Sajjad's Blog

Came across this site, quoting from the fabulous Monty Python movie, "Life of Brian". I found it in a comment on an article about "the bubble" (what has the Internet ever done for us). More about that in a while:

Posted at 14:37pm PKT Comments(147) | ¶

This morning I was a little late to work, as usual, and by the time I got to the car park, there were no more empty spaces left. I got quite frustrated until I managed to sneak in my newly polished car into Marriot Hotel's parking nearby.

When I started work here at Dancom, there was more than enough space in the large, gravelled area, just behind Marriot. It is the unofficial parking area for those visiting or working at the Evacuee Trust Center, the building's own tiny parking being in the basement. Within these two months, I have seen the number of cars almost double and it looks like things will get a lot worse soon.

I've seen similar problems all over Islamabad. I had to change the route I take to work because the main highway connecting Islamabad to Rawalpindi and the airport is clogged with traffic in the morning. The CDA (Capital Development Authority) is widening it by adding another lane, but I doubt even that can keep up with the growth rate.

Try eating out at a decent place on a weekend. You'll end up wasting as much time looking for a place to park as you will spend actually enjoying your food. And I can't even begin to describe the horrors of trying to drive down Blue Area during office hours, let alone finding a parking spot.

I remember that just a few years ago, you could play cricket or badminton on most mid-sized roads and just give way to the one or two cars that drove by every half an hour or so. Right now, that's unthinkable.

There seem to be a lot of causes for all this mess. Firstly, the number of people who can afford at least one vehicle has increased. Salaries are better than they've been for a while and leasing cars has become much easier and popular lately. Then a huge number of people have returned to Pakistan from overseas in the last couple of years, bringing with them lots of foreign currency and the comfortable lifestyle they were used to.

Then there is the great social pressure to own a car. Owning a car is a sign of success. It earns you respect and envy from those around you. It means that you can be indifferent to weather conditions or time schedules of buses and vans. In Tokyo, almost everyone I knew, including our CEO, often rode the train with us because it was faster, cheaper and less hassle than driving. Cars were usually used only by people in the suburbs and that too mostly for weekend outings. It was much the same in Singapore.

Public transport is still a joke here and even riding one of the Varan buses I once wrote about is not much different from being herded into a cattle truck. But that is still better than being stuffed into the smaller vans that have replaced every normal sized seat with two tiny ones. Even cab rides are not a very pleasant (or safe) experience. And this is just the Capital. The traffic situation in other large cities has worsened to the point of complete chaos.

Luckily, unlike other Pakistani cities, Islamabad is designed with some room to grow internally in the shape of green belts and open areas. Not the best idea to cut down trees to make way for roads, but it's still better than traffic jams creating copious amounts of noise and air pollution.

What's the solution? I would recommend a world class mass transit system that is clean, affordable, comfortable and gets you where you want to go in half the time. But that seems unlikely anytime soon since the population density isn't that great in most of Islamabad and the places with higher densities lack most other basic necessities (such as a proper water and electricity supply). Plus, not everyone would be willing to pay a little bit extra for a more comfortable, faster ride.

They could do something similar to Singapore and make it less attractive to own a car. Tax single vehicle owners a little more and a lot more for more than one car, then use the extra revenue to improve public transport, build roads and car parks. Not something that people would welcome with open arms, but it's for the best in the long run.

Posted at 17:01pm PKT Comments(16) | ¶

Got this spam yesterday on one of the corporate email accounts (sensitive parts removed/blanked):

From k219@hotmail.com Mon Sep 27
Return-path: 
Received: from [80.48.192.72] (helo=80.48.192.72)
From: fneves@registro.br
Subject: How one can become a terrorist?
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1437
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1441

Welcome to our web site www.#########

Please use http://63.240.81.# in case of our domain outage.

You\'re invited to shop for large selection of bombs and different
kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air,
surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the
following types of rockets you will be
able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power
stations, bridges, factories and anything
else that comes your mind. Most items are in stock and available for
next day freight delivery in the USA.
Worldwide delivery is available at additional cost. Prices are
negotiable.

