i always used to get upset when i send a message or set a status on an english site in arabic, only to have the punctuation all messed up. well, thanks to two unicode control characters, \u200e and \u200f (for ltr and rtl, respectively), i can finally go from writing:
يحيى الإسلام!
to writing:
يحيى الإسلام!
much better 
thanks goes to this wikipedia article and adil allawi, whom i first heard about this from.
one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there's way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.
مسلسل قوي بجد و راءع
حال الدنيه يحزن - اءول ايه بس - اللهم احفظنا واحفظ شباب و بنات المسلمين... امين
update - try pasting that into google translate and see what it says... apparently, "ameen" translates to secretary and google doesn't like egyptian slang...
iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful:
iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file
i've been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they've made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be... there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you're set.
you can see a screenshot here.
the past 2 days at work, i've had some interesting happenings... yesterday, i met my egyptian friend and coworker who works here with me too, and, when he asked how i was doing, i said, "el7asharat wel saraseer metala3een 3aynee" (which roughly means, 'insects and roaches are giving me a hard time') -- he said, "oh, you're one of those guys! just like these other guys who are like, 'senna zar2a' for bluetooth" :p i practiced it on some germans in broken german too, 'hast du blau tzan on dein komputer?' -- hehe.
i guess what's interesting though is that in pretty much all languages, all the technical terms are in english. it sounds really funny to say 'senna zar2a' or 'blau tzan' for bluetooth and 'saraseer' or '7asharat' for bugs... why though? hehe i guess in arabic, some people call the internet, 'alshabaka,' which literally means 'the net' (like a fishing net) -- (by the way, why don't they say '3esh el3enkaboot' or something? (spider web)). but yeah, most people call it, "el net" -- 'el' being the.
as for y3k... so today, i introduced a y3k in the source code to our application. i asked my project lead and such if it was okay, and they said, "no one will be using our software until then." -- basically, i had a list of files, *strTIMESTAMP.ext -- and i wanted to delete them all, but i don't want to delete *str.ext itself -- just the ones with a timestamp. so because the delete method doesn't take in a regex (so i can't pass in *str+.ext), i had to find another solution.
the easy way (which i didn't want to do because i am lazy) is just copy *str.ext if it exists to something else, do the delete, and copy it back. but instead, i opted to do delete *str2*, which means in the year 3000, our software will stop deleting its temporary files... i might go back and fix it later after fixing the other important bugs...
update: i found a much easier fix -- use *str?*.* instead since '?' is supported
peace...
one interesting observation i came along is the treatment of "ﻻ" (which you get by pressing b on a qwerty keyboard) in php... for whatever reason, if someone enters it into a form for example and you try to get the value of the first character of the string, you get 0. oddly enough, this works fine for any other arabic characters typed in. any ideas on why this would happen?
no one has still fixed the bugzilla bug i reported a while back about arabic shaping... looks like i might have to grit my teeth and do it if i really want it done
لقد عزمت النية ان اتعلم كتابه العربيه على الكمبيوتر إن شاء الله.
at the suggestion of behdad off the arabeyes-developers list, i've posted my color and arabic shaping frustrations [along with the code] on gnome's bugzilla.
hopefully someone can point me in the right direction...
greets...
so the pango team [owen in specific] were really helpful in the past in helping fix the arabic tashkeel problem [where tashkeel on characters causes random spaces in the text]. luckily, this is fixed now. (interestingly enough, firefox for windows is broken in this respect, and, in linux, if you don't compile with enabling pango, its broken there too... but it works on osx out of the box).
i ran into another little issue and was wondering if anyone knew how to get around this [and i emailed owen taylor in the meanwhile]. basically, the issue arises that when you insert html tags in the middle of a word, the state information of the parser is lost... as a result:
i went to houston last weekend. pretty nice, the only notable thing is that all the traffic lights are sideways. that and our flight to got delayed for such a long time because the gas truck ran out of gas [or, as we were to later discover, "broke down"]. thank God i didn't have a connecting flight... anyways... that's all for now.
peace. oh yeah, if you're looking for the important [time worthy] summary of this blog post, then here it is -- "this post is a total waste of time -- but best of luck to my friends who are taking finals!"
anyway (for those of you who have time to waste), so one of my friends had this as an away message:
"Pyar huwa ikraar hua hai, pyar se phir kyoon darta hai dil? kehta hai dil, rasta mushkil, pyar ki hai kahaan manzil?"
being the honorary desi i am, and knowing a few urdu words, i tried to make some sense of this. pyar and dil were obvious ones that i already know. arabs will recognize mushkil as short for mushkila (problem), and manzil as home or place a person resides...
ikraar could come from taqreer, so basically as a statement or expression.
the first person i interviewed on this topic was our beloved mufti, sheikh "not-a-mufti" (those who know him, know him hehe, those who don't, well... i'm protecting the innocent :)).
and first i asked him about the meaning of ikraar and he said, "i believe it means 'to utter' or to say." -- he then asked me, "context?" -- and at that time, i didn't have the full away message (because my friend had come back from away mode) -- so i told him that it was gone and that i'd find out. and he said a very beautiful statement in the form of a mathematical expression:
P(away msg is mushy | contains 'ikraar') > .9
so anyway, i then proceeded to get the full away message. and i asked our beloved mufti for a translation and he said, "love happened and it has been said, then why is the heart scared of love? the heart says, the path is tough, where does the path of love lead to?"
trying to map it back to the original message, the only thing i was able to notice is that "phir" probably maps onto "fear," so i guess urdu got some influence from l337 h4x0r talk too (ph34r 7h3 31337 h4x0rs!)
yeah, i just wanted to post. nothing meaningful today, maybe tomorrow. peace out everyone.
