Zein's place on the net

I found this today and I found it so funny I had to share it!

Ever since I put together my low budget NAS, I have been wanting to upgrade it. Initially it was a proof of concept, now it needs to be low power and functional. The old NAS was a 32-bit system (32-bit makes ZFS crawl). I wanted a low power and cheap 64 bit system and so I ended up getting a atom 230 based mini-itx system from Intel… The D945GCLF. I fitted 1GB of RAM and used a 4GB CF card as the hard disk (via a CF-IDE adapter). For the OS I used ncp 2.0 alpha 1 (based on Ubuntu Hardy).

I had a few problems with Nexenta on this board:

Once I get me NAS up and running, I will then spend some more time trying to fix the CF card issue. The onboard LAN issue will solve itself in time. Until then, I can wait.

Getting to Krakow

I got in Krakow on the 22nd at about 9:30 AM. The hotel wouldn’t let me check in until 2:00 PM so I had to walk about the city. I found a shopping mall and worked on my presentation. By the time I checked in, had a shower and prayed Duhr and Aser, I was dead tired so I went to bed. I woke up at 11:00 PM. By the time I had finished my presentation, it was 6:00AM on the 23rd. So I got ready, had breakfast and set of for the conference.

The conference

I arrived at 7:30 and picked up my registration material. They gave me a backpack that was 10 times better than the crappy backpack I got at SC07.

Keynote speakers were a mix of brilliant and boring. I was really happy with the talk by Maria E. Orlowska about “Intrinsic Limits in Context Modeling”. She spoke about problems that people are promising to solve yet have been proved to be unsolvable. She states that context modeling is the way forward but we need to understand what the limits are. I like part of her talk that highlighted that when speed and size of our computing abilities have increased, computing itself has remained static in terms of what we can compute.

I was very Nervous about giving my presentation but It went very well. Now that I have got that over with, I can enjoy the conference. Other presentations of interest were by Intel about there 45nm shrink process and some linear algebra work on the cell processor.

Instead of explaining, I will just ask you to watch this 10 minute introduction (1st video) or the full 1 hour long presentation (2nd video). I think I will buy the book when I go to the US in July. I wish that we had professors like this in Egypt.

I found this interview with Mark at the Ubuntu Developer Summit on YouTube. He is wearing a shit shirt with Arabic writing on it. It says “I am not a terrorist”

A few weeks ago I approached one of my Muslim brothers here in Canberra to participate in delivering of Khutba’s at the Muslalah at the ANU. He told me that he had a 2 issues with the prayers being held at the Muslah. One of them was that the Khutba must be given in Arabic. He guided me to an article by Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, that argues that case.

I believe that Islam is a practical religion and that its laws reflect that practicality. I also believe that when faced with different opinions from reputable scholars, it is our job to chose the opinion that maximizes benefit for the Muslim Umah.

Faced with my brothers gentle request to accommodate him, I started to research the subject. I immediately aimed my browser at Islam Online where I know there exists a fatwa bank. I found a few articles and several fatwas on the subject.

articles on the subject:
Delivering the Friday Sermon in a Language Other than Arabic
Role of Friday Khutbah
Friday Khutbah in the Language of the Audience
There, I found a multitude of fatwas that permit giving the khutba in a languge other than Arabic.
I also found this link from the Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc. whom I have never heard of.

I think that it is safe to say that there is no problem in giving the khutba in English.

The grub menu in Nexenta is modified thought editing the menu.lst file. However the menu.lst file in question resides in the syspool file system (the root file system is syspool/rootfs-nmu-000. This is accomplished by:

mount -F zfs syspool /media/temp
vi /media/temp/boot/grub/menu.lst
umount /media/temp/

About 2 weeks a go I bought my self a Syba 4 port PCI SATA controller based on the sil3144 chip. I then spent a week trying to figure out why, while working perfectly in Linux and FreeBSD, I couldn’t get it to work in Nexenta. After flashing the card with the non-raid version and a lot of googling, I decided to try a different flavor of opensolaris just in case. I downloaded BeleniX and gave it a go only to have the same problem. The BeleniX CD has a “no acpi” option which I tried just for the sake of it. I was very pleased of course when the controller actually worked. The no acpi option is passed to the opensolaris kernel via a “-B apci-user-options=2″ more info here

The Egyptian ministry released a statement saying: “A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time”.

After 4 under sea cables have been cut in the past week, conspiracy theories emerge.

Not 100% mind you, but something like 70% after 2 undersea cables were damaged due to ship anchors.

I phoned my Family in Alexandria, Egypt and they tell me that the Internet is so slow it is unusable. I can’t imagine living without broadband let alone without Internet at all.