Please feel free to inquire by ICQ # ######### or contacting us
directly:

###############
###############
###############

Today special:

******* AIR BOMBS *******


******* UNGUIDED AIRCRAFT ROCKETS  *******


******* ROCKET PODS   *******



Our clients are well known Al-Q####, #########, Al-J####, #####, ####
###### Group and many other terrorist groups. We are well known
supplier in the market and looking forward to expand our clientage
with assistance of Internet.

Do not hesitate to contact us via ICQ # #########

Impatiently awaiting for your orders,
ShadowCrew

Instead of bombing sovereign nations and deporting innocent people, shouldn't the powers that be go after these guys? I mean how hard is it to track 'em down? They give out their ICQ/IP/Telephone numbers. The domain must be registered to someone. The owner of the network block (originating IP for the spam appears to be a polish network) must know who is using it. Hell, they're using Microsoft Outlook Express and probably a pirated version at that. What more do they need?

I know how difficult it can be to track online abuse and domains, IPs and other info can be easily spoofed, but it can't be harder than invading a foreign country, having lots of civilians as well as own troops killed and pissing off a large chunk of humanity.

Posted at 15:40pm PKT Comments(14) | ¶

An update on my password generation effort, previously known simply as "Passgen". Say hello to PyKey. I didn't give it that much thought, but the name kind of popped up while I was trying out different combinations using 'py'.

It even has its own home:

I've also added a difficulty option which right now just prints out random words or combinations of words from a dictionary at the 'easy' level. 'Medium' does what passgen did before, i.e. mash dictionary words together and manipulate random characters. 'Hard' spits out random characters which are usually very hard to remember.

The medium and hard levels make sure the passwords have at least a digit, upper case letter, lower case letter and a special character so they should be pretty secure. The easy passwords should be crackable in a matter of minutes or hours unless other security methods (such as limited retries) are used.

Here is the demo:

and the source:

Use './pykey.py --help' for information on how to use it from the command line.

Now bring it on with the "I f#$@^& hate pykey" jokes.

Posted at 21:26pm PKT Comments(4) | ¶

For the last year and a half, I've been using Straw to read RSS feeds of my favorite blogs and news sites. As of late, I haven't bothered to install it on new systems or update the current setup, mainly because of all the other dependencies I need to install.

Today, I got the Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/) plugin for Firebird installed through a simple click and restart. Looking good.

Posted at 22:42pm PKT Comments(1) | ¶

One of the most important things when it comes to security is good passwords. Ideally, a password should be of reasonable, but random length and consist of at least one digit, meta-character, upper-case letter and lower-case letter. This may seem extreme, but most people tend to forget that usually passwords can consist of phrases and words can be easily modified to match this criteria.

For a while now, I've been using simple scripts to generate totally random, really difficult passwords (or passphrases, which really is more appropriate). Although the human mind is quite amazing at storing this kind of information, memorizing a few dozen of these can get tedious.

The script I currently use, transforms randomly selected dictionary words to generate a passphrase that matches the above criteria. I've written it in Python and will keep on adding more options and features as new ideas come to mind.

One idea I have is to generate random, non-dictionary words which are easy to remember and pronounce, but can't be cracked using a simple dictionary attack or even one which tries all the possible substitutes (such as '@' in place of an 'a'). I memoramember fincovering another password generator that utiliates like this, though writing a function to test the readapronability could be an abonomatorically daunteresting task. Reminds me of the BlackAdder III episode about the origins of the Dictionary. :-)

Give 'passgen.py' a try here and please do suggest a better name. I'm thinking along the lines of 'pypass' or 'pygen':

The code is available here:

Please note that this is more of a demo. Since the generated passwords are transmitted in plain text to your browser (unless you are using SSL), there is a possibility of them being picked up on the way. The same script will run from the command line so run it from there.

Posted at 17:44pm PKT Comments(85) | ¶

There's been a lot of hype surrounding Sun's announcement about of its Project Looking Glass. It looked very cool in the demo and I would just love to get my hands on some of the features they showed off. Like being able to flip an application over and write a note on the back. The thing is, I couldn't find a way to try it out for myself, so thought I'll try out one of the other projects out there. Just installed 3ddekstop which runs on Linux and allows you to view your workspaces in 3d. Not very useful, but it was blazingly fast and just looked awesome.

