Accelerator Addiction

With three of my friends evading an eminent death, by a traffic accident in last 15 days, I had nothing in mind but to spew it out of my head. In all the cases the subjects were speeding. I actually am scared at the magnitude of injuries sustained by one of the fellow. To add insult to injury, in Friday prayers there was a special announcement after prayers, that a student died in a traffic accident so everybody was asked to pray for his forgiveness.

Now coming to the topic. Speed. Everybody has different reasons to push the accelerator. People only take into account the reason for speeding is  “the exhilaration in breaking the law and driving recklessly on highways”. Which is in-fact holds true for juvenile youth out there but my point is that it has become an addiction.

Addiction is responsible for killing people. Take anything, Narcotics, Cigarettes, Alcohol, Exercise, Education, Gaming, you name the activity, addiction to it will most definitely kill you or will give you free passes to hospital. The more you become slave to something, the more intensity it takes and finally overpowers your ability to think rationally. Obviously when it overpowers your thinking ability, then it is very hard to control it, and you feel your emotions rise if you do not commit your addiction.  Eventually it fulfills its promise and the next thing your hear is the sound of death’s secretary saying “Next” and you find yourself first in line. You suddenly realize your mistake. Too little too late.

I have been driving for so long that I don’t remember my dog days on road. Like every other young man, I was into stunts and driving recklessly on roads without any purpose or just for the thrill of it. I learned my lesson – Thankfully without any accident – and stopped doing that. I enjoyed driving.

Now, I enter into university in 2007, I seldom do the stunt stuff, but not that frequently. The first and the last think I get with it is driving to university and back home. Initially it doesn’t hurt much as university was hardly 10 minutes from home. Ever since it has shifted to Islamabad, I have to drive for an hour. Since that one hour is a complete waste of time I speed up and try relentlessly to reach as fast as possible. The driving conditions are so frustrating that I am barking as I drive through the traffic left right left right.

The purpose of drawing the above picture was to bring home a point that everybody around us goes to work. Well most of the people on the road do go to work. We are so engaged in our daily activities that we try to find escape in different addictions. I am addicted to speed. The moment I sit in the drivers seat I hit the accelerator so hard that it bangs on the metal floor with a “cluck” sound. I find it difficult to control myself and drive within the speed limits. The proof of that is that i accelerate even if I see the next signal is Red. my friends and the people who go to work face the same issue. When I reach home I see my eyes and they are black with tension. Although it is never apparent, because driving a vehicle is just like breathing to me but my whole body is strained.

Accidents do not happen while you are alert but usually while driving a list of things is going on in a working driver’s head. That is where he loses concentration and bang. It is about time we realize that our workload is becoming excessively huge. So When we save time because time is money, we are bargaining our and others life on it. I don’t know the solution to the problem, and I don’t blame the people for their addiction to speed or any other thing. I just hope that someday people like me will calmly drive to work and return back home smiling.

Lets just hope that most of the helpless people entangled in the shackles of addiction stay alive to see a remedy. Drive Safe.

Going v6–For Newbies, Doctors, Architects and Average Joe’s

In this article I have tried my best to remain non technical. For technology savvy public, a pdf is link is present at the end of the post.

Prologue

The year 2011 dawned on the internet as 2012 of human race. A lot has been said about the end of internet and human race as we know it. But fact remains that this over exaggeration of something that is really not “that” much importance to the end user will increase the market of IPv6 based boxes.

Most of us had seen v6 in the past, somewhere in the internet connectivity options but never bothered about why is it there. It had been in almost all the machines for the last 8 or more years. The hype about the protocol took heat when IANA – International Assigned Numbers Authority issued last pool of v4 addresses. Like everything technologically advanced, rumors flooded the internet that somewhere in 2011 internet is going to choke, or there were speculations that its not going to function any more. Well first of all we had similar situation in 1990’s. There were similar speculations that IPv4 was about to end in 1995 [and it could have ended], that was the time when a technology named NAT took birth [RFC-1918] and the deadline of IP address extinction relaxed by a decade and a half. We are in 2011, and NAT is upto its limit in saving address space for our exploding cloud of internet enabled devices.

