Finding a decent Linux distro

I recently acquired (thanks Mum & Dad) a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer, and one of the first things I do in such circumstances (which don’t come that often, admittedly) is to install Linux on it. I started using Linux in 2002 and have used it on pretty much every PC - and a Mac - that I’ve had access to since. I also have a laptop, but apart from that, I’ve had a succession of second-hand Pentium 3 computers, most recently a Compaq Professional Workstation from around 2000, which was fast enough but was beginning to seem a bit long in the tooth, particularly when I tried running modern software on it. This machine (2Gb of memory, 500Gb hard drive, dual core processor) seemed like a snip at £329, but things haven’t worked out as easy as I’d thought.

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Posted in Linux, London life | 8 Comments

Muslims, shaikhs and the oppositional mentality

Looking at the discussion which has ensued from Umar Lee’s original “Rand Institute Muslims” post two weeks ago, something which has stuck out is the oppositional attitude of some of the major contributors. It seems that as long as a public speaker, whether it be a shaikh as such or someone else, feeds the desire of some (mostly young) people for rebellion, he is all right by them; as soon as he or she ceases to do so, they become a sell-out and are written off as if everything they said before had counted for nothing.

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Posted in Community, Extremism | 6 Comments

Don’t be a drudge – go for a trudge

Kids around snowmanSnow in Kingston, February 2009 - a set on Flickr

So, we’ve had the biggest snow fall in southern England since 1991 (which I remember fairly well; I was away at school), and the whole city has ground to a halt with all of the buses cancelled. Really, this is pathetic - if this happened in Canada, it would be business as usual. Much less snow than this two years ago caused chaos as well. Why don’t we take their advice on how to deal with it?

Anyway, perhaps one day of it gave people an excuse to take the day off work, and lots of people were playing out in it, building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. I went out to Kingston for the afternoon (the first time the snow has actually lasted long enough to still be there when I’m ready to go out), trudging through it (well, not where I didn’t have to, but for most of the route I did) for some two miles there and back. Fun. I ended up spending about an hour in Kingston as I had to get back before the sun went down, but I managed to get my coffee, read the paper and take a few pictures of people snowfighting before starting my walk back just after 4pm. In most of the town centre, there wasn’t much snow, but a lot of ice, and most of the shops (including the entire Bentall centre - in fact pretty much everything except the cafés and Sainsbury’s) were shut.

I discovered when I downloaded my pictures that the camera had darkened all of my JPEG images - luckily, my camera shoots raw as well, so I used Bibble to construct decent JPEGs out of the raw files and have uploaded a few to Flickr, which you can see above, insha Allah.

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Posted in New Malden | 5 Comments

The organic corporate nanny

Does anyone out there (particularly in the UK; I’m not sure if it’s available anywhere else) like Kingfisher toothpaste? It’s an organic brand of toothpaste which is available in a variety of flavours, including things like fennel, and provides an alternative to the industrial mint flavour of so many corporate brands of toothpaste. I have used it for years, usually buying it from the former Fresh & Wild or Planet Organic.

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Posted in London life | 5 Comments

Review of rotten book by the Sookhdevil

Ben White of Fulcrum, a website for evangelical Anglican Christians, has drawn my attention to a review he has written of Patrick Sookhdeo’s 2007 book Global Jihad. While I’ve not read Sookhdevil’s book, this review examines a whole load of the distortions we used to regularly see in his articles for the Standard, the Spectator and even the Telegraph - accusing Muslims of taqiyya as some sort of religious principle, completely ignoring whole aspects of recent history, and basic and stupid historical errors (like describing Hizbullah as a Palestinian organisation). Even if you don’t have time to waste on reading hundreds of pages of Sookhdeo’s drivel, which I don’t, this review is a must-read.

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Posted in Islamophobia, Sookhdeo, Patrick | 6 Comments

Why Britain is up the spout, by Nick Cohen and a Frenchman

I have recently seen two articles ruminating on the causes of the recent credit crunch and resulting recession, one by Nick Cohen in the Observer Review last Sunday, and the second by Jaques Monin, the London correspondent of Radio France, in the G2 section of yesterday’s Guardian. Cohen blames a government of the left which sold out its principles and let the market run riot; Monin blames a culture in which everything is assessed by its monetary value, in which pragmatism rules and the state is allowed to run riot. They both have good points, but Monin’s are let down by his blindness to the limitations of the “French model”, while Cohen jumps at the chance to attack the leftist/Islamist alliance yet again.

