Free Kashmir – and economic perspective – Part 3 now published

Part 2 of Free “Kashmir – An Economic Perspective” now published

I am doing a series of posts on Free Kashmir – An Economic Perspective at my new blog saunzal.org. Don’t forget to check it out.

PS: I have moved my blog to Saunzal.org. Please update your feeds.

It has been a wonderful and rocking 1 and half year of blogging at wordpress. Now the time has come to move on.

I will be blogging on my new site saunzal.org. Hopefully I will also manage to blog more regularly.

Please update your feed readers.

Thanks

This is for readers of kongposh.net.

I wish to inform kongposh.net will be down for a couple of days stating Dec 27, 200. Please bear with me.

Thanks

On August 22^nd 1997, a phenomenon started to take its first steps. This was GNONE.

This has been a long way here. GNOME has come up from being a small project with relatively very very new toolkit in 1997 to a mature and rock solid desktop environment.

I met GNOME(and Linux) very briefly in winter of 2000. Then from January 2002 I started using it fultime and it has been wonderful to see GNOME grow all these year.

So let’s all wish happy birthday to our beloved GNOME.

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Watch this video first. The I will say

This video claims that a Kashmiri person named Manzoor Ahmed Shah was kidnapped and killed by millitants for converting to Christianity.

Are you a Kashmiri. Fine, no need to read further.  You already know the truth, if you watched the video.

For other, here are some points to be noted.

1. Women folk shown in the video are wearing Sarees. I ask, since when did Kashmiri women started wearing it.
2. The faces shown in the picture. I ask, are these Kashmiri faces.
3. Where is the picture of the so called dead person, Mr. Manzoor Ahmed Shah.
4. Why the pictures shown are not shown in close ups.

This is reported by some CWN channel(I saw the logo in the background). Google tells me that CWN is Catholic World News (CWN)

Why did not this come in mainstream media. Such big news. Bloody thirsty Moslems slay a god fearing man.

Can this be trusted?

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There are some untold stories of Kashmir that you might new get to know.

Watch The Brutality,  The Humiliation, The Inhumanity, The Tyranny, The Insanity, The Irrationality and judge for yourself

I will not put forward my opinions. I, as a Kashmiri, DO NOT have right to one.

One thing to be noted is that this report in not done by any Kashmiri.

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GoPHP5.org has generated a lot of buzz. Now it comes from PEAR Camp

After being the leader and most used PHP applications and libraries for many years with over 30 Million downloads, the PEAR Project is happy to announce that the next version of PEAR, named PEAR2, is going to aim at being only available for PHP5.2 and newer versions of PHP.

And PHP.net Says

[13-Jul-2007] Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

PHP 4, Rest In Peace.

Update: Removed the typo in above line where I had put PHP, Rest In Peace instead of PHP 4, Rest In Peace.

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I will be attending Open Source Camp  Delhi. I will be speaking on topics like Drupal, CodeIgniter, Django, Pylons, Turbogrears and jQuery.

Don’t miss it!

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PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and
served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4’s
shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago,
but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of
reasons.

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Take a look this video  http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=404

This one is real cool. How great will it be to work here. Well can’t say that whether it presents a true picture or not, but the faces of the people in this video definitely convey something.

Comments say that this company is Connected Ventures

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Rafi at his best

You will love it.

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From Barry Jaspan:

The Schema Project has achieved a major milestone: The Schema API 1 has been committed for inclusion in Drupal 6 core. The Schema API allows modules to declare their database tables in a structured array (similar to the Form API) and provides API functions for creating, dropping, and changing tables, columns, keys, and indexes. Thanks to Frando for co-authoring the patch with me and the numerous people who helped review and test it.

Now thats a great news.

Technorati Tags: drupal

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Through Sakooter Speaks

HOW DO U FEEL ABOUT THIS?

A man went to a barbershop to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed. As the barber began to work, they began to have a good conversation.They talked about so many things and various subjects.

When they eventually touched on the subject of God, the barber said: “I don’t believe that God exists.”

“Why do you say that?” asked the customer.

“Well, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God doesn’t exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can’t imagine a loving God who would allow all of these things.”

The customer thought for a moment, but didn’t respond because he didn’t want to start an argument.

The barber finished his job and the customer left the shop. Just after he left the barbershop, he saw a man in the street with long, stringy, dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked dirty and unkempt.

The customer turned back and entered the barber shop again and he said to the barber: “You know what? Barbers do not exist.”

“How can you say that?” asked the surprised barber.

“I am here, and I am a barber. And I just worked on you!” “No!” the customer exclaimed. “Barbers don’t exist because if they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards, like that man outside.”

“Ah, but barbers DO exist! ” answered the barber. ” What happens is, people do not come to me. “

“Exactly!” affirmed the customer. “That’s the point! God, too, DOES exist!

What happens, is, people don’t go to Him and do not look for Him.

That’s why there’s so much pain and suffering in the world.”

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A traveler once came to the mosque to see the prophet. After greeting the prophet he was asked where he was from. The traveler replied that he came from very far just to get a few questions answered.

What follows is the dialogue that took place between the traveler and the prophet.

Traveler: I do not want adhaab(punishments) to be written in my account.
Prophet : Behave well with your parents

Traveler: I want to be known amongst people as an intelligent person.
Prophet: Fear Allah. Always.

Traveler: I want to be counted amongst Allah’s favorites.
Prophet : Recite quran every morning and evening.

Traveler: I want my heart to always be enlightened.( roshan and munawer)
Prophet: Never forget death

Traveler: I never want to be away from Allah’s blessing.
Prophet: Always treat fellow creatures well.

Traveler: I never want to be harmed by my enemies.
Prophet: Always have faith in only Allah.

Traveler: I never want to be humiliated.
Prophet: Be careful of your actions.

Traveler: I wish to live long.
Prophet: Always do Sile Rahm. (Goodness towards blood relations, neighbours etc.)

Traveler: I want my sustenance to increase.
Prophet : Always be in state of Wudhoo(Ablution according to Quran).

Traveler: I wish to stay free of adhaab(punishments) in the grave.
Prophet: Always wear pure and clean clothes.

Traveler: I never want to burn in hell.
Prophet : Control your eyes and tongue.

Traveler: How do I get my sins forgiven.
Prophet: Always ask forgiveness from Allah with a lot of humility.

Traveler: I want people to respect me always.
Prophet : Never extend your hands of need at people(only ask from Allah’s Treasures).

Traveler: I want to always be honored.
Prophet: Never humiliate or put down anyone.

Traveler: I don’t want to be squeezed by Fishare Qabr. (squeezing in the grave)
Prophet: Recite Sura Mulk(Chapter 67 of Quran) often.

Traveler: I want my wealth to increase.
Prophet: Recite Sura Waqi’ah(Chapter 56 of Quran) every night.

Traveler: I want to be safe and at peace on day of Judgement.
Prophet: Do zikr(talk about) of Allah from dusk to night.

Traveler: I want to be in full attention and concentration during namaaz.
Prophet : Always do Wudhoo(Ablution) with concentration and attention.

May ALLAH (Subhan-Va-Talah) keep all of us in the Right path and provide us with success in this world as well as in the hereafter.

Ameen

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Barry Jaspan announces “The Schema Project” for Drupal. According to Barry,

The goal of the project is to provide a database schema abstraction layer for Drupal. The benefits of the project will include more reliable compatibility with a greater range of database systems, reduced install-related code size, centralization of the growing schema information required by or for other modules (such as Views and CCK), and a wide variety of other advanced capabilities that will no doubt arise once the system is in place.

