whistler’s blog

6th was my visa interview date so I had to go to Islamabad. Woke up at 2:30 at night, I had 5 O clock PIA flight and that reached there at 7:00. I did not have any luggage, just a hand bag, so I was the first one to get out of the airport. Reached the convention center a little later. It was quite unexpected, bags and mobile phones were entrusted to some people before getting in to the shuttle. The shuttle took us in the enclosure towards the embassy. Then there was a really long wait after i got interviewed. They said I’ll hopefully get a visa before the GYLC starts.

When returning to the convention center, the shuttles tire’s went flat, so we had to wait for another shuttle to come.

Last week got a TI-83 Plus, cost me around Dhs. 500, sadly my dad could not find a TI-84 in Dubai. Five minutes after playing with it I wanted to connect it to my computer and add some additional applications, but to my surprise the package had a CD-ROM with more applications for the calculator but did not have a cable to connect to a PC. However there is a small cable which can link two calculators. TI-84s come with a USB cable with them.

I have almost completed my IB math syllabus and more than half of physics without requiring some fancy calculator like this. At least I’ll be able to use it during my exam. But should I or should I not? I hardly know how to operate the calculator properly and I am pretty sure I will be able to do as good without it.

If you have ever used Linux, the idea of running Linux and Windows together must have occurred to you at some point. The good news is that there are better methods to do this than simply configuring a boot loader like Grub or Lilo to be able to load only one of the operating systems at a time.

There is a great software called Wine which can help by implementing Windows API on Linux. It lets you run a lot of Windows applications on Linux but some of the applications require wasting time on configuration, some have minor display problems and other bugs. However most of the light-weight windows programs seem to run perfectly without any configuration.

I have been in Karachi for years but havnt seen anything like what I saw last week when I was returning from school olympics with Ahmed, Faisal and Faizan. A Corolla was bumped really bad in the back possibly by some truck and it was still running on Sharah-e-Faisal, these pictures and video was taken right outside City School PAF Chapter.

I had been warned by my brother that it is not good because of which I had canceled my plan to go there twice. I had tried Papa Johns once in Dubai which i did not like at all. Even then yesterday i decided to go there with a few friends. It turned out to be a wonderful evening.

For starters we had ordered cheese sticks and chicken wings but the waiter brought us cheese sticks and some potato thing. They made that complementary for us when we told the waiter we had not ordered that. For some unknown reason they do not make thin crust regular sized pizzas so we had to order a large one. See our bad luck, instead of a thin crust the waiter served us with a thick crust pizza. We had to call the manager. Now this pizza was made complementary for us. Apart from this we also got a free pitcher of Pepsi free.

Click here for a larger picture

Many people want to look at a picture of this, I could not find any myself on the Internet so I put one on it myself. I know this picture seems crap but it is the best I could capture with my phone camera. The fountain is somewhat visible from my rooftop but I wanted to give it a closer look ever since it began operating, got the chance yesterday. The place I took this snap from was totally dark and seaview was unusually quiet for a Saturday. I wonder how this looks in the morning.

What kind of a rare bird is that? Let me explain, today I was at Technorati, for those who don

Since this information is available no where on the Internet I decided to put this here so others can benefit from it before this page gets updated. Here is how to install a PC-Tel modem on Fedora 4, if you have anything other than that check out the link above.

1) Download the file http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/pctel-linux/pctel-0.9.7-9-rht-4c.tar.gz
2) Put the attached file pctel-4c-01.patch into the same directory
3) Execute the following commands:

Hamza, Raheel and me were on our way to Royal Rodayle, when we heard a noise which is not unusual for Hamza

A very good software is out for the J2ME mobile phones, Opera Mini. Although I in no way like the desktop Opera browser which I used a few years back, I found this to be the best web browser freely available for Java phones. Opera Mini outperforms others because it uses a gateway which processes the pages before serving them, it scales images to a suitable size for mobiles, compresses the text and removes ads. The result is fast web browsing over a slow GPRS connection.

The browser takes reasonable time to load, not instantly, but better than what most J2ME programs take. It has a user friendly interface. I particularly like the bookmarks feature where the favicon is also saved along with the URL, and links to several of the popular sites comes preset in the bookmarks, you can simply select the link instead of typing in the URL even when you use the browser for the first time.