Afghan War

From when NATO invaded Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism, the poverty-stricken country has served as an election-winning tool for leaders of the involved countries. Every time election gets closer, the leaders of these countries make an announcement that could potentially win them votes.

Julia Gillard’s announcement of Australian troops withdrawal is nothing but a means for Labour to try and gain some popularity as they have been doing not all that good in the polls. This might just work for them as noted 64% of Australians are in favour of pull-out.

Every time the government is in trouble, they talk about the “War on Terror” to take people’s attention away from their national screw-ups and to try to stay as the favoured party around the time of the election. It is not surprising that withdrawal might start just before next federal election.

Obviously, both Obama and Gillard will spin the achievements as victory, but they know and everyone else knows that this illegal war and occupation will end as badly as it started.

Afghan conflict is complicated, obviously, NATO has not figured it out. Sooner or later they all will leave, shamelessly and all they have is nothing to show apart from a claim that they supposedly killed Osama and dropped his body in the sea and neutralized terrorist threat that supposedly existed in Afghanistan. And of course no one will ask them about the innocent lives lost and destructions they brought upon people of Afghanistan.

If you are using a full-blown IDE, they come with their own formatting facility, but if you are using a multipurpose editor such as Notepad++, then you may have to use a plugin to format your code. There are many 3rd party programs that can be used with Notepad++ that will help you format your source code without going through a lot of effort.

I use different tools for different languages. I use PerlTidy for formatting my Perl code, and AStyle for certain other languages. Here are the steps taken to add AStyle to Notepad++. Please check the AStyle website for further information on AStyle and its options.

First you need to make sure you have NppExec plugin added to your Notepad++ by going to Plugin menu.

NppExec Menu

Download AStyle. The zip archive includes all the source and an  executable. You can simple copy the executable to a suitable location (For this demo, I am copying it to H:\tools\AStyle.exe. Or you can recompile from the source.

Go to NppExec under Plugin menu and click on Execute or hit F6. You will get the Execute dialogue box.

Execute Dialogue Box

Select ” from the dropdown box if it is not already selected.

Type in the following commands in the window:

h:\tools\AStyle --style=allman "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"
npp_open $(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)

The first line, formats the code and saves the file. The view doesn’t get refreshed, so we need to reload the file from disk, and npp_open does that in the above. Note that I am using AStyle with –style=allman flag which uses broken brackets.

Hit the save button and it will ask you for a name, just type an appropriate name and hit OK to run.

Execute AStyle

You could stop right there and every time you need to run the command, just go to Plugins -> NppExec -> Execute… But let’s go one step further.

Under Plugins, go to NppExec and click on Advanced Options.

NppExec Advanced Options

Select “Run AStyle” from the Associated Script drop down menu and then hit the “Add/Modify” button. Make sure the “Place to the Macros Submenu” is ticked.

This will add a new option in Macro Menu.

Notepad++ Macro Menu

That is it. Hope you have found this short tutorial useful.

از ماست که بر ماست - It is from us which is upon us

It is very rare for a country to get involved so deep in the affairs of another country without an ulterior motive. If NATO countries are fighting in Afghanistan, they are doing it only for their own sake. They are not the least bit interested in what happens to Afghans and Afghanistan. If in the process of their work, some Afghans benefit, they claim the credit but they don’t really give a fig either way.

Let’s face it, Pakistani government is not our best friend either. Fair enough, they let refugees in their country during the years of Soviet invasion and Afghans are still living there as refugees in somewhat peace of mind, but their intention is clear. They only want a government in Afghanistan that is more than just friendly neighbour. The same goes for Iran and even India.

Consequently, whenever there is a discussion about Afghanistan among Afghans, there is hardly a time when some outsider is not blamed for the miseries Afghanistan has faced and still facing. Some blame America, some blame Pakistan, some other blame Iran, and some blame all of them. While there is no doubt all these countries played us over the years, what people forget is a great deal of blame falls on us too. A puppeteer without his puppets is nobody. His art can only exist if he has puppets.

