Whiz Kid Woes

We are having sports week in the university! I participated in Squash competition earlier and I lost the BEST OF 3 by 2-10 and 6-10. It was about 2.5 years since I had played squash! Just for fun, I wanted to test my strength in the weight lifting competition. We have a programming competition planned day after tomorrow as well and I’m the chief organizer for it! We had to set up all the computers today because tomorrow would be Sunday and Monday is the competition! I told my friends what to do and did initial setup. The gym is pretty far away from that lab so I had to run back and forth from the gym to the lab. I did that for about 2 or 3 times. Finally I gave my number to a friend and asked him to let me know when its my turn! My turn came at about 5:30PM! We had about 14 contestants in my category. There were two rounds of the competition, the first one was pull and jerk round and the second was the snatch round. You get three three tries in jerk and lift so I did 55kg, 62kgs and I could not do 66kgs. My best score 62kgs was counted. Next was snatch, I did 55kg first, then I tried 60kgs twice and I couldn’t lift 60kgs. So my total was 62+55. I got 5th position! The 4th position was 0.5kg more than me and the 3rd was 1kg more than me. Even the second one was not far off! The gold guy from Electrical department was super strong! He did 70kgs in jerk and lift and 60kgs in snatch. It was a great experience, I’ve been out of gym for almost an year now! Next year would be cool! Faisal Mehmood from BE CIS (Batch 2001-2002) was a great help thoughout the tournament and he cheered up all the CIS guys from third year and second year! He settled for a bronze, in the end.

We reached the dynamic programming contest place on time but they had problems and the contest got delayed a bit. We roamed around the software competition place and came back, only to find that all the teams were in position and were ready to go! I was sitting next to a bunch of indian teams. The one on the immediate right was Kunal’s team! This time we had a really weird computer with a 14 inch monitor and a conjested place. Finally! The competition started!

We got brownies and pepsi served during the competition and that was supposed to be our breakfast! Wow! They stopped the scoreboard when one hour was left and we were at 5th position then with four correct solutions! We submitted the 5th correct solution and we burst into a big ‘YEAHH’ in the crowed. The MAJU team seemed to be pretty disappointed because they had solved 4 and they were above us. We knew that we were amongst the top 3 but we weren’t fully sure. We were given certificates and shields of participation after the competition was over. There was a huge ceremony in the evening time. They were about to announce the DPC (Dynamic Programming Competition) prizes and there you go… NED University gets the 3rd prize! We were so darned happy! They called ‘NED’ as in ‘ned kelly’ but I knew what it meant. Usman, Mehroz and other FASTian friends were wondering why I was jumping with all the excitement. They realized after they called in our names. We went to the stage and collected our prize money. It was $250 + $50 (bonus!). Dinner was served after that and we were the happiest people on earth! We went to the lodge for one last night.

The night at the PTCL lodging was nice. I woke up early, took a bath, did a shave and we were ready to raise hell! The bus was a bit late but we made it to FAST well ahead in time before the contest started. We ate a bunch of Shawarmas before the contest started. We did a photo session with the indians during the lunch session and we made good friends! Gagan, Supreet, Kunal… only to name a few. Usman and I heard drums and guitars near the hall where the initial ceremony took place and went to take a look. FAST had planned an entertainment night planned for the particpants and guests and the guys were preparing for it. They were generous enough to let me in that small place where they were practicing and I sung with him the Lifehouse song Hanging by the Moment. It was so much fun! Now it was time to do some programming!

Today was the warmup round since there were lots of people who did not know how to use PC^2 and had so many questions about the nature of the problems. Finally the contest started, we were team-21 on the warmup day. There were indian teams all around us. I was on the keyboard and Mehroz and Usman were doing the major thinking (lucky me!). We were sitting on a Dell machine with a 17″ monitor! We worked hard but ended up in 5th position. We didn’t take long to revise VC++ and STL and we were alive and kicking in minutes. Mehroz proved to be an extremely fast learner when he got hang of VC++ in a very short time. By the way, we guys messed up a simple binary search algorithm, can you believe that? Doh!