Background

The Internet was not designed to be used by home users. Yes its True. Initially called ARPA NET the internet was made for military use. At that time it wasn’t realized that in four decades it will be something like water, gas and electric supply in homes. In other words they had believed internet will only be used by restricted military personnel.

Now like your home, every device on internet has an address, a unique number that identifies it on the planet. When you send a snail mail, the mail mechanism nearly matches the mechanism on which internet works. Now consider that in in near future the addresses of homes become so long, that they are unable to fit on an envelop. So we will need bigger envelops. Fortunately this hasn’t yet come for our homes. But internet has reached the stage where the devices have increased exponentially and require a bigger address.

Initially when the protocol TCP/IP was made, the size of address was kept, 32 bits. This means we could have 2^32 = 4 Billion Internet addresses. Now that we have internet in PC’s, Mobiles, Tablets, Vehicles, KIOSK’s, Bathrooms, Microwaves, Refrigerators , etc etc You name the device we have internet in it and since the WiFi, WLAN, WiMAX, 3G, EDGE, and other mobile IP technologies, the requirement of addresses has increased a lot.

So when IANA allocated the last pool, it was the last of 4 billion allocable addresses. So what does it tell you? Take the house example. Since the address space is full. We can still build new houses, but we wont be able to send them mails or identify them. Same will happen to the internet. The existing system will remain online, and will not crash or cease to work, but there will be problems for new devices that are currently flooding into the market. There will be lesser addresses and more users.

The IETF – Internet Engineering Task Force, had seen it in 1990. At that time somebody gave NAT – Network Address Translation. NAT is the same thing by which no matter how many jobs and offices you change, the IP address of the computers lies in the range of 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x . NAT was a very successful but a temporary solution to IP address choke and now things are way out of NAT’s scope.

The Solution

The problem is finally being addressed. The address size of internet machines – in other words the size of IP – is being increased by 4 folds. So the new IP address, known as IPv6 is 128 bits and inherently using it we can have 2^128 = 3.402824e+38 unique addresses. From the consumer point of view, things will not change much, as the internet will continue to behave like it does today. Yes the 128 bit address will be longer, and not easy to memorize. The format of this addressing scheme is in hexadecimal, so a normal IPV6 address will look something like:
1010:4A40:19C0:0010:78D2:1010:4A40:19C0

There are other new things which will later come into existence in shape of application when v6 will be deployed. Like autoconfiguration, self homing , unreachability detection etc. As the address size will change, it will accompany change in many things that accommodate the address. All the protocols will be reconfigured to be compatible with v6. Like if you increase the size of envelop for snail mail, you will need bigger post boxes and larger delivery trucks. The situation is about same with IPv6. Since the progress of this configuration is still in testing phases that is why some semi-technical people have created panic among the masses.

What Can you do with it?

Where the others are panicking, I see a million job opportunities in the area. Since the IPv6 is relatively young, people can relate to endless literature available online and can either contribute in its development or can also make application out of its new features.

Transition to IPv6 was eminent to technological giants, so they started working on it but were not willing to shift to it as there was no need back then to put an investment in it. Times have changed, there doesn’t appear to be any other solution to the internet choke, but IPv6 and it will have to be adopted by the end of this year or so.

I want to Participate

There is an event taking place place known as the “World IPv6 Day”. On this day Top Internet giants, i.e. Facebook, Google, Yahoo are going to test drive IPv6. Facebook and Google already have their IPv6 sites online and are accessible through an IPv6 enabled machine.

If you want to participate in the event there is a thing by the name of a “tunnel”. You can create a tunnel between yourself and an IPv6 provider server. The server will essentially pack the IPv6 traffic in IPv4 packets and will send you through normal IPv4 address. On your computer this traffic will be unpacked and translated to get IPv6.