There is a saying in Dari, “Az maast ke bar maast” which translates to “It is from us that is upon us.” Certainly external forces have been a big factor in the destruction of Afghanistan, but we as Afghans have done enough to 1. Directly by following their order, 2. Indirectly by creating unfortunate situations to benefit them. We have been more than accommodating to their demands for a few dollars.

If we keep a balanced view, we should notice that we share enough responsibility in making Afghanistan what it is now; either as a proxy for outsiders or for our very personal advantages. Next time when you get into a discussion about who is to blame for the bad fortune of Afghanistan, do not forget to mention “Afghans” along with other candidates.

Muslims and Christmas

Every year close to Christmas you would see forums, blogs, chat rooms full of Muslims talking about how Christmas has nothing to do with Jesus and Christians are wrong to celebrate it, and how it is not mentioned in the Bible.

It is one thing to tell your fellow Muslims not to celebrate Christmas and not to say “Merry Christmas”, but to keep talking about how wrong of the Christians to celebrate this is just ridiculous. Even a Da’wah TV program called “The Deen Show” had an interview with some scholar about the fact that Santa is not in the Bible.

Obviously we cannot get our priorities right. There are far more pressing issues that we Muslims face as a community and on individual levels. Our people are starving, war is destroying our homes, corruption is ruining our countries, yet as soon as Christmas or Easter is close, the same war against Christmas beings.

I frequent a forum that most of the members are Muslim. Every year there are new threads about all or some of the issues such as putting decorative lights up in Christmas, Saying Merry Christmas to Christians, Christmas is pagan holiday, Santa is a marketing scheme, Valentine’s day is Haram, Easter is not Christian in origin and the list goes on.

I am not sure I understand this obsession, but I am certain there are more important things in life. I thought here I’d give a list of activities in no particular order to delve into, instead of wasting your time offending Christians on their festive day:

1. Volunteer to clean your local Masjid
2. Memorize some verses of Qur’an
3. Pray Nawafil
4. Organise a social Halal event for Muslims
5. Plant a tree
6. Collect donation for the needy
7. Prepare meal for homeless
8. Volunteer at a shelter
9. Register for foster parenting (You will be amazed how many Muslim kids need foster parenting)
10. Take your parents out for dinner
11. Go to YouTube and listen to a lecture
12. Update your blog
13. Donate to a charity organisation of your choice
14. Tutor your younger siblings
15. Read a story to little kids
16. Prepare a meal for your family
17. Recite longer Surrahs in your prayer
18. Pick up your phone and call a friend that you haven’t spoken for a while
19. Visit your grand parents
20. Visit the Blog Etcetera and leave a comment or two.

I read somewhere that regardless of the industry if you are in an organisation for 3 – 5 years without being promoted, then it is time to move on. This fits my situation because I have been with my current employer for over 5 years now. Although it is a good company, people are nice and work conditions are great, it seems I have reached my limit in terms of learning and expanding my skills.  Not only that, due to the nature of our company, there is no position for me to ascend to. The only thing I can become is a senior developer, then a more senior developer and so on. Of course I can rely on my yearly review and expect some praise and some raise, but that will not keep anyone going on.

The other issue is  that the main technology we use is propitiatory and we are in a vertical market that has a fairly limited application. This in itself puts a limit in the on-job training and capacity building.

I have been keeping an open eye and looking into my options. IT job market is good at the moment and based on my skills, I can land on a job easily. However, I have been slacking and not getting the courage to leave my comfort zone. The options are there, the opportunities are there. I should be able to take the risk that the conditions in the next job may not be as good, people may not be as nice, and hours inconvenient, but as long as there is opportunity for career development and the pay is reasonably higher, I should not hesitate to take on the next opportunity.

Based on my experience, an IT professional should try to move on after maximum of 4 years in one place. This helps in career development and exposing oneself to different technologies and markets. Of  course unless you work for an organisation that is extremely dynamic and cater for different domains. I should listen to my own advice.

But if you really want to do it without having to dramatically change your code or moving away from PCL, there is a trick that you might or might not have figured it out or heard of it.

