Lamin Barrow - Articles, Photos and Prjects RSS Feed

Lizard Sun Bathing

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

I saw this lizard sun bathing the other day so i thought why not, let me take a shot. :)

I Have Been Denied a US F1 Student Visa For The Second Time.

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Lasted Edited: February 10, 2012

So today I went to the US embassy for the second time for a Student F1 visa application interview and I have been refused a visa for entry into the United States. Last time I was denied it was laid on the bases that I did not provide any compelling evidence at the time of my interview to compel me to return home after completing my studies. I understood and they were completely right for doing so but this time around all the evidence was there, I was so convinced that finally I will be granted a Student visa to pursue a computer science education in the United States but once again the sweet talking consular woman said I am sorry to inform you that the law has not change and that I still find you to be ineligible for a US visa... What? Coming think of it, I think what it comes down to is that she doesn't like me for some reason. I mean what I have done to deserve that. Last time she only interviewed me for barely a minute and this time around I can swear it was less than 30 seconds.

All she asked me was that ... has anything changed in your application from the last time that you applied, I replied yes and I pointed to her that there is a letter from my sponsor emphasizing my ties to the Gambia and original documents showing evidence that my family owns a home and land in the Gambia and also a brief talk in writing about my career goals upon returning to The Gambia. Then she asked me why do I want to go to the particular school and I said I have found out that it's a good school which lays strong emphasis on technology and it suits me financially... but oh no that was not enough to convince her.

I was not even given the chance to defend my self and no suggestions where made to me on how to overcome the refusal just in-case I choose to reapply in the future. The most hurtful part of the whole thing just like in my first time is that, as it was clearly stated in their rejection letter that I cannot appeal their decision. Its like being convicted of a crime that you did not commit and the justice system won't allow you to make an appeal. Where is the sense of justice and equal rights for all that the United States is so outspoken for To me that is clearly missing here. Anyways, it all cones down to one thing, if you are from my race and my continent, you'd probably gotten used to the double standards everyone else applies to you. I am talking about poor Gambians here including my self who have lost $131 for a visa application fee or more putting into consideration the madatory $100 SEVES fee just like that without the chance to appeal the consulate's decision. They will tell you that, that the money goes in to the Visa processing but wait, I filled in the form and I printed it from their website then I went to the bank, paid $131 in to their account paid for the $100 SEVES bill online and stood before the consular on my interview day and I was asked 1 question and then refused a visa without a chance of an appeal or refund and you tell me that is Visa processing.

There has to be a stop to this reign of Visa Terror by the US Embassy because to me it certainly is if you, like me lost so much money and resources and not to mention precious thinking time you devote to the whole process. It's time someone takes the lead and put an end to this injustice. I am going to report this to the Human Rights Watch (HRW), the United States Embassy in The Gambia (they can just ignore it like my last email if they like) and I am going to find ways to report this to all major international new media providers like CNN and BBC including our local media, the US and Gambia governments. Also to publicize this on social media buzz websites I will. You know just a little something to create awareness of what's happening. Even if I will never benefit from a compensation or money refund once the whole thing is resolved, I know my fellow citizens certainly will.

So, that is $361 the US government owes me for the two F1 student visa applications I've applied for including the SEVES fee. I know that they say the visa application fee is non refundable but I don't care because that is money I worked hard for and I want it BACK. Somehow they are just going to have to pay me back and I mean it. ( I no longer care, am unto other things now)

I will probably never apply for a US student visa again because it is a very humiliating experience when you get rejected and your chances of getting one after two earlier rejections is very slim. With that goes all my dreams of getting a computer science education in the US all shattered in-front of my eyes. I have a compulsive urge to pursue education in the field of what love and i have to admit that it is extremely painful and difficult and it hurts getting denied of that. Right now I feel like just sitting here and cry out loud like a little child no kidding. I wont WHY Because I am a MUSLIM and a grown up and I believe when one door closes another one opens and who knows, everything happens for a reason and this one of those things part of my destiny. Perhaps this is what is best for me right now. I think that i have the whole thing figured out. I know what I want and what I have the capacity to do by what Allah has blessed me with, i thought going to school was one way of getting there. I though that without going to school, it may be long and difficult road but I guess now it is time to take the trek head on.

I am a defiant and a rebellious person by nature but law abiding and peaceful (I suppose it all has do with my religion). They can't hold me down, now more than ever I am more determined than I have ever been my entire life. We are all meant for a purpose and I will certainly serve mine insa'Allah (God Willing).

