sampling but with an aspect ratio of 16×9, and I encoded it with the lossless FFV1 codec developed by the ffmpeg developers themselves.  This gave me a 7GB AVI file – not small, but far more manageable than the original 25GB source file.  I downloaded that locally, and then I attempted to remux the video & audio back into the same file.  And this is where the next issue occurred.

I first noticed the problem on my server, where I attempted this technique first – that is, remuxing the FFV1 AVI with the FLAC audio into another AVI file, this time with combined video & audio.  I noticed my server started to lag tremendously, and even my rsync download of the video to my PC at home had halted (at more than 90%, no less).  I managed to kill the ffmpeg process, and upon inspection of the load of my server, it had apparently jumped up to 30 or so during that time.  I was confused, but I didn’t piece it together yet.

After the FFV1 AVI file had finished downloading to my PC (I had to restart the rsync, but thankfully, I had [and usually always] used the –partial-dir parameter to save partial downloads for just such an occasion), I attempted the same remuxing operating on my PC.  Less than a minute later, I noticed that my PC had frozen.  I knew it was still working because the hard drive was thrashing, so I attempted to SSH in to my PC from my laptop, which I happened to have handily next to me.  After wait for about 1/2 an hour for the connection to establish and actually be able to get the system to respond, I discovered that ffmpeg’s memory usage had jumped up to 1.3 GB.  And, as my PC has only 2GB of RAM and I had numerous bloaty apps open already (Thunderbird, Firefox, Konversation, Pidgen, Gwibber, and, of course, Gnome itself), this mean the system had run out of memory and was thrashing the swap file.  I managed to killall -9 ffmpeg, and that brought the system back to the land of the living.  I inquired on #ffmpeg why this might have happened, and the response I got was that ffmpeg doesn’t like FLAC in AVI.  So I tried other container formats – Matroska & NUT, notable.  They both exhibited the same problem, but I was able to kill ffmpeg in a similar fashion much more swiftly.  I decided to just suck-it-up and converted the FLAC to WAV and ffmpeg muxed that without any difficult whatsoever.  My PC didn’t even break a sweat.

As a side note, following some additional advice from #ffmpeg, I used mkvmerge to mux the FFV1 AVI file with the FLAC audio file, and it worked, but it lost the aspect ratio.  I tried to manually specify the aspect ratio, and it gave very odd numbers that were, perhaps approximations of 16×9, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I stuck with FFV1 & raw PCM audio in AVI.

Finally, I can jump into DeVeDe and attempt to make the DVD.  As I am quite pedantic about quality (in case you haven’t gathered that by now), I chose the best quality options for encoding the DVD video that DeVeDe gave me – highest rates for audio & video and two-pass video encoding.  Matt had specifically said he didn’t want any menu for the DVD – he just wanted it to play, so I removed all menu options.  The whole mastering & encoding process took abut an hour and a half, according to what DeVeDe reported at the end, but I just slept through that (I had stayed-up all night, partially because of this, but not solely so).  I burnt the ISO that it generated onto a DVD-RW, tested it on different systems (Fedora & Windows), including a consumer DVD player, and, alhamdulillaah, it worked beautifully everywhere I played it.

So, there you have it – the trek to make a DVD about the problems caused by software patents completely with free software.  It was a fun experience, and I’m glad that I was able to help with getting this important message out.  In shaaʾ Allaah this will have a positive impact on patent reform and strengthen the arguments against the enforcement and even existence of software patents.

Assalaamu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve had much of a presence in the Blogoverse, and part of that is due to just not having the desire to go through, login, and making a post through the traditional WordPress administrative interface. However, until now, I still have not found a blogging client with which I’m totally satisfied. So, I’ve decided to go ahead and give lekhonee another shot.

One aspect for which I have not made an opinion yet is that the interface is basically plain text, and it allows you to post in raw HTML, which isn’t terrible. However, having a rich-text editor really isn’t that difficult to add, so, I’ll just have to see if it’s worth it or not. So, let’s see how it works-out.

