Is this Arabic and what does it say ?

Posted by: andy

Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 03:56

I've spotted that a whole bunch of images from my photo album, mainly pictures of my young newphews and nieces, have been linked in this forum thread:

http://www.mysadness.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=688

The forum is in Arabic, or something else similarly unintelligable to me. I would like to know what the thread is about.

Can anyone here translate ? The bit in particular I am interested in is the second post in the thread (which starts with the picture of the boy with face paint).
Posted by: webroach

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 14:45

Yes it is arabic. I can't find a proper translator, though.
Posted by: andym

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 14:59

Is it me or do you find it a little uneasy when people link 'personal' photos and place them on a public forum. Are you going to block offsite requests for the pictures?
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 15:43

I would feel fine if I could read the page. It does seem a very odd selection of photos to link.

I would rather not have to block off-site links, because I post links to the site myself here and elsewhere so if I did there would have to be various exceptions built in.

Don't know how easy blocking selected off-site links would be in IIS, I might have to code an ASP/ASP.NET page to serve up the images in the photo album.

I am keen to find out what the page says though. I tried one translation service trial but it produced nonsense.
Posted by: DWallach

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 16:33

Hmm.. you've inspired me to see if I can observe my own images being inlined anywhere.

Based on two days of log data, it looks like there aren't too many surprises. Some sort of blog site (xanga.com) has a number of users who are inlining a photo of mine as their page background (about 40 hits in two days). I also found a thead on a (lame) architecture chat board where Dallas and Houston people are arguing about which city had buildings of any given style first. They inlined one picture I have of the Houston downdown skyline. I also found a guy who interviewed me for a radio show and is inlining my high-resolution headshot and putting it on his page at low resolution.

My sister is to be appearing in a Fox reality TV show starting in a few days (The Complex: Malibu), so I can only imagine whether or not she'll pick up rabid fanboys who'll manage to find the few pictures of her on my site and will splat them all over whereever.

Meanwhile, if you want, I'll see if I can ask some of the Arabic-speaking students here if they wouldn't mind translating that page for you...
Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 17:01

Out of curiosity, which one is your sister? It'd be cool if they "won."
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 17:35

Quote:
Don't know how easy blocking selected off-site links would be in IIS, I might have to code an ASP/ASP.NET page to serve up the images in the photo album.

I think you could use an ISAPI filter, but in ASP.NET it should be pretty easy - you can hook into all sorts of useful parts of a request. For instance proper regex rewrites can now be done with little additional code added in.

Also doing on-the-fly thumbnails is very easy in ASP.NET - there is built-in image handling and compression code that seems to be pretty quick.

Gareth
Posted by: Dignan

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 17:49

Andy- which pictures are yours? I mean, from what site exactly? Are they like the one with the kids at a birthday party? I just want to be able to get you specifics on what they're saying about your pictures as well. My girlfriend's parents can read it, I believe, so I'll run it by them.

Quote:
Out of curiosity, which one is your sister? It'd be cool if they "won."

If I remember correctly from his post about that wedding they went to, I believe it's Jayna. Dan, what exactly do they do on that show?
Posted by: DWallach

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 18:30

Quote:
I believe it's Jayna. Dan, what exactly do they do on that show?


I don't entirely know. The general idea is that it's Survivor meets This Old House or something along those lines. Eight couples are supposed to revamp apartments in the same complex, all given the same budget and presumably other wacky constraints. At the end, they are somehow judged or auctioned off or something, and whoever wins gets all the loot. There's also some sort of "kick you off the island" mechanism. At least before she left, she had absolutely nothing more than the vaguest idea of how all of this worked, mostly based on watching episodes of an Australian reality show ("The Block") upon which the Fox show is based. Once there, she was completely incommunicado. They were only allowed to bring one suitcase each of basic clothes and toiletries. No computers. No cel phones. No tools.

Well, she's back home now, but she's bound by something of a NDA, so she can't tell me squat. The NDA, all by itself, is quite a piece of work. She's "responsible" for keeping her family quiet. She can't have a personal web page. She can't give press interviews. On and on. Basically, Fox 0wns her. But, because reality shows are technically game shows, she doesn't get paid squat (unless, presumably she wins).

I knew some swing dancers who competed on a show last year, a revival of Dance Fever. They were eliminated in the first round of the judging and came out crying foul over many of the details of how poorly the show was run. I don't have terribly high hopes for this one being any better, but I'm going to have to suck it up and watch the damn show so I can see for myself.

Here's what the Fox web site says:

Quote:
From the creators of AMERICAN IDOL comes a new kind of makeover show. THE COMPLEX: MALIBU moves real-life couples into a cliffside apartment building in Southern California's coastal enclave of the rich and famous, and puts their construction, interior design and, most importantly, their relationship skills to the test with the chance to win a large cash prize. Home renovation under normal circumstances can be stressful enough to tear a relationship apart, but when couples are forced to keep within a tight budget and faced with strict deadlines and competitive neighbors, the stakes are even higher.

