Ubuntu bug

What next :P ?

Nauseating

With all the brouhaha about Zardari jokes and their being branded as anti-democratic propaganda :P I thought I should have a peek at the now famous Cyber Crime bill. While I am neither a law expert nor did I expect to understand all of it, I did stumble upon some interesting stuff. For example under the Offenses and Punishments chapter:

CHAPTER-II
OFFENCES AND PUNISHMENTS

ll. Misuse of encryption. -- Whoever for the purpose of commission of an offence or concealment of incriminating evidence knowingly and willfully encrypts any incriminating communication or data contained in electronic system relating to that crime or incriminating evidence, commits the offence of misuse of encryption shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both.

So does this mean that if I sent Zardari jokes I can be jailed? And if I encrypt them I can be jailed even more? Other questions that also come to mind are: How will they break the encryption in the first place? Do those idiots even know how to use a computer? Have they ever seen one?

Then I found this in a news item by Dawn (13.07.2009):

An official announcement by the interior ministry said that the government was launching a campaign against circulation of what it called ill-motivated and concocted stories through emails and text messages against civilian leadership and security forces.

.....A senior official of the ministry said: ‘Sending indecent message is a crime under the Cyber Crime Act and liable to punishment.’

.....Under the Cyber Crime Act, violators could be jailed for 14 years, besides confiscation of their property. Similarly, any Pakistani living abroad and violating provisions of the act may be charged and will be liable to deportation to Pakistan.

Under the campaign, all Internet Service Providers would be checked physically by the FIA on a daily basis.

Let us forget the humongous 14 year prison time for a moment or the definition of 'indecent message' :P. What bothers me the most is that the FIA is allowed by law to inspect and record all internet traffic going through an ISP on a daily basis. WOW. While I find it hard to believe that the FIA possess the technical know how and resources needed for such an endeavour, I am distressed by the ease with which they can implicate thousands if not millions of internet users in the country. The democratic government's lack of respect for freedom of expression and their complete disregard for privacy is a different yet equally sad story.

Guess it's back to Faraz jokes, eh? :P

Do check out the Cyber Stalking section in Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance, 2007. It's hilarious :)

Garmi in Deutschland

Mercury hit 28°C (feels like 34 ) in Hamburg today. Back in the old country (:P) this meant business as usual but it's a totally different ball game over here. I am not one to complain about the heat but matters become worse when you don't have air conditioning or even fans in your room. It kind of reminds me of those 6 hour 'breakdowns' when all you could do was sweat after the UPS died on you.

Within the student circle, other than the usual summertime activities like out door barbecues and cycling and bird watching and bunking classes and cursing the RAs and what not, there is this unusual exchange of notes on how hot it is today and how it compares to our home countries and who is 'man enough' to handle the heat.

A Russian friend of mine asked me if I felt it was too hot today. I sad yes. She retorted, "Why? You should be used to such temperatures. :P" As it turns out, she was getting back at me for saying something similar about her feeling cold in winter :)

I had two 'deliverables' to finish today and the heat is normally a good enough excuse to drop all pretenses of even wanting to work but this was a matter of izzat :P. So naturally, I spent the whole day cramped up in front of the computer trying to suppress compiler warnings :P. It was like that time when the generator at my old workplace had gone kaput and there was no air conditioning for weeks. The only relief came at the end of the day when I used to go running down to my Khyber and turned on her trusty AC :)

Panoramas continue - Hamburg

Last week SBA came to visit. Together we did a months worth of sightseeing within a week's time. Tourism in the fast lane, eh? On one of our adventures we went to a well known church tower from where you can get a really awesome view of Hamburg port and city. The camera deprived photographer that I have been for about half a year now, I took SBA's camera and made a round around the tower with the camera in stitch mode. Later SBA stitched the pics and the result was a shiny 9MB file that was simply breathtaking. Later we used the same control I used for the Gawader panorama and produced this. I really like it. Rather, I'm lovin' it :)

Link: Hamburg Panorama

People

It's funny how people act and react in some situations. For the last few months there have been complaints in our hostel that people's newspapers are being stolen :P
There were a couple of emails on the email group and the matter seemed to have been resolve until this email. Hopefully the newspaper thief will pay heed this time or be prepared for the consequences.