There is a website offering this service for free, and I often use the service to check IPv6 based websites. The website is GogoNet. http://gogonet.gogo6.com . You have to register for free on the website and then download a client name Freenet6 form the same site. It will enable you to connect to their server via a tunnel. Then to check if your Client is working properly goto the following sites:

Facebook – http://v6.facebook.com

Google – http://ipv6.google.com

If you can see these two websites your client is working perfectly and you can boast to your friends that you participated in the world event. Also you will not feel the difference when you connect via v6 with exception of some lag due to unpacking and packing of IPv6 traffic.

You can get the Full PDF which includes the technical details on the subject here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/48706577/IPV6

TouchPad Stopped Working in Ubuntu

The Story

The other day while I was busy typing something in terminal my palm accidently touched the touch pad of my laptop. The next thing that happened wasn’t very pleasant. The taskbar froze, mouse pointer froze, keyboard stopped working. So there was basically nothing that I could do. Surprising Alt + Ctrl + Del combination worked and I was able to suspend my laptop.

Upon a restart the mouse and keyboard worked fine till I logged in. Just as the desktop appeared, again the same thing happened, and my mouse pointer + Keyboard + Taskbar [most of it] froze. Annoyed, I was able to launch Terminal using Alt + F1. On another PC I searched on the issue and here is what I found:

The Cause

There is a feature in Ubuntu that disables mouse pointer when you are typing, so if you are running many apps don’t expect your laptop to respond that quickly. Worse thing is that people hit hibernate. So for some reason the disabled mouse control never returns.

Quick fixes

• Hit  Alt + Ctrl + F4 to go into Command line and then Alt + Ctrl + F7 to return. Doing this has fixed the issue for some users.
• Plug in an external mouse, it will help you sort out the problem and atleast move a round a bit. [If you don’t know the keyboard shortcuts]

Complete Fix

Launch the terminal using the shortcut Alt + F1 and then navigating to terminal in the taskbar. Type in the following commands:

First check if the device is listed here :

xinput list | grep -i touchpad
XInput is a utility that gives you list of devices which are detected by the OS.
Then type this command if your drivers are loaded or not:
lsmod | grep touchpad
Then type in the following command to enable your touchpad:

gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true
 

If this fixes your issue [or even if it doesn’t] hit the like button.

Stay Open Sourced.

Media Bitchiness

The fourth pillar of a state, the tongue of a country, the only form of expression for the people, language of the poor, although I could add millions of other attributes to it but since the heading says it so I’ll just settle with the fact that I am talking about our outspoken media. People often are found criticizing and complaining about the islands of power in the higher echelon of the state of Pakistan. Every five years you get to select the same people either in opposition or in power and they keep fooling all the people all the time because fools elect them to fool the already fools and the other half who are not fools, so in the end, you get fools electing fools to fool the fools which ironically are the same fools who elect the fools. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it?

The story doesn’t end here fellows. There are islands of power in media as well doing the same function. Like the start of my usual day, The first thing I do is I throw out the least important and things of no value out first [1*]. The State Media Please stand up and get out. So that was  the state media, which in the most polite words is the government’s bitch. It’s the governments property so I would not be surprised if they start airing dirty home videos of the President and the Prime Minister. Awesome.

The other ones are private, and now that’s the point where the families come in. Obviously when you talk about different channels each channel has a backing of a trustee who funds it, or a group of trustee’s you can call them directors. These trustees are the ones controlling the channels, and primarily under ordinary circumstances they don’t care what their channel is airing. But each group represents their own mentality. Their ultimate goal is to sell stuff, which sells. It’s a business, everybody likes sensational news all the time, irrespective of the mentality of the businessman he sells his product which in this case is stupid news. Its like a drug trade, the big fish behind drug trade don’t realize the depth of hole that they are pushing people in. They are happy with the fact that people pay them to get into the hole.

