Life on the edge

Some people love to live life as El Paccino would say, "on the edge." Just dont look down. 

To our society

Our prophet wed four daughters. Only one of them, Fatima, was given dowery. What was she given? Anyone who's read elementary level Islamiat knows that. The only reason she was given dowery and others werent is that she was being wed to Ali, who was also under the Prophet's kifalat. Whatever little dowery was given to her was purchased from the mehr amount paid by Ali himself. There was no meal served.


This is "laanat." I give this laanat to myself, to you, to everybody for being part of this sick society. Here's a couple of letters that were published by the editor of a newspaper recently and were read to us today by the khateeb in the Friday prayers. The first one was written in the blood of the writers. I am only providing the account in my own words, not exact quotation, the letters were in urdu.

Letter number 1, I quote:
We are four sisters. Our father died years ago, and our mother raised us with a lot of effort. Instead of supporting, us, this society only hurled us around. Our mother is now on her death bed with several terminal diseases. We given tuitions and teach the Quran to the neighborhood kids to keep the bread going and to manage to stay indoors. Whenever we are forced to go out for some necessary chore, the beasts of this society await us to peal off our skin. We request someone to kindly do us a favor by wedding us all off so that we can finally live a safe, dignified life.

Letter number 2, I quote:
We are four sisters. Our parents are old and I work on computer composing to keep the livelihood. Whatever little I earn is hardly sufficient to pay the bills and for us to be able to cook pulses (daal) and vegetables. We never even cook beaf. People offer us huge sums to commit adultry, but our parents are asked for huge dowry for marriage. Islam made marriage simple and sin difficult, but our society is making sin inexpensive and marraige expensive.

Laanat on this society, and on you and me for being part of it. I wish that either Allah guide us to correct our ways, or send a bigger earthquake throughout the country to destroy us all, because all we are doing is spreading evil. It is better for a few good men to die alongwith the sinful rather than be supressed and watch evil spread.
If you look at it, women are the most suffering in all this scenario, at least as far as this world is concerned, yet, women are the only flag bearers of these stupid customs that we acquired from the hindus. I dont know if I can convince my parents, but perhaps I can convince you that what is wrong is wrong. Perhaps you can convince your parents, or perhaps at least, as parents ourselves, we would become a wall against this idiocy.

My editor

I think there's an error in the third paragraph here. 

Dead fish

One of my brother's fish died. Here's a post mortum snap of it. It is reportedly a specie termed as Angel. I was wondering why one of the fish was near the top permanently, head upwards. 

Raqimul huroof

Did I tell you I taught him to write? 

Correction

and we just erase it if we make a mistake 

Do the maths! 

Turning over a new leaf

Oh the sinful life! But now, I'm going to turn over a new leaf. 

News

Well, I have changed my blog settings so that anyone can post comments, and not just blogger members.
Also, I've got some really interesting photos to post to the blog, but there's something wrong with the hello picture sharing networking apparently.
Stay tuned.

Quotable quotes

• On success: A successful man is one who can make more money than he can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.


• And talking of success: Behind every successful man is a woman. Behind her is his wife.


• On necessity: Necessity is the mother's invention.

The only prayer I'll ever need

Well, the only prayer I ever need answered is that Allah keep my parents well, because as long as they are with me, all the prayers that I'd never even asked for would be answered for me.
I got my marks for Stochastic Systems I mid term today. Even though 50% isnt a good score, but that's the top 3rd or fourth score in the mid term. The class average is 26. The course is tough, no doubt. I was very sceptical about the mid term and never expected to be anywhere near the top 10. Lo and behold, the result is beyond my expectations. The only reason is my parents' prayers. Otherwise, my own acts wouldnt warrant acceptance of my prayers.
Now I'm preparing feverishly (well, if you'd call taking time out for blog and stuff feverish, that is) for the final that is on Monday next week. I hope the final is easy because most of the final content was covered in the last two weeks with plenty of extra classes. We didnt have enough time to practice.

