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Reading this article on IOL, perhaps there is an explanation for this, which wouldn’t go well with the Indian government.
Perhaps if you stopped letting your troops RAPE women of your opponents, this disease will stop spreading. Yes, its true. You surround tribes, separate men from the women, and then begin a session of mass-rape, in particular of Kashmiris! Try denying that!
So, the story doesn’t come as a surprise. Also, you have a wonderful law that soldiers that can’t be held accountable for actions whilst on duty. In reality, we will all be accountable for actions of the Day of Judgement in front of the Almighty.
But who knows. It seems that the liberation of Kashmir may come sooner than later, becaused the Indian Army is screwing itself (pun intended).
Yesterday I registered at http://www.sareunited.com/ – its a website that tries to reunite high school classmates. Was kind of sceptical atfirst, will Rylands High Matriculants in 1996 actually sign up to this?
Yes, there was: Fathima Khan (aka bombnose), Mumtaaz Parker, Rehana Hamid.
So South Africans, sign up to SA Reunited. You’ll be surprised how many class mates you’ll meet.
Last night I attended Moulood-un-Nabi celebrations at Masjidul Quds, Gatesville (Cape Town). The speaker, Hafith Mahmood Khatieb, gave anexcellent talk, and there is one point which made me really think.
Muslims believe that all other prophets came to inform their people of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), Jesus told his followers, and so didMoses.
According the speaker, the presence of Jews in Medina is indicative of this knowledge that they knew where the Holy Prophet (PBUH) would reside. Plausible?
Today I attended the staff orientation programme at work (UWC – University of the Western Cape), here in Cape Town, South Africa.
What can I share about the experience?
We were addressed by various members of the university’s executive, include the rector, Prof. Brian O’Connell, all of whom had inspiring words to say in imparting the UWC vision to us. Some of the things that stuck:
Change is often slow, only rapid in exceptions. One of the examples cited is that of marriage. Once couples have exchanged vows, it seems as though they have undergone rapid change, yet in reality, they have committed themselves to a path of learning about each other. Understanding that change is often slow is vital if we are particular focusing on encouraging others to change their behaviour – let alone ourselves.
Knowledge has always been important, and in the primitive age (pre agricultural), man had to be able to distinguish between wholesome and poisonous food. This knowledge was shared, and gave rise to role of expert who advised others – a knowledge management exercise!
Prof O’Connell gave the example of the Aztec people and how wrong knowledge can be disastrous:
The Aztec people realised the importance of the Sun that they started worshipping it. They knew that the Sun disappeared in the evening (but not that the Earth was round). Out of fear that the Sun could fail to rise the next day, they started offering sacrifices to the Sun. They recognised that the greatest sacrifice is to offer the self, and from occasion, had tribesman killed as a sacrifice to the Sun.
One of the points that he elaborated alot on is that of transcending culture – In the pursuit of excellence, we often need to recognize the limits of our own culture in relation to challenges. There is no ‘best’ culture, but in the face of challenges, we need to incorporate best practices.
A statement of his is interesting as a thought on the generation gap. “It is easier for those on the edge of the culture to transcend and accept new ideas, than those in the middle.” Hopefully I can write more on this at a later stage
We accept that spam is a daily reality and nuisance we’ll have to live with and accept in the Modern Age. But there is something worse than spam – it is Spam Identity Theft, and something I had to recently confront.
What is Spam Identity Theft?
We all know what spam is. Spam Identity Theft is when someone (the spammer) uses your email address as the sender (From: you@youremail.com).
This is unethical and problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it gives the domain a bad impression as one that sends out spam. Secondly, you (and not the spammer) receives the failure reports, undelivered mail messages, etc. I had to battle daily with around 30 such reports, frustrating of which is the bandwidth and time wasted using a dialup connection. (There is another frustration called Telkom that many South Africans are aware of).
Taking the fight to the Spammer
There are many ways to take the fight to the spammer, and I write more as a victim of spam identity theft, then as a victim of spam. One which I thought would help was to trace route the IP address to an ISP, and ask them to stop this. Spammers need a way of connecting to the Internet you know. Results wasn’t too great 
Second Approach: Find the owner of the website they are redirecting you.
This takes some explanation. Spammers can fake the From: address because they are not interested in replies. They want people to visit a certain website, which redirects people to the final website.
Redirection is important, as this is the way referrals work, and the spammer makes a living. Many people focus on attacking where the email spam come front. Why not also attack the sites where the spammer wants you to visit. Usually the owner of the domain is the spammer.
I tried this approach and it seems to have worked for now and the spammer has probably taken up a new domain for spam identity theft (s.p.i.t.). Looked up the domain using www.checkdomain.com, I managed to get the owner’s email address and sent him an email. Had this not worked, I would have emailed the hosting company. Nonetheless, step one was good enough to clear the use of our domain.
