inside aebrahim’s head

The folks over at the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank kindly took the time to interview me last November. I just noticed that the interview transcript has been posted online last month.

On 29 May 2007, Zainab and I were blessed with a beautiful daugther, Rashida Ebrahim. She was born in Westminster, UK.

My last blog entry was on July 8, a good two and a half months ago, I think my longest hiatus yet from blogging. Since then, things have been sort of a whirlwind on all fronts (in a good way, of course).

Most important on the list is that I got married on 15 August 2005, to Zainab Currim (now Ebrahim), who I have known for the last five years and been engaged to since December 2002! We had both been waiting for this for a long, long time, and it is amazing to finally be married.

When I say that I got married on 15 August, I should qualify this statement, because marriages for Muslims and Indians don’t work in the same way as they do for many of you who have grown up in a Western environment. For many of you, after the marriage ceremony in a church, there is a reception, and then that’s it. For us, it’s a bit more complicated. First we have what is called the nikah, which is the marriage contract itself, and is executed between the groom and the bride’s appointed representative, which is usually her paternal grandfather or father. Once the nikah is complete, the couple are legally married. However, that’s not the end of the deal. Prior to and after the consummation of the marriage, there are other traditional ceremonies that also take place, and it is these ceremonies that constitute the wedding celebrations.

So my nikah was performed on 15 August, but the wedding celebrations are yet to take place. They’ll happen this December in Mumbai (most of my extended family lives there) and Kolkata (Zainab’s family lives there), both in India.

The venue of our nikah was Najam Baug, a Dawoodi Bohra community hall that my great, great grandfather originally built along with his brother-in-law in 1886, and was recently rebuilt by our family and inaugurated on 15 August 2005 (my nikah took place during the inauguration).

I took on the task of designing the website for Najam Baug, and just completed it a couple of days ago. It’s the first website that I’ve designed from scratch (though I did use a CSS trick or two from ALA), and I’m pretty happy with the result. Designing the website just reminded me what a pleasure it is to design for standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

When it comes to rendering standards-compliant pages, these browsers Just Work™. Internet Explorer drove me crazy with its Screw Standards™ rendering mode. I spent hours making IE not totally screw up floats, and also a long, long time trying to figure out why content was just plain vanishing in IE. As it turned out, the vanishing content bug was IE’s notorious Peek-a-boo bug, which I was able to fix using Matthew Somerville’s line-height hack. After making all these efforts, the website now displays only acceptably in IE, but still not perfectly. For those of you who have IE, you’ll notice that there is a lot more whitespace than you see in other browsers. I still haven’t figured out how to fix this.

There’s still a lot more that’s happened in the past couple of weeks to talk about, but for now this is all I have time for. I hope that over the few days I can write a couple more entries. One of the things I want to write about is about using Firefox at work, and a few observations and challenges I’ve faced in being able to use it 100% of the time.

This morning I officially graduated from my one-year Mandarin language course at the Beijing Language & Culture University. After five years away from Hong Kong, tomorrow I finally return home permanently, and am looking forward to starting at my new workplace.

在北京语言大学学了一年汉语以后，我终于毕业了。今天早上我拿到了我的进修证书。我在2000年离开我家去美国上大学。在2004年为了学好汉语我来到北京。暂留了五年以后我明天才往家回去。回到了家以后，我快要在我家庭的公司开始工作。

As a matter of pure coincidence, yesterday while I was renewing ebrahim.org’s domain registration, I noticed that ebrahim.org turns six years old today. Six years is a long time, especially in the internet world, where it’s an eternity.

When I first registered ebrahim.org back in 1999, I knew nothing about web or email hosting. On the recommendation of a friend, I bought ebrahim.org and purchased one POP account from Network Solutions, my first domain name registrar. I also had a one page “Under Construction” website at www.ebrahim.org (then, now). Things have come quite a way since then. I now host with a real hosting company, use ebrahim.org to host email for my family members, and also for this blog.

According to the Chicago Maroon, student social security numbers (SSN) and grade reports may possibly have been compromised at the University of Chicago. The University has set up an Incident Response site where those affected by the compromise can find information about the event.

According to the Maroon article, the SSN of Alumni from 1990-2002, and the grade reports from Autumn 2003 are amongst the items believed to be compromised.

