Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

My friend Imthisham, who works with me, got married yesterday to another girl who works with us as well. Since this is sort of an in-house wedding for the company, everybody from work turned out at the wedding and as many services as could be provided from the company was provided - the music was provided by the head of the music department, the photographers were from the company and the wedding was videotaped by professional cameramen from the camera crew. I wouldn't be surprised if the bride had been made up by the company's make-up artist :p

As usual, I've been side-tracked by another project - and inundated with work too :p The other project is not something that a lot of you will find a use for since it's Islam related - but I needed it (or thought I do ...) and so I'm working on it <g> So what is it? Well, I guess I need to go into explanation mode for a bit - Islam (as you've probably heard before ...) is not just a religion, it's a way of life. There's instructions on how you should dress, what you should eat, how you should eat it, how you behave, how you pray etc. The main source for these rules/laws is the Qur'an and the secondary source is the Hadith, or the prophet's (peace be upon him) sayings. The sayings were collected by various people into several collections that people use to refer to when there is a doubt about a certain point of religion and it cannot be verified from the Qur'an alone.

Now the problem is that sometimes people will say that there is such and such a Hadith and that you should do something as if they really know what they are talking about but on reference, you'll see there is no such Hadith at all or that they'd misinterpreted the Hadith. Like all things that we humans touch, we sometimes seem to pervert the Hadith too as an easy way to get something done "our" way or simply to spread mis-information, knowingly or unknowingly. In my case, my Dad told me a few days ago that an uncle of mine had told him of a Hadith which stated that a Muslims beard should be larger than his mustache. Of course, this happened because I sport a goatee these days and it'd become pretty tiny :p I just don't like doing anything on hearsay and so I decided to do some research and went through several online Hadith databases and found that the Hadith had actually been misinterpreted (at least as far as I could tell ...) - what was said (in effect) was that the beard should be *longer* than the mustache ... or actually, to trim the mustache and let the beard grow. I have a feeling in this case that it simply got repeated from person to person and each changed the wording the way he saw it till it got to be "beard larger than mustache" ...

Anyway, I decided that this is something that I shouldn't let happen in the future and so I decided to create a program which would simply be a database of Hadith that could be referenced and searched easily. So I searched the web for a downloadable database that I could use in my program and was going to create my own database from the online ones by parsing the text if I didn't find a downloadable database. To my surprise, I actually found a program (a freeware one at that ...) which actually did exactly what I wanted ... but it didn't give me the degree of control I wanted since you had to select individual Hadith collections and weren't able to search all available collections at once. So I was wondering whether I couldn't use there data but create my own front-end :p And so began a project which currently seems on the verge of completion - though that's the same way I'd looked at it yesterday and probably day before too :p

I was going to write about some weird things I'd noticed about the cyclical nature of my life (but then again, my life's always been weird :p Or is that the case for everybody? <g>) but there's a lot of Blog news and so I decided to put off the metaphysical discussions for another day <vbg> I got most of the features that I wanted for the 6.1 release except for a weird problem that I can't seem to always reproduce (and so can't debug). Since you can define custom code snippets, I also wanted to have the ability to define toolbar buttons for those snippets for easy access - actually, I always rely on the right-click menu for the code snippets but somebody else may want the toolbar buttons ... While you can define a toolbar button for a custom snippet and even the custom icon appears correctly, the toolbar buttons sometimes disappears after a restart of Blog! I still am not sure what causes the problem since the buttons sometimes disappears after the first restart while sometimes it takes two or three restarts ...

In the mean time, Tyran found a bug with the Previous and Next tags in that they point to non-existent archive pages if there are breaks in your entries. This was due to my sloppy/lazy coding where I expected people to have at least one entry per week :p Yeah, I know - dream on <g> So I cleaned up the code to actually check when the next or previous entry occurs and then build the archive link based on that. While I was on that, I also fixed the Previous and Next tags to return just the archive file name and not the full link HTML code since that'll allow people to better customize things to suit their needs. That's the way it originally was but somewhere along the way I'd changed it for some weird reason :p

I've been going in a reverse cycle in my reading - I've been reading fantasy for the longest time I can remember but a few months ago I moved to science fiction and now I've moved back to thrillers. The current book I'm reading? Robert Ludlum's latest (and probably) last novel - "The Sigma Protocol". I've been a longtime fan of Ludlum and was surprised to read on the inside cover that he'd died in March 2001! Unlike Arthur Hailey whose last book, "The Evening News", was a major disappointment to me after the scintillating tales he used to spin, Ludlum seems to have produced one of his best novels ever as his last work. I've read only about one third of the book so far but it has been a great read up to now.

I think my first Ludlum novel was "The Holcroft Covenant" and it had everything - action, intrigue, love, a Nazi plot to take over the world that continued after the fall of the Reich and a young man who is slowly transformed from an innocent to a trained killer :-) If that wasn't my first Ludlum, then it was probably "The Bourne Identity" which again was a superb novel and had something that I just loved - the story of an amnesiac (don't ask why ... I've always loved amnesia stories ...). I think "The Sigma Protocol" probably stands with both the above books - which are probably the best Ludlums in my opinion. It has some of the elements from "The Holcroft Covenant" such as a Nazi plot (well ... not really a Nazi plot since it involves people from both sides of the war ...) that continues even today and (hopefully ...) a great love story (though the love story has not started yet though I have a feeling it will eventually :p). But the protagonist is different - he is older (I think, since I can't remember the ages of Holcroft or Jason Bourne/David Webb) and is more prepared for the action ahead of him due to a childhood spent in wilderness training camps and a rugged life. However, he seems to be a bit slower on the uptake since at one point of the story, he just does not realize that somebody could have changed their name, though it was obvious to me as a reader :p Anyway, it's a great read and I'm enjoying it thoroughly at the moment ... Next book? Probably, Archer's "Eleventh Commandment".

Another weird/funny step in the marriage drama <g> My parents had placed an advertisement in one of the local papers (which is a fairly common thing to do over here BTW ...) seeking a bride for me. I assume they mentioned the fact that I had been in the US though I haven't actually seen the ad myself. It has been about three weeks now and I would have thought that the ads would stop by now but it looks as if they keep trickling in since my parents keep responding to them :p Anyway, one of the latest responses they received was this weekend and they decided to get back to the respondent. The respondent had been the bride's mother but it turned out that she actually was looking for a person who was to marry her daughter and then go to Canada! That seems pretty outrageous to me - here is somebody who wants you marry their daughter and take them away from them completely ... and not only that, they want to tell *you* what to do (such as go to Canada <g>) even before you're married in to the family. Of course, the whole marriage routine over here probably seems very bizarre to a lot of you from other parts of the world :p

I'm alone at home after several weeks of either having my parents here or being at work and it feels strange. Usually, I'm OK with being by myself and simply occupying myself with reading, watching movies or playing a game but I feel really listless and perhaps that's the reason for the strangeness ... Anyway, I did watch a few movies yesterday including "The Musketeer" and "Bridget Jones's Diary". Both were great movies in their own way as far as I am concerned :p

"The Musketeer" was a re-telling of Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" with a generous helping of artistic license applied <g> They used a lot of corny old jokes, had impossible fight sequences, kind of stilted love scenes and great big plot holes (such as people being killed left, right and center during the charging of a castle but a creaky old carriage drives right up to the castle without any problems ...) but overall it was just a fun romp. As long as you can switch off your brain and simply watch the amazingly choreographed fights (one of which I know I've seen somewhere before - the fight on the ladders - perhaps, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? I'll have to watch it again to see if that is so ...) you should find it a fun movie ...