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A good friend of mine recently started a website at www.religionwriter.com. You’ll recognize the design as using the same wordpress theme as my own blog, but with a few modifications. Insh’Allah she’ll be rolling out with a site facelift soon.

One area where Religion Writer’s site does differ from my own however, is content. Andrea’s got the kind of thought-provoking blog posts that drive you to deep thought faster than Haley’s comet. She’s written posts about Ramadan, interviewed prominent On-Faith Journalists, and even penned a stirring post about the first Mormon Presidential Candidate–no, it’s not Mitt Romney.

Religionwriter.com is also about Buddhism, Catholicism, and the Amish. It’s a delightful mix of religious interviews, commentaries, and book reviews, and it’s free as in air. Go check it out!

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In truth, there are rare occasions where I find myself so enthused by a website that it hits my list of sites to blog about. But Mint.com is no ordinary website. To begin with users sign up with Mint and add accounts to their profile. After the usual Credit Cards and Bank Accounts are added through the secure interface, Mint scans your account details to determine whether your interest rate is too high, your gas bill just average, or if you’re spending too much money renting out DVD’s.

What’s more is this fantastic service comes at little more than the cost of air. It’s free as in zilch, nadda, zip, nothing. Which means you can probably fire that financial planner and start saving your first buck.  

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A month and a half ago Fatema was leaving messages on my Facebook wall, asking me when I’d be ready to hop over to Saxbys Coffee Shop. We were getting Mocha Frolattes. As we walked from Lauinger library to the corner of 35th and O street, we talked about life, marriage, graduation, and the good things to come.

A day or two later we were taking a stroll around the River Front in Georgetown. Fatema shared with me just some of the anxiety she was having over what to do with her life, while I stared back at her in avid fascination. She was an individual of remarkable accomplishment, and my mind puzzled how she could ever worry which of the many doors available to her was the right one to walk through.

I could never have imagined those final few encounters to be the last I would see of the beautiful, the bright, and the radiant, Fatema Khimji. I had mailed her an invitation to my wedding celebration. And I had half-expected her to show up.

If any good has come from an otherwise hopelessly tragic incident, it is in that everyone close to Fatema has become more conscious of the time we have left, and how well we use it. Insh’Allah she and her father are in a far better place. And Insh’Allah our prayers for her and her family are answered by the Almighty, Allah(SWT). May they rest in peace.

Innalillahi wa Innalillayhi Raji’oun. To God we Belong, and to God we Shall Return.

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What this means for the throngs of Mac loyalists who have long-since drudged having to leave their favorite browser simply to write a post on their blog or reply to an email from gmail, is that they may now emphatically chose not to do so. :)

Written below are four easy steps to get RTE functionality built into sites where it’s not already there.

STEP 1:  Download and install Safari Stand. 

STEP 2:  From the new “Stand” menu in your menubar, select Safari Stand Settings:

STEP 3:  Within Safari Stand Settings select “Include Debug Menu”

STEP 4:  Relaunch Safari. From the new debug menu select “User Agent” and then “Firefox 2.0.0.2″

The page will reload and if you’re on a page with a rich text editor then you should get those shiny icons you’re so familiar with from FireFox.

So what works and what doesn’t? Well from my Wordpress blog I was unable to hyperlink a bit of text without going to the html editor. And although I was able to upload and send images to the editor without any difficulty, I didn’t get the usual anchors over the images to manipulate their size, and left/right alignment. I hear Matt, the developer of Wordpress, mentioned the next iteration would include a hook so you wouldn’t have to do the above spoof to get it to work. Perhaps some of these bugs will be ironed out with the update. 

But it’s rich text editing in Safari. Something me and a few Mac fans have been waiting on for a very long time. So I’m definitely not going to gripe about it being in its infancy right now :) 

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Amidst this all I find myself fishing for new meaning. Should I watch People’s Court to be entertained by the abuse angst between judge and citizen? Or are those sometimes always outrageous monologues by the wrongdoer and wronged to be my source of satisfaction? Perhaps only time will tell. In the meantime, here are some of the best bits for your enjoyment.

People Expect My Vomit:

Judge Judy’s Pinky Is Smarter Than You Are:

MADtv Puts It All Into Perspective:

Powered by ScribeFire.

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Enter Stage6. When I first came upon this website I was spellbound. Content streamed into my browser at near-perfect quality. The intuitive DivX Web Player, a required but quick download from their site, automatically dimmed the rest of my desktop and provided options for full-screen view that was actually full screen. A few quick searches on Google for “Happy Feet Stage6” produced several websites with links upon links of movies available for my viewing pleasure, all in beautiful widescreen glory. The movies on Stage6 weren’t broken up into several parts either, which meant I could literally pop out the popcorn, kick up my feet, and get entertained.

What does this mean for the Movie industry? And are the MPAA likely going to have something to say about it? My guess is they will, and probably soon. While videos on YouTube and Metacafe are served piecemeal with choppy quality at best, Stage6 provides an alternative to DVD rentals that is simple, elegant, and for all intents and purposes, an actual alternative.

But all need not be lost. Stage6 still provides an excellent platform for indie film makers to broadcast their latest creations in hi-def, and it does so on a significant scale. What’s more, for every hundred links to Hollywood films on Stage6, at least 20 will be dead within a week–something which strongly indicates the Stage6 team are doing something to combat piracy.

