This seems to be my week to receive gifts 🙂 Aaron Freeman had told me a while back that he’d sent me “The Replacements” off my wish list, a few weeks back. Well, it arrived yesterday and since “The Replacements” was a movie I enjoyed very much on the first viewing, I’m looking forward to the second viewing with all the extras – thanks a lot Aaron! (And if you’re reading this, I hope you were able to sort out the comments problem – I haven’t received a reply to my last e-mail to you and while I keep on meaning to go over to your site and check out the comments again, I keep on forgetting :p) Incidentally, my apologies to Mark and Nigel for not updating the Hall of Fame with the gifts they sent till now – again, I’ve been meaning to but kept on forgetting … It should be done now – unless of course, I forget to upload it :p

Speaking of gifts, thank you one and all for gifts of another kind – your wisdom and insight 🙂 I was feeling kind of low on Monday when I whinged about the current situation with my parents and stuff and forgotten (or had not thought of …) quite a few of the things each and every one of you mentioned in your comments. I appreciate the concern and the moral support – I’m feeling much better now 🙂

I received another gift from my wish list 🙂 This time it was a birthday gift from Mark but unfortunately, it doesn’t say which Mark it is and there are several Marks I’ve communicated with about Blog over the last few months and so I’m not sure whom I should thank. But thank you Mark! The book on Delphi troubleshooting will prove to be invaluable – I know it 🙂 As I’ve said before, it’s a really nice feeling to come home and find that there’s a gift for you – it sort of lets me know that I have friends that I’ve never met, somewhere in the world 🙂

As for coding, I haven’t really had much of a chance to work on any code related stuff. I really should release Blog 6.1 and get on with stuff so that I can move on to working on Blog 7.0, for which the feature list keeps on getting longer (and yes Nigel, the digest feature is in there :p). I don’t like to bundle too many features in one release because then it becomes harder to spot the bugs and any inadvertent behaviour changes that I may have made but I’d like to also get in all the features that are currently planned. So I guess it’s imperative that I get to work soon …

Had a fairly quiet and subdued weekend – partly due to the fact that I simply wanted to finish “The Sigma Protocol” and then began “The Matarese Countdown” (again by Ludlum) which I can’t seem to put down either :p Actually, I think I like “The Matarese Countdown” even more than “The Sigma Protocol” in certain ways. For one thing, it’s funnier 🙂 I’ve always enjoyed Ludlum’s humorous thrillers – specifically the one’s involving General MacKenzie Hawkins a.k.a. The Hawk – and “The Matarese Countdown” has a touch of that humour surfacing now and again but this time mostly from the mouth of Brandon Scofield, the agent from “The Matarese Circle” … I guess I shouldn’t go on like this since only a Ludlum fan would recognize most of the references but I guess the basic fact is that I’m enjoying the book :p

The other reason for the quiet weekend is a bit more personal – my mother is/was giving me the quiet treatment :p Unfortunately, either I’ve never learned how to handle my parents or they’ve never realized that I’m not the child I used to be … especially my mother. She thought she could badger me into cutting my hair and I decided to give her a dose of straight-talk – neither worked and the end result was that she ended up not talking to me. Again, I know most people will be mystified by this – such as why I need to cut my hair, why my parents still tell me what to do and why my Mom would stop talking to me – at least I’d think so since some of this seems pretty strange to even me now after living in the US for four years though it probably would not have seemed so strange to me a few years ago.

The hair? Well, that’s because of the fact that in Sri Lanka people, Muslims more so than others, hate people to be different from what they consider to be “normal”. I am different since I have long hair and that irritates people for some reason and they keep on telling my parents how their son having long hair is bad for their (my parents’) image as parents since people will think it’s their fault. Incidentally, this is how a lot of things work in Sri Lanka – everybody worries about what “others” think and this again is something I’ve never understood. The problem has gotten worse in recent months since my parents are trying to get me married but most prospective brides (or rather their families …) take one look at me (or rather my hair …) and say “No” since I’m different and couldn’t possibly be a good Muslim :p This again seems to irritate my parents since it seems (maybe I’m judging them too harshly …) that we shouldn’t be refused since that somehow lowers our “status” – we are the one’s who should be doing the refusing :p

Of course, all this has led to my Mom deciding to somehow get me to cut my hair. I might have done it under normal circumstances if it had been a simple request because *she* didn’t like it (maybe … you never know with me :p) but since I know the cause of the request is basically because she wants me to “conform”, I will never do it! I hate the fact that people give in to pressure from this invisible “society” and do whatever is asked of them, right or wrong. The fact that people don’t stop to think about what they do. I believe that this is the kind of thing (in a larger scale …) that led to World War II Germany – because people just went along with society instead of voting their conscience!

