Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 65)

Got the visa and also the ticket confirmed for tomorrow night. Now if something bad doesn't happen, I'll be landing on the Helsinki airport on Monday morning.

The Protector:

No, I am not talking about any new action movie, but rather a person/department in Pakistan that is responsible to 'protect' Pakistani workers in any foreign country. I've been doing different sorts of jobs at very different places in Pakistan for the past 3/4 years but there haven't been any kind of support from the Government at all. I am very thankful to my relative (who is a traveling agent) who warned me that i might need the signature/stamp of the 'Protector' on my passport before i leave and he was quite correct about it. I spent the past two days trying to get that stamp and I did get it but please don't ask me about the details. Seems I was a bit luckier than this poor chap.

I take my words back about the Finns. They are good at fulfilling their promises (at least): They did decided on my case yesterday and I'll be getting my passport tomorrow or the day after. The traveling agent told me that i might need a transit visa for UK, depending on what kind of visa i am given but I (and Uraeus) are quite sure that that shouldn't be the case if I won't get out of the airport. This page seems to suggest that we are wrong: http://www.german-embassy.org.uk/airport_transit_visa.html . Anyway if everything goes smooth, I'll be lending at Helsinki airport next week.

Battle City:

Will Webekind emailed me today a link to the Battle City ROM but seems it won't run in my favorite super-nintendo emulator (snes9x) since the ROM is of NES not SNES. I (apt-cache) searched for a NES emulator, found fceu, installed and it worked but couldn't find the keys for fire. The manpage seems to be lieing about the default key bindings.

It seems the Finns are not good at keeping their words either. Anyway, lets hope for news (hopefully good) before the end of this week.

Another journey into the childhood

metaur told about the supertux in his blog so i got reminded of the days when i used to play Mario bros. for hours on my Nintendo, so i apt-get installed it, played it and I'll be playing it when there would be nothing to do. Mario bros. reminded me of another game that i had on the same machine: Battle City. That was my favorite game and we used to play that day and night (quite literally). It was simply referred to as 'Tank' in the Nintendo gamebox i had, so I had to search for it's real name first before actually finding any free clone of it. But who cares when you have the whole Sunday :) I was able to find the real name of the game but not a free clone of it. :( I think i might be able to find an SNES binary for it but I'll search it next weekend :).

Thinking about how difficult could it be to write as simple a game as 'Battle City' another idea struck me: How about blending some conecpts from 'Battle City' into bzflag? How i imagine it, it would be really great and not very hard to implement. Maybe, time for me to get into a little 3d/game development.

The concerned authorities in the Helsinki have promised to take the decision on my case this Monday. So far, I have only seen them being bad at predictions and guess-work. Now let's see if the Finnish people are really the man (or woman :P) of their words. Once the decision is made, I should be getting the visa in a day or two (or at most a week). Then I intend to fly to Helsinki the next week.

My work at Movial:

There shall be times, when i won't be able to tell anything about my work and I don't think many people shall be surprised to know this. But I'll definitely be writing in my blogs about the stuff that i can talk about. Just keep in mind that it's not that everything that i will work on will be something for my employer.

Gazpacho work:

Currently, I am trying to implement a viewer application for gazpacho. The goal is to be able to develop and view the GUI on separate machines. E.g "hey! we should move the button a little to the left.. button moved some pixels right.. OK, now it looks good". Sounds cool, eh?

Obviously for Gazpacho hacking, i had to learn python. :yuck Now that i have learnt it, i still am quite sure that it's no better than lisp/scheme in any respect but one: right about everyone in the free software world seems to be going for it and that is why right about every nice free library has python bindings for it. BTW, don't try to tell me that it's 'easy to learn' in comparison to scheme, that is just plain bullshit.

Lush:

Since some people read my blogs to find out about new tools, i thought i should be referring to nice tools that i come across. So the first one is Lush (Lisp Universal SHell). I have installed it but haven't really tried it yet but from what is mentioned at the front-page, it seems to be a very impressive tool. Although there was one thing that pissed me off when i referred to the docs: The author was referring to some paths on his computer. WTF?

