Whats up with Hatim!

On Saturday before I went to MAJU campus, there were more bomb blasts in Rawalpindi. The target were Army personnel. It saddens me that in all this exchnage of violence, its always the most common man or soldier who is affected. Pakistan's situation is already critical and I don't know how long the confederation will hold up. 

When I was in MAJU campus, I had the chance to have a discussion with an acquinatice of mine. He was telling every one how the cleric of Lal Masjid died in gun battle with Govt. forces and how peace ful he looked in death as he had attained martayrdom. Some times it amazes me how common people, who seem to have very limited knowldge of relegion, are so swayed by the idea of eternal life and martayardom. People who have no ambition in life, who don't want to work hard, use their knowldge or fight back in true sense find it rather comforting that they can still  achieve some thing rather easily (ie by just confronting evil with nothing in hand, no plan what so ever and making your self die for a "nobel" cause).

Perhaps Ghazi Abdul Rasheed was a pious man, perhaps all his deeds were right and perhaps he is a martayar, but if he did kidnap people to enforce his visions, with that act I don't agree. There are millions of things which are wrong with this world and all the Mullas care is about sex and booze (or perhaps the lack of them in their own lives). Islam is a beautiful relegion but the fact is that Muslims of present day (presnet company included) are a bunch of horrible, misrable hypocrites.  

I am in need of a new laptop in coming months. For me the decession was simple, it just had to be a 17 inch Mac Book Pro. Having a MacBook has many advantages, first of all its Apple machine, so it adds a lot of cool points to your personality :P. Secondly being a devloper you could run any major Desktop-OS on that machine.
At around 2400$ it feels a bit expensive, but I was not able to find much difference between prices of MacBooks and other high end laptops. There are some other aspects to the machine as well, it has a high end graphics card which I don't plan to use much. It's battery time is not the best in the market and it is sensitive machine, unlike HP or Acer which can rough out much more IMO. Also I am not really sure when would Apple be laucnhing it's latest product offerings (it is speculated that may annouce a Peryne based MacBook Pro as early as January 2008 in Apple WDC)
I will post the following questions on some credible Mac forums

So far I have been able to come up with following list of questions, I will try to get them answered on different tech sites/forums very soon 

1. From experience when should we expect new MacBook Pro's?
2. Are refurbished MacBook pros a good deal?
3. Is there any chance of design flaws in the upcoming MacBook pros, considering that they would be of a new generation of processors. Would it be based on proven core?
4. Is there any real user experince difference between 17inch mac book pro and 15inch MacBook Pro.?
5. Is 5400RPM hard disk fast enough, is 7200RPM worth the extra money (I would avoid putting in my own hard drive for now)?

[Edit the questions and post] 

Like any sunday I was given atleast 2-3 taks pertaining to home repairs, which usually comprises of getting few things fixed here and there. This weekend there was an unusual repair concern. During lunch (while there were people outside repainring a water heater) my dad found that there was some thing happeing to paper painting that he had brought from China. I immediately recognized it as fungi. We looked at the back of the frame and it was very obvious. But the interesting thing was that how fungi grew here so fast and was able to penetrate inside the building.

The problem with that particular wall was that it was still mosit from the consturction done almost 2 years ago. In areas like Aboottabad, it may take years before moisture completely goes out from concrete pourings.

 Any who we got it under control, but it seems that we may need to inspect pictures after every 15 days or so.

We are entering the 5th week of our design pha for our ERP projects graphical modeler portion and it seems that more can be done in terms of design. Software design is some thing which cannot be figured out in one go, and good design should carter for future upgrades. But having little background in the technolgies we are planning to use is some thing which I am concerned about. The thing is that we are implmenting a standard for which Class diagrams are already suggested. These diagrams themselves are some what sketchy so for our own understannding we have improvised fiew new fields.

[Post examples of ambiguties in current ISA95 in very generic terms and hint at the solutions taken by me] 

I have a CentOS server in my home for linux practice. I have nicknamed this server as tivoserver as I plan to make it a TiVo box. I will later put MythTV on the system and station it in my family home in Abbottabad. But for now I had to install my D-Link PCI Wireless card onto CentOS 5. There are no linux drivers available for it so I searched for alternative solutions. Foryunately this card is supported by Ndiswrapper. I used the following two links to get it setup.