Insa'Allah next time I apply for a US visa, it may be to attend a Microsoft developer conference or something and I may be the owner and founder of Gambia largest software development firm. I think its time to realize the BarrowBros. dream and OH boy where do I start.

Anyway, till then, but right now I need to relax. I had a terrible ordeal today.

Cheers!!!!

Essential web browser tools for the pro web developer

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

From the beginning of my web development career after high school in the summer of 2006. I have frequently used certain web browser tools or add-ons if you like to aid me in my every day web development. Through the course of time I have learn to use these tools to become a better web developer. In this post, I will make a list of all the web browser tools or add-ons I find most useful to the professional web developer.

Firebug

In my own opinion Firebug is the most useful out of the crowd of web browser add-ons for the web developer. It has helped me finish task quickly which will otherwise take me hours to finish. It's functionality spans from the ability to inspect page elements and there HTML, edit CSS values and preview results instantly and even set breakpoints in your JavaScript code to aid you in the debugging process.

Firebug is available only to the Firefox browser at the time of this writing. Download Firebug here.

IE Developer Toolbar

This internet explorer add-on is similar to Firebug in use and functionality. Although it has some extra functionality such as a ruler and one of my favorite, the eyedropper tool (allows you to aye drop the color use on n image, text etc. on your web page), the only thing I feel it is lacks is a syntax highlighter which makes in look inferior to Firebug (I hate to say this because I like stuff from Microsoft). It?s quite a handy tool just when you get to know it.

Download IE developer tool bar from here.

Fiddler

Fiddler is a tool developed by Microsoft for inspecting and debugging web request(s). It runs from your machine and it could be used to debug and inspect internet traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and a whole lot more. It includes functionality that enable you to run simulated test on the web request and tools that can emulate tweaking it. Hands down fiddler is great for examining what?s under the hood of the web request(http/https). Fiddler is an extremely powerful and feature rich application and it?s not for the faint of heart.

NOTE: In order to run fiddler, you must have at least Microsoft .Net framework 2.0 installed on your computer

Download the .Net runtime frame 2.0 from here.

IETAB

The life of a web developer is not at all easy in the world of multiple web browsers. Backward compatibly is a must if your web application is hosted and it is available for use online. That is why I still use IE 6 for testing purposes just to make sure that everything renders properly.

That?s were the Firefox add-on IEtab comes to use. It gives you an option to open a link in a Firefox tab which uses the internet explorer rendering engine to do the actually rendering of the page in Firefox.

I like IEtab because it saves me space on my windows task bar. Instead on lunching many internet explorer windows ? I could load them in multiple Firefox tabs which is nice.

Note: IE-Tab is only available to the Firefox web browser.

Download IE-Tab from here.

HTML Validator

This add-on is available to the Firefox web browser only. It inspects a web page?s HTML/XHTML markup and validates it against a validation engine you specify and then it reports any errors it finds. It?s just the perfect tool you need when you want 100% W3C compliant HTML/XHTML.

Download HTML validator from here.

Yslow

If you are a web performance freak like me then you will probably want to squeeze all the performance out of your web application. Then you will find the Firefox add-on Yslow to be your ally in your quest to design and build better scaling web apps.

If you put a lot of care into work , Yslow will force you to write server side code depending on the framework you use(AP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, JSP etc) to handle and produce better browser output code .Yslow is developed by Yahoo! and it?s an extension to the already popular Firebug extension.

Sometimes i use Yslow to check on the big guys to see who is implementing the best practices and who's not just for fun and most of the times i just laugh at what i see.

Download Yslow from here.

This list is by no means an exhaustive list of essential web browser tools for the web developer but merely a representation from my own point of view. If you have any other suggestions please list them in your comments.

It has been a while

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I know it has been more than a month since i last blogged about anything. It's a very hard responsibility to keep a blog going and most of you know that. Over the past month several events have happened in my life for example i now do website related consulting work and client support from home for the company i use to work for Rhythm Ltd and Geographical Media because they are in the process of relocating their office outside of the Gambia.

Working from home has a lot of fun involved in it which is a good thing but one of the most challenging things is the motivation factor. It's very hard to find anything to stimulate your motivation to do work at all and then you begin to feel it - less productivity. I have been trying to find something that will keep me moving on and this morning i thought perhaps if i should start blogging on a regular bases that should help.

I have been experimenting with a lot of new technology for a while now and over the coming days i shall be writing about some of those exciting things I've learnt.

So there you have it.... am starting the blogging engine. Stay tuned.