Obviously where money is involved, people are interested very much interested. So the families pay huge lump of money to the government to get them a license, then they buy people. Obviously when they buy someone, they look for the needy. The ones who are hungry, the ones in the shackles of poverty, which constitute around 80 percent of my country, and like many of us, they are happy to curse on everything they want. So what the world is looking at is one giant philanthropist, giving away thousands of jobs to people and feeding their families single handedly. While the reality is they are hiring mercenaries. Striking the most sensitive part of the hungry nation, food and emotions.

Now as I said earlier, that the people in the media are from the 80 percent of the hungry population. [4*] So obviously they know what the rest of the bunch likes. Again as I said earlier, people like sensationalism so there you are, a perfect setup for a puppet show to be controlled by the board of trustee’s and ALAS! They use people from the same society which they control, as strings. They only give ideology to the channel and the rest is the work of mercenaries , to add spice and toppings to it.

Have you ever wondered how the advertisements work? There are many ways in fact:

1. Introduce an irresistible offer
2. Introduce a new concept
3. Viral recursions of something, its like brainwashing
4. Making something sound more grave than it really is
5. Women…

There are couple of other ways to get attention. The same goes in your media, every other day you see repercussions of the things happened a month ago and people don’t seem to be bothered about it. Obviously it sells that’s why they show it, why else would they do so? All we are seeing is advertisements on the TV, and then there are paid commercials as well, so genuinely you are only watching ads of an ideology nearly rebellious in nature– that is totally “Jahilana”- and then the commercials to support these ads. Its commercials supporting the advertisements and commercials supporting the advertisement and the commercials supporting advertisements,  – learned that from somebody – I mean its unstoppable recursive chain and why does it work because its what you want. How many times have you shared something on Facebook trying to become the center of attention? Why do people smoke Twitter with their breaking news stuff? Why do you think at the scene of the accident people are often seen making videos of the dead and injured, instead of helping them? Who in the heavens name is you think GEO Dost? What is See and Report?

The bottom line is that this is just big illusion under the name of ‘public opinion’. There is no way out unless you understand fore mostly important fact that its an illusion a bluff. An eye wash of a deceiver. A blinding spell  of a magical madman. A dust storm in the Sahara….  Whew that was quite a handful. Again you probably get what I am talking about.

I cant resist leaving one fundamental factor while discussing media. I think you guessed it right. The fact that our media is tainted right to its roots under the influence of the Indian media. I have been to the most remote areas of Pakistan which have the facility of electricity and a luxury of TV. It is more demoralizing rather than shocking to see people glued to Indian media and their  propaganda irrespective of the fact that they live from hand to mouth. TV is an addictive thing, like all other addictions, it doesn’t give direct effects, but later if you turn on the second favorite news channel, and you see people committing all sorts of atrocities and further telling the world how “Jahil” are we. So one fact is established, Start Plus sells in our public. Along come our channels, painting their programs and drams with the same brushes and paints and making second copies of an already substandard stuff. Great. People seem to have lost interest in art, rather all they like is some ugly Indian cow dressed in a sari, with a full exposed back and the belly button. Majority of clientele of this are women who play a significant role in fostering a society. Women its always your fault. [2*]

It is evident from the news bulletins that they like to exploit and spread despair in society. Have a look at this excerpt from a 9’o clock news bulletin few days after assassination of Governor Punjab:

Governor Punjab Salman Taseer  who was Assassinated by his own guard, has been taken to blah blah blah. The Guard said blah blah. The man who jumped off a plane and dies is still unidentified. Then there was a gang rape report and followed by a murder.

Now what are they trying to tell everybody? most of the people with very little understanding of this find an easy escape from the poverty or other problems that we have and try doing the same stuff that is printed in newspaper. Also if media had realized the responsibility of their work, they would never shape a bulletin like a death report from Pakistan. What if people don’t know about if somebody killed someone somewhere? Isnt that the police’s job to find out? I would also like to mention here that there is more information that remains hidden from people, and they still live absolutely fine without it, so why not keep the brutalities/adversities aside and give them a breath of fresh air. As is said, “Don’t tell them what they don’t need to know”.

