Why Internet Explorer is unsafe and my browser history:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's getting late so I'm going to stop now. Hope someone finds this useful, specially those still stuck with Internet Explorer.

Posted at 03:12am PKT Comments | plink

Hairy Barbarians:

Ex-boss Tim Romero, now a good friend, has finally started blogging. Bloggers such as Stuart and myself had been pushing him to do this for around two years. Good to see him get started.

Tim has been writing elsewhere for quite some time now. One of his pieces was picked up by O'Reillys and he has his own e-zine by the name of Tangled Webs. Welcome to blogging Tim.

Posted at 01:33am PKT Comments | plink

Linus's Businessweek Interview:

Here is a nice interview where Torvalds discusses his role as the leader of the Linux movement and other related topics:

Posted at 01:05am PKT Comments | plink

Sufyan's Wedding and Two Independance Days:

Saturday, 14th August marked 57 years of Pakistan's independance, gained from the British empire. Sunday (the 15th) was India's turn to do the same. These were also the days during which my friend Sufyan got married in his village around the edge of the northern border. It was my first Pashtun wedding and I really enjoyed how simple yet fun it was.

The rest of the guys and I had decided to leave on Friday night, but as usual I was the only one to arrive at Babar's place (the starting point) on time. As usual, we were delayed by several hours until Sufyan called and told us to come in the morning since the area can be quite dangerous late at night.

We spent the night at Babar's and left in the morning. One of the nine guys that were supposed to go wasn't feeling well so had to stay behind. The trip went well though lasted almost six hours instead of the usual three or so, mainly because of the frequent stops we made on the way.

We got to Sufi's house just in time for lunch (which happened to be very delicious). Next, we drove all the way back to Naushera to the bride's house for the main ceremony. The "Nikah", the most important part of a Muslim wedding, was held in a nearby mosque and that was pretty much it. No long processions, no big fireworks and no other time-wasting and costly rituals. The rest of the evening passed while we were getting back to the village.

The next morning, we drove around for a while and then went to a small irrigation canal for bathing which was a lot of fun. Around the big cities of Pakistan, there aren't many open-air, unpolluted places like this where you can swim or bathe safely so it was a rare experience. The water was very shallow though.

We got back in time for the "walima", a meal arranged by the groom's family to announce the marriage. After more of that delicious food, we sprung the surprise we had arranged the day before: a garland made out of a wall-clock. We learned that it isn't commonly used these days, which made it more fun. Nobody seems to know its significance and when Victor was here earlier this year, he also went away puzzled as to what it meant. I just guessed it stands for "time is up".

The highlight of the trip (at least for me) was getting a chance to fire a round from a real AK-47, also a first.

Congratulations Sufyan and welcome to the club.

Posted at 00:12am PKT Comments | plink

Congratulations Stuart:

My good friend Stuart has just been promoted to a parent. Congratulations, it's a boy.

Link

Posted at 11:18am PKT Comments | plink

Dancom Online:

Today was my third day at Dancom Online Services, a broadband company, as Asst. Manager Systems. Now most of you know that I have my own setup, iinix Solutions, which came to life just over a year ago. It is still alive and kicking (though not on the scale that I imagined it would be after a year) and I still play a part in it, but due to personal reasons, I decided to take the opportunity to try something different (and admittedly something that puts food on the table).

I've worked in three software related companies and know the ins and outs of system administration, but I have never been exposed to a setup involving networking on the scale of even a small ISP. This will give me a chance to learn something about that as well as network with other professionals which I haven't been able to do in Pakistan otherwise.

Looking at the last three days (and the hectic, growing-ISP routine aside), I'm quite impressed with how well Dancom is functioning and growing. Most of the people I've met are technically very competent and hard working, everyone gets along nicely and things are actually quite organized, something rare in Pakistan. For the first time since I joined Vanguard, I feel like a lesser mortal compared to my fellow workers.

Posted at 00:18am PKT Comments | plink

Net Connection Woes:

If you can read this, my Internet connections, or at least one of them, are/is back up. While I'm writing this, I'm cut off from the rest of the online world. Firstly, because our web proxy, which uses a dialup connection for uploads and downloads data through a satellite dish, overheated last night and refuses to boot. It could be a case of a fried processor, but no time to confirm that now. I'm still working on replacing it with another machine which needs a new kernel and lots of DVB card configuration.

Secondly, our trusty DSL connection has been down since this morning. The DSL providor claims it is a serious problem with our telephone exchange, but I'm not entirely sure it's just the exchange's problem. Feels really awkward when you can't even Google for the problem you're trying to fix.

Posted at 15:48pm PKT Comments(1) | plink

Rock Paper Saddam:

Funny:

Posted at 14:41pm PKT Comments | plink

Cost of Cyberliving:

Nice comparison of hourly rates for internet cafes in different countries:

Good to see Pakistan having one of the lowest, only higher than Turkey's, but it doesn't mention the quality of the net connection. Most of the cafes here run entirely on a single dialup connection which you can hardly do much with. Then again, most people's concept of the internet is only instant messaging which, being plain text, works well on these setups.

