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Is this controversial? Well, judging by ‘Letters to the Editor’ in Cape Town’s newspapers, there are some deeply offended people. How dare there be a moon and a star on their spiritual cake? Are the damn Muslims imposing themselves all over? Well, lets tackle the issue (not the person):
When it comes to foodstuff, Halaal refers to a ‘dietary standard’.
This dietary standard essentially says that no pork or alcohol was used in the preparation of the foodstuff. Theres a whole list of things that shouldn’t be used, but that will be going off the topic.
The question could then be asked, if a Heart Foundation sticker appears on your Christmas Cake, would you be offended? If not, why make an issue when the sticker of another dietary standard – whether Halaal, Kosher or Vegetarian (not sure if Hindus have a special name for theirs).
A product being Halaal and being declared Halaal.
Your Christmas cake can be Halaal if it is made without the forbidden ingredients. Having it declared Halaal is an additional test to verify and then publicly declare the product as Halaal. This provides consumer confidence as well as marketing. When in doubt, Muslims would shun certain businesses because they are not considering Muslim dietary needs.
So maybe it is Halaal, but why bother to declare it?
In short, easy market access. Whats the use you have a product but it does not have access to a certain market because of a verification process. The returns outweighs the investment. Many charities sell Halaal Christmas cake as a means of fundraising.
By removing certain ingredients, they instantly have access to a wider market. This is foresight, which if implemented, makes the product more accessible without affecting the quality of the product.
Why do Muslims go for Christmas Cake?
- Do you support charity?
- Do you enjoy delicacies?
- Do you get hungry?
Do I have to be Muslim to eat Halaal products?
Do I have to be Jewish to eat Kosher products?
Will Halaal Products affect me spiritually?
Halaal products are not ‘jinxed’ – they are a dietary standard. Halaal products may however affect your outlook on food. If you choose to only go Halaal, it will keep you away from unhealthy intoxicants and their effects.
Lastly, though Halaal is a dietary standard, not all Halaal products are necessary healthy. Eat too much ‘Halaal’ sweets, you still risk getting diabetes.
Does your daily dose of sms consist of numerous receive-and-reply to a single person? In that case, you’re able to cut costs by simply mxit’in with your friend – estimated to be around 40 ZA cents for three hours!
Mxit is an instant messenger-like program for cell phones that works of GPRS/3G, not SMS. By the way, it also hooks up to MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, AOL and ICQ. (I got MSN to work, ‘timesout’ with Yahoo).
When I first went on to the site, my Samsung Z130 never had a version available. Later on, I tried the Samsung D500′s one – and it worked, so it helps trying the files of another model if your phone is not supported.
With telecommunications in South Africa extremely expen$ive, no doubt this is becoming popular with South Africans. This program was made in South Africa, Stellenbosch to be exact.
http://www.mxit.co.za/ – If you are going to use your phone, go straight to: http://www.mxit.co.za/wap/
Here is another one of those success stories by an idiot! I bought myself a crossover cable to network my PC and laptop, but, as usual, spent two weeks trying to get them to work. PnP (Plug and Pray) didn’t work, nor the ‘tips’ in numerous forums by ‘techies’.
Luckily, I managed to find these step-by-step, take-nothing-for-granted guides at CellarStone. Hell, they even have a flash demo for those totally in the dark. Now this is the type of service IT people should strive towards!
http://www.cellarstone.com/stepup/stepup_cable_connections.htm#direct
In any case, nothing can express the joy of home networking:
- Sharing Files
- Shared Internet Connection
- Shared Printer
- NETWORK GAMING!!
Lastly, what was that small single thing which is so simple yet overlooked and prevented the whole damn thing from not working:
The workgroup names weren’t the same 
Just been wondering on this point, but is IE’s box model bug is a blessing for percentage based widths?
A summary of the bug is:
Take a box, and add margins, borders and padding to it. The W3C recommends that these additions be around the box thus in essence increasing making the box bigger.
Previous versions of Internet Explorer applied these items inside the box. So the width of the box remained the same, but the content width became smaller.
I’ve been experimenting with layouts at different resolutions, and frankly, it is a guessing game trying to get a perfect percentage, unless of course there were some sort of mathematics in CSS.
So here’s a viewpoint, which frankly, I’m hoping to be proven wrong and given a solution.
IE’s box model bug actually suits itself better to percentage based css layouts.
Besides the fact that it is the opposite of the W3C recommendation, where does the damage lie?
Web Application Development has a much more rosy future thanks in part to the development and standardization of interactive technologies. Not to go off on a tangent, lets suffice with a comment that Jakob Nielsen and Luke Wrobwelski are alerting everyone that there are differences between web design and application development.
Noting these differences becomes important as it impacts on the outlook of your project, particularly if one comes from a ‘web background’ as opposed to a software development background. There is definitely becoming more than one web, or the web is becoming more than what it was.
But as the web and software lines blur, it seems that traditional business analysis is being superimposed as is on the web – an unfortunate scenario in my opinion, and hence I’ve been thinking alot of a conceptualisation of Multimedia Business Analysis in recent days.
The web changed the world with its emphasis on design, interface and interactivity. And with web application, we seem to be losing this. The web can be used for application purposes, but without losing the sizzle that people seek in websites.
