whistler’s blog

I totally hate Etisalat, the telecom monopoly over here in UAE, they have blocked VOIP and sites like orkut and flickr. I guess some of the blocks have a good reason behind them but many are totally useless. Whats with blocking a perfectly cool picture sharing service. With hi5 blocked aswell im getting worried about the flickr substitute zooomr i am using now. Its unfair how they are making so much money by blocking calls over the internet so that everybody has to use there service to make overseas calls. With Etisalat also controlling PTCL, Pakistanis dont look very happy with it either.

Regular visitors would notice this blog gone back to a previous date. Well the server got hacked and I had no recent backup. I had just done a lot of updating recently because I know I will not find much time for this in my final year of IB diploma.

Life is tough, have to wake up early in the morning for school, school is a long distance away and traffic in Dubai is a big headache, There are all kinds of deadlines to be met for IB. At TIS we wasted a lot of our time, over here at EIS it is acadamically tougher but people, both teachers and students have been very friendly and helpful so far. Have to catch up on all the work and get where the rest of the students are.

I am working on this new blog where I am going to post about useful freeware J2ME applications and some other cell phone related information.

I had been planning to create a site with such content with ruby on rails, but using a wordpress blog instead, I would be able to focus more on the information I am going to provide rather than website design and maintainance. If I get enough hits, I’ll upgrade it to a proper site.

Please take a look at mobware and give me comments and suggestions.

Some time back me and my brother Shuaib released our first freeware software which can descramble jumbled words, its available for download here. Although it was functional months back, it took us some time to pack and deploy it on our website.

Developed in Visual Basic 6 it used a database of words for quick descrambling. Shuaib did a very good job with the programs user interface, i devised a very nice method for quick descrambling which was taking a lot of time before and now does the work within a second. Download count today is 35.

Just today one of my friends sites got defaced by someone, the page the guy left on the server was quite surprising it had a msn messenger contact email given and whats more it started with the name of Allah and asked to go to an Islamic site al-sunnah.com. Now all the hackers out there would be whining that these script kiddies give them a bad name but this one is doing the same for Muslim’s and even his country KSA was mentioned on the page!

Taking a look at the html source of the page quickly revealed that it was made in frontpage, a windows user. The page even had a animation script from dynamicdrive.com, which for some reason did not render on firefox. Googling the provided email i found there were more sites which had the same fate as my friend’s. Most of the sites had been changed back to something else but google’s cache contained the defaced version. The sites seemed quite random, this dude named Arsalan must have got some exploit script from the net and would be feeling very proud being able to use it. What a loser!

Die slow outside Area 51

Originally uploaded by whistl3r.

‘r’ and ‘v’ of the drive slow sign missing, picture taken outsite area 51, not the military base with aliens but a bowling alley in Karachi. Very amusing, whoever did that. The sign is not like this anymore someone wrote r and v again.

My interest in photography is nothing new, but my gallery at flickr is! I wanted to put a gallery on this site but was facing problems with drupal. So i decided to use flickr to host my photos instead, which is much better than running your own script to manage photo’s.

I’ve put many old and new snaps that I have taken, even got some positive response, I never checked before that someone had commented on my snaps. I’m even thinking of upgrading my flickr account but its useless until I get a better internet connection and better photography skills.

Few days back I went to trip to northern areas with school through Adventure Foundation Pakistan. It was fun and a really nice experience, specially the first three trekking days were really cool. We trekked from Thandiani to Biran Gali on day one, from there to Dagri on day two, next day we trekked to Natia Gali via Miran Jani.

We then had to part with the very nice new friends we had made over the three days. We then camped at Ayubia and rested there most of the time. There we had 16 annoying sixth-graders camping with us. On the second day at Ayubia we went for a trek to Shekapura, if I got the name correctly.

As I would be leaving for my CAS trip very soon, I decided to clean up my K750i memory stick so that I have enough space for pictures. I had only 15MBs left even when I had removed all the pictures. My Mp3s were only 20MB so what was taking rest of the memory? The file hierarchy of the phone had always confused me before, but today I found out most of the folders were junk.

The system folder was taking the most space so I checked it out, I previously thought that this folder would have critical files, essential for running the phone. But it turned out that most of the stuff is useless, the ams folder contained what seemed to be some program data of applications I dont use at all, or were removed from the phone long ago. Interestingly the muvee folder in ams had some .mrp files which turned out to be bitmap images. Just rename them to .bmp and you’ll be able to view them. This was where most of the memory was going. I also removed the SKINS folder, which seemed to have pictures aswell but I could not find any way to open .mbm files. I tried a tool mbmbmp but I guess SonyEricsson uses a different method to store data in these files.

This page contains web links to pages that have to do
something with me.

This site: http://whistler.intelecasoft.com
This basically is my blog.

Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/ibrahimm/
Here is what music i like and am listening to.

E-zine articles: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Ibrahim_Mohammad
I wrote a few articles there.

My Tech Blog: http://techblahog.wordpress.com