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 :)

Really large photo - Gawadar Panorama

I was talking to FS yesterday and he showed me a really large stitched photo that he took on his trip to Gawadar, Pakistan. It is a really nice snap but the problem is that it cannot be shared on any of the popular photo sharing platforms (Flickr, Picasa etc.). So we started looking for web controls that let you zoom and pan across large pictures. I stumbled upon a really nice Flash control by Zoomify. After 10 minutes of tinkering I got this:

Gawadar Panorama

It turned out to be pretty nice. Don't you just love the internet (age).

Anyway. Tell me what you think.

Shameless self promotion

Recently Schmap.com used one of my photos in their Hamburg City Guide. Its a photo of Museum Ship Cap San Diego. This is what Schmap says about the ship:

The elegant freighter Cap San Diego dropped its anchor for good next to Rickmer Rickmers at its home port's Überseebrücke in 1986. After 120 journeys to South America and two new owners, the fast ship with a capacity of 103,000 tons almost went into the blast furnace, but the Hamburg Senate decided to keep it and turn it into a museum ship. So the White Swan of the South Atlantic, which was built for the Hamburg-Süd shipping company in 1961 and is still seaworthy, is now open to the general public. You can go on one of the daily tours, but there are also additional changing exhibitions, events and cuisine on board

Cap San Diego: Original photo on Flickr
Cap San Diego:Schmap

10 tried and tested ways to look busy and do nothing in Itim

I promised a friend to write something for his newsletter. Itim's the place where I used to work and that's what the newsletter is for. The following might seem confined to the aforementioned organization but can easily be adapted at other places too :)

#10 Blankly stare at the MS Outlook window for hours.

#9 Send prints of every email you get and then have little chats with everyone you meet on the way to the printer.

#8 Cover your desk with specs and emails and pretend to be engrossed in them when anyone comes to talk to you.

#7 Have millions of windows opened on your system and periodically press ALT+TAB.

#6 Whine in public about how much work you have to do even though you only need to deliver one FER by the end of the week.

#5 Make infinite revisions to specs and continue to do so even after the component has been delivered.

#4 Have meetings about making revisions to specs.

#3 Talk to your buddy in UK all day long on Skype and claim it’s about P0420.

#2 Spread rumours that you are having trouble in your task and spend hours talking to your pals under the pretense of trying to figure out a solution.

#1 Become a Project Manager.

What? No parade?

It was Pakistan day today and guess what? No parade. That parade is one of the very few things "All Pakistan" and every other year the government finds excuses to cancel it.

Damn you Zardari / Recession / Long march / ... for stopping it this year.

They better do it next year, otherwise I will start voting.

Dialogue

We had a heated debate on my university email group about a seemingly innocent topic that quickly picked up steam and resulted in a record number of emails being sent to the group in years. People got excited as two groups started to form. There was name calling, leg pulling and plain old stupidity. Anyway, when things started going too far some of us rushed in to fight the fire. I wrote the following email to somewhat diffuse the tension. I am hoping it works. I could have written it in English too but it would not have been as interesting as this turned out to be :).

Subject: S2001F per firing ka tabadla

13 March, 2009 - Duniya kai mukhtalif shehron sai hamarai numaindon nai khabar dee hai keh section F kai email group per golioon ka tabadla shiddat ikhtiar ker gaya hai. Firing ka yeh silsila kafi arsai sai jaree thaa magar us waqt apni inteha ko pohunch gaya jub mukhalifeen nai muzakraat kai bajayay aik doosrai per keechar uchalna shurro ker dia. Ainy shahideen kai mutabiq "intelligent" , "shut up", "wasted", "ego" aur dil he dil mein "ullu" jaisai na zaiba alfaz istemal kiyay gayay.

Is alamnak waqiyay mein aik engineer halaak aur la tadaad zakhmi huyay. Engineer Farooq Ali, jo ab is group per naheen rahai, "using ur mind" aur "clarification" kai tabar tor hamlon ki taab na laa sakai.

Hallat per qabo panai kai liyay Rangers talab ker li gayee hai. Hukkam ka kehna hai keh agar chand din aur yeh silsila jaree raha to curfew laganai kai ilawa koi chara naheen reh jayay gaa.