How to build a live comment preview with Javascript and HTML

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In recent times, it has become quite a trendy and nifty trick to show a live comment preview on a lot of blog websites. I remember just how excited i was the first time i saw this in action on a dotnet blogengine application. In this article i will show you how to implement a live comment preview on your website with just simple javascript and HTML.

Okay, to get started i will start by creating a javascript(.js) file with the following on it.

function ShowCommentPreview()
{
  
// Access the HTML elements we care about from our page
  
var enteredCommentName = document.getElementById("CommentName");
  
var previewCommentName = document.getElementById("CommentPreviewName");
  
var enteredComment = document.getElementById("CommentBody");
  
var previewComment = document.getElementById("CommentPreviewBody");

  
// Let javascript do it's final bit of magic
 
 previewCommentName.innerHTML = enteredCommentName.value + " Says: ";
  
previewComment.innerHTML = enteredComment.value;
}

As you can see the javascript is almost self explanatory. First, I declared variables and i assigned various id's of the HTML elements i cared about to them from our page. Finally i take the value of the entered comment and placed it as the value of the comment preview.

Some of the HTML

<textarea id="CommentBody"></textarea>

Finally, i added a HTML Onclick attribute with the Javascript function call to the textarea to wire up the HTML and the javascript method together for the final trick.

That's it ... pretty easy thing to do. I hope you will enjoy building it on your own website. Good luck.

Download the sample file live-comment-preview.zip (4KB)

Free HTML Encoder

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

More and more i feel the need to encode script and HTML tags or elements into to encoded strings so that i could input them along with my blog post without actually rendering the HTML or Javascript. Accomplishing a task like this will be hard and will be prone to many errors if i was to do it by hand. i knew i needed a little application to do this task for me. So therefore this morning i decided to write Free HTML Encoder.

This is quite a very useful utility when you want to encode script, HTML tags and even characters like " ; &" etc into encoded characters that you could input into a WYSIWYG without rending the HTML or script. It is quite a necessary tool if you are a blogger or an administrator of a CMS application.

Download Free HTML Encoder. If you are also interested in the source code please send me an email through my contact form. NOTE: In-order to run this program, you must have the Microsoft .Net framework 2.0 or later installed on your computer. If you are running Windows Vista you already have the .Net framework installed.

500+ Free icons for your website or application

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

This is a collection of more than 500 free high quality and crystal clear icons. Head over to wikimedia to download them now.

Making a background image hover effect work properly in Internet Explorer 6

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Earlier today while i was working on a new menu style, i came across a weird bug in IE 6 wherein a background-image for a hover effect just would not disappear even when am not hovering over the link that was suppose to cause the effect.

So after spending what seems to be like an hour trying to figure out what was causing the problem..... and finally i added background-repeat: repeat-x; in to my CSS file and that seems to have solved my problem.

Before

.menu        { background-image: image.png; }

.menu:hover  { background-image: hover-image.png; }

After

.menu        { background-image: image.png; }

.menu:hover  { background-image: hover-image.png; background-repeat: repeat-x; }

So it turns out that i must have background-repeat: repeat-x; in order to make that hover effect work properly in IE6. Very weird indeed.

My First Post

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Hello there and welcome to my website. My name is Lamin Barrow and i am a genuine chocolate face from a tiny west African country called The Gambia. I am a web designer working for a web design company called Rhythm Ltd. based here in The Gambia.

So this is my first post and i am wondering about what i should be writing about. Anyways expect more and better from me next time. Good bye and enjoy your stay!!!!

Beautiful Day at My Neighbourhood

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:59:05 -0700

A Coloured Leaves Flowering Plant

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:00:26 -0700

This flowering plant has been at door for almost ten years now. Its a perennial plant and that why it keeps growing.

Beautiful Clear blue sky

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:04:35 -0700

I love my Bakoteh.. :)

Sunrise Through Tiny Tree Leaves

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:06:53 -0700

Beautiful Morning Sky Above and a Mango Tree

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:08:35 -0700

My 2 year Old Sony Ericsson Cybershot c902

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:09:58 -0700

Lost Bird

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:17:27 -0700

This bird found its way into my office when my window was open. I had to let it out in the end after i took this photo ofcourse :)

A Coloured Leaves Plant Up Close

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:29:58 -0700

Space Shuttle Flight Path

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:48:58 -0700

You can see a space shuttle flight path directly above us in Gambia :)

Beautiful Sunset Clouds

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:14:21 -0700

Mango Flowers

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:35:50 -0700