Bug Vanquisher: Rant vs Vent

Firefox Updated, Close First Window

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:12:28 GMT

Why should I close gmail for instance?

Catch the Mistakes

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:35:28 GMT

Hot off facebook's profile home...

What are the reasons that prevent you from reading Urdu Magazine? Pakistan Sponsored Poll

Create a Poll »
I don't like the magazine
I can't read Urdu
I prefer reading in English
I live outside Saudi Arabia/I never heard of it
I don't like to read at all

Now, this is SO horribly wrong.

1- Urdu is/was never spoken in KSA. Even the immigrants don't make up much.

2- There is no positive option.

3- It is impossible to answer for a blind person.

4- Not wanting to read is no one particular language's fault, perhaps the individual is real dumb, stupid moron. For all we know.

Flat Perspective

Sat, 24 May 2008 12:16:44 GMT

Not mine, about some stupid movies.

As a rule of thumb if the thing you are watching (in other words, wasting time) does not have a flat perspective, something like spherical projection or, even more obtusely, oblong, then, its simply not worth the time.

There will be no story, just stupid flash backs (strong analogy to 'Lost'). And it will end so suddenly, you'll scratch your head longer than the time it took you to watch it figuring out what just happened.

Who said Mac was horrible

Fri, 23 May 2008 06:59:54 GMT

Apparently, you don't have to walk to a Mac to see those abominations like bitmap graphics, fixed DPIs and no anti-aliasing. You can have these in Windows if you get to work on Eclipse.

Yummy vector graphics at 6x zoom.

Super anti-aliased edges

Horribilus Totalus

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:33:23 GMT

I can't properly write anything from Live Writer if I have IE8 installed. For some weird reason, mshtml.dll seems to decide that an AV is in order at some random instant whenever playing with tables or particularly (read pretty) formatted text.

Stick Your Leg [Here]

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:57:41 GMT

LINQ and SQL Server: Good or Bad Addition to the Database World?
While SQL Server 2008 has introduced many new features and improved many existing ones, one of the newer database features that has recently started taking the development world by storm is Language Integrated Query or LINQ. There are many different varieties of LINQ, including: LINQ to XML, LINQ to Entities, LINQ over Dataset (VB and C#), and LINQ to SQL.

This is what you get when someone who is no programmer tries to stick their leg into matters no one in their ancestors ever understood.

By the looks, it seems that T-SQL itself natively supports LINQ. :)

Muslims Being Holocaust

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:53:14 GMT

This deserved a break from my busy facebook schedule. :)

http://razzita.blogspot.com/2008/03/israel-minister-warns-palestinians-of.html

Why The Hell Are You Still Here!

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:23:10 GMT

Configuring Updates: Stage 3 of 3 - 100% Complete

Uninstalling Service Pack: Stage 2 of 3 - 100% Complete

Uninstalling Service Pack: Stage 3 of 3 - 100% Complete

Everything 100% complete, yet still on computer screen!

Oh! I Just Noticed, "My Eyes Are Brown"

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:26:52 GMT

If your not down with brown you dont live in my town
soon theyll own us
I can honestly say I am a racist, always have been always will be, Its part of the human condition, all we can do is work everday on getting a liitle better.
our outward actions may always be honurable but our minds betray us

These are not my words, rather uttered to me.

A little conversation on skype I was having two hours ago, with a US resident, immigrant from Latin America.

I doubt about myself whether the feeling would be mutual or not.

[Nitpickers corner]

There might be two mistakes in this, I'll correct them in due time. [:)]

I Give Up!

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:52:51 GMT

It is my lucky draw. My fate. Something I deserve.

Well, not deserve, but it always happens to me. Whenever I take a day off, the sucky combination of PTCL + KESC comes into action. I hardly get 30 minutes of continuous internet access during that entire day. Whether it is the frequent power failures happening every 30 minutes just to exhaust the UPS or the time it takes DSL modem to sync during those happy minutes when my computer isn't running off a UPS.

