Going to Sweden for Studies?

If you are a Pakistani, going for higher studies to Sweden below are some indispensable links from Pak Sir Zameen:

• Swedish Visa Application


• Mailing list of Pakistani's in Sweden


• Life in Sweden as a Pakistani Student in General


• Odd Jobs


• Travel to Sweden


• Things to Bring to Sweden


• Ranking of Swedish Universities

Courtesy: Saad Rahman, owner PakSirZameen.net

Distance Learning/ Swedish Universities

I recently saw an email from a Pakistani pursuing "Internet MBA" degree from BTH. A bit surprised, because BTH is a regular university in Sweden and also because education is still free in the country, I googled and found a few interesting facts about Distance Learning.

The cost of Internet MBA is 0 just like other programs offered by most of the Swedish universities. Moreover, you save on the living expenses of the country as well!

Admissions to the program is like regular admissions; you have to have a bachelor's degree, and show English language proficiency, etc. The university is selective in whom to give admission and whom to reject. For example, for Internet MBA, BTH gets 800 applications out of which it short lists around 70. Attendance is must and there are quite a few rules which make it challenging.

Not only that, I found quite a few programs taught using the Internet:

• Masters in Geographical Inforamtion Systems (GIS) from Lund University


• Master Program in Information Security from Lulea University of Technology


• BTH also offers a Masters of Science in Informatics


• A number of courses at Karlstad Unviersity; specially IT, Project Management and Enterprise Systems

Considering the fact that Swedish universities offer world class education (not to forget a "recognized" degree), it's nice even if you complete only a few credit hours worth of courses from these universities.

On Fellow Human Beings

I saw an ad in Swedish on the department's notice board a few days ago. When translated to English it meant something like, "I need help with Haskell. If you are very good in Functional Programming, I can pay you upto 150 kr per hour."

I was desperately in need for money and the offered money was approximately Rs. 1100/- an hour. Despite the fact that I am not good at Functional Programming and my Swedish is not better than George Fulton's Urdu, I thought of contacting the person. It turned out that she had failed the course exam 9 times.

I feel sorry for people who want to be successful in something yet there is some fundamental problem with their approach. With individual attention, they can succeed - just if somebody is there to guide them. I find it interesting that in this culture of pubs and discoes, there is someone struggling with a course and nobody is there to help her.

There would be many people in a similar situation around you and you could easily be their savior. Why do we put in day and night with an intention to become as famous as Alonzo Church or Alan Turing with sheer brute force, when there are friends/ colleagues whose lives would change just with a little help?

But there is another face to this picture. There are people who can be quite troublesome: When I was in Karachi, I once received a phone call at 1 am from a friend in England, asking me to do a programming assignment for him, which he had to submit in the morning. I refused. He said the he would fail the course and I told him that he MUST fail. He was not pleased, of course.

So, who is genuinely in need for help? Somebody who fails again and again but doesn't let it go as well as somebody who is suffering from health or financial problems. I quote from a talk on "Major Threats to Humanity" by Dr. Inayatullah, reported by Dawn:

... 1.3 billion people survive on less than one dollar a day and 840 million people go hungry when alleviation of income poverty needs roughly $80 billion — less than the combined net worth of world’s seven richest men.

I am not sure if the statistics of Dr. Inayatullah are accurate because if you combine the wealth of just two of the US wealthiest, it amounts to $91 billion. But a more shocking statement is, "Around 30,000 people in the world die every day because they are too poor to stay alive."

Pakistani Students in Sweden

The highest percentage of international students coming to Sweden is from China, followed closely by Pakistan as this news report indicates.

Life is not easy here and getting a Swedish visa is not like winning a lottery, to the dismay of most of the Pakistanis coming here. You don't have to pay for studies but still, living is quite expensive and the economy is not as strong as that of the UK or the US, which means that many of the students will go back to Pakistan after completion of their studies. This could be a good thing, if viewed in a broader perspective.

But all is not bleak. Coming to Europe means that many countries are easily accessible. The quality of education is very good; there is an international atmosphere and people are extremely nice. Lastly, you can avail internship opportunities (and perhaps seek job as well) in France and Germany, amongst other countries.

There are very good chances of getting into PhD if you select your courses carefully and do a research-oriented thesis. A PhD student is considered to be a full-time employee of the university; it's well-paid in most countries in Europe (specially in Sweden and Netherlands); something like 2000 euros a month.