رمضان 1430 مبارك

الحد لله, it’s Ramadhaan once again!  Granted, I’m a bit late, but I posted elsewhere in a more timely fashion, so I guess I have some kind of an excuse.  ِAnyway, while this is definitely a month most noted for the abstention of Muslims from food & drink, in reality it is so much more than that.  It is the opportunity to really get yourself into less of a worldly mindset and focus on our goal – Jannah.  So, I ask Allaah to grant us the ability to seek out the full reward of this most blessed month and grant us the fullest extent of His Mercy, Forgiveness, and freedom from the Hellfire.

الحد لله, I am trying more-and-more these days to practice writing Arabic with actual Arabic letters rather than using cumbersome transliterations.  This is partially due to my father’s abhorrence of transliterating Arabic, lest the skill to actually write Arabic in Arabic be lost.  I agree with him, and besides, it’s a great way to learn the language and get used to using it.  So, as much as possible, I’m going to try to start using more-and-more Arabic, where appropriate, in my typing, by using the actual Arabic letters, إن شاء الله.  If anyone has any questions about what a particular Arabic phrase is, then please post your question.  I will try to include a simple glossary.  Some autolinking would be great, too…let me look for a WordPress plugin for that…

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve decided that, after upgrading WordPress, I should do a little housekeeping.  As usual, I find a list best presents the ideas I wish to express:

• I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.2 (mentioned here).
• I fixed some posts that had some typos (I usually am good about this, but these had slipped by).
• I deleted some links that really weren’t relevant to me anymore (i.e., Ruby on Rails) and I added some new ones.
• I changed to a new theme (comments welcome!).

I’d like to elaborate a bit more on the last point above, since it merits some discussion and the action is rooted in something I care about deeply.

Previously, for quite some time, I’ve been using the theme “Vidiyal“.  I’ve actually stuck with it for quite some time because of it’s simplicity, elegance, & beauty (in my eyes, at least).  However, a post by the author of the theme really made up my mind for me.  To put it shortly, despite the obligation to release derivative works of WordPress, such as a theme, under the GPL (as that is what WordPress is licensed under), he insists he does not have to.  I’m not so concerned with the legal issue, to be honest, but the insistence not to release the code as free software is what unsettled me.

To be honest, I didn’t really check before using the theme, and I guess I didn’t really care before this.  But now that the issue has been brought to my attention, I have to stick with what I believe is right.  So, I’ve stopped using all non-free (as in freedom) themes, and will only use themes that I know are free software.  I feel this is the better way to go.

I do hope that Sadish and others see that free software, both practically and, more importantly, fundamentally, are important concepts for protecting our freedoms as human beings.  Software freedom is something we should stand up for, and not tolerate being abused or disregarded.

So, with that, I close my rant and resume pretending to be productive.

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve just successfully upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.8.2, along with several other blogs that I maintain.  I’m really looking forward to the merger of WordPress & WordPress-MU, which, ideally, will make managing multiple WordPress sites on the same server easier to deal with, in shāʾ Allāh.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve discovered a new WordPress blogging client packaged with Fedora – namely, Lekhonee. There aren’t a lot of formatting options, but it appears you can post using HTML, so that’s a plus, I think. Let’s see how it goes.

Innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raajiʿoon.  Verily we are from Allaah, and verily unto Him we shall return.  Shaykh Abdullah ibn Jibreen has passed away.  Muslim Matters has some additional coverage, including some kind words by Shaykh Abu ʿAmmaar Yasir Qadhi, who had the occasion to meet the shaykh several times.

Whenever the news of the death of one of the scholars reaches me, I always remember the following hadeeth from Saheeh Muslim:

Book 034, Number 6462:

‘Abdullah b. ‘Amr b. al-’As reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: Verily, Allah does not take away knowledge by snatching it from the people but He takes away knowledge by taking away the scholars, so that when He leaves no learned person, people turn to ignorant as their, leaders; then they are asked to deliver religious verdicts and they deliver them without knowledge, they go astray, and lead others astray.

May Allaah protect us from the dangers of ignorance and following the ignorant.