And there are people who still say

سب سے پہلے پاکستان

Not that I ever speak ill of my country, but this is one time just too much. I find that really hard to grasp these days.

So, from now on, there will be no off days from work. At least others won't suffer the power loss due to me being at home.

Oh The Tone!

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:23:11 GMT

IE blogs opened the flood gates few days ago by letting out that IE 8 (or whatever!) is being planned.

You may want to look at the comments, as the original post is dwarfed by totally funny comments.

But Then, What Is "My" Culture Exactly?

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:56:24 GMT

A few days back, I posted what's not my culture. Right after that post, the next day when I was going to office, I noticed something else about the bus I was sitting in which culminated in this post.

Writing all this stuff is clearly going to make my blog hit high in some nasty search-engine terms :(. But, that concerns me not, because someone should say something before it is too late.

There was a sentence written on the back of the seat in front of my that made me think all that day what is our culture turning into? The sentence was:

"Put your hand in my pocket and touch my rocket".

Clearly, an indication of psychological disorder we call "homo-sexuality" definitely not allowed in eastern culture.

And that's just one thing we are embracing. Over the years, that sort of behavior has firmly developed in our police and armed forces. Police specializes in being aboriginal "pedophiles". Homosexuality is common in military training institutes. And not just homosexuality, you will find drunk sailors, officers, some kind of wife-swap (even if there is no wife!) in them.

Police forces are almost entirely from Punjab and a minor fraction from interior Sindh and NWFP. Same can be said about armed forces. The problem is three fold. You can expect anything from a person coming from Punjab because generally the ethical background is "anything goes", "do it as long as you are not caught, if caught offer to others too". Men coming from interior Sindh are truly tribal beasts with no education and sympathy. Those from NWFP have women as a banned item in that far, isolated society built around stupid rules and as a result, a guy has to vent off all that piled up desire of "ooh, aah, ouch".

Additionally, over the years, I have witnessed one or two such cases per year while traveling on the bus, take any route, no restriction there! Even the beggars are riding the band wagon. There was one I saw back in June offering glimpses in return for money.

We are also very good at all other whole host of stuff no one would call the chores of a healthy society.

We regularly rob (again, local police a big factor), snatch mobiles and personal belongings on the street.
Our media may as well start broadcasting rated movies than the programs they show with women half naked.
The film industry is rotten right through the bottom with bitches from all over the country joining in as glamour girls. Although, I don't think there is any need of a film industry in the first place.
Our education is a discovery from past and ported back to future.
We are not faithful to our employers in our offices and violate any rule or guideline if it hinders our personal satisfaction.
Political system is a laughing stock for rest of the world.

Nic Robertson: Prerequisite Of Any US Invasion

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:47:36 GMT

During the whole 'Red-Mosque' issue, Nic Robertson was besides himself presenting foundationless accusations upon Pakistan. The program, a special report of CNN investigates, was "Pakistan: The threat within" with such baseless claims like Musharraf being the cause rather than cure for lack of complete US control in Afghanistan and many more.

Now, he is up to his old tricks again, babbling all over CNN about what happened in Saudi Arabia in a rape case, but whatever I have found out about it from CNN only, consider it highly biased.

She went out with a non-mehram[1] to a shopping center some years ago, where she was kidnapped by seven men and was raped. Two of these men were caught and apprehended and later two more was caught and sentenced to 80 (or somewhere near that number which I don't remember) lashes. Additionally, that girl was also sentenced to 80 lashes because she was not with any mehram[2] at that instant. When she complained, her sentence was increased to 200 lashes.

The problem he has got with all this story is that he cannot (in general US) cannot keep his nose out of other people's business. She was rightfully sentenced under Islamic law and see what happened to her breaking those laws.

Last week, some EU countries pushed a resolution in UN to suspend death sentence all over the world which arguably, Uncle Sam, voted against and a majority of members. Some African countries said that EU countries are trying to force their ways to others.

