Double U Blog

Microsoft unveiled Windows 7 at PDC (Professional Developer’s Conference) 2008 and it’s been good news ever since. Impressions of the new OS have been pretty positive from all around (except for a couple of exceptions, of course) and from what I’ve seen so far (which isn’t that much, honestly as I haven’t been able to use it myself) everyone is right in saying “Windows 7 is Vista done right.”

Say whatever you like about Vista, it’s evident that Microsoft has learned from the fiasco. With the Apple ads distorting everyone’s perceptions of Microsoft, the increasing popularity of low-power netbooks that can’t handle resource-heavy operating systems, it’s been a deathblow to Vista.

The Apple matter is a whole other issue, but the thing about netbooks must be very worrying to the bigwigs at Microsoft. Hardware manufacturers have been hinting for some time they want an OS that can run on low system resources — it goes without saying that this is what consumers have wanted since day one, but the fact remains that almost the whole of the netbook market is using either Windows XP still or has switched to Linux. Maybe this is the final turning point for Linux to enter the mainstream, but then what about Windows, which counts for about 90% of all computers around the World.

Steve Sinofsky (senior VP at Microsoft) showed off an ASUS Eee PC running Windows 7 (1GHz processor, 1GB RAM) at PDC 2008; there have been reports of people running it on just 512MB RAM too, but take that with a grain of salt. Seven uses much less hard disk space too, which is another scarce resource on netbooks. Microsoft has reportedly gone over and optimized the whole OS with this aim in mind, which is a great thing — it makes Windows an option for netbooks again. Some analyts are predicting an explosion in the netbook market, so this makes Seven’s low resource usage a very big plus point for Windows.

Today, Microsoft also announced its plans for their security software suite, which is currently called OneCare — they’ll start offering it for free, and they’re specifically marketing the new version (due in Summer 2009) as a small-footprint program aimed at computers low on hardware muscle (read: netbooks). One major complaints users have about security software is that they use too much system memory; if Microsoft can pull this one off even relatively successfully, not only will this make Windows computers a lot more secure (yaay!), it’ll be another positive point under their belt.

I like the way things are playing out so far, and I think this is the right thing for Microsoft to do. They’re building up the right sort of hype for Windows 7 (we just hope we’re not burned by this again), and they’re taking the right steps as a business. I’m in no position to judge business decisions of this magnitude (in fact I’m not worthy of passing such opinion), but as a user, I think this is what Windows needs to reinvigorate itself in the tech world. Windows already has a huge market share — all they need is to get over the Vista slump, and the steps they’re taking with Seven might do just that.

Paul Thurrott has a great roundup of all his Windows 7 coverage on his site; he also does a Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte (TWiT) which you should check out if you’re interested — episode 81 is the one recorded right after PDC.

Pakistan’s electricity crises (which has pretty much existed since forever) has just caught the attention of RentACoder.com (RAC), who have posted on their blog warning customers about the issue and advising them to discuss it beforehand with whomever they hire out of Pakistan. The post was categorized under Severe Weather / Other Critical Situations updates.

RAC is a website that allows you to hire freelance ‘coders’ (programmers, designers, writers etc.) instead of having to do it yourself — outsourcing, is what it is. There are many sites for this, whether your purpose is to buy or sell services, RAC and Elance being two of the most popular few. Pakistanis are quite active in such marketplaces and are generally quite good at it (except a few unfortunate cases which give the rest a bad name). The ByteSense blog has a run-down of numbers (written in June) showing the market for and customer rating given to Pakistani coders from various freelance business sites (including the two mentioned in this post).

Granted, the electricity problem is bad - but it’s not so bad as to hinder all business. As Green&White puts it, we still have power for at least 14 hours in the day; and not all parts of Pakistan have to face this problem in the same degree. It is also a safe bet to assume that anyone who is serious about working at places such as RAC and the like has already made arrangements to alternate power sources for their computer and internet — a UPS, generators and laptops are some common ways to work around the issue, and undoubtedly are used by a majority of Pakistani coders.

I can certainly understand why RentACoder would want to caution their customers about this obviously existing problem. It would undoubtedly hurt their credibility–not to mention that of the coder’s–in the eyes of their customers.