Assalaamu ʿalaykum wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh

Innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raajiʿoon.  Our sister, Marwa Sherbini, was murdered in Germany as a consequence of wearing her hijaab, a style of dress fulfilling the commandment of Allaah for women to cover themselves appropriately when outside of their homes.  Muslim Matters has a story covering this great issue: Marwa Sherbini: The Hijab Martyr.

Without a doubt, her death is shocking and tragic, and the circumstances surrounding her being slain can only be described as bizarre, and nothing should take away from this.  And yet, the true tragedy is the impotence of the Muslim world in its response.  I am not casting-aside the unity this has brought, for example, amongst the Egyptian bloggers.  But is all that we can do nowadays is protest verbally?  Long gone, it seems, are the days when the Ummah had real men leading them, ones that would send an army to the borders of the disbelieving lands because a Muslim woman was slapped, let alone murdered.

I know that Allaah will Remember our sister, “Shaheedah Hijaab”.  And yet, are we really getting the lesson at all ourselves?  May Allaah Guide us all and Help us all.

Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.8 has been released!  Grab it from the downloads page or upgrade, like I do, via SVN.

Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora Project has released Fedora 11!  You can get the torrents and/or check out the new features!

(Sorry for the rather uninspired & lazy post…I usually like to share more details, but I’ve got work to do…;) )

Alhamdulillaah no one was injured in the dramatic collapse of the roof of the Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin stadium in nearby Gong Badak here in Kuala Terengganu.  It is only about 10 minutes away from where we live here in KT, and in fact, it’s on the way from our place to downtown.  Therefore, I took the opportunity to snap some pics over a couple of days.  You can find more pics in the gallery, including several panoramas.  I’ve also taken some HDR pics, but they are not processed yet.  Patience is beautiful. 

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.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve successfully loaded the Fedora 11 Beta Live CD onto an SD card.  This allows me to boot directly from the card using my USB card reader, much as if it were a USB key/flash drive.  In short, after a few attempts, everything just works.

The few attempts mostly related to loading the Live CD image onto the SD card, as my flash memory reader is somewhat fussy and I was experimenting with different filesystems – my preference being to use a free software filesystem before using one of Microsoft’s.  I was able to do this using the ext2 filesystem (no need for journaling on a Live USB key, right?), as I have no need to store anything else on it.  Incidentally, I created an overlay image for persistence, so any changes made to the system while running should be saved and persist between reboots.  We’ll see how that works.

One of the driving factors for getting the Fedora 11 Beta Live image working is because I want to give my father, who just recently purchased a new netbook (Lenovo), a nice tour of a recent version of Fedora.  A Live USB version would be ideal for this.

Update: I’ve since gone ahead and installed Fedora 11 Beta on my laptop, as well (from the DVD install, though).

]]> http://www.basilgohar.com/blog/2009/04/06/fedora-11-beta-livecd/feed 0 http://www.basilgohar.com/blog/2009/03/17/its-a-boy http://www.basilgohar.com/blog/2009/03/17/its-a-boy#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:12:26 +0000 Basil http://www.basilgohar.com/blog/?p=446 Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alḥamdulillāh, on Monday, the 19th of Rabīʿ ulʾawwa, 1430 (16th of March, 2009) at 5:38 PM Malaysia local time, Allāh blessed us with a 2.3 kg (~5 lb.) blessing we named ʿAbdurraḥmān (عبد الرحمن), which, in Arabic, means “slave of the Most Merciful”, which is one of the beautiful names of Allāh in Islām.  In fact, the Messenger of Allāh, ṣalallāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam (may Allāh peace & blessings be upon him) mentioned that the two most beloved names to Allāh are ʿAbdullāh & ʿAbdurraḥmān (slave of Allāh), which is why we chose that name for our first son.

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Book 025, Number 5315:
Ibn Umar reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: The names dearest to Allah are ‘Abdullah and ‘Abd al-Rahman. (link)

Both mother & son are doing fine, alḥamdulillāh, and we all came home earlier today.

Picture requests will not be honored. 

Alhamdulillaah, I am quite pleased with the following HDR image I was able to assemble.  While not as good as the best that are out there, it is definitely a step-up from my other attempt I shared here.

