General

Eid Mubarak to all my fellow Muslims! Eid ul Adha or Bakra-ki-Eid is one of two Eids in the Muslim calendar. This year millions of Muslims in Pakistan and all over the world will be celebrating Eid-ul-Adha. In Pakistan alone millions of Muslims will be performing qurbani i.e. sacrificing animals for God Almighty. The meat of the sacrificed animals is divided into three portions. One portion is distributed among the poor, one portion is given to one's friends, neighbors and relatives and one portion is kept for one's own consumption. A lot of people in Pakistan are so poor that Eid-ul-Adha is the only time of the year that they get to eat meat.

The lesson of Eid-ul-Azha is that Muslims should be willing to sacrifice anything for Allah. God tested Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam by asking him to sacrifice what was most precious to him - his son. Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam submitted to Allah's will and prepared to sacrifice his son. But Allah was only testing Hazrat Ibraheem's devotion so just as Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam was about to perform the sacrifice Allah placed a sheep in place of his son and Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi sallaam sacrificed that sheep.

Eid-ul-Azha is also being celebrated by a lot of Hajis performing Hajj in Saudi Arabia. This year over 2.3 million Muslims are performing Haj. The images coming out of Saudi Arabia strengthen one's imaan or faith. Indeed each and every Muslim wishes that he too could be present in Saudi Arabia to perform Haj this year. This year is also Hajj-e-Akbar because it included a Friday.

It is amazing how Allah has given the Arabs and Muslims the resources and skill to organize the biggest gathering of humans ever. Managing the flow of more than 2.3 million people is no mean feat. Inshallah will accept all the hajis haj.

After over a month of wasted time due to my new ISPs incompetence I finally have a "broadband" connection. Actually its not really broadband but, at 100Kbps, its faster than my previous dialup connection and its always on so its a bit better. I am actually quite lucky to have this type of connection because bandwidth is really expensive in Pakistan and so is a decent Internet connection. But I am stumped as to what to do with my new found online freedom. For starters I downloaded the latest version of seamonkey. But now I have no idea what to do lol. Should I head on over to youtube? Hmmm I wonder what people with fast connections do online?

Microsoft's new operating system and the successor to Windows XP, Windows Vista is being released to bulk buyers soon but it will take until early 07 before it is available for retail consumers. Vista has some steep hardware requirements. Its much touted aero user interface will require a high end graphics card and loads of RAM. For starters you need a 1 Ghz cpu which shouldn't be a problem for most users. You also need a 1GB of RAM! A whole Gig! I mean talk about being a pig. But the really surprising part is the 15GB hard disk space requirement. How many DVDs does it come on :o ? Of course everybody is complaining now but people will eventually upgrade. We have to there is no other option if you want the latest and greatest software to work with. Windows Vista is certainly a boon to Microsoft's OEM "partners" .

The most important question though is whether you still have to restart your computer after installing every little thing? Its been 21 years since Windows was first released and you would think that by now MS would have learned to make a stable and reliable OS .

Your collection of bookmarks or favourites can be very valuable indeed. They are the little gems you discovered during many years of web surfing and it can be a pain to be without them. Bookmark base is a small program that allows you to carry your own synchronized set of Internet bookmarks or favourites on your usb flash drive. You can then plug your key drive into any computer at home or work and it will update the local machine's bookmarks with a single click! If your worried about your privacy and don't want to place your bookmarks on multiple machines you also have the option of opening individual sites straight from bookmark base.

The really great feature of bookmark base is its cross browser compatibility. Bookmark base supports a large number of browsers including Mozilla Seamonkey and Firefox, K-meleon, Opera and Internet Explorer. So if you use firefox at home but have to use IE at work you can still use the same bookmarks! Bookmark base also allows you to perform simple operations on your bookmarks such as organize them or rename them. It can also verify your bookmarks to make sure that they work. If you like you can try out bookmark base by downloading a trial version.

Here are a few useful windows shortcuts

• Double click on a windows title bar to maximize it. Repeat to restore it. This is easier to do because the title bar is a wider area than the little square maximize button in the top right corner of a window.
• windows key + m to minimize all windows. Functions sort of like the show desktop shortcut
• select a file or shortcut icon and press alt-enter to view its properties window.
• windows key + L to do a quick log out. Useful if want to quickly zip away from your computer but don't want to leave yourself logged in.
• windows key + e will display my computer.