With all the hype about Marxism and Socialism, I remembered this story. Someone in my family back in the 1980s spent some time in the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison. They had taken him because of suspected links to anti-government elements. There were certainly more than one in every family who the Read more…
Having lived in Australia, I am familiar with very long flights to most places. If you are going to spend 15+ hours on a plane towards your next holiday, you might as well do it on your own terms and have a layover somewhere worthwhile. Especially, if you are travelling Read more…
Volunteer computing is an arrangement where volunteers provide or donate their computer resources to projects. That way, these projects are able to do really advanced and time-consuming computations. Most of these projects are scientific trying to solve different problems. Some are run by universities and other not for profit foundations. Read more…
We are only two Muslims in our workplace, but every Ramadan almost everyone else fasts one day to share the Ramadan experience with us. Our work organises a dinner for those who fast. This year, one of our colleagues emailed us the following and with her permission I decided to Read more…
Imagine you have a file with multiple columns and you need to quickly get the total of a column in command line in UNIX. The easiest way is to use AWK in the command line. Let’s take the following file: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 2 Read more…
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 Read more…
I am a big fan of beautiful code, not only in terms of quality of programming but also formatting the code nicely so that it is easy on eyes. If you are using a full-blown IDE, they come with their own formatting facility, but if you are using a multipurpose Read more…
If you ever had to deal with PCL you would know that there is no command to centre the text. There are some printers that support HPGL command embedded in the PCL file, but not all. If we are printing a predefined text, we know the measurements and would set absolute positioning. But Read more…
I know some inspiring brothers and sisters who make being a practicing, obedient Muslim look so easy. But it is not. It takes constant struggle and for people like myself who are not very disciplined it is very hard to keep up the pace. I know several brothers and sisters Read more…
Dandenong is home of great diversity in Melbourne. Like other parts, there are people from different backgrounds living in this heavily multicultural suburb. Rightly so, it is known as the most culturally diverse suburb in Victoria. Afghan businesses have flourished in Dandenong for the past 10 years or so. Specially, Thomas Read more…