Every module’s tables are defined in a data structure (just like a form), indicating its columns and data types, keys, etc. Not surprisingly, it looks very much like a Views hook_views_tables structure. For example:

$schema['node'] = array(
    'cols' => array(
         'nid' => array('int(10) unsigned', NOT_NULL),
         'vid' => array('int(10) unsigned', NOT_NULL, 'default' => '0'),
         'type' => array('varchar(32)', NOT_NULL),
// and so forth
),
    'keys' => array(
         'PRIMARY' => array('nid, vid', 'UNIQUE'),
         'vid' => array('vid', 'UNIQUE'),
         'nid' => array('nid'),
// and so forth
));

Each module that wants to define tables in the schema implements hook_schema:

function mymodule_schema() {
  $schema['#version'] = 1;
  $schema['mymodule_table_1'] = array(/* table definition */);
  $schema['mymodule_table_2'] = array(/* table definition */);
  // etc
  return $schema;
}

An open question is how schema updates will occur. The simple solution is to continue using the present install approach:

function mymodule_schema_update_2() {
  // Explicitly update the schema from version 1 to version 2.
  db_add_column('mymodule_table_1', 'new_column');
  db_remove_column('mymodule_table_1', 'old_column');
}

Another possibility is to include schema version information in the table definitions:

$schema['#version'] = 2;
$schema['mymodule_table_1'] = array(
    'cols' => array(
         'new_column' => array(...,
       'version_added' => 2),
         'old_column' => array(...,
       'version_removed' => 2),
         // etc
));

What does this buy us?

The Schema proeject will provide many benefits:

• Several modules (e.g. Views) already need schema reflection; this just centralizes the information and makes it much easier to create new modules that need reflection. A module that wants to support Views or other similar modules can store any necessary data in its $schema array. In fact, many modules will probably not have to do anything more to support such reflection-requiring modules.

• Code size reduction and elimination of duplicate code. The automatically-generated schema for core is only slightly larger than all the explicit CREATE TABLE statements for a single database engine, but the single schema array will support multiple engines instead of requiring a duplicate set of CREATE TABLE statements for each engine.

• The Schema module can use database inspection to validate the database layout against the defined schema, reporting errors and/or disabling any modules whose tables are not what they expect.

• It can provide hook_schema_alter, allowing modules to alter other modules’ tables in a clean way. For example, a node-enhancing module could add additional columns to the node table, eliminating the need to join against its own custom table.

• As already described, it is a huge step towards enabling incremental data migration across Drupal systems.

• The Forms API made all kinds of things possible that were not before, many of them not foreseen until after FAPI existed. Schema will, too.

read full post

Now this is something cool and wonderful.

Technorati Tags: drupal, schema abstraction,

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Whatever happened to paradise. Kashmir Media reports:

Kashmir Media: Indian Army’s Latest: Prove Your Identity Before You Wail For Your Dead Brother

Parveena, wailing and weeping, was stopped by the troops at a barricade outside Aripal village. She had come from her husband’s home in Pampore to see the face of her brother for the last time. For an hour the troops did not allow her to enter the village.

Beseeching the Army officer with clasped hands, she said,

 “I want to see my brother.”

Many women were seen waiting near the erected barricade and repeatedly urging the troops to allow them to go to their respective homes. “Our children are alone there, please allow us to go,” the women said.

The people waiting for the go ahead expressed apprehensions saying that army might harm their family. “The troops have been harassing us for long and this time they might harm our families,” they said.

Whatever happend to paradise. Allah help us! Amen.

Technorati Tags: kashmir, human rights, abuse, killing, innicent, terrorism, terrorism in kashmir, government terrorism, police, indian asecurity forces

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Hi Fellas, I am pleased to announce the new domain for Kashmir Bloggers. “KONGPOSH.net“. Here is a list of currently aggregated blogs. If your blog has not been added, request the addition of your blog. If you want to help in maintaining kongposh.net please contact me.

Happy blogging!

Finally we have set up a true office. Got the internet connection, though through a WLL(CDMA) phone. Broadband in pipeline. Oh Mighty God, I am so happy.

Hello Fellow Bloggers,

 Currently I am in process setting up a proper website for KashmirBloggers. I am planning to user Gregarius feed aggregator for it. If anybody has a better suggestion of tools please do suggest(only PHP/MySQL based).

 Till then now new blogs will be added to Kashmir Bloggers. But you can still send me your blog urls(feed urls as well). I will include them once it is up and running. Post your blog and feed urls right here as comment.

Someone, very very intelligent, has  said:

“Great Minds Are Lazy”

I do not know who has said this, but of late this quote applies to me a lot. I have been very lazy in last 2 and a half months when it comes to blogging.

 Well I was not actually sitting idle al this time.  There have been a lot me developments during this time.  On the personal front I attended quite a few marriages of my cousins and my moms youngest sister. Then we had Eid-Ul-Azha.

On the professional front, we(Nadeem and me) sat down all this time analyzing what was going wrong with our venture. Why we are unable to get work even after having a very successful product in local market. What and Where we were doing wrong.  So we came up with a brand new strategy. Which will be visible from our actions within next few months(Inshallah).

In the end, I appologize to my regular readers for not keeping the updated for a long time.

Blogosphere is burning, aflame with the posts condemning a top Austrailan Imam, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali,Why? Because he, in a Ramadaan sermon said to more than 500  attending  people, that Uncovered women are like uncovered meat. If cat comes and eats the meat, cat is not be blamed because meat was left uncovered.

The world has taken it as that Islam believes that a women is responsible if she is raped not the man who raped. I cannot imagine that how much people can twist the meaning of the a simple word, if it is comming out of a muslim mouth.

Islam no where says women is responsible if she is raped. What is the actual meaning is that uncovered women are inviting rape. This can be shown by the enormous number of rape cases reported in US and Europe every day. Not in tens or hundreds but thousands.

My question, Which is the country which has the lowest number of rape cases reported as well as unreported. Saudi Arabia. No need to say anything more.

Further reported that he said women are the weapons used by satan to curropt men. I say Go to Bible, it says the same thing. In fact until late 1600s, Church was still unsure whether women had souls at all. It seems they do not know their scriptures.

I am sure this is want the Imam meant and not the otherwise. When Jack
Straw talked rubbish about hijab, whole media jumps to protect him by
clarifyng what he actually meant. Who will come to this man’s rescue.

Now, they(he Islamic Council of New South Wales) thinking about sacking this Imam. This is the worst thing to be done by muslims. If it happens, I will be a sorry state for those guys. The price to be paid for Truth.

When those bastards from that newspaper publish filthy cartoons, everyone jumps to their rescue, blowing the trumpet of Freedom Of Speech, I wonder where does this freedom of speech vanishes when a muslim says something. What I feel is that Freedom of Speech is only about what they want to hear and listen and  not what people want to say. If someone says Propthet of Islam is bad(may Allah forgive me this sin), Bravo, go on, Freedom of Speech. If someone says Islam is a terriost religion, Bingo, thats what i was saying, Freedom of Speech. But if a muslim says something, Oh Gosh! How can say so, muslims are so bad. What shit is all this.

OK, I will say some more. If Islam is so much degrades, tourtures and subjugates women, Why is that out of poeple accepting Islam arround the world, 65% are women.

Moreover Islamic Law prescribes same punishment for raping an uncovered women as for raping a covered a women(or a Christian women or a Hindu women or a Jewish women or any other), that is TO BE STONNED TO DEATH, PUBLICALLY.

May I politely ask, How may nations have such stringent laws for rapists. None.

Don’t just talk about women emancipation demonstrate it practically. It seems that media arround the world have taken an oath to blow everything a muslim say or does out of prortions.

May Allah guide them and us to the right path. Amen.

PS: Before flaming me with comments, make sure you answer my above two questions. Of which we are sure you have none.