Well finally that was over, we headed to the entertainment show! The FAST Karachi guys left off with their teacher to explore places in Lahore! They missed the entire contest and they have no idea what they missed! The FAST Lahore people were awesome! They did a drama, they did a bunch of live songs and a guy did amazing magic tricks with the teachers from the Indian delegation. An IIT professor was called upon the stage to sing a song and he sang an old classical indian song for his wife in Bombay. Next, we had a sufi item from a three very special people. They performed for about 50 minutes and they brough the entire crowd into a trance. Bunch of volunteers went to the stage to dance and I joined them. It was so much fun!

We had dinner and were taken to our lodges after that. The first day of contest ends here!

March 11, 2005

Day 0, 7:30pm: Six of us (3 from NED, 3 from FAST) united at the airport to fly down to Lahore. We took the most economical ticket of Shaheen airlines (the plane was delayed by 30 minutes!). FASTians received Rs. 4000 per person for expenses in Lahore and we had only submitted the application which had not been approved then. The journey was smooth and calm! There were two kids sitting on the seat behind ours so we had a lot of fun with them. Mehroz was enjoying the scenic beauty from the window; Usman was reading his Cormen book; Emad, Farhan and myself listening to music (I was reading DaVinci Code too!); Munir was getting bored because he didn’t have anything to read or listen to. It was a petty two hours flight. We arrived at the Lahore airport! Though I’ve been there before but having seen the airports at the US… this time it was quite different! The airport is pretty well-built. Lahore tey akhir Lahore hai!

Day 0, 10:15p - continued: Since we were 6 people with lots of luggage, calling a friend for a ride was not a good idea so we decided to go on our own. We thought of taking a cab but we’d have to take two cabs and each was costing Rs. 400 so we decided that we need a more economical solution. The idea of putting Emad in the bunker came into my mind but then I remembered that humans ought to be treated equal (I did you a favour Emad! heh!). We took a bus to Aara Bazar, we missed the our destination and had to come back in another bus. It was past 11:00p and we were not going to get any bus for Faisal Town. We took two rickshaws and headed straight to FAST Lahore! It wasn’t a very cosy solution but we saved money!

Day 0, 12:00am: Enter fast Lahore, loaded with people everywhere! They collected our luggages, gave us dinner and then we got a ride to our hostel, for the night stay. While sitting and waiting for our carrier to the hostel, we learnt that C# was not allowed in the Dynamic Programming Competition. We were all set to work out the problems in C# so it was a blow in the head for us! We decided that Visual C++ is the next best option! Since I was the official coder of my team, my childhood knowledge of STL came really handy! Usman was well-versed in STL as well! On the other hand, Mehroz had no idea of VC++ whatsoever.

[Fri, Feb 4, 2005]

… so it started like just another morning… we missed the FAST point by 2 minutes so we had to chase another point near Karsaz… fun was in the air and we were not ready for the competition… Usman and Mehroz joined me on time. As scheduled, the first round started right on time. Llack of planning, lack of concentration and lack of sufficient interest got us at 8th place in the first round, we got penalty for an incomplete submission otherwise we’d have been in the top ones….

… several hours passed, we ate lunch, went to say the prayers, regretted on our performance… too embarrassed to tell our score… but then the magic happened we outclassed the entire country in the second round to hit a monstrous FIRST position!

in the second round, we were actually able to convert our 1.5 hrs allocated time into 4.5 hours. Since we couldn’t beat the time, we decided to cheat the time… mortals will just call it ‘efficient time management’… we call it, cheating the time!

that was our little tale of today!

We had a conference on Open Source Adoption in Pakistan, jointly arranged by IBM and PSEB at Hotel Sheraton here. The number of people attending the conference was close to 400, as claimed by Mr. Humanyun Bashir, Country General Manager IBM.

The agenda of the meeting was as follows:

09:00 Registration and Welcome Coffee
09:30 Welcome Note: Mr. Humayun Bashir, Country General Manager, IBM Pakistan
09:35 Introductory Address: Mr. Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari, Minister for IT & Telecom*
09:45 Enterprise Linux: Is it there yet?: Mr. Rudolf Simmer, Linux Business Manager, IBM Central Europe, Middle East and Africa
10:05 Linux Live Case: Manufacturing Sector: Mr. Sardar Naufil Mahmud, Corporate IT Manager, ICI
10:25 TCO & ROI: A Clearer Perspective: Mr. Mohammad A. Sabzwari, Director, LPI Pakistan
10:45 Pakistan Government’s Linux Initiative: Dr. Amir Mateen, Managing Director, PSEB
11:05 Session Chair’s Summary: Ms. Jehan Ara, President, P@SHA
11:15 Coffee Break
11:30 Linux Initiative in Other Governments: Mr. Bashar Kilani, Manager Software Group, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan
11:50 Linux Live Case: Financial Sector: Mr. S.M. Baqar Muzaffar, Head of IT, UBL
12:10 Linux Live Case: Textile Sector: Mr. Mahmood Ahmed, Director IT & Processing, Al-Karam Textiles
12:30 Linux Live Case: Government Sector
12:50 Session Chair’s Summary: Mr. Munawar B. Ahmad, Managing Director, SSGC
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Software Industry and Linux: Kamran H. Meer, Senior Vice President, NetSol Technologies
14:20 Linux on the Desktop: Mr. Kelvin Na, Business Partner Executive, Novell Asia Pacific
14:40 IBM Strategy on Linux: Mr. Ahmed Shanab, IBM Software Linux Sales Manager, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan
15:00 Panel Discussion - Q&A and Thank you note
15:30 Session Chair’s Summary: Dr. Amir Mateen, Managing Director, PSEB /Mr. Humayun Bashir, Country General Manager, IBM Pakistan

The session commenced on time and almost all the speakers spoke within the allocated timeframe. The best thing about the conference were the complete migration cases which were presented. We saw a complete migration report of AlKaram textiles as they moved from Windows NT 4.0 based systems to Linux. UBL has 1200 locations and 700 of those locations are connected through Linux to their central backbone. These companies are also running SAP and Oracle under Linux and they are extremely happy with the performance they are getting. UBL decided to build their entire banking application inhouse called UniBank around Linux and open-standards.

IBM laid a lot of stress on the Open-Standards and what linux had to offer. IBM has invested about $2B in Linxu since 2000 and Linux is their vision of the future. IBM’s partner Novell had a presentation in the conference where Mr. Kelvin explained the power of SuSE Server and SuSE Desktop. Novell has acquired the German based SuSE distribution of Linux, which also happens to be the only enterprise-level competitor to RedHat. Mr. Kelvin also told us that Novell has completely shifted to OpenOffice on all their Windows based systems, which saves approximately $2M in licensing costs. All employees at Novell will have to move to SuSE Linux in the near future, he further added.

The presentation from the City District Government was unimpressive and all we had were some statistics. Senior Vice President of Netsol Technologies Mr. Kamran H Meer shared his views on Linux development at his company. He told us about the tools that they have been using to deploy solutions internationally. He specifically mentioned of a tool called JBoss which is an open-source Java application server and it competes with IBM’s WebSphere. He spoke highly of the tools available in OpenOffice and the experiences at Netsol.

Lunch was given to all the delegates of the conference and the speakers were available in the lobby for questions, that is what we call the true open-source spirit!

I’m finally in the US! I’ll be making my trip blogs here:
http://fnasim-usa2004.blogspot.com/

I started NED class blogs a while ago. Forgot to post the URL here. Here is the URL:
http://cis2006.blogspot.com/

I’m still busy in my exams! They’re ending on Nov 29, 2004. I have big plans after that. I hope everything works out well.

I had some free time before my first OOP examination so I thought I’d take another crack at both Mobilink and Ufone. I was able to work out the SMS gateway for both this time! The application does not require upgrade. SMS to both Mobilink and Ufone can be sent directly through the mobile phone at the GPRS cost. Please read my earlier post on this blog to see how it works. Here’s the URL to the J2ME application download:

http://nasim.org/mobile/download.wml

Your phone needs to have Java support and GPRS if you wish to use this facility. Mobilink is offering GPRS on Indigo subscription so people with Indigo can avail this nifty facility.

I’ve been a member of Orkut.com for quite a while now. Its a really cool place, but sometimes I feel its just a waste of time like MSN. I made a lot of new buddies… people who think just like me! I found my old school buddies too! This is so radical! One thing I’ve thinking is that… this might be Google’s entry to the instant messaging arena. Like, its really hard to come up with a product that will compete with MSN and Yahoo! Messengers but once Orkut is stable enough, all they’d need to do is write a client software for Orkut and voila… all the features of Orkut together with instant messaging right on your desktop! Do it Google!

I have my first final exam in 10 hrs. Need to get some sleep here. Will write again after the paper.