This reminds me of a friend of mine, who used to say: "Zeeshan only likes things whose names either start with a 'G' or an 'L'".

This weekend I decided to visit Mirpurkhas, a city where i spent my childhood. My father was employed in Sugar-Mill there and we used to live in the colony of that Mill. The colony is located 5 miles away from the city and therefore was and is quite peaceful. In those days, jobs were pretty secure and everyone in the colony used to server at least an year or so. My father spent some 20 years (including the 18 years of my life) there. So every family in the colony used to have long-term relationships with each-other, almost like one family. Moreover because of the strict checks on people going in and out of the colony, the parents used to have a sense of security and therefore didn't use to bother much about where their children go (within the colony). So i enjoyed a lot of freedom in my childhood, which is something not given to many children in big cities.

While my way to Mirpurkhas in a bus, I started to look at the Finland issue in a very positive way. I realized that the positive side to this whole Finland 'issue' heavily outweighs that of it's negative side, which is what i am dealing with currently.

The colony had changed a lot but i failed to find 'any' positive change at all. It seems that the mill-owners' new policy is not to care about their employees. Don't know if that would help them in the long run or not but seems one of my worst fears has started to become true: After the fall of socialism through-out the world, Capitalism will no longer need to prove itself humane and will therefore revert to it's vampire-like qualities once again.

I am slowly adapting to the use of my laptop and Ubuntu (hoary) at the same time:

• Data Synchronization

  I recall fawad telling me that he uses rsync all the time for synchronizing stuff between his laptop and desktop PC, so I thought I should also give it a try. It only took a few minutes to learn to use rsync. With only 10GB of space on my notebook and 80GB space on my PC, syncing isn't as simple I would want it to be; I must decide which stuff I should have at my notebook and keep that synchronized.

• Power Management

  I think that ACPI isn't getting the correct status of the laptop batteries, as it shows the battery to be at 100% when it's not running on batteries and then it suddenly drops to 92% all of a sudden when i pull the AC power plug out or if the electricity goes off.

• IrDA

  I have irda-utils installed but can't seem to get anything working. I really haven't tried any hard because i really don't need this (yet).

• Totem

  When i ran a video on my laptop for the first time using the stock totem/gstreamer on Ubuntu hoary, i was disappointed to see it jerking. I thought that it must be some gst. 0.8 problem but last night Ronald informed me that all I needed to do was not to use esd as my audio sink. Since the bug was already submitted in the Ubuntu bugzilla against this, i commented on that bug.

• Sychronization of clock

  It's very kind of Ubuntu devs to care for my system's clock to be synchronized with ntp.ubuntulinux.org each time my system boots but how do i disable this feature? I find no script under /etc/rc2.d that calls ntpdate. There is however a script named ntpdate under /etc/init.d but there is no link to it from /etc/rc2.d so why would it be run?

I am being attacked

Last night someone intruded into my desktop system (most probably through the ssh server, that i enabled last night to login to my desktop system from my laptop). Although I do have a suspect in mind but I won't name him because I don't have any proof against him. If he is reading this blog, then I simply want to tell him that attacking my system won't give him anything good but it might hurt him. Anyway I have restricted the ssh access to local network only.

Finnish Government sucks too

Yes, that is very true. After waiting for two months, my company was told that my visa application was never ever processed because of the fact that company can't apply for my visa on my behalf. They also (claim to) sent a letter to my company in May informing them about this problem but astonishingly the letter never reached it's destination. Now I've applied myself again, attaching with it a note informing them about the situation and requesting them to give a special consideration to my application. Let us all go to Mosque/Church/Mandir/Whatever to pray for my luck. If they don't give me any favor, this process normally takes 3-6 months. :(

Pakistan's Internet back-bone breaks-down

Just when i thought that things can't get any worse, Pakistan's Internet backbone broke when a submarine fiber-optic cable broke. 'Someone' used to tell me that Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman knows nothing much about IT and now am 100% sure about this. The country got connected through this submarine pipeline during the days he was the IT minister and I remember that he would be very happy about this when he used to show up on TV. He (or any of the idiots around him, e.g Salman Ansari) didn't thought of any backup plans. They are still providing clues of their ignorance, when they are waiting for the foreign company to fix it's submarine pipeline rather than to find alternate routes. It's been days, we are waiting for the pipeline to fix. Thanks to some of the ISPs who have managed to find an alternate route (albeit very very slow).