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A Very Very Eid Mubarak To All Muslim Brother Arround The World

May Allah Subhana Wa Ta’ala accept our fasts, because we fast for His will alone.

Now this is something real cool. Ubuntu, The Linux Distro that “Just Works”, may well be the first distro to support those notorious winmodems, OUT OF THE BOX.

Support for Winmodems under Linux had been a constant annoyance to many people, especially those from the third world countries like India. It was also a major road block for lot of people. I personally know about guys who almost coverteded but when they came to know the fuss they had to go through to set up modems, they said we are fine wihout it.

I personally, access internet at home using a winmodem. And you know what I am forced to use for lack of modem support on Linux. Though there are some good packages like Slmodemd, but they created more problems than they solved(at least for me).

Now, if it happens, it will be another feather in the cap of a great distro which is already topping the charts.

Ubuntu has actually made Debian usable for real novices and more usable for nerds.

Long live the Spirit of Ubuntu.

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In 628 C.E. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) granted a Charter of Privileges to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt.Sinai. It consisted of several clauses covering all aspects of human rights including such topics as the protection of Christians, freedom of worship and movement, freedom to appoint their own judges and to own and maintain their property, exemption from military service, and the right to protection in war.

An English translation of that document is presented here:

Letter to the Monks of St. Catherine Monastery

“This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.

 

Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God’s covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate. No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).”

____________

A Letter from the Prophet Muhammad To The Assyrian Christians

 

“God has told me in a vision what to do, and I confirm His command by giving my solemn promise to keep this agreement.

 

To the followers of the Islam I say: Carry out my command, protect and help the Nazarene nation in this country of ours in their own land. Leave their places of worship in peace; help and assist their chief and their priests when in need of help, be it in the mountains, in the desert, on the sea, or at home. Leave all their possessions alone, be it houses or other property, do not destroy anything of their belongings, the followers of Islam shall not harm or molest any of this nation, because the Nazarenes are my subjects, pay tribute to me and will help the Muslims. No tribute, but what is agreed upon, shall be collected from them, their church buildings shall be left as they are, they shall not be altered, their priests shall be permitted to teach and worship in their own way-the Nazarenes have full liberty of worship in their churches and homes. None of their churches shall be torn down, or altered into a mosque, except by the consent and free will of the Nazarenes. If any one disobeys this command, the anger of God and His Prophet shall be upon him.

 

“The tribute paid the Nazarenes shall be used to promote the teachings of Islam and shall be deposited at the treasury of Beth
Almal. A common man shall pay one denar (piece of money), but the merchants and people who own mines of gold and silver and are rich shall pay twelve denars. Strangers and people who have no houses or other settled property shall not have taxes levied upon them. If a man inherits property he shall pay a settled sum to the Baitulmal treasury. The Christians are not obliged to make war on the enemies of Islam, but if an enemy attacks the Christians, the Muslims shall not deny their help, but give them horses and weapons, if they need them, and protect them from evils from outside and keep the peace with them. The Christians are not obliged to turn Muslims, until God’s will makes them believers.

 

“The Muslims shall not force Christian women to accept Islam, but if they themselves wish to embrace it, the Muslims shall be kind to them.

 

“If a Christian woman is married to a Muslim and does not want to embrace Islam, she has liberty to worship at her own church according to her own religious belief, and her husband must not treat her unkindly on account of her religion. If any one disobeys this command, he disobeys God and his prophet and will be guilty of a great offense.

 

“If the Nazarenes wish to build a church, their Muslim neighbors shall help them. This shall be done, because the Christians have obeyed us and have come to us and pleaded for peace and mercy.

 

“If there be among the Christians a great and learned man the Muslims shall honor him and not be envious of his greatness.

 

“If any one is unjust and unkind to the Christians he will be guilty of disobeying the Prophet of God.

 

“The Christians should not shelter an enemy of Islam or give him horse, weapon or any other help. If a Muslim is in need the Christian shall for three days and nights be his host and shelter him from his enemies. The Christians shall, furthermore, protect the Mohammedan women and children and not deliver them up to the enemy or expose them to view. If the Nazarenes fail to fulfil these conditions, they have forfeited their right to protection, and the agreement is null and void.

 

“This document shall be entrusted to the Christian chief and head of their church for safe keeping.”

The peace of God be over them all! This agreement is written by Moavijah Ben Sofian, according to the dictates of Muhammad, the Messenger of God, in the 4th year of the Hegira in the city of Medina.

___________

And the quran says:

Al Qur`an says: “And abuse not those whom they call upon besides
Allah, lest exceeding the limits, they abuse Allah through ignorance.
Thus to every people have We made their deeds fair-seeming; then to
their Lord is their return so he will inform them of what they did”
(6:109)

 

Al Qur’an says: “Those who restrain their anger and pardon men. And Allah loves the doer of good (to others)” (3: 133)

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Salaam fellow bloggers.
Now all the feeds of Kashmir Bloggers are available thruogh FeedBurner at

http://feeds.feedburner.com/KashmirBloggers

This is one more step towards getting Kashmir Bloggers together and in touch with each other.
Always Remember,

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Kashmiri Nomad has an excelent write up. Do check it out. Especially for those who think westerners are tolerant

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On some of my previous posts on Islam have suddenly seen a lot comment activity. The point of dicsussion being

Rights of Non Muslims in an Islamic State.

I started this new post as a point to carry forward the discussions on the above topic.

So Abhishek, you are welcomed to post new queries.

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 Yesterday, when I posted about the post on Ajaxian claiming jQuery to be slow, I pinged back the post on Ajaxian. Now I see that Ajaxian has some kinda goof up, report my pingback with completely different content that I never wrote. Here is what is report as written by me:

results doesn’t change my choice… besides the person doing the benchmark is a prototype user, c”,). jquery still rules for me!

Check it out here: http://ajaxian.com/archives/benchmark-prototype-and-jquery

Dion Almer reports

Claudio Cicali thinks benchmarks are boring and useless, so he decided to conduct a series of micro-benchmarks of CSS selector tests with both Prototype and jQuery. He decided to do this after he saw others observe:

• Prototype (1.5+) has CSS selector syntax now
• “jQuery is horribly SLOW”

See the image. It show out of 10 tests, jQuery failed in 4 whil Prototype failed in 6, still jQuery is slow.

I think he is forgeting that Prototype is way much older than jQuery. jQuery is not even claiming the greatness right now. The best part in jQuery community is that your tools may be fine but we love jQuery.

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Almost all news channels air the news of sharing the proof of Pakistans connection in  7/11 Mumbai Blasts. External Affairs minsitery confirmed sharing of proofs with US. While Govt. of Indian claimed that US has asked Pakistan to use its influence with militant organization to stop attack in Inda, Pakistan has rejected the claims of US ask them to do so.

This is a laughable matter. India is doing same thing to Pakistan, what Pakistan did to Afganistan during US invasion of Afganistan, as an excuse to support so called War On Terror.

Meanwhile, GK reports:

In response to General Parvez Musharaf’s book, Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has made a bold statement that India is ready to he is ready to discuss all the pending issues with Pakistan, Including Kashmir.

This is welcome move by GoI, that will at least bring some hope to the stranded valley of Kashmir and Kashmiri People.

Hey Dr. Singh and General, please do not forget the primary party involved in the issue, that is Kashmir Masses.

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Recently, we have seen a huge growth in the sale of Linux based laptops. Bundling of Linux with the laptops has considerably reduced the price tags with laptops available as low as Rs. 20,000 from ACi, Zenith Acer, and Sahara. But point is that are these laptops vendors accutally commited to the cause of Linux adoption or it is just a trick employed to trigger up the sales.

State of Linux based Laptops.

Current, major players is the Linux laptop areana are Acer, Compaq, Aci, Zenith and Sahara. All of them claim that their products are linux friendly. Lets take the case of Acer. I own a Acer TravelMate 2310 notebook. It came preinstalled with Linux.

