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.

Christian blogged about this earlier.

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

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!

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.’

So we came to barcelona and had a good time at the fluendo office today.

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