The trick is to print transparent text upside down in half the point size from the centre of the page. What you will print next will start exactly from where the last one ended. Now, change rotation back to normal, and print your text in regular size in black. This will work very well.

1. Choose transparent color [ESC]*vo1T
2. Rotate 180 degrees [ESC]&a180P
3. Drop the font size by half (assume your normal text size is 12) [ESC](s1p6v0s0b5T
4. Print your text
5. Choose black color [ESC]*v1oT
6. Change rotation back to normal [ESC]&a0P
7. Choose the normal font size [ESC](s1p12v0s0b5T
8. Print your text.

Note: Please refer to your printer manual for specific PCL commands, such as font sequence.

Image via Wikipedia

I am working on a data matching project. One organisation provides some data to match with data from another organisation.

Generally the data is provided in plain text delimited by a predefined characters (eg tab).
I used the split function to split the line into an array. One of the “features” of the split function is that if there is nothing after the last delimiter, it ignores it. So, if the record in question does not have any information in the last field, the size of the array becomes one less than the number of required fields to be matched. This caused a few issues because the program was written without keeping this in mind.

If you have a string like “This|is|for|test|” and you want to split it by the pipe character, then you will write the following code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
 
my @myarray;
my $string;
 
$string = "This|is|for|test|";
 
@myarray = split(/\|/, $string);
 
print Dumper(\@myarray);

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          'This',
          'is',
          'for',
          'test'
        ];

Well, I don’t really want that. I want the last item in the array to be an empty string. Luckily, the split function takes an optional argument that specifies the limit on number of pieces we want to split the string by. See the example below:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
 
my @myarray;
my $string;
 
$string = "This|is|for|test|";
 
@myarray = split(/\|/, $string, 3);
 
print Dumper(\@myarray);

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          'This',
          'is',
          'for|test|'
        ];

So, if you pass 5 as the limit, you will get the following output:

$VAR1 = [
          'This',
          'is',
          'for',
          'test',
          ''
        ];

But what if you do not know the number of fields? Well, there are a few ways to find this out. My favorite method is to use Perl’s Regular Expression‘s ‘tr’ operator to count occurrences of the delimiter. The ‘tr’ operator or translation operator replaces occurrences of a character with another character or deletes them if the ‘d’ modifier is used. Please note that the substitute operator ‘s’ works differently.

For example:

#Replaces 'a' with 'u'
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$string =~ tr/a/u/;
print "1. " . $string . "\n";
 
#deletes 'a'
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$string =~ tr/a//d;
print "2. " . $string . "\n";
 
#does nothing
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$string =~ tr/a//;
print "3. " . $string . "\n";

Output:

1. Let the cut out of the bug.
2. Let the ct out of the bg.
3. Let the cat out of the bag.

Now that I have quickly gone through tr operator, let’s get back to the point. So, the tr operator also returns a count of replacements or deletions. Let’s check the above code with slight modification:

#Replace 'a' with 'u'
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$count = $string =~ tr/a/u/;
print "1. " . $count. " occurrences of 'a' were replaced with 'u'.
.\n";
 
#delete 'a'
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$count = $string =~ tr/a//d;
print "2. " . $count. "occurrences of 'a' were deleted.
 times . ".\n";
 
#do nothing
$string = "Let the cat out of the bag.";
$count = $string =~ tr/a//;
print "3. There are " . $count . " 'a' in the statement.\n";

Output:

1. 2 ccurrences of 'a' were replaced with 'u'.
2. 2 ccurrence of 'a' were deleted.
3. There are 2 'a' in the statement.

Now to the original problem.
Using ‘tr’ operator you can count the number of the delimiters, pipes in this case, in the string, then split it that many times plus one, like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
 
my @myarray;
my $string;
 
$string = "This|is|for|test|";
my $count = $string =~ tr/\|//;
@myarray = split(/\|/, $string, $count+1);
 
print Dumper(\@myarray);

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          'This',
          'is',
          'for',
          'test',
          ''
        ];

Well, that is it folks. I hope this is of any use to you. It is my first ever tutorial, so let me know if there are any errors in my explanation or code snippets.