Are these notebooks really Linux friendly.
There has been a major leap in hardware compatibility in Linux. All the major hardware vendors either have drivers for Linux or are supported by the drivers from Open Source community. Be it LAN card, graphics hardware, touchpads, displays etc. For instance my Acer notebook has SiS PCI Fast Ethernet, SiS M661MX Display, Synaptics Touchpad and AC 97 audio, all of which are already very well supported on Linux one way or the other.

But when it comes to devices which have reputation for not being Linux friendly, tall claims of Linux friendliness fail utterly. I am talking specifically about Internal Modems and WiFi cards. When I tried to connect my dial up connection through internal modem, I found out that it was not detected automatically. Then I thought resource CD that came with my notebook might have some sort of instructions. It contained all the drivers and a user manual, but to my surprise all these drivers were for MS Windows. Even manual was also meant only for MS Windows. Best part was when I searched it for the word ‘Linux’. The word ‘Linux’ was not even mentioned in that manual. Same was the fate for my Atheros WiFi adapter, though I managed to get it working thanks to various NDISWrapper utilities.

Now the next logical step was to contact Acer Support Center. Next day at office, where we have a broad band connection, I mailed Acer informing them of my problems and asking for suggestions. They did not even bother to respond. For few days, I kept mailing them, but it just did not seemed to have any effect. After that I was able to get modem working using slmodemd packages, but that is not a reliable solution, so I shifted back to external modem using serial to USB converter to connect my serial external modem.

How many Linux laptops actualy remain Linux laptops.
This is a question that most of the Linux enthusiasts ask. How many linux laptops actually reamain linux based. As far as Acer is concerned, I get an image that they assume that people are going to format the laptop for MS Windows. This is evident from the fact that resource CD only contains drivers and instruction manual only for MS Windows. Linux is not even mentioned there. There are no linux based drivers avaiable for downloads from acer website while all the MS Windows based drivers are available. Online manual is also silient when it comes for troubleshooting on Linux.

Conclusion.
What I personally feel is that these vendors are just interested in getting more and more units sold. Hardware is not picked properly. Mostly internal modem and WiFi cards fail. No information, what so ever, is provided on troubleshooting tips on Linux.

If such is the scenario, I really think are these vendors just trying to cash on Linux brand and taking customers for a ride.

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It is a day of great greif for whole Kashmir Valley. A young boy of 25 was butchered in Gurgaon.

GK reports:

Irshad went to Gurgaon for a job interview at
Maruti Udyog Limited the largest car manufacturer of India. He was
appointed in sales department but some days later was “asked to leave when
they found out he was a Kashmiri.”

Tariq(brother) said if police was in a position to get
phone number of their house from Irshad why it didn’t ask him who had
tortured him. He said Delhi police refuses to give answer to this
question.
The father of the murdered youth alleged that Delhi police had
taken his son into custody and later tortured him. “They should tell us
why Irshad was killed. His only sin was that he was Kashmiri,” Ali
Muhammad said, demanding a thorough probe into what he says “custodial
killing” of his young son.

The most pathetic thing about all this affair is that MUL, one of the most repsected company in India, involved in such filthy act.

Moreover, protesting mourner were beaten by police and CRPF. Even shopkeepers and their customers were not spared: GK reports:

Policemen deployed to quell protests were
waiting in vehicles. Some stood on the roadside. The troopers of the
CRPF camp Chanpora were flailing long Bamboo sticks in air while rifles
dangled from their shoulders. The protesters marched towards Rambagh
and when they reached the Natipora crossing, hysterical CRPF troopers
and policemen charged at them beating anybody came in their way.
Bilal Bhat, bureau chief of television news channel Sahara
Samay covering the incident, said, “A CRPF officer was beating people
indiscriminately, women too. I heard shrieks of children in a TATA-407
vehicle when the commandant abused the driver and ordered him to park
the vehicle on roadside. His troopers didn’t spare even the women. A
Maruti car driver and an auto driver passing by were beaten by his
troopers. Were policemen not wearing uniforms the officer would have
beaten them too in the frenzy.”
Police fired dozens of tear smoke canisters towards the fleeing
protesters and beat them up with bamboo sticks on Natipora Bund.
Another batch of CRPF troopers from the Chanpora camp beat up customers
inside a bakery shop, Jan Bakery, in Chanpora.

Hurriyat conference leader Syed Ali Shah
Geelani has termed Irshad’s killing as state terrorism, saying no part
of India was safe for Kashmiris now.
“Killing innocent Kashmiris has become a criterion of
patriotism for Indian police agencies. I appeal the heads of SAARC
countries to give preference to Kashmiris in education and jobs as
their life is in danger in India,” the veteran leaders said in a
statement. (GKNS)

Today, Delhi Police is saying that they found him in that condition. It will not be a surprise if after some days they term him as a top ISI/LeT/Jaish operative and flag the laurals of killing a terrorist.

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In another news GK reports

Aloosa (Bandipora): The residents of Aloosa,
Astengoo, Malangam, and Kuloosa villages of Bandipora area in Varmul
district have accused 15 Rashtriya Rifles of Army of shielding a
government gunmen and two informers who “threaten and harass the
villagers, interfere in their domestic affairs and extort money.”
Army denies that the trio is working for them. However, police
says the three men are working for different security agencies, not the
15 RR alone.

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GK reports

Bandipore, Oct 9: A vehicle of paramilitary Border Security Force troops crushed a boy and critically wounded a girl at Qazipora Bandipore on Monday, triggering protests in the area.
According to witnesses, the vehicle, part of a BSF convoy which was coming from Sopur, hit class 6th student Danish son of Abdur Rashid Rather and Farhana daughter of Abdur Rashid Sofi, both residents of Kaloosa village. They were critically wounded and shifted to Srinagar where Danish succumbed to his injuries.
When the body of Danish was brought here, hundreds of people took to streets, shouting anti-BSF, anti-India and pro-freedom slogans. The protestors also pelted stones on the BSF vehicles damaging two Gypsies.
According to Deputy Superintendent of Police, Ghulam Jeelani Wani, a case has been registered against the BSF.

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Watch this greate Video Lord Of Ramadan. The song beautifully captures the essense of ramadan. Though music is haram in Islam, I feel it is better to watch this type videos and songs than the ones filled with shit of sleaze.

Cool video! Great stuff

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Promote Kashmir Bloggers, put this bagde on ur site.

Paste the following code in use template:

<a href="http://kashmir-bloggers.pbwiki.com/"><img border=”0″ src=”http://kashmir-bloggers.pbwiki.com/badge.php” /></a>

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The website of SSM College of Engineering is up and functional at http://www.ssmcollege.org/. It is the first website that we have developed. We generally do not accept the website development work because it normally does not involve the serrious kind of work. Same routine staic pages, forums etc. Same in every site. We did this because it was a pard of deal that we signed with the college to deploy the College Administration System for them.

But, now we have a separate division at XenSoft Labs to deal with the this sort od website chores, headed by Nadeem, our right hand man when it comes to selling to Kashmir Market and understanding the mentality of Kashmiri Market.

This new division, comprises of PHP developers and web designers who will be developing the websites for our clients, while myself and Raashid(who is still in Chandigarh) will concentrate on developing the long term tech strategy for XenSoft.

So it is official now. We are accepting the development of informational websites for Corporates, Colleges, Business Houses etc.

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Hey Kashmir dudes blogging out there. I have just created a wiki page for collecting Kashmiri bloggers and people blogging about Kashmir. It can e accesed at http://kashmir-bloggers.pbwiki.com/.

To get you Name added to this wiki drop me or Zafar a comment on our blogs. We will add your name to it. Please mention your name, title of your blog and the topics that you post on.