More unexpected thing is that now even female students from Pakistan are coming to Sweden. This is a bold step. I wish everyone best of luck.

Prepare well; lean Swedish and don't forget to join SAATFASE.

One More To Go!

I am done with exams! Surprisingly, Concurrent Programming went worse than Real Time Systems. We had a question on writing MPD like pseudocode for a Bittorrent like P2P client on paper. I don't know what happened to me but I read the question as if we were asked to write a GetRight type download manager (of course, they just wrote the description of intended behavior and not the names of these tools). You can well imagine what I would have done with that question.

So, there is a very short brake before the last term starts. It has been extremely fast uptil now. Except for a few courses, they were all of basic nature and only now we are getting some real mature stuff.

I intend to take Semantics of Programming Languages and Distributed Systems II. I have dumped Language Based Security, mainly because of the teacher; otherwise, that course was also very good. The best thing is that all this is free! One can go and attend lectures in any course; all the material is available on the web; there is so much activity going around; it's hard even to keep up-to-date and time seems too short to absorb all of this. I just checked my list and found out that there is public defence of a PhD thesis tomorrow. It's about
Formal Development of Safe and Secure Java Card Applets.

A few days brake means re-alignment and re-planning. This term has been disastrous as I had predicted.

Exams!

It's snowing like cats and dogs, or buses and trams, or whatever one has to say when it's snowing a lot. It's interesting that sometimes we just want to convey our meaning with least interest in the words we choose and some other times, it's just the beauty of the words that we want to share. Consider, an excerpt from Faiz' poetry:

وہ لوگ بہت خوش قسمت تھے جو عشق کو کام سمجھتے تھے
یا کام سے عاشقی کرتے تھے،
ہم جیتے جی مصروف رھے، کچھ عشق کیا، کچھ کام کیا۔
کام عشق کے آڑے آتا رہا اور عشق کام سے الجھتا رہا۔
پھر آخر تنگ آ کر ہم نے، دونوں کو ادھورا چھوڑ دیا۔


See, what a beautiful combination of both the worlds!

So, I was talking about the weather. After a few days' fluctuation between -3 and +1, the temperature is back to -5 today and I had thought that it's over! I have seen -13 so far and I hope that it doesn't go back to that point.

And the words "so far" remind me of the temporal combinator Sofar in Luke. Actually, I just came back from my first exam of third term: Software Engineering Using Formal Methods and I guess that I did pretty well. Also, I received an email from Reiner Hähnle that they do have some thesis work for students. Good news, indeed!

I had been doing voluntary teaching of Formal Methods to my own class this term - real, formal lectures where students sit and listen to you when you draw diagrams and write equations on the board. I really love Mathematical Logic and the ideas - consider Sequent Calculus and Tarski's Definition of Truth, for example. I got very good feedback and some even claimed that I teach better than the course assistants, Angela and Philipp.

Next is Concurrent Programming and then Parallel and Distributed Real Time Systems. I know that I won't be able to do that good in the Real Time Systems course - it was a very tough course dealing with Mathematical Analysis of Scheduling Algorithms. I am confident about Concurrent Programming but the graded assignments of Real Time Systems have been a killer. There were two assignments of 7 questions each and for answering each one you needed to read research articles and papers with theorems and proofs regarding schedulability. Now, one can manage that as well if that is a single point agenda but we had other courses in parallel. Still, if I manage to get a 5 in that one as well, it would be a record, I guess.

Minesweeper is NP-Complete

Surprising but it's true that Minesweeper is NP Complete. If you remember the definitions from your Algorithms/ Complexity Theory course, to prove that a problem X is NP-Complete you need to reduce a well-known NP-Complete problem (usually satisfiability problem) to X in polynomial time. Solving any NP-Complete problem in polynomial time means that all Non Polynomial time problems would be solved.

And if you can't recall what NP was, let me remind you that problems which require exhaustive analysis of all possibilities to find the best solution are Non Polynomial time. And if you are as dumb as me you will need an example to understand this: Suppose you want to check if a string A is a substring of B and assume that the only possible method is to generate all possible substrings of B and match A against each one of them, then string matching would have been an NP problem.

Some Sokoban addicts seem to be interested in proving that their game is even more complex.