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Posted in Economy | 1 Comment

Saad Abdullah, put up or shut up and fear Allah!

My last long post was a reply to Umar Lee, who posted an attack on so-called Rand Institute Muslims and Shaikh Hamza Yusuf specifically. His post has provoked a series of angry responses and equally angry counter-arguments. Now, the discussion has descended into an all-out slanging match, with one individual posting a disgraceful personal slur sourced from his father, who is not even a Muslim, based on one look at a flyer, people lining up to defend him and his father, and some specific accusations being posted against Shaikh Nuh Keller and Shaikh Muhammad al-Ya’qoobi. Normally I would not post at length about such matters, but these issues need answering.

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Posted in Community, Islam | 79 Comments

Bush, Google and censorship

BBC NEWS: White House plans open government

An interesting report on how the Obama government intends to open up the White House website to search engines. Under Bush, they “blocked” search engines from indexing much of the site (although the data was still there) by using the “robots.txt” file. This file is commonly used to tell robots not to index things like your CGI directory, which you might use to administer your website. If you use a program like WPoison, a script which generates pages full of fake e-mail addresses and links to other pages also generated by it so that spammers’ address lists end up with lots of false addresses, “robots.txt” tells Google and Yahoo not to get caught up in them as well.

However, Google and Yahoo are under no obligation to actually honour the file; if Google did not index the White House website because of it, then they were colluding with the Bush government’s censorship. It is bad enough that they collaborate with the Chinese government’s censors and even betray their users to their Gestapo; in the USA, there is no Gestapo and they don’t have to collaborate, so why do they? Presumably none of what was hidden was classified information, otherwise it would not have been on the site at all. An exception could easily have been written into the spider programs so that the content would have been indexed. They are American companies after all, and guess who funds the White House website.

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Posted in Tech, USA | 1 Comment

Response to Umar Lee on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf

Umar Lee has posted an exposé of what he calls “Rand Institute Muslims” or RIMs as they supposedly exist in 21st-century America. Their characteristics, according to him, are “detachment from the Islamic Revival”, supporting Palestinian causes based on the writings of Noam Chomsky rather than of Muslim scholars and activists, Anglicising and Westernising Islam, but above all, a demasculinised, upper-class mentality with a tendency towards a hippie-ish form of Sufism. He concludes by accusing Shaikh Hamza Yusuf of representing all ten of these characteristics and being the “RIM in chief for America”. I have shied away from “debating” Umar over his ramblings about “masculinity” the last couple of years, but when I see these same attitudes paired with slander of scholars, I cannot continue to keep quiet.

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Posted in Community, Organisations & Leadership, Political correctness, USA | 36 Comments

Heathrow: the sweetener which isn’t

Gordon Brown today gave the go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow airport, the international airport in the western suburbs of London. I posted what Simon Jenkins wrote about this disaster yesterday, and here is what George Monbiot has to say on the Guardian’s website today (it might well appear in the print edition tomorrow). I agree with both writers that this government is composed of spineless wimps: they give in to big business again and again. My theory is that they are chronically overawed by power, which explains their craven subservience to Bush and now their policy of giving into the aviation industry again and again. However, I want to examine the “sweetener” which has been added to this bitter pill: high-speed rail links, which sounds about as sweet as the most alarming assessments of aspartame.

