Sajjad's June Blog

Trying to think of a name for my company. Didn't think it would be this difficult.

Posted at 16:30pm Comments | ¶

How good are you?

Posted at 02:25am Comments | ¶

Drove all the way to the GPO this morning to pick up the two parcels that Stuart had sent. Wish they would just bring them to the house like all other places and just charge us the taxes/duty.

The packages, which had all my LAN stuff and the beloved 18" TFT, were stored there for over a week because I couldn't get up early enough to get there within the 1 hour time frame.

The most painful part was having to pay 6% "withholding tax", whatever that means, on the monitor which had its value written as about 100,000 yen. That, plus the amount I paid for it initially, the cab charges, the shipping charges, all starts to get huge.

Well, I'm happy now. My laptop is finally connected and usable and the sudden change from a 15" flat panel display to an 18" one was very pleasant. Thanks Stuart.

Posted at 02:23am Comments | ¶

The LRP, the router on a floppy project, is now officially dead. Thats a shame since it was a very nice and polished little distro, even when I tried it 3-4 years back.

"As of January of this year I have finally accepted the fact I will likely never be able to develop LRP into the operating system it could have been. A full 6 months later I'm forcing myself to update this page to reflect this. It is not an easy thing to give up on your life's work."

The rest of the author's comments reflect a darker side of the current state of open source and the IT industry. Hope things improve before more great projects like this are lost.

Posted at 19:56pm Comments | ¶

Another frustrating week of downed phone lines. Upon talking to the "linesman", the reason we got for the failure was that he was away on holiday. I would have had his head for that if I was incharge. After that, the power went off just after I finished writing this entry the first time. Apparantly, they are adding more power lines and simply can't be bothered to inform anyone when they switch the current ones off.

Spam is an even bigger menace when you are on a dialup. Right now, I'm using Bogofilter's bayesian filtering to mark my email as ham or spam. It works pretty well, but the database needs constant updating as the nature of spam changes. Here is one project that hopes to eliminate this:

I have yet to look at it thoroughly so any comments are welcome.

Posted at 00:35am Comments | ¶

Until recently, the only way you could be killed because of flying a kite was to fall off of rooftops, run into incoming traffic or have your throat slit by a glass coated string. Now, you can be tried for murder and be eligible for the death penalty:

My 2 year old cousin was cut on the neck by a stray string some time back. He was sitting in front of my uncle on a motorcycle when they ran into it. He was lucky enough to survive. A lot of others aren't.

Posted at 17:31pm Comments | ¶

"You are 0% geek. Boy, you really broke through the bottom on this one. You are SO not geek. I recommend staying away from conventions, computer stores, colleges, universities, or anywhere else people might display the slightest interest in something other than what's on TV at the present moment. Your mere presence among geeks of any degree is incredibly dangerous to the continued existence of the known universe. Here, I'll say it slow so you can understand: Anti-geek + Geek = Big Boom. Now go read a book, for god's sake."

I wonder what I did wrong. But the final kick was the photo I got. DiCaprio. Ughh.

Posted at 15:58pm Comments | ¶

Found a really nice cafe (or mock-bar if you like) while waiting for my pizza order at "Jinnah Super" market. The menu included a number of "Mocktails" such as Pina Coladas and "Long Island Ice Lemon Tea", but I decided to try the margheritas for now. Nice, though much too pricy at Rs.90 (~180 yen) compared to all the fresh fruit juices and other drinks you can normally get for under Rs.10 (~20 yen).

Posted at 08:15am Comments | ¶

It is one of the best art schools in the country and where my brother is currently studying. Right next to it is the Lahore Museum which is built in the same Mughal style. I couldn't go in this time, but hope to do so on my next visit.

Right in front of these two buildings is the "Zamzama", the canon also known as "Bhangian-di-Top" (the gun of the Bhangis) and named by Rudyard Kipling as "Kim's Gun". There is a whole article on the legendary Zamzama here:

Posted at 08:08am Comments(2) | ¶

Lahoris are famous for their love of food which is one of the reasons for the city's exotic culture. It is also why McDonald's outlets, like this one, are everywhere while I've only found one in the whole of Islamabad.

Posted at 09:11am Comments(1) | ¶

Got back from Lahore early yesterday morning after a 5-day trip. Not bad overall, despite the heat, pollution and the state of my digestive system. Lahoris have a saying, "He who hasn't seen Lahore hasn't really been born" i.e. you should see it at least once in your life. The citizen's laid back lifestyle and a history that goes back hundreds of years to the time of the Mughal empire give it a unique flavor.

There are lots of ways to get to Lahore from Islamabad. Flying is the fastest, but quite costly for a trip like this and trains are too much of a hassle so by bus is usually the preferred way. Unfortunately, the "Skyways" bus service that was once the best one around, has gone down the drain lately. That we found out after a miserable 6 hour trip on the *shorter* "G.T.Road" (more on it later) route.

Other than meeting lots of relatives, I had the pleasure of going shopping at a time when the temperature there hit 47 degrees Celsius. That may seem high, but was surprisingly bearable for me. Maybe its a side effect of enjoying snow too much. Anyway, the heat wave has broken a 20-year record and reached 53 degrees much further south around the Indus. Who needs trees? Cut them all down. Maybe thats how the previous Indus Valley civilizations got wiped out.

My camera's battery started to run out and I don't have the charger right now so couldn't shoot much. Maybe next time when I can convince everyone else to visit the ancient fort, empirial gardens and other such monuments that I missed this time.

The ride back was quite comfortable since I decided to pay the extra fare for the really nice Daewoo bus service that runs on the motorway and makes the longer journey in just 4 and a half hours. Almost as good as flying.

Posted at 08:35am Comments(290) | ¶

Posted at 16:24pm Comments(2) | ¶

I finally managed to get online recently from an internet cafe after a 5-day absence. The connection was so slow that it took about 5 minutes just to login using MSN messenger (that was the only password I was willing to type on a strange machine in an internet cafe, though I strongly doubt anyone running or even using them here knows much about keystroke loggers let alone SSH and Linux).

As bad as that may sound, some bandwidth is better than none at all. Ever since our phone line went dead, I was feeling helpless. Unable to blog, check/send any mail or read any news online (though I did look at some Tokyo blogs to read about the Sendai earthquake on my friend's PC). My house is right on the edge of Islamabad and the area looks more like a village gone haywire than a part of one of the best planned capitals of the world. Trying to look for an internet cafe here would be a waste of time.

After registering, on average, 2 complaints a day with the telephone service, the line finally came back up on Friday, but not before I got a chance to try the net cafe. Glad to be back online though I doubt I will have access to broadband anytime in the near future.

Posted at 06:08am Comments(1) | ¶

One of his pieces hanging in our lounge:

I'll get to see more once I manage to visit him.

Posted at 01:25am Comments | ¶