Random Chusses…

Now that the browser wars are set to begin again, I finally decided to try out the new Google browser. It’s not exactly new anymore but me being a faithful Firefoxian, I never really tried it before. Until now, and man, is it fast or what? I’m completely blown away with its speed. In front of this young cheetah of a browser, Firefox looks like an old man grasping his last breaths. While Firefox is trying to get up on its feet chrome is running around loading up sites like nobody’s business, executing scripts and rendering funky HTML. I don’t even have that many extensions installed on Firefox anymore. Only the bare minimum that I can’t live without like AdBlock, fireguestures and a couple more. But despite this the fox needs at least 10 minutes to load itself up. And then continues to hog memory. And having too many tabs open adversely affect its performance, it starts getting stuck every five minutes.

So does this mean I’m going to switch to Chrome completely. Probably not. I now do all my regular browsing on Chrome, and when I need to quickly fire up a site. But for reading the blogs I subscribe to I need Firefox since guess what? Chrome doesn’t support RSS feeds. Why? because they want you to go use that Google Reader thing. While Google Reader is great for some heavy duty feed reading I just need a simple solution. I can even live with the Ads or without the mouse guestures but I need those feeds. Lack of a built in RSS reader for me is the deal breaker here. In the meantime, I did however get this Firefox theme that makes my Firefox look a lot like a Chrome, maybe not in function but certainly in looks…

Ejaz Haider asks in his column at daily times whether the newly restored CJ can or will take on Sufi Muhammad in the near future. Sufi Muhammad as we all know is the founder of the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi who has now renounced voilence and vowed to bring peace to the Swat region through talks with Maulvi Fazlullah and his followers. He recently signed a peace deal with the NWFP government allowing for the implementation of shariah law in the Swat region. Of course nobody really knows what kind of shariah will be implemented. The details of the deal are a bit sketchy. At first we heard that there would be some kind of parallel legal system where one could go to either the shariah courts (which would follow the Islamic shariah of course) or the civil courts following the Pakistan penal code. But apparently Sufi sahab has ‘asked’ the civil judges not to attend courts anymore.

He said, “I will personally monitor the hearings of Shariah courts.”

Addressing a press conference here he said, “According to the deal signed with government, civil judges will have no role in future whatsoever and all cases will be followed under Shariah courts so the civil judges must refrain from courts from Tuesday.”

“Shariah has already been imposed in Malakand Division therefore there is no need of Presidents’ signature”, he remarked vowing, “We will soon setup Dar-ul-Qaza courts for filing appeals against the verdicts of Shariah courts.”

So as tazeen has asked rightly why isnt’ anyone protesting against this edict. Apart from Altaf Hussein i.e. That’s because the majority of Pakistanis at some level want shariah to be imposed in Pakistan. Most of the people I’ve talked to think that’s the only way to solve the country’s ailing problems. In fact some of them are waiting for Sufi Muhammad to finish his job in Swat and do the same in Punjab and other provinces. It’s the people’s will. The same people who helped CJ get back on his seat. So, no! CJ cannot stand up against Sufi Sahab even if he wanted to…

Link: Sufi Muhammad’s interview with daily times What has happened in the past should not be discussed. (President Zardari and Mian Sahab would certainly agree with that.)

Got this really really dreadful news today. A doctor couple belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamat brutally and senselessly murdered in the Pakistani city of Multan, in Southern Punjab. Ahmadiyya.com.pk has posted more details.

It is with great pain that the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat confirms that two of its members were brutally murdered in Multan yesterday. The deceased, Dr Shiraz Ahmad Bajwa and Dr Noreen Bajwa were husband and wife and were both trained as doctors. Both martyrs were under the age of forty.

Yesterday at around 2.30pm local time, unknown assailants attacked Dr Shiraz and Dr Noreen at their home in Wapda Colony, Multan Road. The assailants first taped together the hands, feet and mouths of both victims. They then tied rope around their necks and strangled them to death. Following death Dr Shiraj was hung from a nearby fan.

The brutality of these murders was further exacerbated by the fact that Dr Shiraz and Dr Noreen were expecting their first child.

Dr Shiraz was an eye-specialist who had served at various hospitals including the Fazl-e-Umer Hospital in Rabwah. At the time of his death he was working at a hospital in Wapda. Similarly Dr Noreen was working at a local children’s hospital.

The Press Spokesman of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat, Abid Khan said:

“What occurred in Multan yesterday was an act of such cruelty that it can never be comprehended by decent and peace loving people. Dr Shiraz and Dr Noreen had been married for just three years and were expecting their first child together. They had both chosen career paths which allowed them to serve their fellow men, women and children.

Pakistan is a country that is currently facing absolute ruin. Amongst this chaos the hateful acts of religious extremists are ever increasing, to the extent that loving, caring and innocent people are being murdered because they belong to a community whose motto is ‘Love for All, Hatred for None.”