Alami leadron nai is moqeh per afsos ka izhar kia hai aur mukhalifeen sai apeal ki hai keh woh tashaddud kai bajayay baat cheet ka rasta ikhtiar kerain.

Geo news,
Tora Bora

This exchange seriously got me thinking. We as a nation don't know how to have serious discussions while keeping our emotions at bay. Examples set by our politicians on talk shows are no help either. We are no doubt an emotional lot. So my question: How do we fix this?

Burgers, Bun Kababs and Döners

Where I come from we have this distinct group of people labeled as Burgers. I believe the term was coined in the early 90's when a lot of expatriates returned home from the West to invest in their own country or from the Middle East because of the first Gulf War. Whatever their origin these people clearly had a different lifestyle from the rest of us. The word Burger brings to my mind the image of a guy in baggy clothes, jeans torn at the knees, wearing a cap backwards and Nike sneakers, thriving on imported chocolate and soft drinks and speaking with an accent straight out of a Hollywood movie. Some people envied them yet others disliked them. But I don't think the Burgers put any effort into it. It wasn't their fault. They were who they were.

From amongst the Burger enviers rose another group. The Bun Kababs. I still can not believe they actually wanted to be like the Burgers. The Bun Kababs dressed up oddly. They spoke even more oddly and faked that aura of snobbishness that usually surrounded the Burgers. They were phonies and were quickly recognized for that. It's like if a Quinqi tried to imitate my Khyber. You can tell which one is faking it.

Nevertheless, the Burgers and the Bun Kababs have one thing to their credit - their contribution to the economy. Whole new markets emerged to fulfill their need to look cool. Zainab market (for the clothes), Khori garden (for the imported crap in the guise of western pop literature), the fake branded shoes and sun glasses industry and most importantly - canned soft drinks.

As time progressed the distinguishing features of Burgers and Bun Kababs became less pronounced. Maybe the society finally accepted them or maybe the society became more like them. Perhaps only an outsider can tell.

Then I came to Germany. A country known for its resolute individuality; the sense of pride among its people over their identity. But one day when I was on my way home on the bus, I saw a bunch of teenagers wearing strange clothes and caps that said New York and listening to what was clearly an English song on their MP3 player. This was new. I was both amused and surprised. I call them, thanks to my Turkish friends who have popularized the dish here, Döners.

Definitions: Burger, Bun Kabab, Döner

Programming

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Marvin Minsky, "Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas"

I miss KHI

I woke up today to a strange morning. The streets were unusually loud and crowded. Cars whizzing by. Municipal workers doing their stuff. School children chattering. Expressionless grown-ups on their way to work. The air was a lot smoggier. I even saw a car accident and a fight too (If you can call it that).

All this reminded me of good old Karachi. It was like one of those morning drives of mine which I used to take along the Clifton beach. The pretext of course was teaching my little brother how to drive. But it was also an opportunity to break the speed barriers on my Suzuki Khyber (God I miss that car). You know, to boldly go where no BinAzhar has gone before :)

Anyway. This morning was almost the same as KHI. I remember high decibel sounds being produced even by the most soft spoken of the machines. Early morning vans transporting noisy school kids to their destinations. A few silencer-less rickshaws here and there making their presence felt. CDGK workers in bright orange jackets trying to avoid work. And of course the world renowned, patient and law abiding, drivers of our great city.

Still. There was something missing. I couldn’t figure out what. Maybe it was the lack of melanin in the people around me. Or maybe it was that way those two drivers (read sissies) were fighting. It didn't quite make me feel at home. (Well. They weren’t fighting at all. Apparently they were waiting for the Police. Chickens.)

I gave a sigh of disappointment. There was no place on Earth like KHI. But then it struck me. It was the air. It smelled like, like nothing. Just plain old air. I instantly knew what was missing. So naturally, I went home and burnt some polythene in the kitchen.

Readme.1ST

This is it. My first blog entry. I used to be a Software Engineer but then I took a vacation. These days I am in Hamburg, Germany on a quest of discovery, photography and exploration. Oh, and a bit of studies too. Sometimes I sound naive but that's my way of saying things - so shut up and read.