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?