In this month’s issue of al-Qalam (June 2005), Naeem Jeenah hits the nail on its head with an article on Muslim complacency with crime. He highlights how the Schabir Shaikh and Nelson Mandela art scandal should be an embarassment for Islam and the community, yet it seems we are hiding it as an isolated incident of one of our ‘brothers’.
Naeem goes on to further deplore this mentality when it comes to spouse-abuse, ill-treating workers, tax-invasion, corrupt business practices. We know who these people are, yet we proceed as far as regularly embracing them, as though nothing is happening.
He goes on that it is high time we follow an isolation policy. This last point is already controversial, but lets see how the moulanas and imams react (to protect their personal interests). They are going to proclaim such an attitude haraam (forbidden), but won’t provide an alternative. `Ird-ul-Muslim – violating the honour of a believer is forbidden.
Yet it is ironic and hypocritical that these ‘wannabe victims’ are first-class perpetrators of violations.
One of the great frustrations for the PAGAD movement was that families of drug merchants were given protection to enter Masaajid. These people knew their ‘brothers’ were doing wrong, destroying lives, yet enjoyed the ‘privilege’ of the Imam’s protection to perform Ibadah (worship) – again a hypocrisy.
I’m going to stop my vent for a few reasons, but to conclude that I agree with Naeem on his points. We should not be blinded by criminals and their religious bodyguards. Our eyes need to be opened by Islam to a life of righteousness and morality, encouraging the good, and forbidding the bad.
“Do not get angry. Do not get angry. Do not get angry.” – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
“Help your brother whether he is oppressed or an oppressor. Help your oppressing brother by stopping him from oppressing others.” – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
* It also makes me appreciate why in Islamic law, if a person has to pay blood-money in Islam, the burden falls on his entire family, not just the criminal. Clearly we are suffering when Islamic law is not implemented.
After weeks of trying, I’ve finally managed to complete the audio for Wahied Kannemeyer’s website (www.wahied.com). The month of May was kinda busy for me, but its a nice feeling to see projects being rounded of.
Wahied’s website represents a success for various reasons, and re-inforces much of the ideas I have on web development:
Content first. Probably much to their annoyance at first, I chose to work on the content. But once this was completed, the rest was a breeze. Furthermore, we very perculiar to have free flowing content, works carefully chosen, and no marketese.
CSS layout. The website uses CSS layouts, not tables. Laid out so the content loads first.
CSS Effects. I loved the position=fixed effect, and used this here. For Internet Explorer which doesn’t support it, it uses absolute positioning, so it degrades well. Here again, we had to plan the CSS carefully.
Templates. First time I used it properly, and it works well. The client can change text, without worrying about affecting the layout.
Web audio. The web needs to be taken to its potential, and this just adds to the value of the website.
Search Engine: We haven’t done much here, but Google lists the site as #1 for a search on ‘Wahied’. Perhaps, its the relation between the domain name, good content and layout that puts content first?
Some of the ‘ other lessons’:
The client insisted on transliteration which affects search engine optimization, or does it? In any case, we tried to compensate by having the page titles without transliteration.
Internet Explorer is a nightmare. The CSS and PNG problem is deeply annoying.
PNG whilst better, does sometimes have a big file size – worth it?
Usability in free open source software (FOSS) sucks!! This is a generalisation – but more often true than not. And in trying to understand why, people have come up with the term ‘GUI wrapper mentality’:
Ask any Linux enthusiast what makes Linux great: They’ll tell you it’s the kernel, the engine, the framework.
There is way too much emphasis on the ‘engine’, that development does not focus on the user. It focusses so much on the ‘engine’ that the resulting interfaces are extremely shoddy to say the least. It seems that the engine just had to get some type of interface put together to give it a ‘nice’ look – hence the term ‘GUI wrapper mentality’.
Following a usability approach focuses on the user instead. Its the user interaction that directs development, not the engine.
Some see this as a case of what came first, chicken or egg? Who can one think of development, they ask, if you don’t have an engine or framework to consider first.
The answer is easy!
Planning a software should be done regardless of the platform or language. This isn’t always easy, as sometimes we already have an idea of what script, etc. we tend to use. Knowing the limitations of languages is important, but more important should be considering the limitations for user interfaces.
Furthermore, in many programs, particularly the object-oriented, e.g. Visual Basic and Java, you first program the interface, and then add the action listeners.