The thing that is disheartening is that this message from RAC will surely be taken by some people as implying “steer clear of Pakistanis.” And why not? If I were a customer looking for someone to work on my project and I had two people to choose from, one from Pakistan and the other from whichever other country, RAC’s warning would remain at the back of my mind — I would want the smoothest possible transaction; why risk loosing time and potentially even money? With this mindframe, I think, many people will choose people from other parts of the World over Pakistanis at places such as RAC.

I guess the general complaint with their warning is that it is too harsh, and places yet another hurdle in the path of a Pakistani coder looking to earn pay and experience online.

LittleBigPlanet (the game) is expected to ‘revive’ sales for the Sony PS3, but it looks like it’ll be 6 days late in doing so. Why? Part of the soundtrack music contained verses from the Quran. Listen to it yourself - see if you can make it out (transcription below).

A player wrote on the Playstation discussions forum about this (along with the recording) and asked Sony to have the parts removed. A moderator promised to look into the matter and locked the thread, which has apparently been deleted since; you can read a cached version of the original thread. The user wrote:

I have noticed something strange in the lyrics of the music track of the level. When I listened carefully, I was surprised to hear some very familiar Arabic words from the Quran.

(…) The words are:

1- In the 18th second: “كل نفس ذائقة الموت” (”kollo nafsin tha’iqatol mawt”, literally: ‘Every soul shall have the taste of death’).

2- Almost immediately after, in the 27th second: “كل من عليها فان” (”kollo man alaiha fan”, literally: ‘All that is on earth will perish’).

Many of the players won’t understand what’s being said — even if they do understand Arabic, many might not have even noticed! However, its good that Sony responded quickly to this instead of just shrugging it off.

I don’t blame Sony at all, and I don’t think anybody should - it’s a bit farfetched to expect them to watch out for this sort of thing, I think. The song itself was released in 2006 and included as part of the soundtrack of the game.

You can read more at Ars Technica.

Just saw this BBC News story.

Man killed wife in Facebook row

A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his wife to death over a posting she made on the social networking site Facebook.

Full story, BBC News

The guy was obviously out of his mind, but I guess her changed relationship status on Facebook to “single” (a few days after he had moved out) tipped him over. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes, but he had ‘left’ her, so I guess her choice was justifiable.

Almost half the world’s population — about 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day (source). To get things into perspective, that’s approximately Rs. 200 (Pakistani), roughly the same cost as chicken, which we eat almost daily. 74% of the population of Pakistan lives under $2/day according to a 2002 study (WDI, 2006; source); that number can only have risen in the last 6 years.

Nearly a billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation — I could go on, but I’d rather point you to a site where you can read some excellently presented (read: pretty charts and pie diagrams) poverty facts and statistics as well as other great eye-openers relating to poverty and the efforts against it (at globalissues.org).

Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not being able to go to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.

For many people in developing countries, acute poverty means difficulty making a living, as well as a lack of basic services in education and health. In Pakistan, lack of access to credit, training in income-generating activities, basic social services and infrastructure are critical factors behind the persistence of substantial poverty, especially in under-served rural and urban areas.

– Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund Project, World Bank

It’s a sad fact but it’s something everyone must admit — we have a tendency to avoid, even outright ignore the cold hard facts staring in our face when it comes to such a grim topic as poverty. We read an article, listen to someone on TV and maybe sometimes we pause and reflect afterward on how hard it must be to live on a few hundred Rupees everyday with prices climbing the way they are. We think about it and frown — but in the end we move on. One blog calls it the empathy deficit.

We always look at poverty–and those stricken by it–as coming from far away places; people we don’t really know so we don’t feel empathic, problems we don’t really care about because we’ve never felt them ourselves. The widow mother of 6 children (all under 15) who has cancer can’t be from my neighborhood; the family of 5 that earns a collective amount of Rs. 3000 a month aren’t my problem. After all, things like that don’t happen here. Places like Africa, South America sure, but surely not here, so close to home! The truth can’t be farther from it. (Note: both cases are true stories from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan).

Granted, poverty in Pakistan isn’t of such a degree as Africa and South America  - or maybe it isn’t highlighted as much. But think about the cleaning woman hired in your house — almost every middle-class and above house in Pakistan now has at least one person employed to look after things like sweeping, dusting etc. How much does she earn from each house she works in? Can you imagine your lifestyle with that kind of income?