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Posted in Heathrow threat | 4 Comments

My letter’s in the Technology Guardian

The technology supplement to the Guardian published a letter from me today, concerning the “no clue” nature of Apple’s attitude to low-cost computer kit. You can read what they published here, but here’s what I actually wrote (note that they clipped out the bit about the difference between getting an extra gigabyte from Apple and getting it elsewhere, which is significant, because the difference is more than twice the actual cost of the RAM):

With regard to the lack of an update to the Mac Mini, the price and specification of this machine demonstrates how out of touch Apple are with the current state of the world economy. Prices start from £391 for a machine with a “combo drive” (meaning it can read but not burn DVDs), 80Gb of disk space and only 1Gb of RAM; updating to 2Gb nearly £50. In the real world, 2Gb of that type of RAM costs under £20 from Crucial, including delivery, and you can get a Dell with twice the memory, 500Gb of disk space, a DVD writer, a dedicated graphics card and a faster processor, which can be opened with a screwdriver rather than with decorators’ tools and upgraded easily, for £329. Apple are clearly not interested in selling computers to people on a budget, and since there will be far more of those around in the months to come, one hopes Steve Jobs will get out of the way or get a clue if the platform is to survive.

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Posted in Letters published, Mac | 6 Comments

The fashion police blitz on “rural Surrey”

Trinny and Susannah are something of a national institution here; they are best known as the faces of What Not to Wear and a series of less well-known programmes since they left BBC and the WNTW brand. Last night, they appeared on ITV in Trinny and Susannah Meet Their Match, in which they attempted to correct the alleged sartorial misdemeanours of the ladies of rural England. The premise was that they would live the lives of one of them for a while - the mayor of Uckfield, Sussex, and a lady Anglican vicar from somewhere in the Midlands - and then try to get them to change their habits.

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Posted in Media | 1 Comment

Nothing overwhelming except the damage

Simon Jenkins: A runway for jobs? It’s time aviation’s bluff was called (The Guardian)

An excellent opinion piece on the stream of lies and broken promises which have led to the proposal for the third Heathrow runway, which the Government is expected to approve. New Labour has a long history of giving into “Big Carbon”:

Brown will do what his predecessors have done, which is lie. In the 1960s ministers promised “for all time” that there would be no expansion of Heathrow. It expanded. When T4 opened in 1978 there was another promise of no expansion, and a cap of 275,000 flights. The pledge was broken within a year. At the time of T5 the cap was raised to 480,000, and the prime minister and cabinet agreed that a third runway would be “totally unacceptable”.

That promise is now broken. In 2006 the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, promised that a new runway would be a short, domestic one, with flights only over countryside to the west. She also promised carbon and pollution limits. Those promises have been broken. The government wants almost to double the number of Heathrow flights to 700,000, an astonishing increase on the present chaos, and careless of the impact on west London or its infrastructure. This is an orgy of planning abuse. No Heathrow promise is worth a bucket of spit.

Ministers lie because they know they will be out of office, or out of sight, when their pledges are broken. They know that no government can bind its successor and that Big Carbon, like Big Pharma, always gets its way. When we were young we were told that new airports could go anywhere because new planes would be so clean and quiet that nobody would mind. It was all rubbish.

G2 also had a feature on the places which are likely to be bulldozed, or rendered virtually uninhabitable, by this monstrous scheme. I think it’s madness to expand an airport which is already huge, which already has two full-size runways and is right on the edge of a major city with flightpaths running right over the suburbs. Rather than bulldozing more houses or farms to build runways, they should build (or improve) rail links between the four full-blown international airports London already has - which would only actually involve improving a few junctions, not building vast new lines.

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Posted in Heathrow threat, London life | 3 Comments

If only … I weren’t such a vicious thug

Last night and the night before, there were discussions about knife crime on the BBC London station, based around a BBC Panorama programme in which Raphael Rowe, a BBC reporter who had been in jail himself as a result of a wrongful conviction for a series of robberies, interviewed young offenders who had been locked up as a result of killing or wounding people with knives. One of them opined that he might not have killed, and would be free today, if he had been threatened with a minimum four-year jail term for carrying a knife in the street. I think it would be a disaster if policy-makers listened to these men.

