Ping..

So after a long time, I am getting back. This post is to ensure others and especially me that I am still alive :). Stay tuned!

Michael Pritchard turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com

Michael Pritchard turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com

Posted using ShareThis

Death of Marwa El-Sherbini – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Death of Marwa El-Sherbini – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted using ShareThis

‘If’ – By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected | Webware – CNET

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected | Webware – CNET

Posted using ShareThis

Scientific American 10: Guiding Science for Humanity: Scientific American

Scientific American 10: Guiding Science for Humanity: Scientific American

Posted using ShareThis

Hubble’s final servicing mission – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Hubble’s final servicing mission – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Posted using ShareThis

Google Unlocks it’s Server Design

Google revealed one of their server design. Google posses one of the most efficient, reliable and secure data centers and has revealed it’s server design to help increasing problems of huge Data Centers. For details please read the detailed article at here.

Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer

I came across this excellent post on ReadWriteWeb about 10 traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer and I could not agree more. In 10 traits every thing about a software engineer is sufficed. It is a true analysis of what a software engineer must equip of. The traits are,

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

Read them, analyze them and if you are a software engineer find how many you have from these. For more details read the complete post with description of each trait at here.

Pakistanis did it – Chief Justice restored

In an unprecedented historic development the deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan – Mr. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary and other deposed Senior Judges have been restored by Prime Minister of Pakistan Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani. This was announced in a nation wide TV telecast on morning of March 16th, 2009 , apparently a historic day and beginning.

It took two years of extreme, painful and long struggle of the great and brave Lawyers of Pakistan and their leaders and I salute to their struggle. Lawyers and their leaders Mr. Aitezaz Ahsan, Mr. Ali Ahmad Kud, Mr. Munir A. Malik, Mr. Tariq, Mr. Athar Shams and all other rocks, I would say that this is the only historic moment and movement of our times in Pakistan that has glorified our history to the real extent. In end it was Political Parties like PML-N (Sharif brothers and their workers and other leaders), Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (Imran Khan), Jamat-e-Islami(Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Liaqat Baloch) and some other small parties, who really brought masses on roads especially. Hats off to them (Y). Also a salute to brave officers who did their duty and some courageous who even didn’t obey orders and went with masses.

The Long march’s last day on which Lahoris have to show their vigor and vibrancy and had to move decisively, it’s again proved that Zinda Dilan Lahore can do any thing. I have at-least seen nothing like this. The bravery of masses and leaders and the strength of crowd was amazing, all the time it sounded in my mind that this is historic, this is historic and it should win! I once read in a history book that Lahore decides the decisive fate of movements, yesterday we saw this with our eyes that this is so true. Hundreds and thousands came on roads for a cause and in end we can say that WE DID IT!!

I know some would have many conspiracy theories, reservations and even disappointments over it. Like CJ wont touch NRO or missing persons case, or Musharraf and there are other theories that some superior powers and army is involved, and political parties have their own benefits associated but the bottom line is People, Civil Society, Masses, Lawyers and Political Parties stood for a cause and achieved it well and that’s very rare, so we all proved that Pakistan and Pakistani Rocks!! and time is changing, though a lot more needs to be done and a long long way to go but still now we have a beginning.

Perhaps I will write detailed views and analysis later and I wished I could also be part of this, but as a Pakistani still I feel very happy and proud. Long live Pakistan.

For more details read here and here.

Demo – The Sixth Sense

TED continues to prove to be the best meeting place for innovators and geniuses. Here is another brilliant video on Sixth Sense. Well though naming it sixth sense sounds a bit odd but video is superb!

100 or so Famous People in One Photo

FamousPeopleOnePhoto

The above photo shows around 100 odd famous people of history in one photo. It’s really an awesome picture and worthy to view.

1474 MegaPixel Picture

Check here to view a 1474 MegaPixel picture created by David Bergman. Taken in USA at Innaugural Address of President Barrack Hussain Obama. It is a combination of 220 images which made up a file of 1474 MP or 1.5 GP image.

Wonderful posts at TED

Today I am going to write about three wonderful talks on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

Number 1: Bill Gates unplugged at here on solving biggest problems of world and these are not technical btw :).

