Back from the Dead

Today, as I was enjoying the last day of the week long Eid vacations, I opened up a few blogs and came to realise that I had not posted a single entry for quite some time now. When i started blogging, my aim was to keep a record of my trip to Finland and I think I more or less managed to do that.

Coming back to Pakistan just beat the purpose of writing a blog, so I stopped. I do not know if I am going to keep this up or not, but still, lets hope that the blogging continues.

The first few weeks in Pakistan were very frustrating. you come to realize all the little irritants that you had forgotten that they existed. Being 30 and unfortunately the youngest in my family, I am again treated like a 15 year old who does not know what to do with his life. Half of my time was spent applying to places for a job and half of that rest was spent telling my family that making software for mobiles does not mean that I can work in telenor, warid and the likes. Suffice to say that even after hours of discussion they still had the opinion that working in a telecom company is the best fit for me.

I also started working on iPhone, as in making applications for iPhone. iPhone development is done in Objctive-C which you can call as a Super set of C language. The only fully Object Oriented Language that has ever been created is Smalltalk. Anyway, Objective C borrows from Smalltalk and implements many of its features and also, a lot of new syntax. It is not easy to start Objective C on your own and I understood it after reading a couple of manuals, watching lectures from Stanford University and working on it on my own.

All that was put on hold when I got into Bahria University as a Lecturer. Yes, i chose to take the academic route for my carrier due to may reasons, the most important ones are that I like teaching and it has good working hours. So far everything seems to be going fine. The kids are happy and so am I. The first few weeks were spent in clearing the students' concepts and now it is time to fire up those assignments and quizes (The horns have started to grow).

I have now restarted iphone development but since I had not worked on it for quite some time, I had to restart it from scratch. Surprisingly, since i am teaching data structures, that really helped me in understanding objective C much better this time.

Anyway, I'll go for now, more news later.

Watch our dance moves

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Last blog from Finland

As it turned out, I was unable to secure a job for myself in Finland. Today, that is 27th of May, I am leaving Finland for good. This is going to be my last post from the top of the world and my next posts will probably be from one of the hottest regions of the earth.

It has been almost 4 years since I started blogging. I wish that I had blogged on blogger from the begining as half of my blog is at MSN Spaces. But nonetheless, I kept on blogging from time to time and not too regularly as I had hoped. But still, it is better than nothing at all. today at 1:55 pm, I will be leaving Finland on Turkish Airlines and will set foot on my home soil at 3 am in the morning of 28th of May, which is also my birthday. Again, a scary thought as I will be 30 .. that is 3 decades old and yet to do a lot. 

I also got hold of Mac OS X version 10.5.6 and plan on installing it on my laptop. I hope that gets installed as it is not an easy task to do so on an Intel machine. If, however, I am successful, I plan on doing some cool things. Lets see how it all goes.

So next time, i'll probably write a blog form my home country. Cheers!

Old games new engines

Recently, for some reason, I have gotten really interested in many of the old FPSs that I once used to play. I started playing Doom Legacy ... just to kill zounds of monsters over and over again. It is a good mod for Doom 2 and makes many improvements. I wanted to try Doomsday mod too, but could not get it to work.

If you remember, the first FPS in the Star Wars saga was Dark Forces. It came out in the time between Doom 2 and Quake, and had graphics of the Doom era, that is, sprite based. The game was Dos based, so the only way you could play it was using the Dosbox on the latest windows like Vista or XP. But I recetly found out about the DarkXL mod that enhances the graphics of the original game, provides mouse look, makes it look much much better and also provides the functionality to play it in windows.

As I was searching for this mod, I came across the Dark Forces modification. It is actually a modification of the game Jedi Academy and gives you the first 6 levels of the Dark forces game, recreated using the Quake 3 engine. The work done here is quite outstanding and playing this mod is a treat. It is too bad that these guys are not making the complete game for some reason.

Right now I am downloading the Berserker mod for Quake 2 which makes it look as good as Quake 3 and in someplaces even better as it gives per pixel based realtime shadows. I will also install the high resolution textures that I found at a place and then I will check the mods of the games, Blood and Quake, if I get the time. If someone is also having an FPS nostalgia, I will be more than happy to help out.

Algorithms deja vu

I recently decided that I should re-learn the different algorithms that I once knew. There is a great resource here, that I think everyone should try to brush up their skills. The lectures are from an MIT course so they ought to be good. I wanted to start today, but I cleaned the entire apartment and now I am sleepy. Maybe when I'll get up, I'll give it a try. Oh and I also had an interview at game lion recently. Lets see if I get selected or not.

Star Trek

The new Star Trek movie is going to be out this May. It contains the charachters of the original series, which is the best series in my opinion and has me all excited. Do check out the trailer below:

Shadow of Empire

If you have not noticed so far, i have created another blog, Shadow of Empire. I have been hard at work on my mobile game for the past 4 months or so. It is finally taking some shape and the results have been quite good. I think that the demo for it will be ready quite soon, so I thought that I should keep a website to post the latest updates and to remind myself of any new link that I find and which might help in completing the game.

You can go to its site to have a look.

I got engaged!

Although the engagement took place on December 28, 2008, it is only now that I got a chance to write about it. It was held in Karachi at my Fiancee's home. I went there with my father and my uncle and aunt. It was a small ceremony where me and my fiancee sat on a sofa in the middle and I put the ring on her finger. Many people criticised that I put it too quickly ... but all I'll say is that:

1. How long does it take to put on a ring?

2. I must have been told to do the honours in slow motion.

3. I was in a hurry to get engaged finally!

Ever since the pictures have come, everyone says that we two look alike. And not that I see them, I also feel that we do look alike! The picture below is me and Humaira with my Uncle to the left and my father to the right.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

My entire trip to Pakistan went as planned, with everything done on time (more on that later) and it went peachy... Except for the time when I headed back to Finland. And boy! Was it a trip full of unfortunate events!

I took my flight from Karachi on 1st of January and that is where all the misfortunes started. At first, the flight from Karachi got delayed, which made me miss my connection at Abu Dhabi. Once stuck in such a situation, you cannot leave the airport, which meant that I had to wait for 11 hours to get the next flight to Frankfurt from Abu Dhabi. 11 hours at an airport when you cannot sleep on a bench, is nothing less than torture... if you are tired. I was awake the whole time the day before so you have no idea how tough it was. I played Brood, watched TV shows and movies, chatted, went around roaming in the airport etc and yes, ate! when i finally boarded the aircraft that flight got delayed as well, which made me miss my next connection from Frankfurt. 

Finally reaching Frankfurt, I had to do 3 more hours of waiting, I boarded the flight to Helsinki which arrived here at 130 am. I took a taxi and reached home, only to find out that I did not have the correct keys for my apartment! It was 230 am in the morning, -10 C temperature and I had no idea what to do! I did not even have the number in my cell, to call a taxi, but luckily, I had Zakariya's number. I called him up and got the taxi number from him.

The next taxi then took me to the nearest Hotel, where luckily, I found a room.. even though it was expensive ... 88 euros expensive :/. Later in the morning, I went to the apartment again, called the security company and got my apartment opened; which again cost me 60 Euros! 

You would think that my miseries were over then, but when I went to sleep, I got up after 3 hours due to food poisoning :/. I remained bedridden for two days and it was only then that I recovered. That was one of my worst traveling experiences! The only good thing that came out of it all was that, it made me realise that God has blessed me with enough to take care of myself when needed! God has been good to me and I thank Him for it!