Moved

I've moved to WordPress.com. You can reach me at jafferhaider.wordpress.com

Browser Compatibility

Found this nice article on browser compatibility while finding out what's the difference between .html and .html files. Was a good read. Browser Compatibility Tutorial
Oh and there's NO difference between .html and .htm files, except for the 'L' :P

Web based Desktops

Was searching for some web-based OS's and IDE's, and I found some pretty neat stuff. Purefect is an online application much like a Web OS. One of its interesting features, albiet impractical, is the web based IDE, Kambium. Check out the Purefect demo here.
And I'm sure everyone's heard of youos by now. It's simply awesome.

Ramadan Mubarak, lights out

The blessed month of Ramadan has begun. The first fast will be tomorrow (except in NWFP). May everyone have a blessed Ramadan, and may Allah's blessing and mercy be upon everyone.

And let us not forget last year's earth quake victims (the quake came on 3rd Ramadan last year). Now would be a good time to contribute to the welfare of these people through your Zakat and other offerings. Remember, just because its not in the news doesn't mean that most of the quake victims are still homeless. It is up to each and every one of us as Pakistani's to help them.

Today, the entire country saw one of the worst power outages to date. The power in the entire country was gone for a good 6-7 hours, and even more than that in some areas. There were plenty of rumors as to the cause of the outage. Amongst the one's I heard were that a) the government has been overthrown b) we're being bombed c) terrorists blew up a dam/power grid etc etc. The actual reason turned out to be a fault in the country's electricity net. These rumors, as a friend pointed out, were probably started by the WAPDA/KESC people to distract people from the real source of the problem, i.e. that they were without electricity (and water) on a hot summer day :)

Jet-powered cars, Top Gear and furnace

Just saw on TV that Richard Hammond (the little guy from Top Gear) seriously hurt himself while driving a jet-powered car. The guy probably got bored of all the regular fast cars. Catch the news item here.

On a different note, furnace blew up this summer again. For those of you who don't know, furnace is my 3.0GHz Prescott fitted PC. This is the 3rd straight summer that I've had problems with burnt power cables with this machine ... I guess its time to get a new power supply. If I didn't need all that hard drive space, I'd seriously throw this rig out and buy a laptop :/

Return

After a rather prolonged absence, I have once again decided to don my blogging gloves and, well, blog.

The last time I made an entry here, I was a student. And as of now, I've spent nearly 4 months working in the IT industry. It's amazing how time flies these days. Working in the industry has been an enlightening experience to say the least, and it's fun as well, since I've got old university friends with me as colleagues.

Oh yeah, if you're into RPG Comics and wasting time at work :), Giant in the PlayGround's 'Order of the Stick' is awesome. Check it out here; http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html.
Be warned though, it's highly addictive :)

BSc 2006 Senior Projects (CS)

Yesterday and today saw the final presentations of all Computer Science senior projects for the 2006 batch. We being Group #1 had to give the first presentation (yesterday), which was a good thing since there weren't a lot of people around during our presentation, thus we didn't get asked any tricky questions. Me and Amer gave the presentation on behalf of our group. We also probably had the smallest presentation, but I hope that we got our message across.

Some of the presentations were very good, interesting projects, nice ideas, some were really boring. The highlight of yesterdays presentations was the Nirala project, which was really impressive, and the Dean, Vice Chancellor and people from Nirala had come to see the presentation and award the students involved with prizes. The project was very nicely done. Before that, the project blitzing by Dr. Umar Saif was interesting as well. He seemed really disappointed with the work done by students, and rightly so. Most of the students hadn't done as much as they should have. The senior project experience would have probably been quite different for us if Dr. Saif was incharge.

Didn't attend all of the presentations that were held today, infact, they are probably going on right now. I really liked the Hospital communication system thingy project. Those guys are the only entry for the Imagine Cup 2006 from LUMS, hope they do well. VirtuaCell Game Deck by Aatir, Kashif, Osman and Adnan was impressive as usual. Hope they get it sold to WaridTel, will make an excellent VAS.

I've got 2 placement interviews today, both at local software houses. Don't have much to expect from them, just going to give the interview for the experience of it. I'm hoping they turn out to be nice companies with good packages so that I can seriously think of working there, but they'll be no multi-nationals I guess :/