Number 2: Barry Schwartz’ passionate plea for practical wisdom, a standing ovation talk best in 2009.

Number 3: Technological wonderous 🙂 in nature. Digital blocks with computational ability. MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles at here.

The last one is specially awesome to watch.

Dr. Stephen R. Covey live in Pakistan

Dr. Stephen R. Covey the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People will be live in Pakistan via video satellite link. For more information visit Franklincovey Pakistan.

Regards,

Stop the Gaza war..

It’s heartbreaking that how educated, moderated and secular world is remaining sinfully silent at what Israel is doing in Gaza. Do we need useless United Nations any more? Is there any doubt that America even all of other stronger countries are a big Hypocrat? If we keep all the religious and sentimental views aside, does logic allow us to do this? Comon, world we should try something to stop this otherwise this will happen to any one. Please come forward and stop this mass scale assassination of poor and innocents.

Just to have a look at the brutality look at: Gaza News Photos – very disturbing photos.

Regards,

10 Myths about Pakistan

A nice post on All Things Pakistan at here and the article can be read at here.

Find the complexity of code.

I came across measuring complexity of a piece of code, which is really tricky one. Following is the code,

void function( int n)
{
while(n > 1)
n = sqrt (n); // assume sqrt returns square root of any number and ignore the complexity of square root
}

If any one wants to try this do try 🙂 and post your answers.

A small interesting riddle..

Wandering through the walls of my office I came across this interesting small puzzle, it is stated as:

Question: If it were two hours later it would be half as long until midnight as it would be if it were an hour later What time is it now?

Please post your answers in the comments section..

Launching Executables (showing GUI) from Web Services deployed in IIS

Recently one of my senior colleague was faced with a problem of launching executables from Web Services hosted in IIS. Following is the problem he was faced with (as is email),

“I am working on a dotNet web service that needs to launch an executable (.exe). I have used System.Diagnostics.Process to launch the process. When I run through VS2005 test environment, web service triggers the executable and its UI is displayed (e.g., launching notepad). But when I deploy the web service under IIS, the web service does launch the process but UI does not appear.

Can someone shed some light on what is happening and suggest a solution to this”

After searching on the internet I found the following solution and it worked fine.

According to Microsoft following are the reasons for this

1.    By default, ASP.NET runs its worker process (Aspnet_wp.exe) with a weak account (the local machine account, which is named ASPNET) which don’t have permission to interact with desktop.
2.    By default, IIS Admin Service won’t allow its application to interact with desktop.

These can be resolved by:

1.    Allowing worker process(ASP.NET) to run in SYSTEM account.
This can be done by editing the machine.config file which is located at (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG. Open the machine.config and find the ProcessModel tag and add the following attributes to it,

userName=”SYSTEM” password=”AutoGenerate”

2.    Enable IIS Admin Service to interact with desktop. To configure this, follow this steps.

a)    Open Control Panel and follow these steps:
For Windows NT: click Services.

For Windows 2000, Windows XP, and .NET Server: click Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b)    Double-click IIS Admin Service.

c)     On the Log On tab, select the Allow Service to Interact with Desktop check box.

d)    Stop and restart the IIS Admin Service.

3.    Sometimes ASP.NET account does not have enough privileges to access certain WMI namespaces. So to resolve this do the following

a)    Open the Computer Management Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.
b)    Expand Services and Applications, and then select WMI Control.
c)    Right-click WMI Control, and then click Properties.
d)    In the WMI Control Properties dialog box, click the Security tab.
e)    Expand Root, select CIMV2, and then click Security.
f)    In the Security dialog box, click Advanced.
g)    In the Access Control Settings dialog box, click Add. Select localMachineName\ASPNET, and then click OK.
h)    In the Permission Entry dialog box, make sure that Apply Onto is set to This namespace and subnamespaces.
i)    Make sure that the Allow ‘Enable Account’ and Allow ‘Remote Enable’ check boxes are selected.
j)    Click OK in each dialog box until you return to the WMI Control Properties dialog box.
k)    Repeat steps 5 through 10 for other WMI namespaces that your application will access.
l)    Restart IIS. To do this, run IISRESET from the command line.

Information obtained from:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;317012
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555134

Regards,