Independence Day

On the eve of Pakistan’s 61st Independence Day, it rained thoroughly throughout the city — perhaps throughout the country. I walked out late in the morning over the wet asphalt on a road that was rebuilt a few months ago to the spot where one of our cars was parked. Dad is in [...]

Benchmarking Apache web server(s)

If you are not a systems administrator, you likely may never need to benchmark individual servers on which your applications are running. But if you are, odds are good that you already identify with the importance of knowing which parts of a system under your control are under-performing, causing bottlenecks, and plainly not coping [...]

Ask: Lack of grounding may cause USB mouse to go nuts!

This is the third USB mouse that has gone nuts. After roughly what may be two, three months of buying and using, the mouse starts to frequently send two signals instead of one back to the CPU when the left button is clicked. The end result is that instead of a single click, [...]

Symbian: iCode for ‘Enter’ and ‘c’ keys on Nokia phones.

The following won’t make sense to most of the people reading my blog. However, hopefully, it will help out fellow Symbian developers from pulling off their remaining hair looking for the solution I break out in the space of this post.
Nokia phones have a ‘c‘ key which mostly deletes selected items or text. [...]

Paste Mode: Pasting text (and indenting it) in Vim

Pasting a block of code copied from elsewhere in Vim is a nightmare, unless you know how to do it right. The autoindent (and, possibly, smartindent) features of Vim go crazy when you yank and slap a block of text. How do you do it right, then? This is not a new [...]

Epilogue: How to terminate your PTCL Broadband DSL contract

After months of bearing mental torture, limited or no connectivity, and bandwidth and service charges apparently without having a usable service at hand, I have finally decided to throw in the towel and terminate the contract I have for PTCL Brandband DSL service. Now, since the monthly bill for the service comes augmented with [...]

So, yes, I still haven’t quite got over it!

Apparently, in what appears to be a decision that is beyond my comprehension, the almighty staff at Slashdot, in their infinite wisdom, thought it necessary to turn down my rather serious and (what appeared to me to be a) reasonably well-written, on-topic and coherent post on CRT Monitors causing headaches about a month ago, but [...]

lolcat picture!

I put up my first lolcat picture last night. You might find it both cute and funny. The malnourished cat in the picture was trying to hide amidst plants in the porch next to our little garden.

Ask: Do CRT monitors cause headaches?

I posted this on slashdot.org two weeks ago, but the story got rejected. I am posting it here.
I have myopia (medium to high myopia). I wear corrective lenses (in the form of glasses) with negative six optical power, both eyes. The optical power had gradually been decreasing, but since over two years now, it [...]

Note to self: How not to light a BBQ fire!

It is barely past two in the afternoon. I am still struggling with the hangover from last night’s BBQ party. The lower part of my torso aches like it has never ached before, in part from sitting on my knees and in an uncomfortable position for hours at a stretch while grilling and [...]