And then...!

I am still undecided about the courses. Rumor is that Business Communication [BC] is nothing but Communication Skills aka Technical Report Writing. Somebody went to FS to ask about it and she seemingly confirmed it, saying, "Aap logon ko kya zaroorat hai yeh course leney ki yeh to aap pehley hee parh chukey hain!" Hmmmm, that is interesting enough. Anyways, we already were pondering over dropping the course, and taking Computer Graphics instead. BC is all presentations and stuff, a course that is supposed to be offered in the freshmen and sophomore years, not in the last semester of the junior year! So the majority of the population is dropping Digital Image Processing and BC and instead going for Compiler Construction and Computer Graphics. And I have decided for Computer Graphics too. Lets hope it wont be too much of a burden for me!

The saga continues...

And just what I was fearing really did happen! The management had to mess up with atleast something, and now they ve come up with this list of enrolled students, with only 75 students each in Network Programming and Digital Image Processing. The DIP seats are offered on the basis of CGPA, while the NP seats are on first-come-first-serve, or rather first-submit-fee-first-get-seat basis. Hamad put it in the right perspective when he said that this looks like a race, you submit the fee as early as you can! Anyways that has messed up my plans, I had to take NP, and now my name isn't in the list. I guess I'll talk to Ayaz Ahmed for a seat, because he is teaching that course.

The FASTian trivia

So it was the first day of the sixth semester. I've been enrolled in all courses that I wanted, atleast unless there is no peculiarities from the management [read authorities]. My Radix status is now submit fee, which means that [ofcourse] I need to just submit the fee, the courses have been approved! And then, just out of the blue, the management decide to tinker with the existing sections. A few people from all sections have been shifted to the next section, ofcourse the exception being our section, mainly because our section [D] has no section after it! I wonder they would have been mulling over sending us onto the sophomore batch, had this been feasible. Mughiz has been shifted into our section, and he was [seemingly] unhappy about it. Hassaan finally got a haircut, a nice counter-strike style, of which his mom his pretty excited about. She asked me especially to look out for his hairstyle which was cool (according to her) and shareef too. No doubt he looks way bit shareef now!

The interminable gap...

It would just look like that I am through with blogging, that my interest has waned, but sadly, that isnt so. Just that I have got a new interest, or rather an interest that has resurfaced! Yep, I am playing Counter-Strike these days, and playing it like anything. There was this long loll of my interest in playing CS, when I was [supposedly] busy in studies, but I guess I am back in the market. Its been raining like anything since yesterday afternoon. Got a rather chilly atmosphere with mercury dipping to 18 degrees (according to the official broadcast), but I rather think it was somewhere around 14-15 degrees. Think, that is chilly enough for us here. What would happen if someday out of the blue we get snow showers? Frozen, to say the least. It was only light showers, and the Met officials say that all their observatories around the city had recorded less than one millimeter of rain. I wonder that, with the showers continuing across the afternoon, we got only less than one millimeter? And then: Mr Mehmood said winter showers were a regular annual feature and the city received rains almost always in December, January and February. I wonder that, again. I am living in this city since twenty years [I was born here :D] and I dont remember rains being a regular annual feature. Anyways, the Met department people are like that. I have met some, and they dont even know their right from their left. God help 'em, and us!

Astonishing!

I just read an astonishing piece of news in Dawn. There was supposedly an incident where a wife beat to death a husband. Astonishing, isnt it? Atleast it is for me. Though the feminists amongst us might be thinking that this is the breakthrough women needed in this society, when men can beat their wives to death, then so could women beat their husbands to death. But that bears the sign of downfall, of impending doom. The woman has to submit to her man, to obey. She is made just to do that. I am not saying that men have the right to submit their women to torture. But men can right their women's wrongs, and if by beating it could be done then be it. Women killing their husbands, this could possibly bring the whole working of society into a disarray. And this disarray bids the end of the world. I feel like that. I dont know if its wrong or not, but I dont sure like that. You can read the whole piece of news here.