HDR Scooter

The workflow this time was almost the same as always, with one minor difference.  I took several shots of the same scene at different exposure levels (1/3 EV), amounting to a whopping 28 (!) separate exposures, which is about the most I’ve ever done.  I renamed the images so that they were in sequence from darkest to lightest, which helps with the next step, which is to align them using Hugin’s separately-packaged align_image_stack.  However, instead of using the align_image_stack utility directly, I called it from within Qtpfsgui (using the –align switch on the command line).  I used the default HDR generation settings and output to OpenEXR format.

The difference is that I did the HDR generation from within Qtpfsgui rather than using align_image_stack’s own routine (which also outputs in, I believe, Radiance HDR format).  Comparing the two, I realized that there wasn’t much difference at first, but at a closer zoom (e.g., 1:1), the Qtpfsgui method has far less noise in some areas (but not without some glitches, maybe you can find them), resulting in a smoother & more-natural picture.  I may consider playing with more than just the default HDR parameters with Qtpfsgui for generating the HDR image to see what other results I can get.

The final phase is tonemapping, which I generally don’t tweak.  Contrary to previous attempts, the Mantiuk algorithm produced a very colorful image, which I usually can only get with Fattal, which brings with it some other complications.  All in all, it was great.

If I had to guess, I would say that part of the reason for the ease of working with this HDR sequence was that the image had plenty of HDRness available to play with – the sky, the ground, the scooter with its reflective highlights as well as its darker spots.

Alhamdulillaah, to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that I started using Fedora personally with Fedora Core 4, and not 5 like I had previously thought.  This makes me feel better as I’m glad I started using Fedora earlier, because I like to think I recognized the importance of a completely (or as close as possible) free operating system (free here means freedom, not just free of cost).

At the time, I was content running it as a dual-boot system and just playing around with it.  By the time Fedora Core 5 came around, though, I was giving serious thought to using Fedora (Core, at the time) as my primary OS.  The complete transition happened, I believe, with Fedora 7 (which is also the year that Fedora Core & Fedora Extras combined, creating…Fedora!), where I relegated Windows XP to just being a spare OS for the very few things it does that I am unable to do with a completely free operating system (yet).

My experience with Fedora Core 4 was overwhelmingly positive.  I am sure I was impressed by the sheer amount of Free Software that was available for it as well as the elegance of a system that was not originated in Redmond.  I was and still am very pleased with the way Gnome works, and that was a big factor for me at the time as it is now.  I do wonder, though, if I downloaded & installed Fedora Core 4 today, what my experience would be link….hmm…

I remember seeing Fedora first in use as Fedora Core 2, when I was surprised someone was using it, as the name “Fedora Core” made me think it was the core of an operating system, but not the complete one.  I don’t know how or why I picked that up, but it is likely related to the perception that Fedora is not really meant to be used, and it is just a development platform (a blatantly false accusation).  I do know that I heard of Fedora Core when it came out, but again, my perception was likely incorrect at the time, thus causing me to adopt using it until quite late.  I had been using different GNU/Linux distributions since I was a freshman in college (can anyone say 1999?).  At the time, I recall trying “Corel Linux” – yes, I…don’t know what I was thinking.  I do remember it being based on Debian, though.  I also remember it significantly for a large amount of disk activity.  I don’t remember much else other than me deleting it shortly afterward.    Other flavors of GNU/Linux I tried were Red Hat, and that’s about all I can remember now.

So, anyway, this might be a good idea for a meme.  My first Fedora.  Talk about when you first started using it, why you did, and how the experience was.

Alḥamdulillāh, I’ve gone ahead and removed all the microblogging updates to my blogs (the ones titled, “Identi.ca updates for yyyy-mm-dd”).  I thought it would be a neat idea, since I had started using identi.ca, to add some unique content to my blog, but the result was all I was doing was spamming my own blog.  How terrible is that?  Since I already have a sidebar widget that displays my identi.ca activity and anyone can subscribe to my dents directly from the site, I felt the blog updates were just too much.

In an ironic twist, I’ve now enabled my blog to make a dent (the identi.ca term for Twitter’s “tweet”) whenever I make a post using the same plug-in.  In shāʾ Allāh I won’t have the reverse problem.