“Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure.
Wealth enough to support your needs.
Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.
Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
Faith enough to make real the things of God.
Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.”
Year: 2006
Peter Jackson Not To Direct ‘The Hobbit’
In a letter to TheOneRing.net Peter Jackson, director of the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, officially announced that he would not be directing the movie incarnation of the LOTR prequel “The Hobbit” even though he wishes to.
The main reason why he and his company Wingnut Films won’t be making this movie is a financial dispute with NewLine over the money made from “The Fellowship of the Ring”. Wingnut believe they deserve a bigger cut of the profit and are suing NewLine for it.
NewLine offered to tie the settlement of the dispute with the making of “The Hobbit” and to negociate a new deal accordingly, but Wingnut refused that and said they wanted to first settle the lawsuit on it’s own without being tied to a new deal.
Peter Jacksons says about this:
“…In other words, we would have to agree to make The Hobbit as a condition of New Line settling our lawsuit. In our minds this is not the right reason to make a film and if a film of The Hobbit went ahead on this basis, it would be doomed. Deciding to make a movie should come from the heart – it’s not a matter of business convenience. When you agree to make a film, you’re taking on a massive commitment and you need to be driven by an absolute passion to want to get the story on screen. It’s that passion, and passion alone, that gives the movie its imagination and heart. To us it is not a cold-blooded business decision.”
And as NewLine say they only have the rights to make “The Hobbit” and another LOTR prequel for a limited period of time, they will be proceeding on the new Hobbit films without Wingnut.
I think it’s a shame that it won’t be Peter Jackson and his team revisiting Middle Earth and the Shire to bring the magic of “The Hobbit” to our screens.
I’ve been looking forward to this movie ever since I read the book and the LOTR trilogy ended, and I knew that it would be a great experience in the hands of Peter Jackson.
Anyway, I hope whoever takes the helm of this project realizes the responsability he has on his shoulders, and the kind of quality he has to live up to, and does something really good with it.
Ikbis – Video & Photo Sharing
Ikbis, the new service by the creative guys over at toot has gone live.
After a really cool viral marketing campaign featuring “The Largest Yellow Button On The Web” and the humorous animations behind it, the service went online this morning.
Ikbis, which means “Press” or “Click” in Arabic, is a cool online video and photo sharing service, sort of an Arabic cousin of YouTube and Flickr.
The design is very nice, simplistic and clean; I really like the logo, the colours used and the way it’s organized. Then again, I wouldn’t expect anything less from the toot designers.
The interface comes in two languages, English and Arabic, and is pretty simple and straightforward, which is always good in a web service; you upload your photos or videos, label them, describe them, tag them, organize them into albums, choose who can view them or not…etc; on the other hand you can navigate through the videos and photos uploaded by other users, leave comments and add users as your contacts.
In short, it’s a fully rounded sharing service with all the bells and whistles you could need.
RSS feeds of each user’s video and photo stream are available too.
The service is still in beta and might be a bit rough around the edges when it comes to certain small features or their usability, but I’m very sure these are things that the ikbis team are ironing out as I speak.
I certainly recommend you check out the service and play around with it, it’s a very good effort that I’m sure will continue to grow.
Finally, I’d like to congratulate my friends over at toot for this new baby and wish them all the best of luck and success with it.
McDonald’s Australia & Halal Food
McDonald’s Australia reaches out to Muslim fast-food lovers…
McDonald’s Australia has introduced halal products at two Melbourne restaurants, Brunswick East and St Albans, significantly boosting sales.
However some non-Muslim customers are furious they were not told their hamburger meat was slaughtered and blessed in accordance with Islamic rules laid down in the Koran.
[…]
Coburg resident Miriam McLennan was stunned to discover the hamburger she bought from the Brunswick East store was blessed.
“Just as a Muslim would not want to eat anything that isn’t halal . . . I should have my rights to eat normal, ordinary food that hasn’t been blessed,” she said.
[Source: Herald Sun]
First of all, I think this is great news. Being a fast food fan myself, when traveling abroad, I often find myself wishing there were a restaurant or two of my favorite chains that served halal food. So I definitely hope more and more chains consider opening up halal restaurants.
Secondly, regarding the reaction by some of the non-Muslim customers, I think that it might be because of a misunderstanding of the concept of halal food and the way the animals producing halal meat are killed.