The wrath descends

Just what I was thinking about. People would be really pissed off with my attitude, but I simply don't get time to visit the campus. And then all of them, the WebMasters, ProCom WebMasters, ProCom Seminars, Online, almost everybody is pissed off. I got this mail from the chairman WebMasters. Have a look and enjoy. From: Rabia Sajjad <****@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Jan 17, 2005 8:18 am Subject: juniors ... ya ppl ve xtremely disappointed !! sorry to say ... but juniors ya ppl have xtremely disappointed me !! 2.5 months and no results ... we all r busy .. itz not just ya ppl involved in projects and demos ...!!! we all r committed to webmasters and have put in all of our efforts but ya ppl ... have only come up wid excuses raheel ... tumhari tou khair baat hi karna fazool hai most of da webmasters don even know who raheel is .... aur yousuf .. tum ko aik kaam diya tha .. virtual tour ka theek hai .. ya picked da code from net java applet mil gai ... picture mil dai atleast configure tou kar letai !!!! fast ki building dance kar rahi hai in ur virtual tour it took just 10 mins to configure da thing ... and it seems atleast better than wat ya send 2.5 months mein atleast tum loog 2.5 hrs hi contribute kar detai this is too much and atleast i cant tolerate it In short, she is pissed off with me, since I sent her the Virtual Tour thingy only a day late, and that she had a resounding verbal beating from Zaki Rashidi on the Internal Programming Competition day. And that anger was passed upon me. But no, I dont keep favours. Right that day I mailed on the group. Here is my reply: From: "uXuf" Date: Mon Jan 17, 2005 8:30 am Subject: juniors ... ya ppl ve xtremely disappointed !! Oh wow! I agree that I could ve been very disappointing indeed. But that isnt to say that I haven't put not more than 2.5 hours in it. Do you really think that that virtual tour was that easy? Then go ahead take the pics from me (the ones you sent me) and try making one. Then only you would find how many hours were spent into it. Just try making one large picture of the six crappy ones you provided me with. And with the "Dance" thing, that isnt no dance man, that's the "autopan" feature, and every virtual tour in the world has this panning enabled. Just look around for some virtual tour, you ll get what I mean. I am not getting mad but seniors should really think about their workload and could reminisce that would they ve done all this when they were in their junior year? uXuf. Well that's that. I know she is pissed but I cant help it.

Back

I think I am through with this damned semester. All the hardwork that had gone into the semester has been wasted, to say the least. That database project, the best and the most comprehensive that I have made in my entire life, now looks so rubbish. God help these TA's, they don't have any sense about our hardships. Believe it, she looked at my project and said, "This is what you were making?" Like duhh! How I hate her! And then there is this new fuss of "Online Registration", with limited seats. I registered my self but by some quirk of fate my request didn't reach the advisor. Now the Network Programming seats are finished and the advisor tells me to re-register my self. Who'd make up for my loss of time only God knows. To say the least I am fucking bored with this all. I am dead in studies, I am bored with the constant puckering of everyone, I am bored with my life! I agree with someone who said that I need a break! I need a break from studies, from home, from her, from everyone!

I found this little joke to be pretty amusing: Little boy goes to his father and asks "Daddy, how was I born?" The father answers: "Well son, I guess one day you will need to find out anyway! Your Mom and I first got together in a chat room on MSN.Then I set up a date via e-mail with your Mom and we met at a cyber-cafe. "We sneaked into a secluded room, where your mother agreed to a download from my hard drive."As soon as I was ready to upload, we discovered that neither one of us had used a firewall, and since it was too late to hit the delete button, nine months later a blessed little Pop-Up appeared and said: You've Got Male!"

What more should I say?

