Being open is good, and so is using open source technologies. But I think the most important thing is to be “Not Evil”. I know I just stole Google’s motto and to some extent I believe that even they are not truly angelic. But these days Evil is not M$, it’s Apple and Facebook in my opinion.

Apple has been involved in lots of questionable activities in the past few weeks alone. They think that they have made it and users will follow them blindly what ever they do. They make good products for a high premium price and don’t necessarily care about the end consumers (like telling people when new iphone will be released so as to milk off from the old versions, controlling all the channels of their distribution to make sure that who ever they like gets a better treatment and who ever they deem un-likeable, regardless of their stature gets kicked out without any explanation). Apple is plain arrogant, they think they know better, they think they can continue mesmerizing the public with their flashy products. There are few gimmicks that could help them in short run, but they need to focus on being less of a control freak.

Facebook is probably even worse than Apple. I think Steve Jobs just thinks that he knows better what users want, but Mark Zukkaburg has no regard for his end users. He thinks he owns them some how. The privacy policy changes of Facebook reminds me of the Animal Farm, it keeps on getting more and more shady and towards the dark side of the force. Then there are these absolute waste of time games which make billions of dollars go to utter waste. What good is a virtual fence for, some uber looser’s way of escaping the real world? I think Farmeville should be banned and no company should be allowed to waste young peoples time and money like this. Leo Laporte deleted his facebook account which has got me thinking I might be doing that too.

So conclusion: for the forseeable future I would not develop for technologies like Apple and Facebook, not because they are not financially attractive, but because they exploit/control people, which is one thing we have learned is not a good idea.

Life is all about getting experiences, learning new lessons, acting on those lessons and forming your own philosophies based on them. There are people who base their philosophies on other people’s lessons (or just blindly follow other people’s philosophies which are based on other people’s lessons)

I had been taught that it is always good to learn from other people’s experiences and learning from your own mistakes while effective is not a good idea (point being you should not be making those mistakes in the first place if you pay attention to other peoples experiences).

I came across these presentations [1,2] on TED from an Austrian rock star graphical designer. He has shared some beautiful lessons in life (which I now know have been published in the form of a book).I will be working on these life lessons and will try to refine them and will try to learn from them as much as I can. But what I want to do is to make my own life lessons and perhaps share them. I don’t want them to be too generic though.

Another thing which I have been wanting to do for some time now is to share my list of heroes from whom I have learned things or got inspired, these are not necessarily real life heroes (they include characters from different TV shows as well). I have willfully not included any religious figures into this list as it has the potential of becoming controversial. So here are my life lessons and heroes.

There are few lessons which I learned today

• When ever traveling make sure that you pack every thing and when going out make sure you pick every thing which you packed.
• Never take a costly library book for reading on an air craft, there is a chance that you may loose it.

I came to know from BBCurdu website that his family converted to Islam after his recoery from illness for which his mother had a vigil at a Sufi’s shrine. While I my self don’t believe that asking for some one in a grave is by an means true interpertation of Sufiism, but it’s good to know about the Sufi roots of this musician (some thing which I associate my self to be a part of). Another thing which I came to know about him was that he was educated at Oxford, in Western Classical music (his music style has always been different than most of the musicians). Along with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (another sufi musician) he presents a good example that a blend of eastern and western music is nothing short of spectacualr.

I have heard his music for which he won the Oscar, but it is nothing compared to the beautiful scores he has composed over his entire career ( Dil Se, Taal, Roja, Bombay to name a few). He is also part of two other faverioute movies of mine, Lord of War and Lord of the Rings.

One thing which truly embodies his sufism is what he said accepting one of his oscars,

All my life I have had a choice of hate and love. I chose love and I am here

I hope his winning the oscars will make more people in my region follow music education if they want to persue music and that it also helps bring new age to sufi and fusion music at a global level.

But so what? I can always persue a different path. I don’t really need to be an expert in DataStructures or Algorithms or any thing to do with Realtime systems (all of the things which I was once very interested in). I am also not very fond of ‘Compilers’ and ‘Language Theory’ as a subject. I am actually not interested in Computer Science as such any more, but more into Business and Legal aspects of IT. There are some CS areas (AI/Speech Interaction) which still have some attraction for me but probably not to the extent that I would be doing any thing serious (in C++).