Next Step: Start an feed aggregator for Kashmir related blogs.

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Did you ever wonder how can you shoot yourself in foot.

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One single problem that I have with Firefox, it is memory leaks in firefox.
After using it for arround 3 hours my system monitor is reporting a whooping 102,786 K of memory usage.

Mozilla Guys need to do something about it.

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Greater Kashmir reports:

Soldiers of Army’s 36 Rashtriya Rifles shot dead a brother and his sister and injured their spouses in south Kashmir’s Islamabad district on Tuesday night, triggering massive anti-India demonstrations on Wednesday. Reports said the soldiers opened fire on a family at Ahlan Gadole in Kokernag area when they were returning to their homes from fields

And the killers appologize

The Army has regretted the Kokernag killings, saying the civilians were killed due to mistaken identity

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I WONDER WHY:

Why a Jew can grow his beard in order to practice his faith.

    But when Muslim does the same, he is an extremist and terrorist!

Why a nun can be covered from head to toe in order to devote herself to God.

    But when Muslimah does the same, she oppressed.

When a western women stays at home to look after her house and kids she is respected because of sacrificing herself and doing good for the household?

    But when a Muslim woman does so by her will, they say, “she needs to be liberated”!

Any girl can go to university wearing what she wills and have her rights and freedom?

    But when Muslimah wears a Hijab, they prevent her from entering her university!

When a child dedicates himself to a subject he has potential.

    But when he dedicates himself, to Islam he is hopeless!

When a Christian or a Jew kills someone religion is not mentioned,

     But when Muslim is charged with a crime, it is Islam that goes to trial!

When someone sacrfices himself to keep others alive, he is noble and all respect him.

    But when a Palestinian does that to save his son from being killed, his brother’s arm     being broken, his mother being raped, his home being destroyed, and his mosque     being violated — He gets the title of a terrorist! Why? Because he is a Muslim!

When there is a trouble we accept any solution?
    But If the solution lies in Islam, we refuse to take a look at it.

When someone drives a perfect car in a bad way no one blames the car.

    But when any Muslim makes a mistake or treats people in a bad manner – people         say “Islam is the reason”!

Without looking to the tradition of Islam, people believe what the newspapers say.

    But question what the Quran says!

Original URL on Orkut.

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Times of India has this wonderfull story about an Islamic School, 
The Al-Jamiatul-Fikriya
Islamic English School,  that makes wearing the burkha compulsory for its staff, even non-muslims.

Read the interesting comments by hindu staffers

However modestly we may dress, men’s eyes always fall
on our bodies, sometimes resting here, sometimes there. But in a burkha, what
can a man see
Malti, Teacher

Mashaaalh!

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While working on an assignment to write a front-end for Wikipedia, I ran into a lot of troubles. First, I searched if there was someone providing API’s to get articles from wikipedia(I hate site scrapping). Found Ontok, after working on it for some time, I realized that id was more PITA than sites crapping. They changed API’s three times in two weeks and some how managed fuck the hell out of the wiki markup, with some weired encoding that seemed to work fine inside the text editor, when viewed directly from a web browser and when queried from localhost(with PHP) but somehow, it never worked when accessed from my clients box(I was using same configuration as my clients box). Finally decided to do it with cURL(sigh.. ).

Now after using cURL to get articles, client wanted all the links to be rebuilt to point to the search URL of his site rather than wikipedia. Now this required a lot of regular expression work to get this working. I hate to admit, but I din’t not want to write regular expression and debuging them for a week. Don’t get me wrong, Regexp is a very very powerfull tool but equally easy to shot in your foot.

jQuery came to rescue:
jQuery is a damn cool JavaScript toolkit that really rocks. Here is a bit of code that did all the trick for me:

--------------------------------

            var search_url = 'http://www.example.com/search.php?q=';

            var wiki_url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/';

            $(document).ready(function() {

                // Get all A elements with there 'href' attributes.

                $("a[@href]").each(function(i){

                    //Split the href to pieces

                    var link = $(this).href().split('/');

                    //Check if it is an interlink on wikipedia

                    if(link[link.length-2] == 'wiki'){

                        // for debugging with FireBug. A must have for web developer.

                        //See  http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

                        console.log(link);

                        //Split the last part of the link to check if it is a non-article link

                        //Non-Article links will include a ':' like 'Special:sreach', 'Category:Computer'

                        //We want to keep non-article links intact

                        var article = link[link.length-1].split(':');

                        //An article link does not contain a ':', hence  will not split

                        if(article.length == 1){

                            // This is what we need prefix with the search_url. i.e.

                            $(this).href(search_url+article[0]);

                        } else {

                            //rebuild all other links with to wikipedia, because wikipedia uses relative linking

                            $(this).attr({target: '_blank', href: wiki_url+link[link.length-1]});

                        }

                    } else {

                        // Make external links open in a new window.

                        $(this).attr('target','_blank');

                    }

                });

                $("#loading").css('display', 'none');

                $("#wiki-article").css('display','block');

            });

--------------------------------

Update: Removed scrpt tags. Don’t for get to include standard jquery.js file.
Notice at the end i am setting display:block for an element with id ‘wiki-article’. This is because this javascript script executes when DOM tree for the page is ready. So until the page loads fully, the fetched article will still have original links. We do not want people to see orignial links. So the article was hidden first and we will display it only when it is ready.

jQuery is a great way to do JavaScript. It actually makes JavaScript fun.
Very easy to learn and very intutive.

Do check out http://www.visualjquery.com/ for a great visual api docs for jquery.

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Buddy Arif(or ario, as we call him) has a great post that sums up the friendship that three of us(Ario, Irfan and me) share, in his blog post titled f.r.i.e.n.d.s. Below are few excerpts, with my comments:

Three of us still have fun together whenever all of us are in Srinagar.
The occasional appearances by other two good friends: the
Banglorean(Ovaise) and the Lawyer(Faheem) do occur, but they somehow
manage to remain out of touch!

So true about Faheem and Ovaise. The best part is that they always seem to have some justifiable excuses for not showing up. .

Nazim, the prolific output function, has always something to deliver…

Hmmm! One line definition for me. Who could have done it better than you, ario.

I do the most of listening while Irfan proves sometimes a potential argument to him at times…

Well ario definitely does do the listening most of the time, but take my word, when he talks, there is no way you gonna prove him wrong.

but then he[nazim] always manages…

Well, that my quality dude. I am not an entreprenuer for nothing.

Let me tell you something about our picnic trips….they happen at an
unusual time….they happen spontaneously…they are long drives….and when
we reach there for some reason or the other we have to turn our car
back and rush towards our homes and the picnic spot space vanishes and
enjoyment time tends to zero.

That is true, and you know whom to blame for it. Rememer, our trip to Preng.
What! Where is Preng. I can’t see it.

I hope next time this does not happen when all of us might be in Srinagar….next summer.

Whisfull thinking. Keep dreaming.

PS: The subject line Ario Mario Tario TICH  is an absurd, but funny folk game and a song with same lyrics, that children of kashmir pay a lot, mostly in chilly winters.

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Highlights of Python 2.5:

New Language Features

• Internally, the Python compiler now converts the source code to an
  abstract syntax tree (AST) before producing the bytecode.
• The ‘with’ operator replaces a common try/finally idiom that results in much
  cleaner and safer code.
• Generators gained push, throw and close methods. Values passed to push
  will be returned by the yield statement when the generator is resumed.
  throw takes an exception and causes the yield statement to raise the
  passed exception in the generator. close is used to terminate a generator.
  This turns generators into a form of coroutine and makes them even more
  powerful.
• Conditional expressions of the form (format: TrueValue if Condition else FalseValue)
  were added.
• Import can use both relative and absolute imports when inside packages.
• Try/except/finally were changed so that it’s now possible to have both except
  blocks and a finally block for the same try block.
• Exceptions have become new-style classes, and the exception hierarchy has
  been rearranged a bit.
• Internally, Python was changed to use the Py_ssize_t type – this means that
  many structures that were limited to 2^32 objects can now hold up to 2^64
  instead.