Thanks to the creator of the Sasser worm, my system is puked. Add the burden of running Visual Studion .NET 2003, and you'll have some idea of the throughput I am getting. The worm conveniently crashes the local services server (lsass), and since I am on a network, opens connections to hordes of other systems. That bogs down my system like anything, and to top it off the cut-copy-paste operations are rendered useless because of the lsass crash. I salute to whoever devised this worm, a pretty nice way to bring Windows on its knees. Although I read about his (sasser's creator) arrest, I haven't followed up to the trial (I wonder if it's being taken place). According to PCWorld, this was a 18 year old German, Sven Jaschan, who created this worm. He says he wanted to make a virus, Netsky, to remove MyDoom and Bagle from infected computers. Now how he ended up creating Sasser and crashing millions of other systems boggles my mind. Thanks Almighty my Linux is invulnerable to these petty differences, so I can manage a life. But I have to survive with XP too, to keep the family and VS. NET happy! You can read more about this news here.

Racing against time - Defeating Sasser

So it was finally the time I was ready to install Visual Studio .Net 2003. Cool, I felt all my hardwork has paid off. My system was (supposedly) working, I had the VS.Net software, and the database project was well on its way. But the thing I hadn't considered, Sasser! You see, this Sasser thing exploits a hole in a Windows component called the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service, or LSASS. Now that is one crucial component in the Windows environment. And then the RPC server crashes, rendering many basic operating system services unavailable and Windows useless for the session. The most noticeable things that might make you fret over are the absence of copy-paste, unavailablity of general programs like Media Player, Word etc because they depend on the RPC, Internet Explorer somehow forgets all the cookies, wouldn't redirect to sites etc, and the bogging down of the system, although no visible heavy processes are running. I find it amazing that the Microsoft people could leave such a large gaping hole in such a crucial component of their flagship product. You dont need to open any unsafe email attachment to get infected, your presence, on the Internet, is reason enough to get infected. The worm spreads to other systems from an infected system by opening ftp connections. It then could tranfer its copies to other systems, infecting them as well. It could also arrive in the email as well, and it could send itself from an infected machine to others if it could find addresses in the Windows Address Book. The attachment is usually a file called PP.exe, and this worm generally makes use of an IFrame exploit in IE. I had installed Service Pack 1 and patched my system accordingly, but to no avail. Having no way out, I set about the task of installing .Net. Now I dont know what got into the head of these Microsoft people. They have seemingly modified their VS.Net installer and now make use of webpages. Did I mention that Sasser exploits IFrame in IE? VS.Net on average takes 1.5 hours to install. I had in mind that my system would become infinitely slow since it was infected, so I decided to root out all the "readme.eml" files I could find in the VS.Net directory. Now it was time to tackle head on the gigantic task of actually installing Visual Studio. [To be continued...]

Finally!

I got through with installing Visual Studio .Net on my system. Although it took around 1.5 hours, and a lot of headache, but it was done. The database project is actually a social networking site, like Orkut, Friendster etc. These kind of sites are ASP based, requiring the IIS to be installed on the system. The IIS (Internet Information System) comes bundled with Windows and it turns your system into a webserver. The .Net installed on my system won't let me create ASP .Net applications, citing that the Webserver running on my system isn't ASP .Net ver 1.1. Cool! Just what I needed after toiling for five days! That turned out to be a no-op. Actually sometimes the service isn't updated. I found the solution from Devshed.com. Just have to execute and fix the service. Here is what to do:

1. Open Console Window (command prompt)
2. Presuming that you have installed Visual Studio .Net 2003 (ofcourse!) and you are running Windows XP, go to the folder %windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v1.1.4322
3. Run aspnet_regiis.exe -i (Note the switch -i, that's important)
4. And be happy! Your system is now running ASP .Net ver 1.1!

That fixed my system, and now I can create web applications easily!

Damn XP!

All the more reasons to hate XP. I dont know. Maybe people would think I am too biased in favour of Windows 98 and hating XP, but simply put, I cant help it. And I dont think I am wrong either. The Architecture project demo is tomorrow, and Adnan had all the source code. I had to install VS .Net, so I brought all the source code and .Net setup. But no! Thou shall not leave before XP's vengeance is unleashed! I dont know what vengeance! But it did give me a headache. It messed with the ISA client, puked some file, and wouldn't finish the IIS setup. Talk about streamlined ease and programs running up faster, I have got a system whose performance has touched rock bottom, thanks to XP. I really think Microsoft people should start supporting 98 again. Its such a baby. Atleast it doesnt give headaches!