How does this all ultimately break down? Well Intellectual Property law is a complex and emerging field of law, and I’m still only a law student so this won’t be official legal advice, but I’d be willing to venture (and hope) websites like Stage6 will stick around for a while. The bottom line is so long as people are uploading links at a faster rate than Hollywood can find and stomp them out, the real fault won’t be with people who provide the online video services, it will rest on the property holders who fail to find those links and report them.

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Credits

Truly this isn’t a moment for me to bask in any kind of glory. Virtually 95% of the work that has gone into this plugin pack has come from other plugin authors for WordPress–they are a fantastic community of developers and they deserve full credit for what they do.
Most notably, the Profile Pics plugin was originally done by Hannah Grey, with major modifications to make it MU compatible by WDuluoz.

Usage

After installation, users will be able to navigate to their Profile page and upload their own photo. The photo will appear next to their comments across your WPMU site, and, if they use my Author Profile Enhanced widget, in their sidebar next to their “About Me” text. For a demo see http://suleiman.hadithuna.com.

Installation Instructions

The plugin pack consists of 3 separate items.

1. Modded Profile Pics Plugin
2. Modded Author-Profile Widget
3. Modded MyCSS Plugin

STEP 1: Create the folder wp-content/avatars/. CHMOD to 755 or 777 if you have problems.

STEP 2: Unpack the Profile Pics Plugin into your mu-plugins folder. Then go to Site Admin –> Profile Pictures to configure its settings. Please Note: In order for the plugin to interact with the Author-Profile Widget, you MUST set your directory to wp-content/avatars/ and you MUST restrict the allowable file types to .jpg

STEP 3: Unzip the Author Profile widget to your mu-plugins/widgets/ directory or your plugins directory. Please Note: You will need to edit lines 74 and 75 of the code to point to the correct path and URL for your site!

STEP 4: Unzip the MyCSS plugin and place it into your mu-plugins folder. Only the relevant portions of the css that style the user’s image and the default image are contained in the css.

STEP 5: That’s it! You should now have a fully functional Avatars system for your MU site! User’s pictures are automatically added to 90% of the themes in the comments area, and you obviously in the sidebar.

You will also be kind to take note of the enhanced Author Profile Widget coded by moi :) The widget only displays a user’s picture if its uploaded, and if not displays the default image. It also displays the Author’s information from their “About Me” section. It also works in the loop, outside of the loop, and loop-ti-loop :)

Known Limitations

The Profile Pics plugin is broken in i.e. 7 (thank you Microsoft), because the form that it embeds in wp-admin/profile.php does not contain “enctype=multipart-form/data.”

The plugin is also broken in some themes, where pictures either don’t display next to comments at all, or come out formatted incorrectly.

Download WPMU Avatars 1.0

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The video(s) below are of the madness that erupted on the campus after their victory. The streets were literally packed with students flocking from all four corners. I never knew so many kids even went to this school!

Anyways, without further ado, enjoy these clips:

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What follows is excerpts from her initial posting, with my responses below. Please do read her initial posting for a better understanding of what’s being discussed.

It almost appeared as though the Round-table discussion was a free-for-all opportunity for these people to a) show off how politically connected and informed they were, b) lament their personal grievances against their own community (i.e. “My community calls me an apostate.”) or c) viciously attack the agency’s representative and hold them responsible for all their personal grievances.

I think what we’re talking about here is a more complex problem than appears on its face. I’ll throw out three issues which I believe are plaguing the Muslim community in Canada and the US these days:

1) Generation Gap — You come from a small town in Toronto, your parents come from that village in Pakistan. There are going to be problems seeing eye to eye.

2) Old World Mentalities — Coming from that village your parents are accustomed to a certain mode of living. Bribing the police officer to get out of a speeding ticket is standard operating procedure out there. So is loud mouthing your opinion, be it on the streets, in the office, or at family parties. Remember: Their home town is not a place wrought with opportunities for civilized dialogue. The net effect is a drastically diminished demographic of dialogue-ready lobbyists. These people don’t artfully navigate the idiosyncratic pathways to political power, they scream.

3) Lack of Alternatives — Take a look around. The sad reality is there is an overwhelming shortage of people who know how to lobby and when/where to be heard. And as mentioned earlier, people who crowd the streets and start yelling stand a better chance of getting attention than those precious few with sound points to be heard.

So where does this leave us? And what should we do about it? In great part the real answer is nothing at all. Within a decade the generation of loudmouthed Baburs will have taken a seat. Their kids will have moved out, they will have retired from their jobs, and generally will be out of tune with political reality except in the very tangential sense.

The kids who move out will be moving out to bigger and better things insh’Allah. What we are witnessing is a rapid transformation of the Muslim community in North America, where Muslims are quickly advancing to positions of power in the feilds where that power holds the most sway: law and business.

This next generation of Muslims is not a generation with ties to the homeland, it is a generation with ties to the Ummah. It has not scrapped together half-baked rumors of a religion from people who thought they were sheiks but couldn’t even understand Arabic, it has sought religious knowledge from sheiks and alims who have studied devotedly the precepts of our faith. The next generation of Muslims is informed.

So does all this mean we should just sit tight until our next Golden Age swings by? Absolutely not. As Hafsa herself stated:

The Round-table experience made me realize just how important it is for the Muslim students across Canada and North America to raise their voices, to stop letting others speak for them.

And I think that just about sums it up nicely.

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