The same conclusion can be drawn here. Why is US trying to force her own way to other countries? Is it just the "Oil" in the middle east or some higher motives? Isn't it trying to parade into someone's house breaching their privacy?

[1] A non-mehram to a women is any male who can marry her, in short anyone who is not mehram.

[2] A mehram to a women is any male who can never marry her. Some examples are father, brother, son, grandfather, brothers of father and mother etc.

Definitely Not My Culture

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:10:38 GMT

A couple of days ago, I sign-up to second life to check out what the hype is all about. Then, I forgot the password, that recovery email is yet to come. Instead I got this:

Jackhammer John has invited you to join a group in Second Life.
Jackhammer John has invited you to join a group.
There is no cost to join this group.
Group:
Sinful Erotic Xstacy Vip: This Group is for Our SEXY and Hot Patrons!!! If Your Not Here what are u doing on Sl??Come and Enjoy Yourself in SL Up and Rising Hot Night and Day Spot*wink wink*
Were open for business *winking*
Log in to accept or decline this invitation.

And the irony is two fold. I still cannot log-in to my account. And certain keywords in this post will increase unwanted traffic to my blog. I already had the misfortune of not understanding my actions and periodically get unwanted hits to disappoint the searcher. :)

I Demand An Explanation

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:32:55 GMT

They say "A picture is worth a thousand words". Therefore, I'll keep this post very short and let you figure out and tell me which part of hardware is from ATI/AMD on my system when everything screams an "Intel Inside"!

Perhaps, these may help you make your decision quickly.

(from msinfo32)

(from device manager)

Is Microsoft playing "Idiot Outside"? Do count this when making announcing the verdict.

Anecdotal, Yet Outdated and Incorrect

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:23:46 GMT

As a closed group of friends knows how much I read and the 150+ blogs blessed with my reading, I spend most of my time reading something, anything technical.

I have seen a phenomenon occurring over and over for the last few months. It is my habit to read a blog back to front when it is blessed :). And during those flash backs to past posts for the writer, I frequently encounter links which have been broken, out dated information, design decisions which never made to light of day etc.

As four (yes,four not just one) examples, consider these blogs (all are from Microsoft employees). The Old New Thing, Larry Osterman's Weblog, Brad Abrams and IRhetoric (this blog has been moved since).

First two are really old times for Microsoft. Their blogs are proud story tellers, recounting the events they had had over their career. But they don't stink, because they are not littered with broken links, code which will no longer compile, examples which do not apply to what is running right now on my computer. Well, honestly, Raymond's stinks a little because of his dry (sarcastic, add any others you may like) jokes.

On the other hand, consider the other two. Brad Abrams is the oldest one from any Microsoft employee I have read so far. But being old should count as a negative point. Earliest posts are from even before the PDC 2003 era. Most of the links are broken because they refer to GotDotNet. Some of the information about Longhorn (read Vista) is entirely incorrect.

Similar analysis can be done for IRhetoric. The links are broken all over the place. Information is entirely incorrect in earlier posts. What used to be Avalon, has posts containing sample which will never compile with the RTM bits.

But there has been no urge to update the code, fix the links or at least point out in the post that those links will no longer work, the code will not compile etc.

Bibi Takes Her Toll

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:26:36 GMT

I was very happy last week that two entirely unexpected holidays were gifted to citizens of Karachi. (Of course, I feel deeply sorry for the bereaved!)

But the problem is I have no holidays on two consecutive Saturdays, tomorrow and the one after that.

It also goes by 'Wait'

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:47:30 GMT

They all spell the same. They all mean the same. They mean try as you may, it will not let you for a whole host of reasons.

Get introduced to the second name of the wonderful machine, the marvelous invention 'computer'.

For the last hour, I have been building the latest release of boost. Yet my computer won't let me do anything else.