XPeatrics: No Urdu there!

Yup! Never trust a better technology. Stick with the old ones! With new things there are new problems, and advanced too! I should have known better. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net does not work on Windows 98. Because the Microsoft people have stopped supporting Win98. Oh good old Win98! So I had to install exactly that. You see, there is this database project looming ahead, and the Computer Architecture one too. The medium of choice for database project was ofcourse VS .Net, and I didnt particularly want to quit Win98. But finally, after some persuasion, and lots of failed attempts of finding a workaround that could make C# code run on 98, I had to go for WinXP. And thus my folly, I chose to upgrade 98 to XP. I should have done a fresh installation. Anyways, it took almost 2.5 hours to install. I was using Abba's CD drive and the CD used for installation was also an old one. My CD drive is with Wasiq and dont know when he will deign to return it! And then the Sasser, Blaster, Chir, dont know what hordes of virii, worms attacked my system. I was better off with 98. I hate XP. I love 98. And I love Linux too! Some InPage file of Abba got corrupted too. And his client was here and he wanted exactly that file! Phew! Abba wants 98 too. Everybody wants 98 at my home. But Dot Net needs XP! Damn Dot Net! I am content with 98 and Linux. Though I am on XP and Linux now.

A new start - Say bye to cellphone snatching

Mobile phone theft has really shot up in the city of Karachi. Most of the guys in my social circle had gone through this ordeal. In most of the cases, it was snatched. There were a few cases when it was just stolen. And that was that. There was nobody a person could turn to in this event. You see, the Police can't help, primarily because they are inefficient, because a cellphone theft doesnt merit a place in actual theft. And then, when murders go unabated, undetected, then what's a cellphone? Finally some nice souls gathered to find a solution to this surmounting problem. What they have done, is that they have build software to counter cellphone theft. There are three easy steps, when you purchase a new cellphone, or if you are concerned about you current one:

1. Visit their site
2. Fill up the form and your International Manufacturer Equipment Identification (IMEI) number
3. And cross your fingers

And then if you still be the unlucky one to get your phone snatched (or stolen) or lost, you can mail them, or can call 2743390/2743392. I have heard that the Police (finally!) can also be approached for help, you know, Madadgar 15!

Anyways this is a good notion, although they haven't mentioned what the website is.

You can read more about this here.

End of the innings!

So a long, hard innings finally came to the end. Yep! Fall semester 2004 has finally, finally finshed! After freaking us out, after making our days miserable, after messing up with our grades, it has ended. All good things must come to an end, and so should all bad things. And so was this semester. I am grateful its gone! And yeah! Happy new year to all of you!

A new year, a new start

Only the Computer Architecture and Computer Communication exams are remaining. CA is tomorrow and CC is on Friday. And that would be the 31st of December. After that, ofcourse, the new year. And it would bring a new start. A new start for all my ambitions, new commitments, promises. I would try to keep my promises then. I would try to work hard. I would be the real me again. That's a promise, to you, to myself.

Demographics de Orkut

The Orkut people had displayed the demographics of their service, how many people are there, which country has the most users, the age group of most of the users etc. The most users are from Brazil, no sweat in that. Then comes USA, then Iran, then Pakistan. I was astonished to see that Pakistan had leapfrogged into the fourth place over India. When I had earlier seen these demographics India was in the fourth place and Pakistan in the fifth. Looks like Orkutting is a fast growing phenomena in Pakistan! Most of the users (55.94%) are between ages 18 and 25, 88.69% are interested in friends, while 51.56% are single. A whole 20.75% people decided not to give any answer about their marital status. Country List: Brazil 61.99% USA 10.85% Iran 7.71% Pakistan 2.96% India 2.41% Canada 1.17% UK 1.11% Estonia 1.10% Japan 0.96% Germany 0.62% Its amazing to see Iran and Pakistan have more users than countries like United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. I won't comment about Brazil, its a large country, with a large population. And it seems its people are really infotech savvy. Same is the case I feel is with Iran. Whenever I search for a technological community at Orkut I am assured to find a Brazilian and an Iranian flavor of that community. Interesting, huh! Orkut provides an option to provide hometown and an option for location. Now I dont know that this list is based on the hometown version of the country or the location version. Ofcourse hometown is where you are actually from and location is the place where you are currently at. Maybe they will resolve this ambiguity. You can view the Orkut page here if you have an Orkut account.