To the person taking my Newspaper,

it has come to my attention that the concept of private property is not one Students living here are familiar with. And that is something i am completely in peace with, everything should be everybody's.
And if you, who keeps taking my newspaper, hold reading a newspaper in such high regard to the point that you would go low enough to steal it, that's also cool. And if you don't have the money to buy your own newspaper, that is also something i can understand. I mean newspapers are an extra expense/luxury for student.
So here is my proposal, take the newspaper in the morning (i don't get up early anyway), read it, enjoy it, take your time, but just drop it off at my place (room 3.6) after you are done (hopefully during the same day). I'll see it as nothing more than a friendly gesture of a neighbor dropping of my newspaper for me, and reading it on the way.

No hard feeling,
Your fellow Trifter

p.s. if i don't get my newspaper delivered to me daily, I WILL hunt you down, and there will be pain in store for you. (I mean it)

It can't be me because I can't even finish reading one page let alone a whole newspaper in German :)

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I just finished reading this book written by Khaled Hosseini. It had been on my list for a long long time. Mostly because it's title was in the test data for the application I used to work on. There it was, every time I ran the application, on top of the list. Yet its presence always dwarfed by the urgency of a bug fix or the addition of a new feature. The final push came when I spotted a girl on the bus reading a translated version. There was also talk of awards. So, naturally, I got myself a copy the same day and got down to business.

The book is about two Afghani women from different backgrounds. One a poor villager and the other an ambitious daughter of a school teacher in Kabul. How, starting out from totally different beginnings, fate brings them together to face the cruelties which had become part and parcel of life in their country. It's a story of survival, friendship and self sacrifice. At the background of the story are the upheavals in Afghanistan starting from the Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen infighting, the 'oppression' of the Taliban and finally ending with the American invasion. The author also slightly and very carefully touches the role of Pakistan(is) throughout the story which, even though I wished there was more, is pretty much alright given the focus of the story was on the lives of the main characters rather than international relations.

The description on Amazon.com claims that
"...There are parts of this book that will have grown men surreptitiously blotting the tears that are on the verge of overflowing their ducts, and by the time you get to the middle, you won't be able to put it down....". (Which I have eventually come to agree to :P).
Nevertheless, by the time you reach the middle you also realize that this book was intended to target western female readers. No surprises there.

All said, I like this novel and would definitely recommend it.

Uninstalling Ububtu

Ubuntu is a nice little Linux distribution which everybody has come to love. I remember the first time I ordered free CDs. They sent me a live CD too. It was the latest next-best-thing-since-... in free stuff :P

Anyway, last week I was playing around with Ubuntu Server Edition on my system and after a few hours I realized I had had enough. You know, how depressing it can get without any GUI etc. So I decided to uninstall it but I didn't know how. I googled it (naturally). Results were like "Who would want to uninstall cute little Ubuntu?", "Are you crazy?" and my favourite "Go to hell MS lover." :) That was some serious sentimental shit. It was like when someone asked me to sell my Khyber. My first response was "How on Earth could he even think of such a horrible thing?"

But I had to do what I had to do. I HAD to sell my Khyber and I HAD to uninstall Ubuntu. After quite some searching I found out how to do it while keeping my Vista installation intact.

Since grub is installed by default, install lilo so that its MBR (Master Boot Record) restore feature can be used later on. Run the following to install lilo:

sudo apt-get install lilo

After lilo has been installed run the following to restore the MBR to its pre-Ubuntu state and safely boot in Windows:

sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

I have lived happily ever after since that day :P and have ordered the latest 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Desktop Edition. Can't wait to install it with its lovely GUI :)