For instance, Sabeel recently released some new videos in their Arabic Culture and Life series – entitled “Reliving Harat Abu Awad”. It’s an interesting glimpse at a historical theatrical tour (in 1991) of “Harat Abu Awad”, the famous Jordanian play, in five U.S. cities. Including some never before seen documentary footage! In this segment, we will meet the artist Nabil Mashini (Abu Awad), the artist Hassan Ibrahim (Marzooq), the artist Rashida Dahani (Um Awad), and the producer of the theatrical tour, Mr. Samir H. Haddad. Also, the artist Musa Hijazin who will play the oud and sing on stage with Marzooq and Abul khil (Ghassan Mashini).

Sabeel Media also offers a collection on DVD of 12 short films:  Scenes from the  Heavenly Books, which contains short stories (video clips) – Stories of the Prophets in the Bedouin dialect of Arabic.  You can preview many of the Sabeel Media videos on the Sabeel Media YouTube channel, or the Sabeel Media Vimeo channel.

Along with Arabic language resources, they have recently added some Indonesian. You might also be interested in their FREE downloads of original poetry, featuring many audio podcasts in the Stories of the Prophets series.

Haiku Graffiti

Near Blue Beanie Day; Happy orange, green, blue; HTML5.

Wondering about how to write a Haiku for Blue Beanie Day 2010?  According to Wikipedia, a Haiku is a short Japanese style poem, consisting of 3 phrases (17 moras).  So you’ll need 3 lines. First line with 5 sounds or syllables, a second  line with 7 sounds or syllables, and a final line with 5 sounds or syllables.

In my example above, the final phrase is only one word (HTML5) but five syllables – tricky huh?

This year’s Blue Beanie Day will be celebrated on Nov. 30th.  There will be prizes for the best Haiku. Put your thinking cap on (I mean Blue Beanie),  and get your Haiku ready.

Partying With Web Standards - in Los Angeles

We’re still sweeping up the confetti, and emptying the ashtrays after the last visitor left the party.  We still have some awards to give out, and a few books to give away.  Meanwhile, Andy Clark says  Taylor Swift is still recovering from the after party hangover, and Max Weir is trying to figure out if the CSS Squirrel is a nut case.

This year, I made a video to help promote it.

Thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie (or Blue Toque in Canada) and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2009/ .

It’s easy to participate:

1. Make a personal commitment to fight Web Standards apathy. Show solidarity with the Standardistas on Monday, November 30th, 2009.
2. Buy, beg, or borrow a Blue Beanie (blue hat or cap, even a black or grey one will do in a pinch.)
3. Take a photo of yourself wearing the Blue Beanie. Or take a cool group photo of you and your friends wearing Blue Beanies.
4. Post your photo, or photos to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other social networks on Monday, November 30th, 2009. Remember to switch your Facebook profile photo that day, too!
5. Start by inviting all your friends to the Facebook Event for Blue Beanie Day 2009.
6. Promote Blue Beanie Day on your blog, wiki, facebook page, twitter tweets — telling all your friends to get ready for Blue Beanie Day. 

• 960 Grid System – A mature and stable CSS Framework, that uses a fixed width page layout of 960 pixels, along with the flexibility of  12 or 16 columns.  (Created by Nathan Smith of  SonSpring)
• Blueprint – An elegant and complete CSS Framework that includes a CSS reset (similar to Eric Meyer’s Reset) that eliminates deals with the discrepancies across browsers, a solid grid that can support most complex layouts (without reverting to crazy HTML table-based design patterns), expert typographical principles, CSS form styles for great looking user interfaces, and CSS print styles for making any webpage ready for printing out on paper. (Created and maintained by Christian Montoya and the Blueprint community.)
• The Golden Grid – A simple CSS Framework for HTML web page design, by Vladimir Carrer from Italy

Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.1
• RubyGems 1.3.4
• Rails 2.3.2
• ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
• Subversion 1.6.2
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.1.30
• Apache 2.2.11
• PHP 5.2.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
• Git 1.6.3.1
• Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.

Here’s a brief summary of some tasty new treats in the Ruby lineup:

1. Learning Rails (Rails from the Outside In) by Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill, published by O’Reilly Media (See Learning Rails book cover and O’Reilly catalog description here.)
2. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts (Useful Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems) by Steve Pugh, published by No Starch Press (the Finest in Geek Entertainment). You can download a PDF of chapter 1, “General Purpose Utilities”.
3. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails by Maik Schmidt, published by Pragmatic Programmers
4. Programming Ruby 1.9 (The newly updated Pragmatic Programmers Guide, aka the Pick-Axe book), by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, published by The Pragmatic Programmers
5. Agile Web Development With Rails (Third Edition) by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Justin Gehtland, James Duncan Davidson, and Andreas Schwarz

I hope you are enjoying your summer reading as much as I am.  What new books are you reading?

Guernica imitation grafitti

On this day (April 27) in 1937,  the German air force bombed the Basque city of Guernica, an event memorialized in Pablo Picasso‘s painting Guernica.

Blue Beanies and Green Fiestas