The Humanitarian element and AMD 2.4G processor...

I hate to admit it, but it was a really stupid thing to do! At the "Capture the flag" contest, there were an additional 100 points of decryption. There was a message, hosted on a webserver and in encrypted form. The team that would decrypt the message first would get the points. Our bad luck, we couldn't connect to the server. There was some problem, and since we had almost completed our competition, Ali was pressing me to leave the place for home. So we informed the admin, and left our workstation. In the meantime we decided to check on the rest of our teams. Now the sopho guy, who was competing alone, was trying to decrypt this message. Although it wasn't a tough one, I wonder why people didnt get the basic thing. And the winner team also didn't get it! Ali spotted the first phrase, that had to be "Hey,". Now from now on it was an easy ride. The mistake: Ali told the sopho guy they decryption technique, and we were simply robbed off the 100 points. Man! Was I mad at Ali! We could've atleast got 100 points yaar! Ali said that it was of no use anyways because we had already declared. Yeah Right! We had declared but we weren't out of the game...! Now I hear today that sopho guy was the runner up, with some hundred and twenty so points. Our 100 points! And he got a brand new AMD 2.4G processor! Duhhh....!!! I hate you Ali!

Day Two!

I didnt go to PakCon 2004 Day 2. Reason is simple. Management exam is tomorrow, and I simply am not satisfied with my preparation. Besides that, I needed sleep! I was up last night trying to study, and slept at around 0430. Now if I had to go there, I d have to wake up at around 0730, and then wouldnt have been back till around 1700 or so. And then sleep again, so there was simply no time to study! So I chose the better of it and decided to stay home! Ali didn't go either. I dont know about Talha. He can go since he has got the Marketing exam on Monday. Chilled!

So what!

I went to the PakCon 2004 today. They have changed themselves from "Pakistan's first Hacking Convention" to "Pakistan's first Cyber Security Convention". The president, [fz], talked about this paradigm shift, emphasizing that "here in Pakistan" the term "hacker" is often attributed to a cyber junkie with an evil mind and an eye for compromising other people's systems. Hence the shift. However whatever I was expecting about the convention that it might be interesting, on a large scale atleast, went down the drain. I realized today that there were absolutely no advertising, no marketing plans, no nothing. Even the Neelum Hall, where this convention was supposed to take place, didn't hold one single banner proclaiming anything that was going on inside. The actual event started at around quarter past ten, almost an hour and a half late. What else do you expect when you live in Pakistan? As usual, the Chief Guest hadn't arrived, and so the proceedings couldn't go on. However there was one interesting lecture titled "Phreaking: Past and Present". This was delivered by Emmanuel Gadaix, an information security and telecommunication expert. It was interesting, covering phreaking from the very basics and early times with blue boxes to the modern, enriching phreaking done with sophisticated equipment and by intelligence agency people. Almost after it began the "Capture the Flag" contest. This had six systems on the network running WinXP with RedHat 6.2 through VMWare. The participating teams had to penetrate the opponents' systems and place flags in their systems. The central server swept regularly checking the services and detecting any flags. The score was based on a combination of strategies. Bottom line: We didn't win but we didn't lose either. We did the decryption that was pretty basic, shifting the letters only 13 places and the decoded message appeared! All under 3 minutes! Tomorrow is the Wardriving contest, where teams would have to search for wireless access points. The teams that detects the most will be the winner. I hope we get the wireless enabled laptop early in the morning tomorrow. You can visit the PakCon 2004 website at http://www.pakcon.org