In his latest alertbox, Jakob Nielsen touches on Video on the web. He presents the guideline of “avoid using video if the content doesn’t take advantage of the medium’s dynamic nature“. I’m sad to say: even without bringing in video that WE ARE NOT taking advantage of the web’s possibilities.
At a time when broadband is becoming the norm, and we have the ability to generate graphics and flash (GD and Ming for the PHP guys), it is belittling that the multimedia aspect is lost. We lack the vision to present information in a multimedia format. Multimedia defined as: the presentation of information in text, image, animation, sound and video format.
Business Analysis particularly for the web, needs to be revisited. The web is growing fast, and I don’t think BA is keeping up. You snooze – you lose.
This is a rhetorical question. I have no plans of doing so in the near future. But being so awfully busy lately, I wish I could record my thoughts, have them transformed into digital text and published on my blog. But here are some random thoughts…
What happened to streaming audio? Podcasts are usually in MP3 format, which could stream as a downloads, but probably not as effective as Real Audio, etc. Having volunteered at a radio station, they had the vision of releasing audio snippets on a regular basis. Podcasting is the process, Streaming is the format. Any marriage soon?
Audio Moblogging? Mobile blogging is making ground, people would be able to send SMS, Photos, and Videos to their blogs. Any plan for sending audio. My phone 
has this capacity, but only for five minutes. Could this be another source for podcasting?
23 November 1996. This is the day we received the sad news that Mo Amin was killed in an airplane crash off the coast.
Do not know who Mohamed Amin is?
Mohamed Amin was a Kenyan photo-journalists whose 1984 images led to the global “We are the World Campaign”, inspired Band Aid and Live Aid to save Ethiopians from famine and starvation. Later on, he lost an arm also in Ethiopia.
Live Aid has been resurrected lately. How wonder how things would have been with Mo around – especially in the fight against HIV/AIDS
Yip, this is my new phone. I’m serious when I say that my Nokia 5110 was by no means dysfunctional, but the time had come to move on.
Initially I was after a Nokia 6600 based on what I’ve heard about its feature. Hardly would I have got the phone, people would probably ask when I intend to upgrade.
So in the MTN store, I noticed this Samsung Z130, and went with this one. Now it took more than two weeks for the credit checks to be done, so I wasn’t impressed with MTN here. At Vodacom, we had it done within hours (on a Saturday afternoon at that too).
Furthermore, going through some of the reviews, many people mentioned that they couldn’t get this phone to hook up to their PCs, as well as bluetooth problems – raised some questions.
After having it for a week now, I’m totally impressed. To give you the list:
- It does connect to a PC via USB (you get the cable with the phone). I was on the verge of giving up, but it worked in the end. Some niggles now and then, but I love this feature.
- MP3 player – with uploading your own songs – totally cool
- Rotational View – this is totally awesome. Pity the WAP browser needs to be vertical.
- WAP browser – has a built in smart-browser – like this, less scrolling
- Photos and Video – built in flash, video is 3gp
- POP3 client – yip, i get to download my email
- 3G Phone – though I’m yet to use this feature.
- Java for Games is nice and fast
What I don’t like:
- No SMS – everything is MMS – so I can’t download games
- No Rotational view for browser
- This is the cheapest 3G phone – so I tend to get a connection of 56kb, rather than 260kb+
I have to add, that I’m posting this blog from my laptop connected to the Internet via this phone. Now this makes it all more worthwhile. Makes me wonder how I managed to survive on the Nokia 5110. And yes, lets hope I survive the phone bill!
I was one of the fortunate ones to attend the Eid prayers at Masjidul Quds and hear Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool give one of the most profound talks ever. In many ways, it was comparable to the ‘State of the Ummah’ speech given by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia.
Now the sad part is – a transcript of this speech is nowhere to be found!! The Cape Gateway (Government Portal) doesn’t feature it. Voice of the Cape had a news item on it, but I couldn’t seem to Google it. Archives as well as their internal search wasn’t too lekker (wonderful) either.
It’s more than a week later, but here are points that stood out for me:
Muslims fasted in Ramadaan and abstained from food and drink due to inner strength or Taqwa. Now Taqwa is often referred to as ‘God-consciousness’ or ‘Fear of God’. I think it’s brilliant that he brought in this idea of ‘inner strength’. Negative words are often used to describe Taqwa, but it here he actually uses positive words to describe this quality and source of morality.
The other important point he made was about ‘political gains’, and that Muslims should rise above this and implement Islam as a civilization. Using the example of the Treaty of Hudaibiya, he said that by current standards, the Holy Prophet had no ‘political gains’ of the treaty. In fact, it could have been regarded as a humiliating treaty, something His Companions noticed and were reluctant to accede to.
However, the Holy Prophet had a greater vision for the world, beyond a few humiliating clauses. Had he chose to ‘stick to his guns’, the turnout of history could have been worse. In the end, the treaty’s terms were a blessing not a curse.
The challenge that came from the talk could be said to be – Muslims must rise up to the challenge! Not through extremism, but creativity of facing the challenges that all of humanity face, not just Muslims.
He also quoted a speech made by Hewlett Packard’s (HP) CEO, Carly Fiorina, on Islamic Civilisation and its foundation for success. An extract of that speech can be found here.
I'm a Web Developer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Interests include: PHP, JQuery, ExtJS, Adobe AIR, Linux, Ubuntu, WordPress, Human Rights, Usability, Multimedia