I wonder has our waiting for anything to be done has increased or not? Even with the ever faster computers and more and more computing power available at our finger tips, with the advent of multi-core processors, nearly every body can be seen waiting for something to finish, some download to complete, some compiler to stop whining about the dredged code or have his heart's desire to spit all those informative message about how it thinks a variable may be truncated during assignment.

We wait for our word processors to save the documents, watch those LEDs blink as the computer boots, wonder what's taking it so long to shutdown, curse while those GBs of RAM get written to disk if hibernating or read back during resume operations. And don't be astounded when visual studio takes forever to refactor code even when the changes are confined to a single function, go to any lengths to optimize (not improve) OLTP performance.

Even with broadband availability, our needs have expanded even more disproportionately.

Work expands to exhaust (and demand more) resources allocated to it.

Now, we seek even bigger downloads, Ajax based websites take forever to load on those dial-up connections. Ever tried facebook, with the plethora of pictures on every page, mounds of javascript at your service you better have had a broad band connection.

And a big factor in consumer oriented markets like desktop operating systems and application is to only improve the perceived speed of some operation yet never inspect code like this

Message message = ...;//get from somewhere

// A paramter has only one value, missing break after substitute call
foreach( Parameter parameter in parameters )
{
    IList values = GetAllValues( );
    foreach( Value value in values )
        if( value.Id == parameter.ValueId )
        {
            message.Substitute( parameter , value );
        }
}

They will go overboard to recommend things like

· Consider adding un-managed splash screen to show before the WPF app start. This will present the user with some UI and improve perceived responsiveness. Check blog later for a sample that demonstrates how this can be done.
[Improving WPF applications startup time]

With the release of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft build tools will finally have multiprocessor build support, with MSBuild having /maxcpucount:n and cl having /MP:n as the relevant options. Just as the added generics after MSDN filling pages about how dangerous templates are for everyone's health during .net framework 1/1.1 timeframe. So, I may expect boost to build a little faster next time I try that labor intensive (ahem! actually, only waiting for the damn thing to finish) operation.

It has been ages since multi-core processors came out. Hyper threading is a fact of history we take for granted these days. Multiple processors in one form or another are a norm rather than exception, yet it is hard to find properly written programs which can take advantage of even the most basic form of concurrency available. Having two processors in the bare minimum you can have but programs in the wild (and by wild I mean currently in heavy usage, not just written by your average Joe) blissfully ignore and have only one thread.

Herb Sutter rightfully said about these issue we will face increasingly in the future, with our processor clocks going no where.

We are shifting more and more towards ease. Ease of development, ease of use, ease of deployment, ease of availability, any ease you can fit in. Gone are the days when a redirector had only 128 byte foot print in low memory. Gone is the time when Windows ran happily in 4 MB of RAM.

So, I'll see you around when you will be waiting for my next post because I will be waiting for something else to finish.

Such A Long Absence

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:00:08 GMT

What a long absence from the blog world! Almost two weeks. I really missed writing blog posts and reading others peoples' crazy ideas.

Alas, the tragedy started with us moving our office to a new location. As is always the case, things rarely flow smoothly when you are moving premises for about 25 people and only two hands to manage it. Turned out, it was a full week of agony, working amid all the furnishing going on, with glass being fitted to the windows right in front of our eyes and tiles firmly set on the floor.

Eventually, the hub hub subsided leaving the lingering problem of Internet connectivity. First, it was PTCL's fault. Required DSL modem changed from Loop H to Loop G (as if I know what either of these means). That took two days to grab. Then, it was the matter of properly connecting the modem to the rest of the system which took another three days at the hand of a particularly pesky lineman.

Week 2: Loop G modem is happy to display its Loop 1 green light to everyone but the router stepped in to spoil the fun and still no Internet connectivity. The exact problem is that we are unable to reach outbound addresses.

In the meantime, my poor computer (with a fried motherboard) came back as new yesterday, so here I am.

Human Rights

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:50:36 GMT

Every thing in italics is excerpts from here. My own additions appear like [this].

Lets begin with what the phrase 'Human Rights' means? Wikipedia says

"the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law."