I will try to console my self by posting links to articles from the web which say that C++ is a dying language, disregarding any Bias

Edit:

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread8386.html
http://www.softwarefrontier.com/2006/06/c-is-dying.html
http://4thmouse.com/index.php/2008/02/17/why-c-is-a-dying-language/ (he is a ‘Rocket Scientist’)
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=61112
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/09/1152215&tid=156&tid=8

The thing which really pisses me off is that on a daily basis, people in the NWFP/Afghan border region are being slaughtered by American, Afghan, Pakistani, Taliban and Narco Terrorist forces and not much attention is being paid to that terrorism (All we hear that there was a suspected missle strike and its all fine and dandy, no personal stories, no txt msgs from victims as they showed for some americans on CNN). This whole "war on terrorism" is more like "war of terrorism". And while the TV channels film so called heart felt stories of how wealthy tourists were able to escape death, no one cares about the poor school children of North Waziristan  and Sawat. Is it really the case that human lives in a non democretic society are less important than in a democretic society?

Who is to blame for all of this current turmoil in the world. Colonization I suppose. If the Turks had not lost Ottomen empire, Indian had not lost the Mughal empire and Persia had remained a monarchy unspoiled by the West, there would have been no Islamic insurgencies.

I feel for the 2 year old Jewish boy who got orphaned before his second birthday. I hope he does not grow up learning the ideology of hate as many of the orphans of such tragedies do. I hope that all Muslims and all south asians can come close and try to analyze what is going wrong. We need to resolve immediate issues like Kashmir, Hyderabad, Balochistan, Khalistan. It wont matter in a 100 years if we are a bunch of small independet states and not India, Pakistan, Bangladesh as I see subcontinent becoming some thing like European Union. I woder what would be an appropiate name of this union.

I was also weary of the fact that Obama had called openly to attack Pakistan if there was reliable intelligence that a high value terrorist was in reach and Pakistan won’t corporate. But I was not aware of the full transcripts as I never looked them up and Pakistani media some how did not project his views correctly, most likely because of Pakistani’s associated more with Hillary Clinton (she has alot of Pakistani businessmen in her constituency). But it seems that Obama’s policy towards Pakistan would be in coherence with his ideals of freedom, equality and justice. He co-sponsored a bill with his running mate which is very sensible to the needs of Pakistanis and not Pakistani government. I also found an article which details about other connections of Obama to Pakistan

Overall I must admit that I am still weary of Obama. He is not very experienced and these are desperate times. Some times it takes a non idealistic prick to run the office and Obama seems like a nice guy who may end up in a mess. But I did like few things about all of this. Obama’s campaign heavily relied on the Internet and he himslef realizes the importance of modern communications as mentioned in his victory speech. He is reasonably young man to make bold choices which people of the Age of Mcain would probably not

Finally a shout out to BBC. I watched some of the election coverage on my linux box with firefox and flash installed. I am not sure which streaming technology they use but it was really awesome. Perhaps CNN should also abandon Windows based streaming and come to flash one. The webpage was even updating results with AJAX. Here is a screen shot of the page

In entire Islamabad there is a severe shortage of housing and office space. On top of that all the good spots are taken up by foreign missions etc. They should be moved into an isolated locale so that they don’t affect day to day operations of Pakistani citizen.

The Danish could have made an exception in exercising freedom of speech. They could have just stopped printing of those cartoons the second time. The only messege those cartoons were giving was that freedom of speech is more important than caring about the feelings of millions of muslims. If they had stopped reprinting of those cartoons perhaps it would not have come to blasts in Pakistan. I think there are sensible people in EU and US who would agree with me, freedom of speech does not necessarily mean saying what ever you want, some times making sure that hurtful and hateful message never get across.

I just can’t describe how horrific it was. I have never seen a person die before, atleast like this.Since that time the scene of that young boy in school uniform getting crushed by a truck has been playing in my mind over and over. There was nothing any one could do. No one knew what that young student could have become had he continued his education. We probably loose so many young people this way. This was just a pointless death, So many people could have done some thing to avoid such a loss. I just can’t help but think, what did that young chap deserve to get this painful death. He was son to some one, probably brother to some others. He could have become a sole bread earner for his family, with his death so many hopes and dreams have died. It is true that you can tell the charecter of a nation by looking at it’s traffic. Our charecter can then only be described as thugs, rapists and of murderes. It was the guy’s fault too that he should have considered his own safety. But I would blame it all on the traffic police.

Why can’t Islamabad traffic police stop buses which are over crowded, ban any driver or company who violates these basics of safety. I am not talking about seat belts or air bags, I am talking about people not hanging from the roof of buses and every one having a decent seat to sit on. I am just not going to sit idle on this and will make sure that I make this case heard on every public forum.