• HowTo: Install Ndiswrapper on CentOS
• CentOS Wireless configuration

I downloaded ndiswrapper source and compiled/installed it. Then i put in the D-Link driver CD-ROM and got hold of Win2k/XP SYS file for the WiFi driver. It loaded itself easlity. I put in the configuration into

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

and every thing worked smooth untill i got some errors due to differnet channel selection.

The thing is that even though I explicitly say to the server to use channel 9, it some how was using channel 6. Ofcourse I am using the wireless connection in Ad-Hoc more for peer to peer communication. 

The network at my workplace was misbehaving past few days. It was doing so because for some reason after power failure the main BSD machine won't get assigned a public IP from the fiber-optic router and it would lock it self down (ie firewall rules some how though that no ip means some thing bad, so lock every traffic). This was corrected by restarting the firewall. I have never admnistered a freebsd system and it surely is differnet from a linux system. I hope that once I get my new MacBook pro in January, I would be able to experiment more with FreeBSD.

Perhaps next time I will take a look at this. 

My Kahloo (my mom's eldest sister's husband) a retired Army officer and a seasoned vetnerarian was in town to get his hear checked up (same uncle and aunt who was along with my family for Umrah trip). I was surprised to know that he had a heart problem as he seemed so fit. He would beat us all during tawafs. Any who he came along with his eldest son (also an Army officer). It was good that they atleast got it checked up, as normally people don't take this kind of stuff seriously in Pakistan. I shared his engiography result CD on my website so perhaps other people may download it as well.

I am planning to get both of my parents tested against possible heart and other problems. It will no be easy but the sooner the better. Infact I should get my self check up as well. 

Update : It seems that my uncle would be back in town again for further checkups, so I am planning to shift upstairs in our rented house 

During the weekend I ventured to install Ubuntu 7.10 on my Sony VAIO VGN-FS18GP. This time I decided to go with Kubuntu becuase of Amarok. Kubuntu is a nice Ubuntu derivative, but perhaps it's not as looked after as Ubuntu is. For instance, in totem (which is the default media player in Gnome/Ubuntu) if I were to play a media file, it would get update it's codecs itself on need to need basis. I had to look around on the web for the installation of codecs for kaffeine. Luckily I found the following links to help me out Overall I am satisfied with the OS and its utilities, there are alot of cool feaatures in new Kubuntu. I have yet to put my system with the new compiz package of ubuntu. But I sure do miss the fun and excitement of using gentoo as my primary desktop. Perhaps that will change soon as I plan to get my own Mac Book pro by early next year.

There were a few issues which I faced.

• One was lack of compiz support out of the box. This was easy, I installed compiz, compiz-kde and compizconfig-settings-manager. The last package was not showing icons out of the box so I also installed gnome-icon-theme which solved the problem.
• As for codecs I followed the following links
  • Non Free Codecs on Ubuntu
  • Five Tips for Ubuntu
• Another problem which I faced was lack of touch pad control, for this I installed ksynaptic.

I have to register for IELTS in order to apply for admission in a Masters Programme in Europe. I am targetting Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany. I may also look into Netherlands and Switzeland but so far Sweden is my top choice. Belgium is also another choice but I haven't really explored it so far. I submitted the required fee (around 146$) to the Standard Chartered Bank F-7 Markaz (Jinnah Super) branch. I got the form but screwed it up while filling. Tomorrow I am hoping to fill up a new form and submit it to the British Council for a December 1st test date. I am still not sure how It will work out for submitting the test results to Sweden (I suspect that IELTS reults are not sent to Institute, like TOEFL, but they are confirmed by the Institutes them selves)

 Update : I have gotten the date of 15th Dec 2007 for my IELTS test. I could have gotten Dec 1st, but I hand submitted my documents a bit late.

Last night emergency was declared in Pakistan. It was not surprising, but surely was disappointing. The premise for declaring emergency was increase de-stability of Pakistan, but this had more to do with disagreements between the Supreme Court and the executive branch of the governemnt. All tv channels have been shut down and there is a media black out in the country. While writing this blog entry I don't have access to the internet and I hope that internet is not blocked out as well*.

When emergency was declared I was near the Parliment, teaching Linux to MAJU employees. Needless to mention that my parents some how felt I was out of home (they being in another city)and called me up to get back.

*(Internet is up and running in Pakistan, thank God).