Shocking news. Not just Ahmadis but other minorities are also being killed these days, like shias with alarming regularity. Even the Sri Lankan cricket players were attacked recently. I can only hope things get better…

Muhamma Ali Jinnah wore the sherwani and the Jinnah cap for the first time in the Lucknow session of the Muslim League in 1937. Excerpt from Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan:

To symbolize the dramatic change marked by this Lucknow session, not only in the League’s platform and political position, but in Jinnah’s personal commitment and final goal, he changes his attire, shedding the Saville Row suit in which he had arrived for a black Punjabi sherwani long coat, donned by the Quaid-i-Azam (“Great Leader”) for the first time in public on the morning of October 15, 1937. He had spent the night at Mahmudabad House; and after breakfasting with the Raja was about to leave for the packed meeting outside when his eye was attracted to a black Persian lamb cap worn by Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan (1886-1958), one of the greatest provincial League leaders. He asked his friend if he might try on the compact cap, which would soon be known throughout the world as a “Jinnah Cap”. When he saw how handsome he looked over the white of his sideburns in a mirror, he know it was just the headgear needed to give his Muslim costume its crowning touch. At the 1916 Lucknow session over which he had presided, Jinnah had worn a red fez, but since Ataturk banished the fez from Modern Turkey it was out  of style. The Jinnah cap resembled the fez but was softer, yet equally Islamic in it symbolic significance. It soon became as famous as the flatter “Gandhi cap” of hand-spun cotton, which the Mahatma and Jawaharlal wore. That cap came to symbolize Congress membership, just as the Jinnah cap helped immediately to distinguish and identify Muslim League leaders.

Another excerpt from Jawaharlal Nehru, a biography by Sankar Ghose:

At this Lucknow session when Jinnah spoke of the aspirations of the Muslim nation he no longer appeared in his customary European attire. There he, for the first time, put on a long black sherwani and a woollen cap which later came to be known as the Jinnah cap. So Jinnah now gave the Muslims a complete answer to Gandhi, an ideology of the Muslim nation as opposed to Gandhi’s ideology of a composite India nation and sartorially also Jinnah gave the sherwani and the Jinnah cap as an answer to the Congress’ Khadi dress and the Gandhi cap.

Pictures taken with Nokia E51 as usual…

So I have with me the 3rd edition of the famous Agile web development with Rails. Available in Beta and updated to reflect the latest version of Rails (2.01). Looking at the contents it seems like an awesome book. So I’ve decided once again to mount an attempt at learning Rails, the Ruby way. I’m not sure learning Rails is cool anymore but what the heck, I’ve given myself 60 days to go through the book and learn me some RoR.

I’ve downloaded and installed all the necessary tools.

• InstantRails – Packaged by a kind sould all the Ruby, Rails, web server stuff in one place. No installation required. Comes with MySQL and Apache too.
• RubyMine – The IDE. Haven’t used it before but looks good. No reason not to try. Got syntax highlighting, auto complete, debugging etc. stuff.
• FireFox + FireBug – To test my code in…
• Subversion – For my source control needs. Gotta check in them codez.
• I might need Notepad++ sometimes too.

I think that’s it. I’m good to go. Let’s see how it goes…

So I’ve been trying to get the hang of this micro blogging thing recently on twitter instead of the traditional macro blogging. No body reads my blog anyway so I thought I’d go on twitter and do some blogging in the thought stream. I even coax some of my friends to make accounts but only some of them are active. Basically on twitter you have 2 kinds of followers or people you follow, your friends and people you don’t really know but find their tweets interesting. Anyway my experiments with twitter have so far been pretty good. Twitter is by far, the most popular micro blogging service out there right now. By the way, for those ignorant enough to not know anything about twitter and reading my blog (which I know makes no sense), twitter is ’social networking and micro blogging service’ launched in 2006 which has recently gained a lot of popularity. Made using Ruby in Rails it has had its share of scaling issues. It has a simple web interface with a text box where users enter their ’status’ in maximum 140 characters. Go here for full rundown on the usefulness of twitter and first steps on twitter and start twittering (or was it tweeting).

For those familiar with Facebook (and who isn’t these days? Facebook has more than 175 million users) twitter is basically Facebook status updates on steroids. The real time nature of twitter has become so popular that Facebook even tried to buy it. And now that the buyout has failed (for now at least) for some reason Facebook has decided to launch twitter like features into Facebook itself. So they’re rolling out a new homepage which will reflect a much faster flow on information. That should be better I guess.

Anyway, the twitter team has started rolling out new search and trends features today (after a long time) which are really cool.  I just love the search feature of twitter. The data mining applications of this real time ‘though stream’ are quite amazing. In that sense some people have declared twitter will surpass Google’s search giving real time results absent from Google. Good stuff. Check out some new features that may make twitter better. I’m not sure how much of these features should be integrated in the web interface at least. Twitter clients should have these features while the web interface should be kept as simple as possible. So far I’ve tried out Witty and TweetDeck twitter clients. Witty is made in WPF and TweetDeck in Adobe AIR. So they’re kind of competing technologies, Microsoft vs Adobe. Witty’s simpler with less features and TweetDeck has a little complex interface but a lot more features. There are of course a LOT more twitter clients on all sorts of platforms. So tweet with what tweets best for you. Check out the art of the tweet for a different perspective…

More lame pictures taken from my camera phone Nokia E51…