Zaheer Abbas Merali

I have seen many articles talking about Barack Obama and his middle name Hussein. None of them point out how much he should be proud (and America also to have a presidential nomination candidate) to have been named after such a great personality from the human race, Husayn Ibn Ali.

Just a few quotes about his personality from some heroes of humankind in one way or another about Husayn Ibn Ali:

Mahatma Gandhi: “My faith is that the progress of Islam does not depend on the use of sword by its believers, but the result of the supreme sacrifice of Husayn (A.S.), the great saint. I learned from Husayn how to be wronged and be a winner.”

Charles Dickens: “If Husayn fought to quench his worldly desires, then I do not understand why his sisters, wives and children accompanied him. It stands to reason therefore that he sacrificed purely for Islam.”

Thomas Carlyle: ” The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husayn and his companions were the rigid believers of God. They illustrated that numerical superiority does not count when it comes to truth and falsehood. The victory of Husayn despite his minority marvels me!”

We have just completed 2 months of mourning where every year we commemorate the inhumane massacre at Karbala on Ashura day (Muharram 10 in the Islamic calendar) of Imam Husayn (A.S.), his companions and his family (including a young baby who was murdered with a 3 pronged arrow) and his companions and also the torture of the women and children left over who were taken as prisoners with clothes ripped off them and earrings torn off them and made to walk chained from Karbala in Iraq to Kufa in Iraq and then Damascus paraded all along the way as captives and then imprisoned in Damascus. It is a very emotional period for all Muslims as we see the family of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) being butchered and treated worse than animals so soon after the death of the Prophet by so called Muslims.

It brings some parallels with some current day Muslims who terrorise innocents such as in the inexcusable events of 9/11, and maybe it should help Senator Obama to be an even stronger candidate to be commander in chief of the USA by sharing a name with such a great man.

We at Flumotion stream a lot of TV and radio channels by acquiring them from DVB (either satellite or terrestrial) with the help of gstreamer and flumotion-dvb. I was browsing through some blogs today and found this completely hilarious entry (showing that KabelBW, supposedly a big ISP in Germany) capture their channels for streaming for their “IPTV Service” with the analog output from Dreambox set top boxes.

So thanks to Christian Schaller, who bought a DVB-C card and allowed me access to his laptop, I committed support for DVB-C in GStreamer and Totem. So now just ATSC to go.

Christian blogged about this earlier.

So, a recent feature I have added to flumotion-dvb is to be able to capture multiple channels from the same dvb adapter (as long as the channels are on the same multiplex). The screenshot shows both BBC1 and BBC2 being streamed from DVB-T in the UK. The flumotion flow config is on the right, totem and a gst-launch line playing the 2 streams at the top left and the flumotion admin UI on the middle left and pusleaudio volume control so i can choose which one I want to listen to at bottom left.

Jono, the real significance of the number 5 is the number of European cups (recently renamed to UEFA Champions League) that Liverpool FC have won (the last in Istanbul, in 2005). Hence the 5 stars in the below picture:

Last night, of course the team did us proud and beat Inter Milan 2-0. Inter are top of the Italian League, 11 points ahead of 2nd place and haven’t lost a game in the Italian league all season. They also hadn’t until last night lost any game in any competition since September 2007. But they were dominated on the pitch from the first second of the match until the last second, and the score could easily have been 4-0 or 5-0.

I was at the mosque last night while the match was going on, the first home champions league game I hadn’t been to this season. So I had taped ITV1’s coverage using GStreamer and DVB.

Pipeline used:

gst-launch-0.10 dvb://ITV1\ London ! filesink location=liverpoolintermilan.ts

With the freeze of the GStreamer plugins modules coming tomorrow, I needed to test whether the bus messages for SI information was enough from mpegtsparse for any GStreamer app that wants to do DVB without resorting to non GStreamer based code.

So over the last 3 weeks on and off, I have been writing a DVB scanner that given initial tuning parameters (or if no data provided, by brute force) will go and find all channels on your antenna along with tuning parameters for each.

Yesterday, I got a GUI onto it with a player also. Screenshot:

It is written in python and I plan on making a Totem plugin that uses the code.

PS I do not watch Emmerdale, it just happened to be on when I took the screenshot!

US Defence secretary said “There can be little doubt that their destabilising foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.” (Source: BBC News)

which is not very different in words to, and is less true than the following:

‘There can be little doubt that their destabilising foreign policies are a threat to the interests of every country in the world, especially as they are within the range of the ballistic missiles and bombs that the USA have already developed and used frequently in the past.’

Florian has some really funky photo viewing widget bling screencasted on his blog. It takes virtually no cpu on his machine which has an i915 and runs at about 50fps. Code seems to be here.

I would like to thank the people in Maemo who choose who gets on the N810 device program for choosing me and of course to Nokia to give out these discounts. This is the first one I applied for (did not apply for the 770 or the N800) and am looking forward to its release date. I do have the chinook sdk installed and running on my PC to play with in the meantime.

I would especially like to thank Quim whose birthday it is today. Happy birthday!

So the Nokia Music Store launched today in the UK. A few observations:

• On a PC, this site can only be accessed by Internet Explorer. What milennium are we living in?
• On phones/mobile devices, only the Nokia N95 8GB or a Nokia N81 can be used currently to access it. Surely on launch day, Nokia should have made sure that the other phones which they plan to make the store accessible by would have have had at least the ability to upgrade their software so that they can try out the store on launch.
• From what I can tell, all the audio is DRM’ed windows media. Amazon and iTunes stores have been for a while now selling non-DRM’ed music. Why launch a store now with no non-DRM option?
• The tracks are 80p, compared to iTunes’s 79p (for non-DRMed tracks also) and amazon’s 99 cents (about 50p). Does not sound too tempting, especially as the Nokia web browser is decent enough to browse on amazon’s site.

However, all in all, with the amount of people using their phones now in the UK as ipod replacements, it does seem like a shrewd move by Nokia to try and get more business from their phones. This and the ngage relaunch that Nokia are doing should ensure more after-purchase business from Nokia phone customers.