peace... i installed wordpress 2.0 (actually, its been installed for a few days now, i installed svn version right before it came out because the download link was broken). as you can see, no asthetic changes here... but the control panel is much nicer... really beautiful. in addition, i installed a plugin (spam karma 2) to deal with the comment spam... so far so good, lets see how it fairs over the next while.
in any case, after watching the excellent (yet depressing) syriana movie, mansoor suggested i get the book the scorpion's gate by richard clark - so i picked it up and also picked up dan brown's digital fortress (at the recommendation of emad).
syriana by the way was excellent... i say it is depressing because of the fact that what it portrays feels like a very accurate picture of the state of matters as they are now. i also watched munich, but i didn't really like it. i felt it was very one sided, and i could not enjoy a movie whose plot was to kill muslims...
also, there is a new book, "islam & terrorism... myth vs reality," by mauri' saalakhan... it was just published recently in answer to a particular book that was attacking islam. should also be an interesting read.
i came across a pretty neat looking arabic typing tutorial program (open source) - its called kitab (kitab.sf.net). have not downloaded it yet, but from the screenshots, it looks good.
that's all for now...