Coder's Log

My mom had the tumor removed on last monday but she might still need some chemotherapy. All my sisters are already there and I am leaving for Karachi on Monday morning to be there for two weeks. They say that comedy is the best relief when you are feeling very sad and i think they are right because watching south park every evening really does make you feel better. Yes yes! it sounds very old school to all my western friends but it's not my fault that it was never broadcasted in Pakistan.

If you get a segfault, the debuggers are unable to give you a nice backtrace and g_slice is being used by your code or any library that your code links to, then don't forget to set the environment G_SLICE to 'always-malloc'

As the only male child in the family, it was always considered to be my responsibility to take care of my mom and (mentally disabled) sister, Erum. Implicit in this assumption is another assumption that I will marry a girl that will be a house wife and would happily take care of everything at home while I would be busy making money. I could have made piece with the former assumption but the latter would obviously involve me enslaving another person and that simply goes against my basic principles of morality. When i moved to Finland two years ago, i thought i will be able to live the rest of my life independent and free as at that time it seemed very likely that my mom and Erum will soon be moving to Canada with my sister, Uzma (Api) and her family. Unfortunately, the Canadian authorities denied them immigration an year after i moved to Finland (7 years after the application was submitted) based on the argument that they will be a burden on their social system despite Api's continu

My GUPnP presentation at FOSDEM turned out to be not so un successful after all: Anyone interested in the presentation material can get it here .

If you have been looking for a better reason to go all the way to Brussels to attend FOSDEM , look no further; I'll be presenting GUPnP there. :)

Recently the c't magazine mentioned our dear GUPnP project and published some pictures of my UI (I am hoping to see it tomorrow *if* Stefan remembers to bring it to office). That resulted in at least one person getting interested in our project. AFAIK, everything worked out of the box on his Fedora Core 6 but he was unable to see anything in any of the client-side tools. After a few mails and some help from Christian , it turned out to be the default firewall settings on fedora.

Since my sister was staying at London for a few days on her way back from Pakistan to Canada, I arrived at London around the same time to meet her and her family after 4 years or so. I hung around with her family and some relatives of my brother-in-law for the first 3 days in London and Oxford. The last day, I spent at Cambridge. Mostly it was nice and fun but there were some things that just didn't seem right. It was quite hard to adapt to the "separate water taps for hot and cold water" system of theirs and the fact that you hardly get any water out of the shower when you want warm rather than cold water. I wonder why they take 90€ for a visit visa. Also! I thought Ansku was over-exaggerating when she used to tell me that pubs in Britain close at 11pm but to my surprise We were kicked out of the pub in Cambridge before we could finish our first pint. Err.. Then people say why would someone want to move to Finland.