Again, I have another example of a media hype created throughout the world which claimed a life of a child. Remember when Large Hadron Collider was in full swing, and the night before the day it had to be tested to its full strength,  a young girl from India was so panicked by the stupid exaggeration of media men that LHC experiment will create a black hole, and the world will fall in itself, that she strangled herself to death. Ridiculous.

Now since each department has got some good eggs too, but like others they are left to praise only. Imran Khan is a good political example. The fact that distinguishes the good eggs from the bad ones that they are open. They don’t circle around same things over and over again. They are educated in its literal sense. They know that’s its useless to throw somebody who is in a hole, into a deeper hole. They realize the responsibility of information handling and giving it to people. Again when I go adding airs and graces to everything I go off limits in other words I get into the character of our media, and repeat stuff a gazillion times in using different metaphors. After all everybody has some bit of GEO Dost and and See n Report in him/herself. I hope that someday people open their eyes to reality – Not Reality TV, the actual reality and stop watching the idiot box.[3*] Stop reading substandard newspapers and look into themselves for a change. The revolution always comes from within, otherwise its only a change of faces you are dealing with, with lots and lots of loss of public property. Ends –

The thing that I was writing ended above, but I would like you to tell how they brain wash people and how they buy people. I read in a  novel based on the attack of Israel on Iraq’s Nuclear Facility – “Raid on the Sun” I think was its name. In that the writer has mentioned how Mossad gets to people and uses them – BTW I am not propagating against Mossad, fact is the ISI, RAW, CIA, KGB and every other Intel agency uses the same or variants of it to claim people – The writer wrote that Mossad gets people by attacking the following weaknesses, Money, Drugs, Sex.[a*] There are other ways of getting people on their knees to name one, family. Now for the brainwashing part, Its really simple. It like sleeping with a stupid commercial advertisement being played into your headphones. You get to hear is so many time that you are unable to distinguish between good and evil. If you have really strong will power, they sedate you and then play the savior, then they force you to believe in their truth. Once you are totally disoriented and the first person you see, who appears to be the only one helping you – which he is not, tells you something about you the chances are fair that you will believe what they are saying and then they show it to you again and again.

So having read all this Don’t you find similarities in the processes described above and the rest of the article? The choice is yours to make.

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[a*] – I am not sure about drugs, but I remember having reading money and sex in it. I’ll update it as soon as I get my hands on the actual thing.

“Jahil” : is an Urdu translation for uneducated. The word uneducated doesn’t carry enough weight to describe the depth of its Urdu counterpart.

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Incase you didn’t get that I was referring to

[1*] – poop

[2*] – The previous line was a meant to be a witty statement. don’t take it personally

[3*] – TV

[4*] – Do not get offended by the word hungry, it is the truth, people are very very hunger struck with nothing to eat.

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And in-case you are wondering, why the explanations I understand all of it. Well my friend, there are people who don’t get sarcasm/wit/humor/symbolism etc. etc.

Valentines or Basant?

I was searching on valentines activities in Pakistan, i located a few places where it is celebrated as a full blown event – mostly posh areas of big cities. But one thing is for sure, the merchandise sells all over the country. Basant on the other hand has similar status, but it is more widely spread over the masses. Interestingly, it also comes within a buffer of 15-20 days after 14th of Feb. If i had asked the question of popularity 3-4 years back it would have been obvious that Basant was popular as anything, but since the bans and all that, it has rather subsided a bit, also with “Enlightened Moderation” & “Open society” & “Modernization” & “Doing things like using four ‘&’s’ in a sentence 😛 “and stuff, people have found other activities to celebrate. So whats you opinion, would you go for Lovy dovy Valentines or the Colorful Basant? Or Both?