Next thing to try (when I have time):

Posted at 01:07am PKT Comments(19) | ¶

Last night was the first gathering of "Pak 2600", part of the actual 2600 (www.2600.com I think) which I hadn't really heard about before, but am getting to know better. PAK2600 is "bringing together people of all ages interested in Computer Society, electronic gadgetry, communications, privacy, telco and technology in general". In other words, a geek-fest.

It was mainly organized by Ismael, who is here on a visit from London, and was attended by some really bright people, including my friend Junaid. Zaeem, who works for Dancom Multan, came all the way to Islamabad just to be able to attend. Though I was stuck at work and arrived late, I found that the meeting went really well and we had discussions on some really interesting topics (wireless, VOIP, legal issues and Linux etc).

The turnout was pretty good considering that the event wasn't advertised much. Even I only found out about it a day or two before. For the next meeting, we're planning on informing many more people about it and trying to find something really interesting to try out. Kind of reminds me of the days when I first joined the Tokyo PC Users Group though the crowd here is comparitively much more technical.

The meetings will be held on every first Friday of the month at Civil Junction (next to Hot Spot) in F-7 and will start at 7pm. There will be free wireless access as well as lots of other gadgets that people might bring. Hope to see quite a few of you Linux users, bloggers and tech junkies next month.

Posted at 00:12am PKT Comments(1) | ¶

Here is something I was meaning to do for a long time. My site was badly in need of a makeover, both in appearance and underneath. You can be the judge of appearances, but I'm proud to say that I've gotten rid of tables that I was using for the layout of my html pages. As some of you may know, tables aren't supposed to be used for layout and can be taken as badly as blink tags by some. I'm glad to be rid of them. Better late than never.

As with any change, I'm expecting at least a few things to break. Since I can't test my site on IE or other browsers that don't run on Linux, I have no idea if an IE user will be able to read this. I also don't know if it will break my blogging scripts. So, if you can read this (properly), a lot of my work is done.

More later.

Posted at 00:15am PKT Comments(3) | ¶

A tale of a bunch of otherwise normal, influential people who think dropping IE is a good idea:

Why would someone give up the features that ActiveX and other parts of IE provide you in favor of safer, more stable alternatives? Unthinkable. Blasphemous.

Now seriously, it's a good thing that people are starting to realize the advantages of alternative software, even if it is a browser. I know that it will be a small dent since a huge number of Internet users don't even know what a "browser" is, let alone go to the trouble of downloading and double-click-installing something called Mozilla, but it should be enough for now.

As for my browsing, I can't remember ever using Internet Explorer full time. My web-viewing days started when the wars between IE and Netscape were in full swing. I had also started building web-pages around the same time, so I was using both browsers, leaning more towards Netscape.

Once I discovered Opera, IE pretty much left the picture, forever. This commercial browser didn't display Japanese until about a year later and didn't run on Linux till long after that, but Opera became my favorite browser due to the features, speed and customizability.

Opera is also one of the few softwares that I have actually paid for (not counting games). It was for the long-awaited Linux version which compared really well to the aging Netscape 4.7x that most Red Hat Linux users were using at the time. Just a note. Opera has a freely downloadable version which comes with an ad-bar at the top. The license fee is for the full version where the space can be reclaimed.

After Mozilla started getting stable, I normally ran Opera as my main browser and Mozilla for sites that didn't open in Opera. This lasted for a long time, but since each was a resource hog, it really put strain on my system. Galeon was another option, but I found it too unstable most of the time.

Lately, I've switched exclusively to Firefox. It is fast, simple and stable enough for most of my needs. After adding the java and flash plugin, there isn't much else I need to do and virtually all sites open without any complaints.

The one thing that I do miss, which is also a blessing in disguise, is Opera's save on crash/exit feature. It was really useful to open the browser after a power failure or shutdown and have the same pages open that I had before. Gradually, the tabs I thought were useful kept building up until Opera started using over 100MB of RAM and I had to live with the painfully slow experience. Now, I'm forced to bookmark useful pages in case the power goes before I've had a chance to read them and things are much smoother.

Lastly, I should mention lynx (and "links"), the text-based browser that just can't die. I'm often logged into strange remote servers where running a full graphical browser is not possible or would be too slow. With lynx, I can view html files or trouble-shoot other problems without delays or putting strain on the system. "links" is the newer app that supports frames and limited jav

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