I am still watching Alphas. Slightly losing interest, but I am still watching. I like Gary.

Azita Ghanizada as Rachel Pirzad in Alphas

So Rachel is going to her sister’s engagement party. She is trying to get herself a date to the party so she is not “auctioned off” to her “third cousins” and not having to go on “blind dates” with them.

Now, here is what happens to the majority of Afghan girls who turn in to their sister’s engagement party with a “date”. Well, it does not happen. It is unheard of except in very rare cases of, oh, so liberal families who probably have not much to do with the rest of Afghan community.

Let us say we all wake up one day it has become somewhat normal for an Afghan girl to take a white male co-worker as her “date”, she will definitely have to buy him a nice black suit and a tie that matches her top.

Let me also let you in on another secret about Afghans. Although marrying cousins is quite normal, not all of us marry our cousins. Surprisingly most of us in west marry from other families. Even in cases of arranged marriages, it is still outside own families. Probably mother of the guy sees a girl in a gathering. Then she calls few places to identify the girl, and then find someone who is close friend of that family and asked them if they could talk to the family and organise a visit.

Another thing, the girl’s family do not usually approach to a man or to his family or in Rachel’s terms “auction off” their daughter. In majority of cases, even if it is a love marriage and the two know each other, fell in love and all, when families get involved, the  man’s family would find out about the girl’s family. They then call and ask if they can visit, then they go to the girl’s house. Get to know them, talk about their son who is very respectful, educated and responsible who loves his family, etc. Similarly, the girl’s family would talk about how many other families are interested in their daughter, who is very pretty and educated and loves her siblings, etc. They never act desperate as shown in Rachel’s case.

Let us make one thing clear. It is not unheard of Afghan girl ending up with non-Afghan and non-Muslim guy, but generally nobody knows about such relationship until they are engaged and the guy supposedly converts to Islam and has a Muslim name. Yasin and Yousuf are in public demand. In addition, being in a premarital relationship is not something you would announce to everyone in your sister’s engagement. Therefore, when you turn up with a “date” people will talk about you. There is nothing surprising about it. You are an Afghan and supposedly a Muslim, so you should not engage in dating and whatever comes with it. Doing that and then announcing it in your sister’s engagement party is simply asking for negative attention and hurting and embarrassing your family. Unless, that is exactly your intention. Even those who date generally keep it a secret.

But the talk will not be “Oh I feel sorry for her mother.” or “Her poor mom.” It probably will come up, but in most cases, they will be like “Is that guy with Rachel? Oh man, he is in jeans. How embarrassing!” or comments like “Why is Rachel not wearing something fancy? After all it is her sister’s engagement.” “Is she dating an American now? What a shame!”

Here is another one, in an Afghan gathering the host family would try very hard not to make a scene. If Rachel tells her father that he needs to go to the doctor, the dad will probably say, “I will see”. Then Rachel will say, “Promise me you will, dad!” and then the dad will possibly get mad and without yelling, make an angry face saying, “Ok. I got it. I will. Now get out of my face with your crazy boyfriend.”

The rest of the Episode 8 was ok, I guess. It was those inaccuracies that got me thinking and wrote this. Perhaps, writers should do a little research before writing and making generalized statements.

The mosques of Allāh are only to be maintained by those who believe in Allāh and the Last Day and establish prayer and give zakāh and do not fear except Allāh, for it is expected that those will be of the [rightly] guided. –Al-Qur’an 9:18

Afghan Masjid - Green Street view, Doveton

Afghan community in Melbourne has had a Masjid problem for a while now. The masjid is small and cannot accommodate the large number of congregation on Fridays, Tarawih prayer and Eids. Also there is not enough parking spaces which causes issues when there is a Fateha (ie the gatherings of people who come to pay respect for the family of a deceased person and make Du’a for the deceased and his/her family).