The (dysfunctional) United Nations has much more to say in their "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". Although, I like to note that they need amendments to this declaration, specifically, Muslims are not humans, no rights to them, kudos. Let's party on them.

The words are familiar to every schoolchild in the United States:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That's the beginning of the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), largely written by Thomas Jefferson. ...

[Of course, Thomas Jefferson never said any thing about the means for the pursuit of Happiness. Anything goes. The ethically dying society has all sorts of means: adultery, prostitution, drinking etc. The list goes on.]

...Lynn Hunt [writer of Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007).] partially credits this to "the short punchy Essay on Crimes and Punishments, published in 1764 by a twenty-five-year-old aristocrat, Cesare Beccaria.... The Italian upstart rejected not only torture and cruel punishment but also—in a move remarkable for the time—the death penalty itself." (pg. 80)...

[All Islamic states should look forward to abolishing the death sentence from Islamic law. Already, it is common practice not to issue death penalty to women who clearly deserve it.]

...Despite the emerging evidence of Nazi crimes against Jews [The holocaust which many doubt never happened], Gypsies, Slavs, and others, the diplomats meeting in San Francisco [to create the United Nations] had to be prodded and pushed to put human rights on the agenda. ...

...In 1944, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had both rejected proposals to include human rights in the charter of the United Nations. Britain feared the encouragement such an action might afford to independence movements in its colonies. ...

Has this addition ever helped? Except to western world's own advantage only. Only as a means to gain entrance to some independent Arab state? And to ignore others completely?

The background/foreground in Background Intelligent Transfer Service foreground priority jobs

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 06:38:00 GMT

There was no pun, honestly. BITS in Windows XP (built-in, installable on Windows 2000, and available in every Windows version onwards) allows anyone to download files from a HTTP server, or upload files to an IIS hosted HTTP server which has been sufficiently configured. BITS offers various job priorities like foreground, high, normal and background (default) which directly correspond to how these jobs compete for their share in network traffic with other foreground processes accessing sockets.

The controversy lies with the foreground priority. Foreground priority is really foreground globally, it competes with network traffic from all other programs, robbing them of their share. For these jobs, BITS acts as a foreground download program which will steal all bandwidth available on the machine. The usual throttling of bandwidth usage as is the case with other priorities does not happen. Any other program will starve, browsers will display timeout errors all the time. MSDN incorrectly says that BITS will try to use only that portion of bandwidth which it determines would have been wasted otherwise.

"Background transfers are optimal in that BITS uses idle network bandwidth to transfer the files and will increase or decrease the rate at which files are transferred based on the amount of idle network bandwidth available. If a network application begins to consume more bandwidth, BITS decreases its transfer rate to preserve the user's interactive experience."

Not the case with foreground priority, it uses all available bandwidth leaving nothing for others. Whenever Windows Update in WIndows Vista is downloading updates, you can sit back and watch hopelessly how it steal your right to browse the web with its hungry foreground jobs. Now it seems that microsoft has modified Windows Update client for Windows XP and the default priority for updates is also foreground which was previously high.

Background priority is really the reverse, the one no one in their right minds should ever use. It pauses the download every 10 seconds and downloads about 10 KB in one go. Therefore, if it is the sole process accessing network on a computer, you will be amazed how little progress is made over any period of time. MSDN again incorrectly says that BITS will use any remaining bandwidth which should be all in this case, but the real situation is not what is written.

BG_JOB_PRIORITY_LOW

Transfers the job in the background with a low priority. Background transfers use idle network bandwidth of the client to transfer files. This is the lowest background priority level.

However, this is not at all the case in reality. Background jobs go to hibernation repeatedly, only awakening long enough to grab 10 KB every so much seconds.

Done with RTL language support in blogs

Mon, 14 May 2007 08:25:38 GMT

See my last post, how it has been messed up, the terrible font (perhaps I should edit it to set to something more readable), still more terrible LTR layout of a RTL language.