March « 2007 « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

26Mar/074

Its an unfair World!!!

Imagine how would you feel if you work very hard on a project, as if your life depended on it for more than a year, and then when you think its up to a stage where you can show it to the world take it to a competition. And whats the result?? A project which has 10% functionality of your own project wins the first price, and you don't even make it in the top 3! That hurts!

The competition in question is NASCON 2007, held in Islamabad. The competition was sponsored by EnterpriseDB, a respected open source consulting company around PostgreSQL. I have no clue who selected the judges for the competition, but of the 6 evaluations which were carried out, only 2, I repeat only 2 actually took demos, and both of them appreciated the complexity of the project. Whereas the 4 others they just listened to the theory and moved to the next stall!

The project which won in my category was done by Misbah Mubarak, a class fellow of mine, who had developed a mobility framework for Java application only. My project, being an operating system, provided mobility for all application regardless of implementation language, and hence theirs was a subset of mine, however the judges selected hers to awarded the top prize! Everyone from the judges, spectators and the Vice-president of EnterpriseDB appreciated our project and recommended that we should start a consultancy around this project.

But I take heart from the fact, that research projects generally do not win software competitions. An alumni from my lab, who had worked on a Grid middleware framework caleld JClarens, failed to win any competition here in Pakistan, primarily because, as in my case probably, they did not comprehend the project. However due to his project he ended up going to CERN, Geneva, Caltech, USA and finally Stanford university for higher studies.

So my advice to everyone involved in research projects in Pakistan is not to lose heart if they fail to make their mark in any local competition, they must remember Pakistan is backwards in terms of technology and the judges in these competitions may be equally backwards and narrow -minded.

Filed under: personal 4 Comments

19Mar/0713

MacOSX finds its way onto my Desktop!

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Linux_user_dumps_Linux_for_MacOSX_highlights_reasons]

I've been a Linux user for years now, I've been around since kernel 2.2.x. What I always loved about Linux is the openness, before Linux I was a windows users, and I wasn't learning much about computers because everything I used was closed source hence knew nothing about how they were made, I programmed in Visual BASIC 4.0, and thought I was the ueber-geek! LOL! Since I switched to Linux my knowledge about computer systems has multiplied, Linux is such a great learning platform, and now it has become increasingly mature to be used on Desktops.The latest distros like OpenSUSE 10.2, ubuntu etc are mature enough that they can be installed in laptops without a single hardware not being supported!

Recently I saw a Google TechTalk on the MacOSX Automator, I loved it! MacOSX Automator is an extraordinarily powerful tool which can automate workflows and not just replace scripts but also extend them (scripts can be integrated into MacOSX automator workflow). From that moment I thought I would give MacOSX a try. Although MacOSX Automator doesnt do anything which you can't do with scripts, but I loved the simplicity of the tool. In Pakistan Mac machines are not sold. So I had to go along with MaxOSX86, I downloaded a torrent for 10.4.8, and try to install it always kept restarting, I downloaded another torrent for 10.4.6, that worked!

So here is my take of MacOSX, from a Linux users perspective:

1. MacOSX has a powerful GUI and a powerful Shell

Linux has a powerful shell, and I love that, because the shell provide you complete control over the system. However, although they've made huge progress, Linux GUIs so far can not beat MacOSX's GUI. I really love the minimalist approach. Windows applications are overloaded with options and menus, unfortunately Linux applications have followed suit, however in MacOSX applications, you won't find this bloat, the menu bar on top of the window is context sensitive, and the menu options change with applications, I really like this approach.

MacOSX draws from the strength of open source, it integrates the BASH shell, and runs on the freebsd kernel, its shell programs are 90% similar to that of Linux. So MacOSX is sort of a mixture of fully GUI based Windows and Shell based Linux, and the mixture is a powerful OS, which can be used for both productivity applications like office etc., and hardcore programming and geeky stuff (MacOSX 10.4.6 ships with python, perl, php, nearly all open source software which is available for Linux can be compiled for MacOSX86). I feel that Linux users can take immediate advantage of MacOSX, whereas Windows users would have to take some time out to adapt to the OS.