New or Upgraged builtins:

• partition and rpartition methods were added to str and unicode. This
  greatly simplifies the process of searching and splitting strings.
• New builtins any and all evaluate whether an iterator contains any or all
  True values, respectively.
• min and max gained a key keyword parameter, analogous to sort.

New or Upgraded modules and packages:

• In keeping with the theme of adding tried and true packages to the standard
  library, in 2.5 we’ve added ctypes, ElementTree, hashlib, sqlite3 and wsgiref
  to the standard library that ships with Python.
• Google’s summer of code resulted in a new cProfile profiling module. This is a
  much more efficient version of the venerable profile.py module that’s shipped
  with Python for many many years. GSoC also gave us a rewritten mailbox module
  that can both read and write mailboxes in a variety of formats.
• The struct module was updated to support a new Struct object. These are similar
  to the re module’s compiled form of regular expressions.
• Some other smaller modules added to the standard library include uuid, msilib
  and spwd.

Check out AMK’s section on Whats New in Python 2.5 for detailed treatment. I will put my comments on the changes in new version in detail, in comming days.

Looking forward to get my hands wet on it.

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Python 2.5 is out. I am really excited about the new features in this version. Check out AMK’s section on Whats New in Python 2.5.

I will write my comments on the changes in new version in detail.

Looking forward to get my hands wet on it.

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An explosion just rocked some where near my house. I do not know yet what it was, but it was huge.
There was an explosion an hour ago but nothing happened after that. I mean, I was some kind of crack down or something similar. But now I can hear some voices in the orchids behind my house.

I will have to wait till morning to know what it was.

UPDATE 11 pm:  Now I can here some bullets being fired.

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I just recieved a mail from one of my buddies Raashid Malik, with this short story. It almost managed to roll a tear down my cheek.

ONE BEDROOM FLAT… AN INDIAN SOFTWARE ENGINEER’S
LIFE… – A Bitter Reality

As
the dream of most parents I had acquired a degree in Software Engineer
and joined a company based in USA, the land of braves and opportunity.
When I arrived in the USA , it was as if a dream had come true.

Here
at last I was in the place where I want to be. I decided I would be
staying in this country for about Five years in which time I would have
earned enough money to settle down in India .

My father was a
government employee and after his retirement, the only asset he could
acquire was a decent one bedroom flat. I wanted to do some thing more
than him. I started feeling homesick and lonely as the time passed. I
used to call home and speak to my parents every week using cheap
international phone cards. Two years passed, two years of Burgers at
McDonald’s and pizzas and discos and 2 years watching the foreign
exchange rate getting happy whenever the Rupee value went down.
Finally
I decided to get married. Told my parents that I have only 10 days of
holidays and everything must be done within these 10 days. I got my
ticket booked in the cheapest flight. Was jubilant and was actually
enjoying hopping for gifts for all my friends back home.
If I miss
anyone then there will be talks. After reaching home I spent home one
week going through all the photographs of girls and as the time was
getting shorter I was forced to select one candidate.
In-laws told
me, to my surprise, that I would have to get married in 2-3 days, as I
will not get anymore holidays. After the marriage, it was time to
return to USA , after giving some money to my parents and telling the
neighbors to look after them, we returned to USA.

My wife
enjoyed this country for about two months and then she started feeling
lonely. The frequency of calling India increased to twice in a week
sometimes 3 times a week. Our savings started diminishing. After two
more years we started to have kids. Two lovely kids, a boy and a girl,
were gifted to us by the almighty. Every time I spoke to my parents,
they asked me to come to India so that they can see their
grand-children.

Every year I decide to go to India. But part
work part monetary conditions prevented it. Years went by and visiting
India was a distant dream. Then suddenly one day I got a message that
my parents were seriously sick. I tried but I couldn’t get any holidays
and thus could not go to India . The next message I got was my parents
had passed away and as there was no one to do the last rights the
society members had done whatever they could. I was depressed. My
parents had passed away without seeing their grand children.

After
couple more years passed away, much to my children’s dislike and my
wife’s joy we returned to India to settle down. I started to look for a
suitable property, but to my dismay my savings were short and the
property prices had gone up during all these years. I had to return to
the USA . My wife refused to come back with me and my children refused
to stay in India . My 2 children and I returned to USA after promising
my wife I would be back for good after two years.

Time passed
by, my daughter decided to get married to an American and my son was
happy living in USA. I decided that had enough and wound-up every thing
and returned to India . I had just enough money to buy a decent 02
bedroom flat in a well-developed locality.
Now I am 60 years old and
the only time I go out of the flat is for the routine visit to the
nearby temple. My faithful wife has also left me and gone to the holy
abode.

Sometimes I wondered was it worth all this? My father,
even after staying in India, had a house to his name and I too have the
same nothing more.

I lost my parents and children for just ONE EXTRA BEDROOM.

Looking
out from the window I see a lot of children dancing. This damned cable
TV has spoiled our new generation and these children are losing their
values and culture because of it. I get occasional cards from my
children asking I am alright. Well at least they remember me.

Now
perhaps after I die it will be the neighbors again who will be
performing my last rights, God Bless them. But the question still
remains ‘was all this worth it?’

I am still searching for an answer…………….!!!!

— By an Indian Software Engineer who was in US

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Today I recieved an email from ‘barcamp_delhi’, one of my subscribed mailing list on Yahoo Groups. It was about a friend of someone asking about a problem existing in the mindset of “Indian Programmers”. It was a long email, but the whole point is summarized in just one paragraph.

She(some one not from India, actually China) had observed that in India Guys have this strange notion that Coding is only real test of knowledge . so untill your manager can’t sit with you and punch-in a syntactically right code . your team will not listen to you . design, UI,Usability,Business Logic are looked down . guys who write code consider these things as gimmicks and want to do Pure Computer Sc which in there opinion is only Prog /coding .

It is funny and ironic, at the same time. Funny because this person(who said the above verses) is some one who is actually leading a team of tech guys and Ironic because non tech managers normally misunderstand geeks too much.

The root of all evil:
Basically, almost all geeks and nerds are creative and artistics people, who know that they are creativity. This creativity, along with self conciousness about the same, brings along arrogance. So it is quite natural to look down upon people from other fields mostly management. Now, managers will argue that management is also a creative job. I do not disagree, but it is like my “field of art is better than yours” situation. Painter think they are better than scluptors, scluptors think they are better than wood carvers and so on. But, this a universal problem, not with Indian programmers(until and unless you mean Indians are better programmers ).

But, problem lies in the management of technical guys(I have to say that). Most of the time, geeks are managed by people who don’t even know the ‘P’ of programming. Even worse most of the time, they do not know the real power and limitations of technology. Managers set non-sense deadlines on programmers, keep interuppting them by the famous Project Manager punch line “What is the status”, keep insisting on mailing the daily status reports when same information is already present in support tools like issue tracker, project management app etc. This is what leads to all the problems.

Design, Business Logic solvers are looked down upon by programmer, only when design, UI, usability etc are done by some one who are morons when it comes to programming. By the way, what makes you think that a programmer who can convert you design into code cannot design and develop business logic.

The solution:
Best solution to this problem is to “let the geeks be happy in their geekdom”. Do not try to tell them there are people better than them in other fields. Such a faith keeps things going and your programmers happy and super charged. In other words, “Do not break their moral”.