Eight couples will compete for the opportunity to restore and redecorate one of four units. Under tight deadlines, the couples will battle each other for control of the units, while trying to add the most value to each of the rooms. A panel of real estate professionals - an interior designer, a real estate agent and an architect - will rank the rooms from best to worst and help decide the couples' fate: who stays and who goes. The renovated units will be sold at public auction, and the couple whose unit nets the highest-percentage profit will receive the profits from ALL of the units.

THE COMPLEX: MALIBU is based on the hit Australian show, "The Block," now in its second season. The first season finale last August drew the highest rating of any show in that country in 15 years.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 19:05

That would have sounded interesting if I didn't know that "relationship skills" (or the lack thereof) is going to be the largest part of the show.
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 21:13

Quote:
I think you could use an ISAPI filter, but in ASP.NET it should be pretty easy - you can hook into all sorts of useful parts of a request. For instance proper regex rewrites can now be done with little additional code added in.



Yeah, it would be fairly straight forward to code up some pages to do it. I suspect this is one area where Apache is more useful, no doubt one of the built-in modules can handle stuff like this

Quote:

Also doing on-the-fly thumbnails is very easy in ASP.NET - there is built-in image handling and compression code that seems to be pretty quick.



It is, in fact I already do this on some pages on my site, just not on the photo album yet. I must get round to finishing my album code one day.
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 21:20

Quote:
Andy- which pictures are yours? I mean, from what site exactly? Are they like the one with the kids at a birthday party? I just want to be able to get you specifics on what they're saying about your pictures as well. My girlfriend's parents can read it, I believe, so I'll run it by them.



From:

[image]http://www.norman.cx/photos/20030726 will and jamie's 4th birthday party/thmb/thmb_IMG_3800.jpg[/image]

(William or Jamie, can't tell which as they are identical twins, with face paint)

To:

[image]http://www.norman.cx/photos/20031108 fireworks/thmb/thmb_IMG_5579.jpg[/image]

(my brother with his latest mobile phone, not)
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 21:21

I have no idea why the bbs is refusing to recognise those as inline images, odd.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 26/08/2004 22:49

Capital letters as the extension, probably.
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 02:45

Nope.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 03:25

Possibly the % sign? I haven't tried any images myself with spaces in their names.
Posted by: davec

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 03:25



The %20 needs to be a space in the image code
Posted by: andy

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 05:16

I replaced my %20 with spaces, that didn't help. I've never had this problem linking to my images from the bbs before.
Posted by: David

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 07:26

A List Apart has an article with some good ideas for how to approach this sort of thing using Apache rewrites.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/
Posted by: Cybjorg

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 09:46

Gasp! They have my picture directly above the face painted kid! I'm enraged!
Posted by: davec

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 10:46

That's weird, I made that post above and it worked, but now if I edit that post, the image doesn't show up...
Posted by: Dylan

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 11:19

My friend - who is fluent in Arabic - looked at the page for me. He said it's strangely written and doesn't make a lot of sense. His summary:

"it's supposed to be some kind of birthday wishes to this bint jumeirah person. He talks about how happy everyone is celebrating her brithday and stuff"

Basically, it's the type of post you'd make for your friends with your own pictures. "Here's little billy doing this and here's johnny doing this" type stuff.
Posted by: pgrzelak

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 12:03

Is it my imagination, or does that make the page even creepier than it was before?
Posted by: bbowman

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 27/08/2004 15:28

It looks like a Malaysian site. I'm not sure what it is about, but perhaps a lot of family stuff. Malay is written with the Arabic alphabet. It probably seems strange snce malay is spoken a bit differently than Arabic. Maybe something distanly akin to reading portugese thinking that it was spanish.

Didn't it strike anyone interesting that even though it was written in Arabic, most of the pictures were of Asian people?
Posted by: davec

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 28/08/2004 00:00

Quote:
Didn't it strike anyone interesting that even though it was written in Arabic, most of the pictures were of Asian people?


Yes but the fact that there were pics of UK people related to persons on this forum made me not think too long about it. But you are probably right about it being a Malaysian site.
Posted by: JaBZ

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 28/08/2004 11:19

lol so instead of using his own pictureshe just decided to rip Andy's ones
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: Is this Arabic and what does it say ? - 28/08/2004 19:17

In the HTML the language is identified as "ar", and the domain is registered to: "mohamed almehairbi", "AbuDhabi, 70866, AE" so it is highly likely to be Arabic. Unfortunately the only online Arabic translation engine I found output complete rubbish!

Gareth