Posted at 14:54pm PKT Comments(2) | plink

Screen Utility and Rat Poison:

Screen is exactly what I was looking for. Something that works like VNC, but for text apps.

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets)."

Bilal mentioned it when I was having trouble with starting an application without a shell, but I didn't get to see what it really did. Recent discussions about command line apps got me interested and now I realise how useful it really is.

Here is an article that talks about Screen and the author's simplistic window manager:

I find IceWM to be really lean, fast and stable as a windowing environment. Unlike the more popular Gnome and KDE behemoths, it never gets in the way when doing heavy tasks and ends up making me quite productive. But as with everything else in my life, I'm never satisfied and am always looking for better, faster or more efficient alternatives.

Rat poison is one window manager that I'm testing and may shift to in the near future. According to the home page, "Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen...". Not for the faint of heart.

Posted at 20:46pm PKT Comments(1) | plink

Ufone MMS:

After weeks of waiting, I finally managed to have MMS enabled on my Ufone connection. The delay was mostly my fault since I couldn't make the follow up call after asking for the service many times. Yesterday, I called them up again and managed to get the confirmation that it's done.

The first thing I'll do now is try to get moblogging working, though I'll have to write the plugin from scratch. Simple text messages at first, followed by image handling. And since I'm becoming used to the T9 input method, it should be fun. Maybe I'll become the first ever moblogger from this country (no, Pakistani bloggers outside Pakistan don't count).

Posted at 20:00pm PKT Comments(3) | plink

Running Away from Stuff:

Ever thought about how realistic some movie scenes are? Scenes where otherwise normal humans have trouble escaping from zombies or snakes, yet can outrun cars, missiles and even meteorites. Here is a chart comparing the speeds of common objects (as well as the undead and meteorites):

Pretty useful for the next time you encounter something that may be dangerous.

Posted at 14:54pm PKT Comments | plink

100MB of Yahoo Mail:

My first email address (that I actually used instead of just creating and forgetting about it) was a Yahoo! one about six years ago and believe it or not, I still have it. It's usefulness disappeared a long time ago since with my current setup, I have full control over everything. The space is only limited by the system's disks and mutt makes handling the 50MB+ folders and torrents of messages a day a breeze.

I tried to let the Yahoo! account go many times because it kept running out of free space and because I find web-based email too inefficient, but never got around to doing it. This was mainly because I still receive useful messages on it once in a while and it's used (occasionally) for instant messaging. The forwarding option they used to have a long time ago and an easy way to move my stored messages would have made things a bit simpler, but I guess they really want me to stick around.

Now Yahoo! has upgraded the mailbox size to 100MB, probably in response to Google's 1GB GMail, killing any chance of moving away for another couple of years. I can predict what will happen now. I'll still keep the account, letting new messages come through. Soon the mailbox will grow to a few dozen megabytes, making it even more difficult to get the old messages off. This is one of the reasons I'll be hesitant to seriously use Gmail.

Posted at 11:48am PKT Comments(2) | plink

Linux at Wimbledon:

Another post about an article from the Beeb. This year's Wimbledon tennis tournament will rely on Linux and Grid computing to keep their website and other services running smoothly. This is the first time I'm hearing about Linux being part of an actual sporting event and it's nice to see it cover yet another territory.

Looking at some of the decisions made by the German government favoring Linux and open source, I believe it could be a big part of the IT infrastructure of the next Football (Soccer for you yanks) World Cup in 2006. It wasn't during the 2002 tournament in Japan/Korea (I know because my friend was involved with that) so I would like to see it happen. Anyone require my services for Germany 2006?

Posted at 22:23pm PKT Comments | plink

Pakistani Drinks and "Milkup":

It's surprising how many different drinks there are in Pakistan. Among my favorites are sugar cane juice, lassi and "sattoo" (made from evaporated cane juice and some powder that comes from some part of a wheat grain) and off course the fake cocktails (non-alcoholic) such as coladas and margheritas. Then you have the concentrated, colored syrups made up of everything from almonds to fruits to certain herbs and spices. The variety is probably due to the scarcity of alcohol and the hot weather as well as continual reliance on traditional medicines which these form a large part of. This variety is one of the few things I missed while in Japan.

Here is something home-brewed that I discovered at my aunt's place last summer and which I now have whenever I can. Maybe this should be on Kristin's blog together with all her other great recipes, but I thought I'd share here:

Take half a glass of milk and pour in some 7-UP/Sprite to fill the other half. Add ice if you want. Viola. You have a refreshing fizzy milk drink. Good to fight the heat and also keep your stomach in a nice shape. Haven't tried it with anything weirder such as colas yet, but lassi + 7-Up work pretty well.