Try to get a project manager who has a background in technology, even better if he is a programmer himself. That way your team can always look up to him. It is a kind of satisfaction to have someone on your team who know more than you and can help you if you get stuck. If your project manager’s answer to every technical query is “I don’t know, I am not a programmer”, GOD help your team. Remember, we are programmers and we are the best community when it comes to learning fromeach other.

Let your geeks do the design and time estimate for their work. After all it is them who has to code it, not the Project Manager. Your geeks are best estimators of time. Only bargain on it later when they come up with their designs and estimates. They will love your comments and most of the time accept them(if your comments are worthy). Trust plays an important role here. Trust you programmer, they will in turn trust you. Moreover, it lets your programmers feel that they are in control, means moral goes up, meaning productivity goes up, meaning quality goes up, meaning projects are on time, meaning clients are happy, meaning more money comes, meaning organization grows.

Remember, in software business, programmers are the most important assets, not your managers. It is comparatively easier to find good managers than good programmers.

Remember there are only to types of programmers, ‘God’ and ‘Bad’. God programmer are futher categorized in beginners, intermediate, advance, expert, wizard, etc. Bad programmers are just bad. There is no such thing a beginner bad programmer, advance bad programmer etc.

In the end, to implement all these solutions, just get an agile development process set up in your organization. Take a look Extereme Programming. You will get all these benifits in one go.

What ever I have said above, comes from personal expereince from my running own company, XenSoft Labs(http://www.xensoftlabs.com) and from one of the best place to work at, Tekriti Software(http://www.tekritisoftware.com/), where I worked previously. People there, took care of all the above stated things very carefully and very “implicitly”, without a single programmer ever noticing it. I, myself realized this when I started my own venture. Bieng implicit is very important. Don’t go one touting the trumpet and boasting your programmer that you are taking care of them, make them feel it without ever saying a single word.

Moreover, there is a great essay on Eric Raymonds web page about managing programmers. Read it. Though, I do not agree on everything Eric says in it(thats a different story, altogether), you will still learn much more about managing programmers. There is another article for programmers, teaching programmers how to deal with managers. Make your programmers read it. But for god sake don’t ask your managers to tell the programmers to read it and vice versa. You will make it sound bad. This is something a programmer’s mentor should do(hope you have the mentoring system for your programmers).

Today I took an exercise. I tried to test how many lines of useful code can I produce per hour. Before going into the results, I will tell you about the strategy I adopted to take this exercise.

Test Problem:
Problem had to be something that I understood very well and could finish in one hour using the tools I best know. I decided on a  simple discussion list, which allows you to add a topic and reply to it. No user authentication and no fancy UI’s. Seems doable in one hour.

Class and Database Design
Step one was to define the class design and database schema for our discussion list. I took an object oriented approach instead of writing standalone scripts. It took me arround 15-20 minutes to fully document the class and database design.
Two classes one for topic and other for comments are to be implemented, for features like new topic, edit topic, delete topic, new comment, edit comment and delete comment.

Start coding:
I took this test once using PHP and once using python. The results are below.

1. PHP: I used plain PHP with native mysql libs and no PEAR or any other libs were used. Two classes, when finished, were arround 150 lines of code, without comments and took arround 55 minutes.
2. Python: I used sqlite for database and and CGIHTTPServer available in standard library of python distribution. Design remained same and it was arround 100 lines of code and time roughly the same, 55 minutes.
3. These 55 minutes do not include HTML design.
4. Note that python normally requires less amount of code that other languages to get same thing done.

But this was just a toy problem and not a real world problem.  Well, I am doing this kind of study these days a lot. These day, I am maintaining an extensive log of time I spend on coding. So, far results don’t seem very encouraging.

Alien Problems:
Problems about which I know nothing, those have seen them for first time:
12 lines of usefull code per hour (, includes thinking on it

Some what, I know problems:
Problems, that I know about but have not solved before.
33 lines of usefull code per hour, including thinking

Is there some one who has 3 year of software expereince and still suck at low coding rate.
Ah we have a new term, Coding Rate.

By chance, I happened to search the kashmir tag on www.wordpress.com

Alhamdulillah, I am not alone.

Just take a look at feelings of kashmiris http://wordpress.com/tag/kashmir/ yourself. You will here only one voice, Give us our dignity. You will be asked only one question: You keep on touting kashmiris are your brothers, but what are you doing  for the injustice that kashmiris are seeing everyday?

Featured blog:

• http://kashmir.wordpress.com/
• http://zarafshan.wordpress.com/

While going though my blogroll today, I found ReactOS. ReactOS aim to achieve full binary compatibility for applications and device drivers for windows XP/200x series OS’s from MS.

What really amazed me most is that this highly ambitios project is existing since 1995.

While the aims are good, I have a few words to say in opposition.

What is the aim of Free and Open Source Software.
Aim of FOSS should be to liberate the end user from the tricks that vendors of proprietary and closed source software employ to lock in users. By developing the windows clone. By developing a Windows XP clone we are again putting back the user into the shackles.

Talent can be utilized else where
This talent can be utilized on enhancing existing free and open source softwares such as Linux, GNOME, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird etc.

Spend time on original thing
I ask why would a person use ReactOS, if he can use MS Windows. No matter how hard we try still ReactOS is going to be behind MS version by a very large distance. This was no the case with Linux as the specs where not closed, they were open and developers could implement them and saty on bleeding edge of the features. What is ReactOS team going to do when Vista comes out. It will take them another 10 years to reverse engineer it and then develop it. By then MS will be ready with something else. So IMHO, it is better if we spend our efforts on the oringinal things.

On the positive note, this a very good news for FOSS community. By developing Linux, FreeBSD etc. we demonstrated that it is not only Bell Labs who can develop Unix. Now, we are demonstrating that it is not only MS who can develop windows XP.

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Marc Canter has an interesting post where he talks about houw Google is building a moustrap and trying to force its programming model on developers(kinda).

I fully agree, Marc, except on one point.

Then when it comes to reinventing RSS, go for it. Provide support,
resources and even house the meetings on your campus for Atom – the
so-called next generation protocol.  So far so good.  No one is gonna
complain about that – right?

Atom is actually better than RSS, however google should  have extended RSS rather than reinvent a totally new feed format.

I am doing RSS Vs ATOM kinda study these days will talk more about in comming days.

However, it is really haertning to see that someone is really taking note of it. We do not want another Micro$soft taking holding us hostage. We should remember the age old saying

Do not put all you eggs in one basket

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Greater Kashmir reports

Frustrated by frequent harassment by troops, a youth in Botengo area of
Sopur attempted suicide on Monday. Reports said soldiers of Rashtriya
Rifles were frequently visiting the house of 18-year-old Bilal Ahmad
Mala son of Muhammad Maqbool after he joined protests against the death
of 22 schoolchildren in Wullar boat tragedy allegedly due to negligence
of Navy in May. Finally, on Monday he consumed some poisonous stuff to
end his ordeal.

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For the first time(or may be after a very very very long time), some words of wisdom have come from the mouth of Dr. Farooq Abdullah, chief patron of National Conference.

guns and killings in the state will not stop until New Delhi
“sincerely” talks with Islamabad. “India and Pakistan claim Kashmir as
their territory, but nobody is talking about Kashmiris who are the
basic party rather sufferers of the dispute

Read more Greater Kashmir

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Yet another great great write up, in his too cool style, Ashish Kumar presents

After all, what is a company about

Ashish is definitely one of the best blogger from India writing on entreprenuership.

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Miguel de Igza, guru behind great projects like GNOME and MONO, has a brilliant post about this topic.

Also check out the video

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I am frustrated, you will soon hear one cool guy called Mir Nazim ended up in mental asylum.

