Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 71)

Following is a blog i wrote a few months ago but didn't post it for security reasons ;) Now that i am far from Pakistani Army and ISI, i feel safe to post this. But if anything happens to me, you know who did it :). Here it goes:

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Pakistani army is 'the' terrorist organization

Imagine Stalin or Saddam, and then look at Musharaf. Find a lot of similarities? Most probably not and you'll be thinking of me as as complete idiot for thinking about such a comparison. Well my dear friends (especially the ones in the west), please wake-up. Your thoughts about our rulers are very important. The difference between Saddam and Musharaf is that of strategy. Saddam thought of himself as very strong and his country as unconquerable but Musharaf is a very intelligent man and he knows that he must keep the west happy if he wants to remain in power.

How he achieves that? Very simple, he keeps the west under an illusion that if he is not there and he lets people decide their fate, the country will then be ruled by people not very different from the Taliban.

Where is the proof? Don't panic! I have one (at least): Very recently there were some protests by the human/women rights activists in Pakistan in favor of women marathon. The main participant was none other than the famous Asma Jahangir. The protesters were attacked and were being treated very brutally. Who were the attackers? Not any extremist Muslims but the police. One police-woman tore the clothes off Asma Jahangir. That police-woman later confessed that she was ordered to do so by higher-authorities. Asma told in a recent interview that when she was threatened continuously by some religious extremist party on the phone, she finally decided to track the caller. Do you know what she found out? The number of the caller was not of some religious party but that of some military head-quarters.

My dear western friends! I am not asking you to do anything for me or my society but please don't be fooled by a dictator. He is nothing more than a dictator. Religion and religious extremism is needed by the army and the army will at no cost want to actually eliminate it.

Something amazing has happened, i can now eat the complete pizza of the normal size, which is a little smaller than the one tommi can eat. Hopefully, I'll soon be able to eat as much as tommi can. :) It might be because my stomach has finally recognized the pizza as a valid meal.

Yesterday, i spent the whole day trying to fulfill some government paperwork. Unfortunately, only one of the task was accomplished as the offices close at 4 and 4:30. I was so lost. People are so helping that they would sometimes give you directions even if they themselves don't know where they are :) At one point, i was moving around a big building trying to find the subway station. After a few rounds, i asked myself (intuition) rather than someone else where it could be and believe me or not, it turned out to be exactly where i thought it should be.

Somehow, i forgot to mention about the endless help of Toni Willberg in my last blog. He helped me a lot in the shopping and stuff. He also gave away one of his mattress to me, which is the only thing i have to sleep on. :) Moreover, he is also ready to give away a nice table but that doesn't unfortunately fits in his car. :( Thanks a lot Toni and I am extremely sorry for not giving you your due credits in my last blog.

Day 1 (Mon, Aug 08)

Due to my flight from Dubai to Frankfort getting late, i missed my original flight to Helsinki. Since it was my first time ever abroad, I was very nervous about the whole situation but I felt ok when i got me aboard the next flight. I landed at Helsinki airport at 2 pm. Got myself a taxi and went straight to the office, as Tommi was waiting there. I was told by a number of people that i wont get any language problems since i am good at English but no one ever told me about the strong accent that Finns have. The first thing i did was to go to the bank and make myself a bank account. I spent the whole day with Tommi. We went to some place for some pizza and i was not just astonished to see the size of the pizza but seeing the skinny tommi eating it all within a few minutes (if not seconds).

Day 2 (Tue, Aug 09)

Had too much stuff to do, spent most of the day hunting for apartments. In the evening we went to the small forrest/hill just outside tommi's apartment, from there we went to another hill a bit far away. Fate wasn't on our side and it started to rain. We got quite late on our way back and could only find one place open. From there, i bought a small burger that was not enough for my appetite, so i ate some of the pizza from the last day. That pizza even survived one more day as i was having it for my breakfast as well. Tommi was really surprised at that. On our way back, we met a friend/neighbor of Tommi, who talked as much as woman do talk. I was surprised at that since tommi told me that Finns don't talk much. Upon asking him, he said: "Well, she was a girl". :)

Day 3 (Wed, Aug 10)

Went to see some apartments we found a day ago. All of them were good enough for me but only one in the Lauttasaari was very near to the office. We showed interest in it and that guy managing the deals, told me that i have a bright chance of getting it. At night, tommi got his big screen which he was waiting for. We watched 'The Village' on it and it was fun. I don't know if it was the effect of the big screen or the movie was really good.

Day 4 (Thu, Aug 11)

I finally got the apartment in Lauttasaari. Here are some nice pictures of the area:

http://www.fma.fi/virtualboat/suomenlahti/05/lauttasaari.JPG http://www.kaupunginosat.net/kotikatu/galleriafi/lauttasaari.jpg

I moved into it as soon as i got it. Although I am yet to make a contract with the power department, they haven't cut the power yet. I also bought myself a cable Internet connection and they said that it would be functional as soon as i reach my apartment. Unfortunately, i forgot my laptop at tommi's, so i had to just go to bed. :)

Day 5 (Fri, Aug 12)

Now that i had my own address in Helsinki, i was eligible to apply for a social security ID. Tommi handed me a map and said that it's better i go there on foot. Although i forgot the name of the department/building, i still reached there safely. It was good to see that almost anyone i asked for directions, was willing to help me and was speaking English. The lady at the foreign registration office told me that I'll be getting my ID mailed to me the next week. In the evening, we had a party at the office, which was quite fun. I had to leave the office to buy some important stuff for my apartment. When i was back at office, some colleagues were going to a bar, so i joined them. That was fun too. Now that i had my laptop, the cable modem wasn't able to register itself, so i just went to sleep.

Day 6 (Sat, Aug 12)

I had 'more than' enough to drink the last night, i was feeling very bad. I think my stomach wasn't able to digest the beers. I called the Internet service providers and they promised to fix the problem for me. I went outside, found a Chinese restaurant and had my lunch there (at 5 pm). When i come back home, I was happy to see my Internet starting to work. So i wasted quite the rest of the day looking for some nice stuff to watch on my fast connection. But the only thing that worked for me was the Owen Taylor's Cairo presentation video from GUADEC.

Observations so far:

• Finns have a big appetite.
• They are very helping people.
• They try their best to speak English with foreigners, some survive this effort and some fail quite miserably.
• They don't seem to be in any way like the cunning, negative-minded, jealous and fanatically religious people that i have lived with so far.

They say 'a picture is worth a thousand words' so here are my first thousand words. The next phase of thousand words in on it's way. Too busy right now!

OK, so i finally made it and i am writing this blog just to inform all concerned people. Very busy, totally clueless and looking for an apartment. I might be able to get one tomorrow but can't say anything for sure. Right now i am staying with Tommi Leino (my project manager), but i have no idea how long can he bear me. Too tired to write more so i should just sleep. :)

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'".