Posted at 22:22pm PKT Comments(2) | plink

Breaking codes:

The Beeb has an informative article on how hard it is to break the 128-bit encryption in common use by a lot of current software. It explains the basics of private-public key pairs without sounding too technical as well as describing other popular methods of breaking security.

Although I've played with brute-force tools myself, I've found them to be inefficient and time-consuming at best, especially when dealing with key pairs, so they're right about it being almost impossible. Other methods, such as social engineering, seem to be much more effective.

Another common reason for breaches is poor security policies or not taking the policies seriously. Recently, a certain friend of mine (you know who you are :-)) emailed his private ssh key to his webmail address so he could use it from anywhere. This off course, makes the whole point of private keys moot since nothing is safe if sent unencrypted through email. It sent alarm bells ringing in my head and I made him generate a new key.

Posted at 18:30pm PKT Comments(2) | plink

Top 100 GDPs/Sales:

Via Stuart, this page lists the world's 100 largest economic entities, of which 51 are now corporations and 49 countries:

So Sony's sales are higher than Pakistan's GDP while IBM's are higher than Singapore's. Wow.

Posted at 15:11pm PKT Comments | plink

Active Denial Weapon:

A non-lethal, crowd-control weapon that is still under development. The Active Denial system focuses a beam of energy that penetrates just enough of a person's skin to cause receptors to go off and cause great pain to the receiver without causing permanent damage. Think of people running away in fear, not knowing what is happening to them. Off course, it wouldn't be non-fatal if they jumped off of high places or trampled down others in that state of panic.

It sounds like an excellent tool for torture, though I've always thought that the fear of permanently losing functionality of an organ was the most effective means of torture. Again it would work best if the "torturee" didn't know anything about it.

Other uses I can think of include securing vaults and sensitive areas though I'm sure someone would come up with an effective armor against the beam. Tin-foil anyone?

Posted at 13:24pm PKT Comments | plink

Pakistan Is...:

I happened to stumble upon this long article on Pakistan in the NY Times this morning:

(free registration required)

The picture it paints of the country I call home is pretty grim, but unfortunately, most of it is true. I had always hoped things would get better, but it doesn't seem likely.

Posted at 14:15pm PKT Comments | plink

Got the ID Card:

After the time-wasting I did chasing after my ID card, I had decided to forget it and hope that it somehow finds me, but a couple of days ago, Sufyan wanted to go and submit his own application so I went with him to the G-8 NADRA center.

I thought I'd just check where they had sent mine off to this time, but surprisingly, as soon as I told the lady at the counter my first name, she told me to hold on and brought out my card in a sealed envelope. She didn't ask for the number or copies of my parent's IDs. Not even for my old ID. Just brought it out and gave it to me. I was expecting it to belong to one of the countless other Ahmed's, but it was surely mine.

The funny thing about these new IDs is that there doesn't seem to be any rule regarding their expiry date. Some of my friends' ones expire within 5 years and others in 8 or 10. So far I'm winning with an expiry date of 2018. That's 14 years of not having to deal with these goons (fingers crossed). Cool.

Posted at 18:18pm PKT Comments | plink

October Surprise:

Via BoingBoing, this site lets you guess what we have in store from the Bush Administration this October:

The most popular choices include:

• WMD's found in Iraq!
• Osama bin Laden captured!
• Spectacular terrorist attack on US soil!
• Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert.
• US pulls out of Iraq in October, leaving the UN in charge.
• Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states.
• Escalation in Israel, Iran, or North Korea. US opens a new war front.

I picked the "Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert." option since I don't see the administration giving up power simply based on the outcome of an election. The "Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states" idea is less far fetched, but they're likely to try something really sneaky.

Posted at 17:28pm PKT Comments(1) | plink

Blogshares Billionaire:

Due to increased trading during the last couple of weeks, my total worth on the Blogshares fantasy stock market has gone way over a billion dollars. As of now, my cash balance is almost 8 billion blogshare dollars and total worth is around 13 billion. Plus I own around 40 artefacts (which alone cost me about 10 billion). These I'll try to use once there's more cash balance.

As good as that sounds, I feel that most of the initial fun of trading has disappeared. The worth of the market just keeps growing, contrary to real world theories of finance. The traders keep getting richer without anyone getting poorer and making fantasy dollars is now just a matter of clicking away as much as you can. Despite having billions, I'm still going in and out of the top 100 players list.

My trades are simply based on finding the top 100 most expensive blogs that are available to buy. Then buying more of the same to push the price up until no shares are left. Then I have to wait 6 hours before I can sell all at the inflated price and make a profit. It's become a simple clicking game and I wish there was more randomness involved, but it is still addictive.

Maybe I should hire a "clicker" to do all the monkey work and bring me back into the top 50 player's club. What then? Maybe I can buy up important blogs and gift the shares to the owners. If only I could get a thousand (or even a hundred) real dollars for every billion of blogshare money.

Posted at 22:12pm PKT Comments | plink