Sajjad's Blog

First day of the fasting month of Ramazan (or "Ramadan" if you prefer) here in Pakistan. And the first time in 5 years that I can "break" fast with other Muslims in a Muslim country (though I did fast for a day when I was here 3 years ago).

I love the general feeling you get during the month. Waking up before sunrise for a meal and prayers, spending a relatively relaxed day at work and then joining your family and friends for the evening meal.

So different from last year when I was still in Japan. i.e. oversleeping and missing the breakfast, working as usual during the day, and having conbini salad and some fruit juice in the evening. But I do miss the days at Vanguard when I would order bagels in the evening and others would join in. We even built a local Mojo store to take these orders.

Posted at 17:34pm Comments(1) | ¶

I haven't seen any *yet*, but looking at Spam's history, this can only get worse:

Would be a good time to add bayesian filtering to Pylogger's comments module. If only I could find the time.

Posted at 16:21pm Comments | ¶

Looks like they've done it again. This time in Iraq:

This reminds me so much of the SouthPark episode "Red Sleigh Down" where Santa gets shot down over Iraq while delivering Christmas presents, except thats not what these guys were upto.

Posted at 00:37am Comments(2) | ¶

A couple of days ago there was an announcement in the newspaper about how the government will now allow ISPs to offer DSL in Pakistan. Until now, only 4 companies could do this and they still have a tight grip on everything, so prices should start to fall soon. Hurray. Reminds me of what was happening in Japan about 3 years ago.

One big difference that I've seen is that while we had unlimited data transfer with a typical connection in Japan, the ones here always charge by the Mega/Giga/Tera byte. Our office connection finally came through last night and we now have 128Kbps DSL with a fixed IP, but we'll be charged extra (at a higher rate) for data exceeding 2GB. That's barely enough for downloading a typical linux distro.

On the bright side, another phone line has been freed from the shackles of dialup and we have more than twice the speed. For bigger downloads I'll just have to bug the good guys at the data center.

Posted at 20:35pm Comments(330) | ¶

When Yahoo upgraded their protocol a couple of weeks ago, my Gaim instant messaging client stopped working until I upgraded to version 0.70. But before the upgrade, I decided to try out Jabber, an open source protocol that is well supported by many clients on different platforms. Unfortunately, Gaim kept crashing whenever I tried to register (right now, you can only register from within a client) and none of the other Linux clients worked. Must have been something related to my ISP.

Anyway, the Gaim upgrade worked fine with Yahoo and I didn't bother with Jabber again until now. As of yesterday, I can't connect to MSN through Gaim because of their protocol upgrade. Since they are also implementing licensing in addition to security features, it's unlikely I'll ever get to use it again (not that I'm unhappy about it, good riddance I say), so just tried to register for a Jabber ID and was successful this time.

Also got Sufyan to register so besides Jim, I have one more person in my contact list. About 90% of my contacts were through MSN so I guess it'll be empty for a while. Others are urged to switch to this as well.

My Jabber ID: sajjadz (at) jabber.org
My Jabber Clients: Gaim, PSI
More clients here: http://www.jabber.org/user/clientlist.php
Jabber Servers: http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers.php

Hope to see you in my list soon.

Posted at 18:17pm Comments(1) | ¶

The software competition, which I had a stall in, is finally over. I had spent most of the last couple of weeks preparing for it, though the outcome was still below my level of satisfaction. Because of some stupid last minute change of plans, we ended up in a remote corner of Marriot hotel's ball room and started later than we expected.

The brochures that I had ordered turned out to be a disappointment. Bad color output and alignment and not the correct size. The triangular sign board I had envisaged became a 6 feet tall monster that is a pain to move around and most of the presentation plans, such as running different distros were scrapped due to the lack of interest by the visitors.

I didn't even put up the banners which were supposed to have a tux in one corner and our logo in the other. In place of the cute penguin was painted a cross between a monkey and a toad and it looked like someone had wiped their nose where the logo was supposed to be. I could have done *much* better myself.

On the whole, the event was a success. The advertisement we sent in for the event guide looked great and a handful of people did show some interest, but it was still depressing to have people ask if iinix was a new software or have a bunch of students ask a dozen irrelevant questions in 5 seconds.

Better luck next time. At least I got to see the Matrix Reloaded because of it.

Posted at 18:38pm Comments | ¶

As part of the preparations for NaSCon 03 on Saturday, I went to have a sign board made for our pavilion. The best place for this type of work is in the old bazaars of Islamabad's twin city, Rawalpindi. The cost for most things is half of what you would have to pay in the capital and the people are sometimes more skilled than the designers with credentials, but the price you pay is braving the ultra-narrow streets, insane traffic and hordes of beggars and street vendors.

This part is especially old and looks like something out of an Indian underworld movie. I parked the car at a nice cosy place just outside a bakery and went on to find the craftsmen. The first one didn't care much about what we wanted and suggested something that I imagined would look ugly at best. Then we went to the nice old man who printed our visiting cards. It took a while to get everything the way we wanted, but when we returned to the bakery, the Car was gone.

My first reaction was "Oh great, not again". The car is worth many times more than my camera and whatever I had lost last week, but at least there was some hope of getting it back. David Copperfield was nowhere to be found so we asked the fruit seller if he had seen anything. To our relief, if that's what you'd like to call it, he said it had been towed away to the nearby police station (illegal parking, though where else are you supposed to park in a place like that?).

The real amusement came when we went to pay the fine and collect the vehicle. Since my driving license was lost with the camera, it could have gotten messy, but hey, Sufyan was driving it wasn't he? And he has a valid license. ;-)

To our surprise, all the officer asked for was the Rs.200 fine. I paid it, considering it a parking fee, and drove back without showing any ID, driving license or registration. Amazing.

Posted at 02:11am Comments(1) | ¶

You've probably heard about this already. A mob went on a rampage and damaged some shops and cars after a militant leader was killed here on Monday. It also burnt a police motorcycle. I had read about this yesterday morning, but couldn't be certain how bad it was and if something was still happening.

We were at a customer's office (the same place I got mugged last week) later on, when a guy came in and said things were being broken nearby so we got out soon to avoid the wrath of the mob. Luckily, the worst was limited to a commercial area (Aabpara market) that fell in our path was sealed off by riot police. Had to drive all the way around the capital to get back and didn't manage to see anything unusual.

Later on, at night, I had to go to a wedding and passed through "Aabpara", driving over bits of glass. Saw quite a few broken shop windows as well, but that was pretty much it. Oh yeah, they burnt down "Melody Cinema" which was the only one I know of that played some of the newer flicks.

It may sound bad, but most Pakistanis have gotten used to these things and it wasn't serious at all compared to riots in the past.

Thanks to Alex for reminding me to post about this. Would have done it this morning if I didn't have to prepare for the exhibition on Saturday (will try to post about it).

Posted at 21:38pm Comments(2) | ¶

Just when I was starting to think the crime rate here was comparatively low. I had just got out of a customer's office and was looking for a cab when these two guys on a motorcycle came out of nowhere and made a grab for the small bag I was carrying.

Didn't lose much except for my beloved IXY digicam, my cheap mobile and the trusty Leatherman, but it was still shocking. I guess they thought it was full of wads of foreign currency, judging from my appearance (yes I was wearing a tie).

Now they tell me that those kinds of bags are usually carried by unsuspecting old cashiers and such and are vulnerable to this sort of attack. So what was I supposed to do? Stuff everything in my pockets? Anyhu, lesson learnt. From now on, I'm implanting everything in my skeleton.

Posted at 20:18pm Comments | ¶