here’s a screenshot of my linux box taken on february 25th, 2010. click the image above for the full sized view. linux desktop running openbox, a bunch of transparent urxvt terminals, cairo clock, and trayer (with banshee, pidgin, transmission, pino, dropbox, guake, and tomboy running).
i recently finished watching the old star trek movies, hence the star trek influenced desktop. and, of course, here’s the problem with teleportation.
after the nexus one came out, i became a little more interested in android. while i had written a simple ’salam world’ app some time ago, i figure it would be nice to delve a little deeper and try to write something remotely useful.
so without further adieu, introducing a (very simple) quran for android:
source code on github
for the most part, android is fairly fun and easy to develop for. however, one of the most frustrating parts is the extremely limited memory for apps. since apps can’t be on the sd card (due to some security issues), you are limited to the very small amount of memory on the device. consequently, in order to display the images for the quran in this app, i have to require the user to download the images to their sd card (or do it for them over the web).
note – try it at your own risk, i only tested it on the emulator…
today, i felt like playing some more with ubiquity, which i had installed for a while now but had not played around with sufficiently. i decided to try to write a simple plugin that will search the quran for a particular set of words. to do this, i felt obliged to expose an api for the alpha version of quranicrealm first, which was good because i needed to do it eventually anyway.
and here’s the mandatory screenshot:
it still needs a lot of work… things i still want to do if i get around to it:
- add a favicon (for the site and for the plugin)
- more options (ex, “search english,” or “search transliteration,” etc)
- replace the current text with a link (or translation). this would be useful in im conversations or while writing blog posts.
- a “get-ayah” command (to say, “get ayah 1 of sura fatiha in arabic,” for example).
anyway, i’ll post up the code when i’ve added some improvements insha’Allah. if you want it before then, post a comment.
i’ve recently been playing more and more with ruby and i really like it. at the same time, i’ve been loving launchy, an open source application launcher for windows (currently using it on my work laptop).
since i love launchy so much, i started to wonder, “why not write something similar for linux?” – now i know one will say that deskbar does the job, but its not quite the same. so anyway, because i wanted transparency and so on, i decided to look into cairo, and the rcairo ruby bindings.
here’s a screenshot of what i’ve been playing with so far:
note the very right side is the part showing of my open gvim window. while i have yet to organize the code and start writing it for real, the ruby file i have is a proof of concept of all the required pieces i can think of (cairo wise anyway) working together.
i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.
and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!
i’ve done some work on namaztime. i made a few improvements to the interface and to the calculation algorithm, and hopefully fixed some bugs.
insha’Allah hope to release sometime soon, just got a couple more things that i want to get done for this release, a couple of small things to fix, etc…
emperor works great under
cedega – i beat one level with it 
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. i started playing with the excellent ITL
libraries today. my hope is to write a simple application that just sits in the system tray and gives a simple listing of when the salat times are.
as you can see, its in uber beta stage right now. insha’Allah the plan is for gtk2 and windows versions; and then insha’Allah i’ll try to fix up my broken gdesklet.