Finally, to quote Linux guru Eric Raymond:
The biggest obstacle between open-source software and world domination is not Microsoft, it’s our own endemic cluelessness about how to design software that won’t make nontechnical users run screaming… A glitzy GUI interface fails to compensate for some astonishing blunders. There are lessons here for other projects.
There is a neat attribute first introduced with Internet Explorer to programmatically turn off auto completion (complete the entry as you type) for web-based forms. Here’s a screenshot of auto-completion which comes in quite handy at times.
However, there are times when you would like this feature to be turned off. An example is when you are busy with user administration. You usually have:
<input name=”username” type=”text”>
This will often try to autocomplete usernames you have already added, or even your own username. To turn this off, simply add an additional attribute to the form.
This is browser specific and works for Internet Explorer and Firefox but worth the inclusion as a W3C standard.
The above is input specific, but you could make the whole form as such by adding it to the form tag.
Firefox, however, does have an irritating bug. If you have that item saved as a username / password match it will default the values to these username and password values WITHOUT auto completion. Highly irritating.
The alternative is to rename the name of your input box.
Mozilla also has plans to identify text close to it, even if the name of the text input box isn’t the same.
Around two months ago, I had hoped to start a series on Islam and Knowledge Management. Though I have not gived up on this, time has not allowed me the opportunity.
But perhaps it’s good in another way. It has reinforced my belief that blogging and research do not go well together.
By not going well, I do not mean that nonsense blogging (the one liners, etc) is acceptable. Good content is always appreciated.
But it does mean that academified research is not necessary or essential for good blogging. Writing from a sense of experience, sharing ideas, insights, interesting info, broadening topics, etc. are aspects of good blogging.
Many academics are reluctant because they know that research takes time, blogging doesn’t have to. Research needs footnotes and references. The closest you get to a reference in blogging is trackback.
This happenend on the the 10th of May already, but only saw this today. How did i see this?
Well, I was having problems with multiple incidences of FCKeditor in Firefox. Thought I’ll go there to look for help.
I’m using it with the tab panel from cross-browser.com, but still doesn’t work. Guess I’ll drop the tab-panel – not in the mood for debugging javascipt.
“We were raped in police cells, say girls” reads this story on IOL. This incident occurred to girls who were locked up in a police cell with youths. The policeman on duty refused to take any action or be bothered by it.
On the outset, let me state that rape is a horrific beastly act of violence and I have no attempt to undermine its seriousness. But lets see whats happening…
In court, the youths and policeman are claiming that consensual sex took place, and this seems to be the main focus of the case – sadly so.
What would an Islamic court probably find in this matter?
None of them deny that ‘sex’ took place, and because it is fornication (zina), they are all guilty of this! It now remains to see whether it was coerced fornication – rape.
The ruling would be:
Fornication - punishment of 100 strokes or stoning to death for non-virgins, applicable to both parties.
Coerced fornication – stoning to death for the youths, girls are innocent
Morally, this is higher that what the court will have to look into, and sadly why it is only in instances like this that Islamic law gets appreciated.
This is another reason why rape is so uncommon in Islamic environments. It is the fear that the punishment of fornication will be applied to them. And even if this fornication was ‘consensual sex’, there is always the possibility that the woman can claim coerced fornication (rape).
Fornication is illegal and wrong in the first instance.
As from next year, pay-channel Mnet will not be allowed to have an ‘Open Time’ slot for all viewers, as decreed by the Independent (so they say) Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).
Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I don’t have Mnet, but I hardly watch TV, let alone Mnet. SABC welcomed the ruling, and surprise-surprise, there’s the SABC’s spokesperson Paul Setsetse speaking on the ruling.
Hey, wasn’t he the spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice!! Yes he was, but now he’s General Manager of Corporate Communications for the SABC.
Did SABC like what he did in government, so appointed him? Was he disappointed with government, he left for the SABC. Or how about this – the Government was so impressed with him, they promoted him to the SABC.
Sorry for the cynism. There’s way too much co-incidences in the ANC government. It’s probably a co-incidence Zuma met Shaikh – whatever!!!!!!!!!!
One of the addictive dos game I enjoyed back in the days was Scorched Earth or simply Scorched, the tank shooting game, where you had to control the direction and velocity, etc. Well, you can imagine my excitement when I game across a 3D version of the game. it’s even more addictive!!
Best of all, its free, cross-platform, and supports network/internet play. Download it from the website http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
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
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