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Posted in News | Leave a comment

Prince Harry and his little friend

On Sunday, the News of the World (also known as the News of the Screws, a tabloid “scandal sheet” owned by Rupert Murdoch known for printing kiss-and-tell stories) put on its front page a story about Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles (and Diana) who is currently an army officer, who shot a private video of his Sandhurst comrades waiting for a plane to Cyprus, and calling a Pakistani fellow cadet “our little Paki friend, Ahmed”. They also accused him of somehow insulting the Queen by giving what sounds like a perfectly normal goodbye to his Grandpa, also known as Prince Phillip (by the way: the NOTW’s weekday sister paper, the Sun, is known for supporting a republic, and responded to the Queen’s coronation by telling her she had had her fun and should abdicate the next day). Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation has called him a thug who had been trying to portray himself as being like his caring and respected parents.

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Posted in Racism | 3 Comments

Videos from the Palestine rally

I shot a few videos with my new camcorder at the rally for Palestine yesterday. Besides wanting to do this for its own sake as the first serious usage of my new toy, I decided I had to counter the images the media and certain blogs will give out of the rally. It was reported that it turned violent later on in the evening (I left around sunset), something I had been warned about, but the bit I participated in was overwhelmingly calm and good-natured, and the “anti-semitic” banners (actually, it wasn’t anti-semitism as such but such things as Israeli flags with swastikas in them) were a small minority. More later, insha Allah. Videos are over the fold, or you can view them here, here and here.

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Posted in Palestine, YouTube | 5 Comments

Exciting times to be out of a job

Train company is to cut 300 jobs

Southeastern trains [which operates trains in south-east London and Kent] is to make 300 people redundant over the coming year.

The company blamed “reduced passenger journey growth” and the economic climate for the decision, which will see up to 90 staff axed by May. …

Staff affected by the job losses are to include a number of managers and administration workers, Southeastern said.

In a statement, the company said: “In line with many other companies in the UK at the moment, this step is being taken in order for us to remain a successful organisation.

“It’s necessary to take these measures in a time of reduced passenger journey growth and a more challenging economic climate.”

Meanwhile …

Screenshot of Southeastern train company website, proclaiming 'Exciting times' and inviting you to look for a job there

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Posted in Recession / Credit Crunch | Leave a comment

British welfare laws and foreign competitors

On Tuesday, the Guardian printed a lengthy article about welfare standards - or lack of them - on pig farms on the Continent (Europe). Now, as Muslims we may not be too fond of pigs and we don’t eat their meat, but animal welfare is important and we don’t like to see any animal suffer, particularly when it’s just to maximise some guy’s profit, and most of us will have heard the hadeeth about the man who gave water to a dog in his shoe. Britain has welfare laws which regulate the amount of space in which the animals should be kept, but the upshot has been that demand for British pork has slumped by 36%; 60% of the pork products eaten in the UK are imported.

The treatment the animals receive in parts of Europe is appalling - being kept in the dark because it reduces noise, having their tails docked (without anaesthetic) to stop them biting each other because they have nothing else to do, male piglets being castrated without anaesthetic, and sows being kept in stalls, which prevent them moving and inhibit lying down and getting up again, for the entire length of their pregnancies. But it’s cheap, and for some reason we can impose laws which ban all these things, but we can’t stop our farmers being undercut by farmers overseas who still do them.

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Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Study Islam, become an atheist?

Douglas Murray has an article in the latest edition of the Spectator (which at least had an edition last week, unlike the New Statesman which insisted that we make do with one edition for three weeks) in which he claimed that studying Islam made him reject his former Anglicanism in favour of atheism ([1], [2], [3], [4]):

Charles Darwin didn’t do for God. German biblical criticism did — the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith — that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that ‘holy’ texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day. …

But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’, plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?

Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.

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Posted in Douglas Murray, Islam, Islamophobia | 9 Comments

Muslims and Neturei Karta

Reading Mas’ud Khan’s account of his recent exchange with Melanie Phillips ([1], [2], [3]), I noticed that he had mentioned Neturei Karta to her, asking her whether she regarded them as “self-hating Jews”. NK, for anyone who’s never heard of them, are the men in black coats and top hats who you might find at pro-Palestinian demonstrations: they are strictly orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism. They are not the only group of Jews who oppose Israel or Zionism, but most others are secular leftists and not religious. I am sure some Muslims think that their presence demonstrates that we are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semites; in fact, we do not need them there to prove that.

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Posted in Palestine, Phillips, Melanie | 18 Comments