Reason

My Acer TravelMate Notebook

It just keep dumping core. And right now i don’t even have the liberty of sending it to Acer support center for a week due to the pressure of work. After asking my vendor about the solution, he says that this is a known problem in Acer Notebooks. So no gaurantee that this problem will not surface again.

Why the hell did not you tell me this earlier.

Now, I am planning to change my notebook. Any recomendations. I need a laptop that is most user friendly. It is linux supported modems, wi-fi cards etc. Minimum 3 hours of battery backup. 1200×800 screen resolution etc. I am thinking about HP. What do you guys suggest.

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Nick Lewis has posted a greate piece of text on drupal.org. It is a must read for wannabe drupal developers. I will not write any comment here. Go and read it yourserlf on  http://drupal.org/node/77487.

PS: Once your read it, you will come to know why I am not commenting on it here. It is a surprise for you.

Technorati Tags: drupal, best practices, drupal hell

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After recieving the comment from Nitin on my previous post, I am really happy that there are poeple in India who think from above their shoulders rather than from between their legs. Most of the time people just blindly support their forces not even thinking for once whether they are acting righteously or not.

As the saying goes result matters not the means used to acieve it. This is what Indian Security Forces are doing. I am fine with India trying to wipe out so called terrorism in Kashmir. No respectable country would let go one it’s parts easily(Reality Check for Kashmiris: At this moment Kashmir is definitely a part of India). But the point is if the tactics employed to achieve the ends are

• RAPE THIER DAUGHTER, SISTERS AND MOTHERS
• KILL THEIR YOUTH
• HUMILIATE THEIR ELDERS

on what basis is India claiming that Kashmir is the part of India. (Reality Check for India: These tactisc will only go on to esclate terrorism and this is already visible in other parts of India).

What my point is, that Kashmiris are always made to feel that they are an entity external to Indian emotions. If just one of the national news channel had broadcasted this news to rest of India, condemned it and captured the views of rest of India, it would have gone a long way in building trust in India, its people and the Govt. We are not demanding the coverage as expansive as Mumbai Blasts but at least some coverage. We do not need any large donation camps to be set up for the families who five sons were murdered or any rehablitation center for minor girls raped by security forces. But at least listen to our side of the story. Address the root cause of terrorism. I have just stated three.

Moreover, the CRPF personals who killed this youth in cold blood, were rewarded with promotions and Rs 100000/- cash prize.

And Nitin: Greater Kashmir is a small unaided news paper in Srinagar continously recieving threats from Security Forces(many times they published those threats). They are doing a great job. On what ever small budget, their full new paper with full articles is available online free of cost at http://www.greaterkashmir.com.  Even Times of India will dare put full news paper with full article  s online free of cost.

If you really feel for Kashmiris, I request eash and every Indian to stand up and demand an explaination for what is happening in Kashmir. Otherwise you are just after the land and it is only a war of egos between two nations.

May Allah forgive our sins and give peace to whole human kind. Amen.

Greater Kashmir reports

Troopers of paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) shot dead on Wednesday an undergraduate student near Dalgate here claiming that he was about to throw a grenade on troopers when they gunned him down. Eyewitnesses and local residents rubbished the CRPF claim, saying he was riddled with bullets from a close range and then a grenade was dropped in his bag to pass him off as a militant. The killing triggered a protest demonstration against the troopers and the state government which was instantly quelled by police in the area where shopkeepers and local residents have been protesting against the coercive security measures since August 1 when militants shot dead two CRPF troopers from a pointblank range.

Body of the youth killed by CRPF men in Dalgate. (Mubashir Khan/GK)

THIS IS BRUTAL: A student with
a copy of Greater Kashmir during protests against the killing of a
student in Dalgate. (Habib Naqash/GK)

More images at
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/photo.asp?Date=10_8_2006
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/photo.asp?Date=11_8_2006

What keeps on suprising me that after such a cold blooded murder, how much the police and security forces lie. Both parites have the contradicting versions of the incident. While Security Forces said that he was about to throw a granade, Police said in a press conference that granade exploded in his hands.

These news will never make it to main stream media in India. Today whole kashmir is asking the rest of India.

• Why do only distroted versions of such news reach the mainstream media?
• Why are such news not broadcasted in each Indian household?
• When News and Media people do not have any problem in showing atrocities comminted by Indian Security Forces in places like Tripura and Nagaland, Why are they trying save the face in case of kashmir?
• Is it the media that is not showing these news or the government just wants to keep  FUCKING us.
• Blasts in Mumbai, triggered whole country in union and whole country showered moral, monetary and emotional support for the victims. Kashmir has lost more the 100,000 sons, where the the moral and emotional support from rest of India.

I do not understand. I want each and every citizen of India to answer my (our) questions.

Just one

Finally we  moved XenSoft Labs to Drupal CMS with a clean theme based on Foundation Theme.

Drop down menus are generated using nice_menus module. Great  thing about nice_menus module is the it is a pure CSS no Javascript menu if used in Firefox. a small JS file is required only for IE(huh) due to brain dead nature of CSS engine in IE. I hope IE7 final release is better.

Local daily Greater Kashmir, yesterday reported  the resignation of the chairman of J & K State Human Rights Commission.  Reasons  cited were that he was fed up by lying to people about the actual number of human rights voilations.

Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad earlier had quoted in current assembly session that number human rights voilations cases during his tunure of one year are only 3, while according to SHRC there were 44 cases of desappearences after arrest by Indian “Security” Forces, in Srinagar and surrounding town.  This led to a lot of dabating in assembly and opposition leaders holding CM and security forces responsible.

Hizb-ul-Mujaideen chief, Syed Sallahudin, quoted through same news paper that current CM has given a free hand to security forces and not allowing local police bodies to interfere.

Greater Kashmir, few days ago, also reported arrest of an major from Rashtiya Rifiles regiment of Indian Security Forces while he was trying to molest a 16 year old girl in a hotel.

I am surprised why these news never make it to the main stream media. Why are such news limited only to local dailies. Is it that Indian Govt. is trying to hide the true face of Indian Security Forces in Kashmir from the people of India. Or that Indians have become Zombies and these thing have no  effect on people at all. Or that they actually want Kashmiri’s to be abused like this. I cannot understand.

If this sort of abuse continues, there is not even a remotest possibility of peace prevailling once again in Kashmir.

May ALLAH give us peace

Just testing to check out posting to external blogs.

We just updated XenSoft website with a very simple template from www.oswd.org.  We used leaves template designed by Anthony. Thank you very much Anthony and OSWD.

Do check it out.    

Do you know the anwer. Well one of my buddies seems to know it. He sent me an email with some IT related Trivi. There was one question that prompted me to write this post. You know what question I am talking about. Any guesses what answer was given there.

A J A X 

What AJAX. Google is not written in AJAX. In fact no web application can be ever written in AJAX. SO, I leave it here for you to reasearch WHY!!!.

This blog post “stop writing loner applications“  that is asking web developers to stop making stand  alone apps and create small plugable, replacable and interchangeable moudules instead.

And this one, “Reprogramming Wheel“, talks about why Loner apps are created.
Both are

• Interesting
• Entertaining
• Correct (yes both of ‘em)

That I am planning to write a blogging software.
Here is what it will be

• A Blogging Platform
• A simple CMS as well
• A feed aggregator
• Built with Django (I am lovin it)
• AJAXified

And may be some day it may have:

• Plugins/modules capability
• Theme engine
• Some day run on my site (err. sorry. new site)

DISCLAIMER: No promises.

After a lot of trying, I proudly announce that I have given up the task to import my old Planet Nazim posts into this new blog.

Since my personal site, PlanetNazim, expires tommorow, I have setup this new blog here on WordPress.com. There are a lot of reasons why I am not renewing PlanetNazim.com, which I will explain in some other post. .