Linux users have been whining since long for office productivity applications like Photoshop, Office etc. The real good thing about MacOSX is that all these application are available on it, if you have the money that is! OpenOffice.org is cool, but to be honest, I do all my writing in MS Office 2007 on Windows XP, which I run as a VM in VMware on my notebook.

2. MacOSX86 has surprisingly good PC hardware support

Before installing I thought that I might run into hardware problems, as MacOSX86 can not be expected to work natively with PC hardware, but I was in for a surprise. I tested the following: A BenQ Scanner, Canon Printer, USB external storage, Sound etc.., every single peace of hardware worked with minimal configuration, most of it without any! I recently tested Windows Vista, and I was disappointed to find that it didn't support the Intel 865 motherboard! There was no sound available, as the driver for the Intel 865 was not available either from the Microsoft Website or the Intel one!

3. Software installation is extremely Easy!

Traditionally the only way to install software in Linux was to compile from the sources, recently package managers have become increasingly more user friendly, and in opensuse 10.2, I rarely find myself compiling from the sources. YaST handles everything automatically, just add the installation sources, and click on what you want! In MacOSX software installation goes something like this that you mount some image (it mounts itself), and drag the application to the Application folder or to the desktop, it copies something and done!

These are the top 3 reasons so far, I'll keep adding them as an when I come across them. Now surely some Linux geek will come by and say that MacOSX is evil, because its proprietary, well the entire OS is not! The kernel is based on an opensource kernel, it integrates a lot of opensource software, and you can run any opensource software on it as desired. Compare this with current Linux distros, there are a few distributions which do not come packaged with some sort of proprietary software, OpenSUSE 10.2, tries to avoid it as much as possible but still upon install it prompts 3-4 times that you are about to install a non-opensource software and asks if I agree with the license, of course I do, I don't have any choice!

Since MacOSX supports all my hardware on the desktop, I have no reason to install any other OS (It replaced OpenSUSE 10.2, as my desktop OS, opensuse 10.2 however remains on my notebook). MacOSX poses a threat to not just Windows, but also to Linux because it has all the things people love about Linux (except the freedom) Apple should promote MacOSX86, while the Open Source community should learn from it and see what people love about it and emulate it, rather than emulating Windows.

Filed under: apple, macosx 13 Comments

4Mar/070

April Fool’s Day RFCs

Some time back on Slashdot there was a story running on a technology, developed in China, to remotely control pigeons to make them move up,down, left and right. Obviously there are some very serious ethical issues involved in this. However in the same slashdot post I came across two RFCs which I was not aware of:

RFC 1149: Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carrier

RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

Both have been published on the 1st April, and by the same guy!

Upon further investigation it turns out that there a whole bunch of April Fool's Day RFC, published every year (Although none was published last year). Wikipedia maintains the entire list. Some of them are a fun read!

Filed under: misc No Comments

3Mar/0714

Vista’s “Open With” Dialog a MAJOR step back!

[digg=http://digg.com/microsoft/Vista_s_open_with_dialgo_a_step_back]

I often require to open a file in one viewer or another for example, in this case I wanted to open a VMware configuration file in an editor to change a setting. Previously in Windows XP, even in Windows 98, when you used to select the "Open With" option you used to see a number of programs to choose from, and if it was a configuration file, a unix one, I simply selected Wordpad, since Notepad didn't interpret the newline characters correctly, and life was easy!

In Windows 98:

But no longer in Windows Vista! When going to the open with option, I was greeted with the following dialog:

The only program to choose from is the officially associated program. I went on to click "Browse", and I was greeted with the following window, where I had to manually search for Wordpad to open the configuration file! Leading to wastage of seconds from my life, just because Microsoft changed something that didn't need any change at all.