I've just returned from another software competition in Lahore. I highly regard Softec, however this year, I would say that it was close to a disaster.

First, the food: Last year participants were offered 3 meals a day, break fast, meal and dinner, however this time around, the first day it went well, however the second day they did not offer any meal, and participants were left to fend for themselves. I also heard that the accommodation which was provided to participants was below standard and even the police broke into it during 2am in the night to check up something, and participants had to be shifted to some other facility.

Second about the judges for the software competition: They were the most pathetic and rude lot I've ever seen in any competitions. I've never witnessed a judge telling a participant that I'm not interested in your project so I'll not evaluate you, this was common place in Softec 2007. All judgments were purely ad-hoc, some projects got as many as 6-7 evaluations (we got 6), while others just got 1. Some projects like SIGMa, which was presented by my friend,a judge was sent to evaluate, he flatly said I'm not interested in your project so I won't evaluate you.

The judges we got were disappointing, the judge who came to us on the second round, did not know that running programs are represented in the form of pages in memory, and by transferring all the pages of a program you transfer the address space of the process. He found this difficult to understand as he had no concepts about paging in Operating systems. Paging was not part of my project, rather Grid enabling application was, hence in process migration I made a passing mention of it, and thats were the judge got stuck and spent some 30 minutes in this basic theory, at the end he got tired and left, without listening to the entire project.

Except 1-2 judges of all the 6 which came to us, none of them knew about CERN, the largest particle physics lab in the World, and the birthplace of the WWW.

The main issue as I see it was that most judges were from the local industry, the local industry is still in its infancy. People who are employed in these industries mostly came there by just having learnt some Microsoft technologies like .NET or VC++, so have no indepth knowledge about systems such as Operating systems. ProCom featured some of the best judges I've come across, some of them were from IBM. The reason we won there was that both judges and us, spoke the same language, this was not the case in Nascon or Softec, where the judges were either FAST faculty members (Nascon), or local industry professionals (Softec) and were low on indepth knowledge about systems. Additionally cause ours was a research project on Grid computing, in Pakistan there is no requirement for Grids as massive processing is not carried out here, so people just do not know about it and thus are in a poor position to evaluate a project in this domain.

However Softec, still had a happy ending, another project from my university, the National University of Sciences and Technology (nust), won 1st prize! It is an IP-geolocation software. This means that NUST has won ALL major software competitions this year, which include Nascon (1st and 3rd prize to NUST), ProCom (1st prize to NUST), and Softec (1st prize to NUST), still one major competition remains, that is SoftCom held by the GIK Institute. However I would not be able to attend it as I will be in CERN, Faran, who wrote the IP geolocation software might be unavailable aswell.

Last week my team, attended an All Pakistan national software competition, in which our research project, a Grid Operating System based on Linux, won the coveted first prize! ProCom, held by FAST Kararchi was a mega event in a mega city. Karachi is officially the 7th most populous city int he world. However the ranking is based on a census carried out in 1998, currently it may be the largest city in the world. Take a look at this snapshot of Karachi from Google Earth, one can see that it won't be long until some parts of Karachi cross the border into Baluchistan, the neighboring province.

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.

What an incredible 100 days it has been. Before I started my blog my mail was flooded by mails from the Linux Kernel developers mailing list. But during the last 100 days, it's increasingly flooded from comments to my posts .

During the first 100 days, the blog amassed 30,000+ page views. Recieved 169 genuine comments and 141 Spam comments. There have been 38 posts. The largest number of views in a single day was for the "Happy birthday KDE!" post, which got close to 10,000 views, because it was digged!

Before starting my blog there was no reference to me when you searched "Irfan Habib" in Google. Now this blog makes it to the first page!

In the last 100 days, God has been gracious to me! In October my first research publication was presented at the International Conference of Grid and Cooperative Computing, Changhsa, China. Tommorrow I have another research paper presentation at the 4th Workshop on the Frontiers of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. I also got my admission to a PhD programme which involves research work at CERN. I also got a publication in the Linux Journal. Earned more than $3,200, which allowed me to purchase my first Notebook. Another thing which happened in the last 100 days was the openSuse 10.2 was released !

My tip to everyone is that they should keep doing something that they love (but make sure that that thing is productive, not unlike one of my friends who keeps watching TV serials and is the most unproductive member of our research team), and always keep their trust with God, and success will find you.