In the Koran, here’s what we find:
“Forbidden to you are: dead meat, blood, the flesh of swine, and that on which hath been invoked the name of other than Allah. that which hath been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or by being gored to death; that which hath been eaten by a wild animal; unless ye are able to slaughter it; that which is sacrificed on stone;…”
Us & Life…
“The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity. We have a tendency it seems to over complicate our lives and forget what’s important and what’s not. We tend to mistake movement for achievement. We tend to focus on activities instead of results. And as the pace of life continues to race along in the outside world, we forget that we have the power to control our lives regardless of what’s going on outside.”
GOD 2.0
Al Jazeera English Goes Live
Al Jazeera English, the new 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel from the Qatar-based television network, has begun broadcasting from its main studios in Doha in high-definition format.
Al Jazeera English also has broadcast centres Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington.
In addition to the four broadcast centres, Al Jazeera English will have 20 supporting bureaux which will gather and produce news. It will share the resources of the Arabic language channel’s 42 bureaux and is planning to add further bureaux in the future.
The opening broadcast, which was expected to be available in 80 million households around the world, took place at 3pm Doha time (12:00 GMT) and featured a clip introducing the channel.
The channel has attracted some of the best known faces in international news from BBC, CNN, ABC and others.
In addition to cable and satellite, it will be available on broadband, IPTV, ADSL, terrestrial and mobile phone platforms.
Along with the launch of the new international channel, Al Jazeera’s English website got a much needed overhaul. The current design is much better and puts more focus on the content.
I caught the news on Al Jazeera English today on my lunch break, and first impression speaking, it’s looking pretty good up to now.
For more info on Al Jazeera English, it’s programme, presenters …etc; check the Press Office.
[Site: Al Jazeera English]
7 Pains You Should Never Ignore
Just came across this article titled “7 Pains You Should Never Ignore” and thought I’d share it. Apparently if there are any 7 pains that you should never ignore, it’s these.
Here’s the list of pains and the possible conditions associated to them:
1. Sudden Groin Pain: Testicular torsion
2. Severe Back Pain: Aneurysm
3. Persistent Foot or Shin Pain: Stress fracture
4. Sharp Pain in the Abdomen: Appendicitis, pancreatitis, or an inflamed gallbladder (Cholecystitis)
5. Transient Chest Pain: Indigestion or heart attack
6. Leg Pain with Swelling: Deep-vein thrombosis
7. Painful Urination: Bladder cancer
Of course most of the conditions listed ase are worst case scenarios, but still it shows how we should never take things lightly and brush off certain pains as nothing.
For more details, check the full article: “7 Pains You Should Never Ignore“.
Java Open Sourced with GPL
After years of requests and debates, Sun Microsystems is going ahead and releasing Java source code under a GPL license.
It plans to put the code for the programming software under the version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2), which governs Linux and many other open-source products.
The Sun-hosted Java.net Web site will provide access to Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) software for mobile phones and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software for desktop applications.
Sun already has open-sourced its server-side Java Platform Enterprise Edition software in a project called GlassFish. But it is now making that same software available under the GPLv2, rather than the Sun-conceived Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
The nature of the GPL is that additions to software available under the GPL must also use the license. However, Sun is employing the so-called “classpath exception,” a license addition that allows the company to place limits on the software that the GPL covers.
This should help protect the work of programmers and companies that build their applications on top of Java.
This move by Sun is an attempt to build a stronger community, gain more developer followers and to avoid the problems of packaging Java with Linux distributions because of concerns over license alignment.
I’ve personally been one of the supporters of Java becoming open source for a long time, and I think the best way to keep it growing and always innovative is by opening it to the huge community of Java developers. So I think it’s great that they’ve done this at last.
[Source: CNet News]
Some Small Design Changes
As you should’ve already noticed, Subzero Blue has undergone some small design changes, the most important of which is the switch to a 1024×768 screen resolution.
I’ve been working on these design changes for a couple of months now, mainly getting used to them myself, trying to work out the best way to use space and organize the different elements of the blog.
There’s still some work to do here and there, but well I thought I’d just go ahead and put up these changes anyway, and then continue tweaking.
Other than the small changes in the design that I will let you discover for yourselves, I have also made the summaries feed a full post feed too. I think a person subscribing to a blog’s feed should be respected just as much as a person who visits the blog itself, if not more.
You’ll also notice some ads scattered here and there, not all of these will stay, some are just for tests, others are temporary placeholders.
I showed the design to a few people over the past month or so to get their feedback, and the reviews were mixed (some loved it, some didn’t like it), so in the end I went with my own instinct about it and put it online.
What do you think?