Sajjad's July Blog

Found this by accident when instead of auto-completing the URL, Galeon passed "blogshares" onto Google:

Oh, and I'm worth about B$250 million these days:

Posted at 20:09pm Comments | ¶

The used/reprinted books market here is huge. Lots of relatively small bookshops near one another. The books are very cheap, but its so hard to get what you need.

In the computer section, all you'll find are "for Dummies" books or lots of C++ and Visual Basic. Maybe some Java ones, but hardly any Perl or Python. It's so frustrating when the only Linux books available are for beginners and geared towards a specific version of a specific distribution.

The thing that most upset me was how scarce O'Reilly books are. Most booksellers haven't even heard of it. I did manage to find "Programming Perl", "Stopping Spam" and "Webmaster in a Nutshell", but nothing that I absolutely need.

I know what most people will say, why don't I just order from Amazon? They do deliver here, but their prices and delivery terms aren't feasable for a country like Pakistan. I'll wait until they start "Amazon Pakistan".

Hope my collection gets here soon.

Posted at 21:40pm Comments(1) | ¶

Finally have a reliable 24-hour dialup from World Online (WOL). It costs about Rs.2,000 (~4,000 yen) per month, plus phone charges (you get charged per call for ISP numbers, regardless of how long you are connected) which is appalling compared to Tokyo's $21/month for 12Mbps DSL, but is a great deal here.

I get a lowly, but consistant 3-4KB/s which is ok for browsing and email, but not enough for all the updates and bleeding edge software I absolutely *must* download.

Hope we get enough business to be able to afford DSL soon (or the ISPs reduce their DSL charges).

Posted at 00:12am Comments | ¶

Looks ok on Galeon, Opera and Mozilla, but I've heard the formatting is wrong on IE5 or worse.

Posted at 23:29pm Comments | ¶

As you may have noticed, this is my first blog entry in more than 3 weeks. Connectivity problems aside, it was mostly due to preparations to start my company.

Finding office space was easy enough. The main sectors of Islamabad were either way too expensive or too congested so this place made a lot of sense although it is a bit far from most of our potential clients. That's not a big issue since we hope to do most of the work remotely.

I think the most time-consuming part was coining up a cool name and an equally cool logo. The (un)availability of domain names helped a lot with the name and using the Japanese "i" in the logo came naturally.

The site is really simple for now and needs a lot of work, but none of the links should be broken and it validates as Strict Xhtml. Comments?

Posted at 15:58pm Comments | ¶

This should fit in nicely with what I am planning to do with my company, though looking at the present state of things here, I have an enormous task ahead:

Posted at 04:00am Comments(3) | ¶

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

Posted at 16:30pm Comments(4) | ¶

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 | ¶