Building a new Masjid has always been a plan. However due to different reasons it has not been achieved. Recently the Masjid committee decided it was time to get moving and purchase a plot of land in Doveton to build the much needed Masjid & Community Centre. Alhamdulillah the community has pledged to help in every possible way to make this happen.

The task of designing the Masjid was given to my dear friend, Mr Homan Asiaee, who I must add has done a great job. The new Masjid will include a separate praying area for sisters and brothers. On the ground floor the main area will fit 650 worshipers. In the upper level, there is area for sister that will fit 250 people. There is also another small area on the ground floor for ladies. The masjid will have a lift for Muslimahs who may have problem walking up the stairs.

There is a multipurpose hall that can be joined with main praying area for the special congregation such as Eid prayers. The hall can accommodate up to 1000 people. The Masjid has a big car park and Inshallah the issues facing the community will no longer exist once the Masjid is built with the help of Allah (SWT) and generosity of the community members. All in all, it is a beauty!!!

I urge you, Muslim brothers and sisters to give generously for this house of Allah to be built and increase your Hasanaat. Rasulullah (May peace and blessing be upon him) said:

Whosoever builds a house (Masjid) for the pleasure of Allah, whether it be small or large, Allah builds for him a house in paradise. (at-Tirmidhi, Ibn Khuzaymah, Ibn Hibban, Abu Dawud, and Ahmad)

By providing a place to pray, one receives a reward for each prayer that is made and for any wayfarer who seeks shelter inside. The rewards for the prayer are multiplied each time someone performs their prayer.  Imagine if 1000 people pray in the Masjid every day, and from each of those prayers, people who contributed in building this Masjid will reap rewards.

May Allah make the initiator of this project successful and reward everyone who has and will contribute to building of this beautiful house of Allah.

Afghan Masjid Bank Account Details:
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
BSB: 063 427
Account Number: 10079059

To receive Masjid SMS news please text your name to 0428 030 619

Online donation is not available at the moment but as soon as it is, I will update these details

Poor is getting poorer and rich is getting richer

First thing first, I do not like Karzai. I really don’t, but I can’t help feeling sorry for him at times. When he was offered the position of being a puppet of USA, he probably thought that he would go to Afghanistan, help NATO in capturing Osama and Mullah Omar, get some high-profile jobs and government contracts for his relatives, make some cash in the process from different sources, things will go better, US will leave and he would become the saviour of Afghans from whatever they thought they were fighting.

Didn’t work well for him, did it?! Well, he did most of those things, but now he is stuck in a situation that nobody likes him or trusts him. Northern alliance think he is helping Pakistan, Americans think he has a little too much sympathy for Taliban, Taliban know him as servant of America, people are sick of him because his government is very corrupt and incompetent. I would hate to be in his position right now!

He knows the issues and he knows that he is nobody’s favourite anymore. He tries to change things but it is too late for him. He constantly asks NATO to schedule a withdrawal of their troops, he encourages Taliban to make peace, he even once confronted his own brother about his illegal activities months before he was killed. But nothing seems to be going his way anymore. When I was in Kabul in 2002, I thought Karzai was doing some positive things and since he inherited a fairly peaceful Kabul city and surroundings, we didn’t believe American occupation would last this long.  At that time at least people in Kabul kind of liked him, because they copped it worst from Taliban’s social and recreational restrictions.

I am not a political analyst, but the way I see, the whole thing is one big mess. To be honest I do not see anything that is happening over there in a positive light. It is dim and grim; US  is supposedly staying until 2024 now, which by the way indicates how badly they have failed, insurgents have changed their strategy and are doing more targeted damage now and it is very clear from the recent assassinations that they are picking up momentum, corruption is through the roof, poor is getting poorer and rich is getting richer. Well, actually the last one is true about everywhere in the world.

Right now, I do not believe anyone has a solution for Afghanistan. It looks like they are letting chips fall wherever they may and nobody has a sense of direction. As a matter of fact there is no destination to have a sense of direction for. Walking blind and hoping the next step is the right one, or do we even care if the next step is the right one?