Whats up with Hatim!

My new job has brought me to lahore to a major cellular comany Network Operations Center in Lahore for testing and deployment of our solution. I am currently working with XML-RPC using GNU C. Its been long since I have worked with C. The elegance simplicity and beauty of C code is refreshing. It takes me back to my early days in programming when we used to work with Turbo C++.

Initially I had planned to stay for only one day, but things changed and I got stuck here. I will hopefully get home by friday and take the weekend off.One side effect of staying in Lahore has been the dining out part. I had the chance to go to food street and Lakshmi chowk with colleuges. And I was able to eat falloda after a very long time. I had been trying to find a nice place for falloda in pindi for 2-3 months now

After almost a gap of 10 months I have a gentoo system up and running. I got a barnd new p4 3.0 Ghz as my new work machine. Its better than the Mac eBook I had at my previous job (although I do miss the solid MacOS). But the best thing about this machine is that I have gentoo on it.

I still have to fine tune the system to its full multimedia glory which requires enormous amount of tweaking ( which I plan to do over the coming months).

It was a bit disappointing to learn that gentoo is no longer supported for stage-1 compilation. But stage-3 isn't that bad (after all I was able to emerge every thing again with my new CFLAG and USEFLAG settings).

I have recently resigned from my job at the small databases company I was working. It was a nice company and I learned a lot about myself. The work was not very exciting, but then in this country you don't get to work on exciting things any ways. The primary reason I left my job was that I got another offer which is more suited to my interests. The job is closer to home and pays a bit more. On top of that I would be working with current technologies.

I also had the opportunity to give interviews to few more places. It seems that US based companies are increasingly outsourcing their work to Pakistan, especially in last few months lots of work has pumped into Islamabad. I have come to realize that I desperately need to revise my OOP and Java concepts as I am getting rust after 4 months of structured programming