Balakot

When I went to Sialkot for Eid this year, my aunt told me that one of my cousins was in Balakot on eid. He had gone there earlier in ramazan, too. When he called home, aunt asked him to come back. He told her that if she'd see what he was seeing their, it would make her wish she could give her life to help the people there. Later, most volunteers had gone to their cities on Eid. A doctor whom he had made friends with, called him up and asked him to come to Balakot, so my cousin went to Balakot a few days before eid. He has been a boy scout for several years and has also done weight training with Junior Mr. Punjab, so I'm sure he's an indispensible person for such a situation.

Distance vector routing assignment complete

I completed and submitted the distance vector routing programming assignment for the course on network protocols and standards. As I posted earlier, the first part of the assignment was to use pre-built simulator code to implement a fixed static four router topology. The second part was to modify the simulator and to implement a generic distance vector routing protocol that can also handle link cost changes. You can download the code.

Boojho to janain

Can you guess what this is?

You will not like me when I'm angry

"Insan banta hay ya bahar a kay lagaoon aik hath" Hamza is upset and he's about to let all hell loose. 

The professor is in the class

Alright class, so last time, we were discussing the centrifugal rotation of the nth derivative of the subatomic particle neptutron of the element Boron. 

CAN I PLEASE HAVE SOME PRIVATE MOMENTS?

HEY, CUT THE CAMERA! GEE, YOU CANT EVEN HAVE SOME PRIVATE MOMENTS. Thank God, I had this hand fan to cover up.

EVERYBODY has a blog

I'll tell you, everybody has a blog these days. Even miththu is blogging. He is seen here typing out his message to the world. He hasnt had the time to actually sign up for his very own blog, so he shared mine. To see what he had to say, view this entry.

ASP.NET 2.0 membership providers

If you set up Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and try out the login controls that use the membership providers, you may come across a situation where the create user page comes back asking you to choose a different password. I consulted google and came up with this useful result.
The following was typed by my bhai's mitthu:
wqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq

Just kidding

By the way, I was just kidding. Nothing like it has ever actually happened. Just fiction.

CPR

Oh, OK. Now I get it! So, it is CPR (acknolwedgement to S.G.). At night, when you turn a corner at LUMS, you trip right over a couple and I was always pissed off and confused exactly what the hell are they doing in that corner or sitting inside those window slots. With that description on S.G.'s blog, now I understand it all. They're practicing CPR. How stupid of me, I should've known. Those are very community minded people, who believe in being prepared. They're practicing civil defense. I salute them.

Wedding reception

So, last night was the valima reception for the same wedding I was whinning about earlier. I excused myself from the torture on the pretext that a couple of programming assignments are due, one was tonight and the other one is on Sunday. My brother and his in-law(outlaw) went there. The dinner was even more unruly than what I saw on the wedding night. Thank God, I wasnt there.
My bhabhi said that she put a plate down on the table to get some food onto it, and as soon as she took a spoonful out of the serving dish, she discovered that her plate wasnt there. Someone took it. Since people were after anything they could get their hands on, they had taken multiple plates with servings of everyhing, most of which they would never eat. So, there was a shortage of plates, and hence, she was unfortunate. On the gents side, things were even worse and several relatives of the groom resorted to eating in the women's dining area.
Hamaree niyyatain kab bharain gee?

Distance Vector

The second programming assignment for the course Network Protocols and Standards had been given to us prior to the Eid Holidays. It had two parts. Part one was to build a simulation for a static four router topology of distance vector routing. I completed that task in Sialkot and forgot to upload it here. Feel free to use it if you find it useful. The assignment handout is available for download and a resource page is available here. This is my solution. I'll upload the second part of the assignment when it's done.