Some good news (I hope so)

My former-employer has agreed to let me use his office facilities, which include the DSL connection. I told him that i might need huge downloads often so i can pay him if I exceed their monthly limit.

Since I didn't want to ask him for a lot of stuff, i decided to buy myself a used laptop. So I bought a 'Compaq Armada E500' the other day. I have installed ubutntu on it (maybe for the time-being) and seems most of the hardware works out-of-the-box. Also according to these pages, this notebook works very well with Debian GNU/Linux Sarge:

http://kirya.net/~julien/wiki/doku.php?id=freesoftware:articles:armadae500

But there are a few problems:

• One weird problem is that I get kernel panic if I boot the kernel with the default parameters, i-e 'quite splash'. Something more weird is that i don't get the panic while the kernel is booting itself but rather quite later than that. So maybe upgrading from warty to hoary will help out? Anyway, I've already started 'apt-get dist-upgrade' at my office and left laptop there for everything to get downloaded while I am home.

• The xfree86 drivers for the ATI Rage Mobility doesn't seem to support the 3D acceleration capabilities of the graphics-card. I've heard that Xfree86 3.x had this support, so might be x.org have accelerated drivers for it.

Since Uraeus was very excited about the Luminocity demo at the GUADEC, i thought I'll have a look at it too. I found some nice pics and video of it in action and was really very impressed with this latest development by owen. So I started feeling envy of owen and thought why shouldn't I have Luminocity running on my machine. :P Thanks to the Luminocity wiki, I was able to get it working quite easily (well almost) following the instructions there. I thought of contributing some screen-shots that are some how different than what others have contributed already, so here are the screen-shots of 'IBM's Linux Ad' being played in a wobbling gstreamer cacasink window:

http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-44.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-47.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-51.png

If you interested to see some normal but cool screen-shots then here are some more:

http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-40.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-43.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-26.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-29.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-36.png
http://piipiip.net/~zeenix/Screenshot-37.png

Decent Internet Connection:

Seems there is no way i can get a decent Internet connection in this area. Even if i am fortunate enough to get one, it might take a few weeks to get installed. I have no idea how much downloading/uploading I'll have do while i work for Movial from here; if they want me to hack scratchbox, i am doomed. :( Maybe, i should acquire the services of my former employer for this purpose, since he wants me to keep coming to the office and look after my replacements' work anyway :)

Finally it's here, an XChat plugin that will allow plugin writers to write their plugins in the worlds' most simplest and powerful language: scheme. :) I would love to get it included in XChat itself, but don't know if XChat developers would like the same, until and unless there are some plugins based on it that people start to use. The documentation is available here.

Finnish Visa:

Seems the governments suck everywhere. I am to join Movial this Monday and I still haven't got the visa, moreover they say it might take a few more weeks or probably a month. Silly me! I was hoping to get it before GUADEC. What worries me a lot now is working for Movial from home for these reasons:

• It's damn hot here and it'll keep on getting worse and worse until the end of this month. It's hard to do a lot of work in summer. The brain also can't seem to function on high clock-rates these days.

• I don't have a high-speed Internet connection, only a very slow dialup connection. The problem is that the exchange in this area doesn't support DSL. I'll ask some ISP providers if they can provide me a WLAN connection in here. There are WLAN service providers but the problem is that of my location. Anyway, i hope i can find a solution to this problem.

• Power-outage: In summer, you get a lot of power-outages, many times as part of the power-saving efforts of the concerned authorities and many times because of some fuse melting-down due to extreme temperatures.