Unfortunately, this has led to stress at home and I’m beginning to wonder whether I was right in coming back to Sri Lanka. I came back because of my parents – because I wanted to be with them and take care of them. But me being here seems to cause them more pain and concern than me being abroad since I believe that people talk more about me when I’m here than when I’m away since you tend to talk more about what’s in your face than out of sight :p I’m seriously considering leaving again but then again, wouldn’t that be running away from the problem? That makes me pause but sometimes I think running away to save my parents some mental anguish might be worth it … I just don’t know …

My friend Imthisham, who works with me, got married yesterday to another girl who works with us as well. Since this is sort of an in-house wedding for the company, everybody from work turned out at the wedding and as many services as could be provided from the company was provided – the music was provided by the head of the music department, the photographers were from the company and the wedding was videotaped by professional cameramen from the camera crew. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bride had been made up by the company’s make-up artist :p

I rarely go out and especially don’t go for functions that go on till late since I normally try to get up early for prayers but this was something that I had to attend since Imthi is somebody that I’ve known a long time – he was at the company when I first joined them and he still is there. He’s always been a good friend and an extremely helpful person. It was good to be out with about the only friends I have in Sri Lanka but after the festivities I feel kind of sad today. I don’t know whether I just miss the cheerful atmosphere or the camaraderie or whether all the questions about when I’m getting married (is that normal for even guys? I thought that in other countries only girls get asked that … :p) just makes me feel down … But it’s still early in the morning and I’m sure that the feeling will pass as the day progresses 🙂

As usual, I’ve been side-tracked by another project – and inundated with work too :p The other project is not something that a lot of you will find a use for since it’s Islam related – but I needed it (or thought I do …) and so I’m working on it <g> So what is it? Well, I guess I need to go into explanation mode for a bit – Islam (as you’ve probably heard before …) is not just a religion, it’s a way of life. There’s instructions on how you should dress, what you should eat, how you should eat it, how you behave, how you pray etc. The main source for these rules/laws is the Qur’an and the secondary source is the Hadith, or the prophet’s (peace be upon him) sayings. The sayings were collected by various people into several collections that people use to refer to when there is a doubt about a certain point of religion and it cannot be verified from the Qur’an alone.

Now the problem is that sometimes people will say that there is such and such a Hadith and that you should do something as if they really know what they are talking about but on reference, you’ll see there is no such Hadith at all or that they’d misinterpreted the Hadith. Like all things that we humans touch, we sometimes seem to pervert the Hadith too as an easy way to get something done “our” way or simply to spread mis-information, knowingly or unknowingly. In my case, my Dad told me a few days ago that an uncle of mine had told him of a Hadith which stated that a Muslims beard should be larger than his mustache. Of course, this happened because I sport a goatee these days and it’d become pretty tiny :p I just don’t like doing anything on hearsay and so I decided to do some research and went through several online Hadith databases and found that the Hadith had actually been misinterpreted (at least as far as I could tell …) – what was said (in effect) was that the beard should be *longer* than the mustache … or actually, to trim the mustache and let the beard grow. I have a feeling in this case that it simply got repeated from person to person and each changed the wording the way he saw it till it got to be “beard larger than mustache” …

Anyway, I decided that this is something that I shouldn’t let happen in the future and so I decided to create a program which would simply be a database of Hadith that could be referenced and searched easily. So I searched the web for a downloadable database that I could use in my program and was going to create my own database from the online ones by parsing the text if I didn’t find a downloadable database. To my surprise, I actually found a program (a freeware one at that …) which actually did exactly what I wanted … but it didn’t give me the degree of control I wanted since you had to select individual Hadith collections and weren’t able to search all available collections at once. So I was wondering whether I couldn’t use there data but create my own front-end :p And so began a project which currently seems on the verge of completion – though that’s the same way I’d looked at it yesterday and probably day before too :p

The first problem was that the data wasn’t in a database as I’d first thought but rather in a DLL! Then I discovered that the DLL had somehow been compressed and had to discover the exact program used to compress it and then find a decompressor for it. This took quite a bit of doing and I came to learn a lot about the currently available exe compressors 🙂 Once I finally found the correct unpacker, I then had to go through the DLL and figure out how the data was stored and figure out a database structure for the data, how to extract the data and to write the logic to do the actual extraction. I did all that day before yesterday but yesterday I realized that the data storage in the DLL files varied in very minimal fashion from DLL to DLL! So I had to go back again and rewrite some of the extraction code so that it will extract the data from all the DLL’s without me having to put in conditional stuff – I’m finicky that way :p Of course, I’m still dealing with all the conditions since three databases extract fairly well but the fourth suddenly breaks off in the middle of extraction with no error message. Guess, I’ll have to try and debug it today if possible …