So this is the suggestion: Instead of fighting backwards and trying to trace spam. Perhaps we should take the fight forward, and attack the websites that they want users to click on, the ones that are doing the redirecting. Now all we need is a court victory where we sue such sites and create a legal precedent. That way, we can hopefully create a spamless (emphasis on less) environment!
Here’s a graph I found in “Knowledge Management – Techniques for Building Corporate Memories” by Ian Watson.
The column on the left speaks of context dependence, that knowledge is data understood (information level) within a context. Two people can be presented the same data, but will understand it differently based on context.
There is one word for this – experience. An interesting discussion: Does knowledge change if the context changes?
For sometime now I’ve wanted to share my thoughts on knowledge management as a philosophy for education, human interaction, and conflict management. Furthermore, whilst reflecting on the topic, I came across many Quranic verse and examples of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) presribing a knowledge management approach. This post will, hopefully, be the first in a serialized format.
What is Knowledge Management?
The first Google’d definition of knowledge management defines this as:
Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyses its internal knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills.
There always been a difference between information and knowledge. Information is but raw data, whereas knowledge is processed data, data that has become useful to the individual and the organisation.
Knowledge management recognises this value and its shape:
Firstly, knowledge is held by individuals, not by systems. Individuals are therefore valued for this knowledge that they have that is useful for the organisation.
Secondly, this knowledge is not taught or academified. Rather it is the result of experience. Furthermore, from experience, individuals learn techniques and processes to be efficient, more productive.
Thirdly, this knowledge is very often not shared or documented, often causing duplicates, and repeats of trial-and-error processes.
Knowledge management, therefore, in recognition of the value individuals have to the organisation (and society), encourages the sharing and documentation of this knowledge to make the entire organisation as such more efficient, productive and competitive, particularly within the Global Village environment that we live in.
In forthcoming posts, I’ll focus on implications on the lack of knowledge management, particularly in relation to generation gap issues within the Muslim community.
Its official that Adobe has bought over Macromedia for an estimated $3.4 billion dollars. But it certainly isn’t a buyout, or because Macromedia is struggling. On the contrary, both parties state:
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better.
Macromedia’s director will also join Adobe’s board. From a developer’s perspective, and simplistic at best, it does raise exciting possibilities:
- Creating Images in Photoshop and exporting with layers to Flash
- Editing Videos in Premiere, and then compiling them into a DVD with Director
The whole is better than the sum of its parts…
Today at work, I have the unenviable task of working with icons. You are given a small block (20×20 pixels) to depict an idea and concept – and believe me, its tough. Fortunately, I’m not responsible for creating the icons – thats the graphic designer’s role!
My task is to help export them from Corel Draw in a ‘least distorted’ view because big they look brilliant, small can be unrecognizable. Fortunately, we managed to persuade the team to try the icons in PNG format.
To be honest, I wasn’t a ‘fan’ of PNG, and came to “know” via Fireworks that you have PNG 8 and PNG 24 which behaved much like GIF and JPEG respectively. It is only when I got introduced to what Fireworks calls PNG 32 that I began to be impressed.
Why PNG?
PNG supports transparency like GIF. But like JPG, you can have transparency in 24bit pictures. The mistake I made was to confuse the fact that in GIF, one colour is allocated to be transparent, and I thought the same was the case with PNG.
I was wrong! In PNG, you are allowed to have various colours of transparency – in lay man’s terms, so you need not bother with what colour your matte is. Technically, it is called the Alpha Layer.
So this is the huge interest in PNG. You have a 24 bit image, with transparency, and without the need to specify a matte colour.
PNG and Internet Explorer
PNG is wonderful, but seemingly discouraged because PNG Alpha transparency is not currently supported in Internet Explorer, without additional coding.
Microsoft points to a style that needs to be added to PNG images. The good news is that there are JavaScript workarounds for this. Simply Google for IE PNG to get some websites. My personal favourite is http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/.
Simply include, and experience the magic of PNG.
Isn’t it amazing what can stump you when you busy programming. I was working on getting a discussion forum thread to appear in a tree format, and in doing so, had to ‘clean’ up the text.
The steps I took was:
- Strip HTML Tags – strip_tags()
- Take the first 50 letters of the post - substr()
It worked well, except for one thread – which for some reason just wasn’t displaying at all and giving javascript errors. The PHP function ought to work, and was working in all the other cases.
The problem…
I got alerted to this by reading one of the user notes in the PHP manual. PHP’s functions do not clean the unicode line break \r \n, so you have to this manually. Else when you echo your javascript, the line breaks will appear, effectively messing it up.
A quick way of cleaning up the line breaks are:
$text = preg_replace("/(\r\n|\n|\r)/", "", $text);
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