I think the biggest hurdle in our way even when we do choose to act on the feeling of empathy is the question we often don’t have an answer to: Can I really make a difference? Will my effort really help? I think the answer is a big fat YES. I guess what we need to understand is that we can’t do this alone. We have to work together, otherwise everything is in vain. An ant doesn’t move a cookie to inside its anthill by itself — no, what they do is break it up and each any plays its own part by taking a small peice back to the hill. Little by little, the whole cookie is back and they have enough to feed everyone. It’s the same way with poverty and how we can get rid of it, or at least try to get rid of it.

Poverty is a global issue, something we all need to work on to fix. The fact remains that this is a real problem. Please think about doing anything you can do to help: donate your old clothes to places like Edhi or Chhipa; buy a bag of wheat for your maasi (cleaning woman); help out at some charity or contribute what you can to a food bank. Again, it doesn’t have to be a huge contribution worth millions of rupees to make a difference. If we can all play out tiny part, working together, we can make a difference.

Oh, and by the way. Please don’t read this and forget about it. Act on it. I’m resolving to at least make a conscious effort to identify things I can help out with - I don’t know what or how I’ll do it exactly, but of this I am certain: I will play my part, however tiny it may be.

So we finally decided the Shawwal moon had been sighted after all, and tomorrow–okay, technically today, because I’m posting this after midnight–is Eid-ul-Fitr!

I don’t have a shiny graphic to post up here in celebration, but Eid Mubarak nonetheless everyone, and have a great day!

Unlike the vast majority of computer viruses (virii?), this one would actually be a good thing.

Brought to you by the brilliant xkcd.

There have been some problems with the database server hosting this site in the last couple of days. You might have noticed crawl speeds and frequent time-outs with a blank page instead of the content. I’m working on trying to get over this issue, but in the mean time, please bear with me (and the slow site!). Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

An update to my last post regarding the “hacking” attempts via the vulnerability fixed in version 2.6.2 of Wordpress, I’ve had several more people trying to take a crack at this - just now I deleted 16 phony users, all with strange usernames and email addresses.

I logged in to my mail today and found a dozen notifications of new user registrations — I have things set up so that I get an email whenever anybody registers an account on this site. While its exciting to see so many subscribers actually taking the time to register on my site, I was suspicious from the get-go. Call me paranoid, but read on.

I opened the emails up and saw that all of them had weird usernames and email addresses (I won’t post what they were as they could be used to cause damage elsewhere). My geek-sense tingled and alarm bells went off, so I quickly logged in here to see if everything was alright. All was well except that there was an update to Wordpress (2.6.2) available. I checked the release notes and, you guessed it, there was mention of an “exploit” that allowed an attacker using specially crafted usernames (and email addresses I assume) to change another user’s password (presumably mine) to a randomly generated one. This can only happen if you allow visitors to register an account on your Wordpress blog.

Because the new password is random, the attacker doesn’t know it — that’s why, as the release notes say, this isn’t much more than a nuisance in that it doesn’t give the attacker access to the account. However, grouped with a weakness in the mt_rand() function, an attacker could potentially guess the new randomly generated password.

The attack is difficult to accomplish,  but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.
– Wordpress development blog

So if you’re using Wordpress version 2.6.1 and allow open user registrations, you should definitely upgrade as soon as possible. Get the latest version, or if you’re like me, you can use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, which works like a charm.

I’ve been playing around with Ubiquity since the day it came out, and I’ve been working on making some routine tasks easier with it.

This time, its a currency conversion command that will get the current approximate value of one currency in terms of the other that you enter. An example command that will convert, say, 10 USD (American dollars) to PKR (Pakistani rupees) is:

currency 10 USD PKR

This will then give you the result right in the Ubiquity window, with no need to open a new tab.

I wanted to use XE’s Universal Currency Converter (UCC) but their terms of use, as I understood them do not allow for automatic extraction of data from their site. This command currently uses Google’s currency converter from iGoogle; be sure to read the disclaimer, as well. If you have a suggestion for a better alternative, I’d be glad to hear it!

To be able to use this command, you need Ubiquity installed and also have to ’subscribe’ to this. Click here, and Ubiquity will present you with an information bar across the top of the window; clicking on the “Subscribe” button will add this command to your subscriptions and you can then start using it right away.

Here’s a screenshot of the Ubiquity command window using this command (click for larger version);

As with all other Ubiquity commands, typing in just part of the command is sufficient for it to understand what you mean — but this, of course, depends on what other commands you have that start with the letters “curr”. You can also take a look at the source code.

Let me know what you think!