While I applaud the university for taking quick action and setting up a status website, I am hugely disappointed that they did not deem it necessary to inform affected students/alumni of what is a severe compromise of privacy and trust. I would also expect them to provide an aggregated list of compromised data, so that those affected know exactly what may have been stolen. If the Maroon is correct in its assessment of what data has been compromised, then I am among those whose data may have been stolen.

During my time at UChicago, I had the pleasure of working with some of the network administrators there, and I found them to be good people who valued the privacy of students. It is thus even more perplexing to me that I found out about this data compromise from news outlets, rather than by being informed by the university itself.

Working on community projects can be one of the most rewarding types of volunteer work out there. This is for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that these type of projects bring like-minded people together and from them build a vibrant community. Watching the community they create thrive is the greatest reward for the project contributors.

Another important reward is that contributors benefit from the exchange of ideas. Many heads are (usually) better than one, and decisions taken after group consultation are often the most well grounded in reason and are most likely to result in the best possible outcome for the community. Also, one learns a lot by following discussions amongst people who are experts in their own field. As long as the project is driven by active people who share similar goals and ideas, these projects always remain in good health.

The most severe challenges that these community projects face usually come months or years after their inception. Sometimes previously active members slowly become inactive, and often the ideas of the active members may evolve — sometimes in divergent directions.

Many people (particularly those involved in OSS development) believe labour is ‘replaceable’. As long as a process is documented, if a community contributor leaves the project, his shoes can be filled by anyone with the required technical expertise. I think this is a dangerous assumption to make. Finding a replacement who is willing and able to work on a volunteer basis, groks the group’s thinking and is technically capable is often harder than one might imagine. It’s easy to find people who meet two of these three criteria, but much harder to find the perfect match.

I think the second problem — divergent ideas — is the more severe of the two (and greatly exacerbates the first). As projects evolve (as they all do with time), contributors may develop different priorities or sometimes even different goals. A sufficiently motivated contributor often puts in extra hours for the benefit of the project to make up for the inaction of others. But divergence of goals or ideas at the most basic level can destroy this motivation.

I’m not sure what the best way is to solve these problems, I don’t see that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. Each project has to find its own unique way in the end.

I was motivated to write about this today because one of my friends, Yusuf, is facing similar issues with one of the projects that he’s involved in. His perspective on this issue is worth reading.

I just got back from the Beijing premiere of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith! The premiere was on Wednesday 18 May, 11:40am GMT. I enjoyed the movie, more so than Episodes I and II.

For all you poor sods out there who didn’t get tickets for the premiere in your location, I have even more maddening news for you: we bought our tickets for the movie just over two hours before the show started!

I won’t post any spoliers, since I know a lot of people (most of the world) haven’t seen it yet, but I will say that I had a good laugh about the part where George W is equated to a Sith Lord.

It’s been around 50 days since I’ve posted anything to my blog. Certainly my longest hiatus yet. I’m very much out of touch with most things that have happened on the web since 7th January, and certainly am out of touch with happenings in the Mozilla world.

What have I been up to? I did some travelling over my Chinese New Year break, and then as soon as I got back and was ready to pick up again, my laptop’s hard drive died, so I lost another few days before Dell replaced it.

Where have I been? I finished my final exams in Beijing on 7th January in the morning, and then the trek began:

07th January:  Beijing, China to Hong Kong (by air)
08th January:  Hong Kong to Singapore (by air)
17th January:  Singapore to Mumbai, India (by air)
22nd January:  Mumbai, India to Kolkata, India (by air)
30th January:  Kolkata, India to Mumbai, India (by air)
01st February: Mumbai, India to Singapore (by air)
03rd February: Singapore to Hong Kong (by air)
12th February: Hong Kong to Mumbai, India (by air)
13th February: Mumbai, India to Surat, India (by train)
19th February: Surat, India to Mumbai, India (by train)
20th February: Mumbai, India to Hong Kong (by air)
21st February: Hong Kong to Beijing, China (by air)

I just got back online from my laptop last night, because on the 20th, my hard drive failed, so I had to bring my broken laptop to China and get it fixed here. Dell was actually very good about it, they replaced my old 60GB/2MB cache drive with a new 80GB/8MB cache drive. They also replaced my motherboard because I told them my fan was making wheezing noises. Apparently the easiest way to remedy this was to replace the mobo, since the fan is attached to it. In any case, I’m not complaining.

I hope to get back in touch with Firefox happenings, so I can start triaging bugs again as soon as possible.

Happy Birthday! You know who you are, and I wish I could be there to spend it with you!