The funniest thing on the planet

When MQM talk of protection, and they do it quite often, there is nothing funnier than that. I found Police Squad to be a very funny movie, but this talk of "protection" beats even that movie. I wonder if they've considered "rubber" for "protection." Its a bit old fashioned, but it works most of the time.

I hate weddings

If it were upto me, I'd ban marriages altogether for a long time. I was at a stinking wedding tonight. We left home at 9:30 pm when I was told we were leaving at 8:30 pm, housewives stink. The baraat left the groom's house at 10:30 pm after lots of video shooting. They were filming the newest tragedy/comedy film.
The wedding was extravagant in terms of expenses. The groom's family are goldsmiths, so no shortage of money, and money was really spent like crazy. That, after the recent earthquakes, and the women were complaining that it was too simple a wedding and a lot had been cut off. Yea, right! The world would be a better place without these women.
Their were fireworks as they finally left the home. Then, there was traffic problems. To cut the long story short, the unfortunate documents were signed just before midnight and we had dinner. What I liked was that the groom's family were giving out itr (perfume) to the guests. The dinner was tragic. People stormed the meal as if they had either assurance that this was their very last meal, or they had been hungry for months. I hate the way people behave on the dinner tables at weddings. Even educated people. They'd push people around to make it to the dish, secure the serving spoon, take out biryani, notice that no spoon is available on the chicken qorma dish, so they'd reach out over the neighbor's coat clad arm, hopefully dirtying it in the process, and serve the qorma with the same dish, and if possible, use the same spoon for everything else. If the dish happens to be "not up to the mark" they'll confiscate the spoon and hold their ground waiting for the server to fill it up again. And there's lots other mess. Then there is further shooting of that tragedy/comedy which goes on till early morning. And when they finally kidnap the stunningly beautiful bride (thanks only to the twenty four hours spent at the parlour) of the ugliest possible groom, there are hours of further shooting and customs execution. Geez, weddings stink. Cant we just be simple. Sign the stupid papers, make the vows, say the prayers, good night. No, sir, that way, we wouldnt be able to piss off the entire remaining nation.

Bouquets

I had been promising to upload photos of the bouquets I got for various farewells before I came to Lahore. I am finally uploading a few of them. I guess I'm getting old, because I cant remember which was given by whom, and I only got about ten or so bouquets for my farewells in the last three or four days.

Another bouquet 

And another farewell bouquet 

Yet another one

License plates

Talking of license plates. Here's one registered in Lahore.

There were others such as GAS, GAL in Gujranwala and LOS (Line Of Sight) from Lahore.

Traffic jam

There was a huge jam on the toll booths at Lahore on the motorway as we returned on Sunday morning. That's what I hate about most married couples. They're unable to keep schedules, they're unable to leave for road trips early in the day. They always unnecessarily get into traffic jams. The queue on the six booths were at least a kilometer long. 

Sunset

A view of the sunset on our drive back to Lahore on this Eid holiday 

Another view of the sun as it is about to set over the sky on our drive back to Lahore from Sialkot this eid holiday 

Sialkot buildings

Industrialists in the Sialkot area are very active in the community and they build absolutely beautiful office and factory buildings. They are complete campuses, if you ask me. I could only photograph some of the ugliest of them because it took time for me to empty my 128 MB stick onto the laptop during the drive. Next time, I go there, I'll bring you photos of some of the real big buildings. 

Trip to Sialkot

We went to Sialkot on this eid holiday by road in my car. This is a shot of the Lahore Islamabad motorway as we climbed it for a short while before getting off to GT Road. 

My brother's miththu enjoyed every second of the trip. Photographed here, he is sitting on the back seat enjoying the scenic route. On the back seat were two golden chickens inside a box, which is not visible in the photo, but that explains the cloth on the back seat. 

Code Run photo

A group photo of the organizers after Code Run 2005 at NED University 

PAF KIET Session on most wanted computer networking skills

I spoke at PAF KIET about top 10 most wanted computer networking skills. We rocked the hall.