With this comes the "Is P=NP?" question. It's one of the Millennium Questions; there is $1 million award for the person who answers it with mathematical precision.

To this day, I fail to comprehend the difference between NP Complete and NP Hard. Also, some problems are said to be NP Complete in the strong sense. Can any enlightened reader shed some light?

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Today, we have CHARM day at Chalmers. The industry comes to interact with the students. After many days of inactivity, once again, I am starting exercise and better time management from today.

Adlerbertska Scholarship

The education system in Sweden is strikingly different from the US (and thus from Pakistan as well). Though they may start charging tuition fee in the next few years, at present they don't - not even from International Students. This has very far reaching affects. Not only that we don't pay the university, we enjoy the same facilities as the local students and each term the university arranges some outdoor activity for the International Students, again free of cost. We have been to Universeum and Gothenburg Opera in the last two terms.

Such an attitude has deep roots in Europe - the culture is of caring and sharing. Perhaps, that's why Europe has most contributors to the Open Source work, around the world. Though there are people who would like these countries to be like the US, apparently such people are very few in number.

In Gothenburg, there used to live a man called Axel Adler (1878-1966). He started working at the age of 7 and later joined the family business of dairy products. He became the company director at the age of 24. After mid-life career, he started studying again; got married; lived in Gothenburg; rejoined family business; restarted studies and finally had a vision for Gothenburg: "a living university town where young people would have access to a rich centre of knowledge and cultural activity." If you visit this small city you will agree that his dream has materialized. Back in his days, he opened a local library in his home and held seminars in many subjects. His farm-house became a centre of new ideas that drew lecturers from the whole of northern Europe.

He established several foundations and to this date, every year one of his foundations gives approximately SEK 4000 to every foreign student who comes to study in Gothenburg. This might seem like a small amount (about Rs. 30K) but consider giving it every year to about 900 students, without any kind of discrimination, just for coming to Gothenburg for their studies!

Assignments: Concurrent Programming and Formal Methods

One of the most famous assignments in DCS program at Chalmers is Train Control in the Concurrent Programming course. Apparently, it's a very good way of learning about critical sections and locking. It can also be extended to classical problems such as readers and writers by drawing the tracks in a different way. But the problem with the assignment is that when you apply brakes, the trains don't stop immediately. They slow down gradually and the time they take to come to a halt depends on their speed. Having the goal to run the trains at the maximum possible speed while managing to brake right before entering the critical section makes the assignment hard and, for me, very boring. It took me one day and one whole night at the university to complete it.

Another assignment that took most of the time last week was to simulate an elevator. We had to write it in Lustre. Chalmers has one of the finest teams in the world when it comes to formal methods for software. One of the Associate Professors, Koen Claessen, has hacked Luke that we use instead of the compiler from the authors of Lustre. Luke generates an HTML page from a Lustre file with all propositional logic embedded into it. It's very interesting. Another tool, KeY, also developed at the university, is used for complex automated verification of software properties.

If life and time permits, I intend to introduce some of these courses when I go back to Pakistan.

Stockholm: Been There, Seen That

I had a quick trip to Stockholm - the capital of Sweden - on 13th of this month. Thanks to Rent A Coder, which makes me earn a few bucks for non-budgeted activities like these.

Stockholm is a city of islands. There are 14 small town-sized islands connected with bridges. It's much bigger and densely populated than the second largest city, Göteborg (Gothenburg or Yootay-bori). Göteborg is small city having the looks of Islamabad/ Muree and everything is just at the walking distance. Stockholm, on the other hand, is a sea of people. It's modern in the style of its building and the traffic reminded me of Karachi.

So, why did I go there? 50% to see the city so that I can plan better the next trip (because that's the hub of software industry here) and 50% to meet Asim Ghaffar. The way I find and meet people seems strange to some - how will you feel if somebody calls you from a distance of more than 300km and says I want to meet you, and then travels for 7 hours, meets you and goes back?

Asim Ghaffar is a traveler like me. Suppose while traveling in a deserted place you come to know that there is another traveler somewhere close by. Given enough resources and the ability, won't you like to meet him? Just to see who the guy is, what he is doing, where he has reached and what he is heading towards?

And I wasn't disappointed. He is worth knowing!

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School is starting today and this one is going to be the toughest term.

Got My Result of 2nd Term!

In Sweden, you get grades in discrete numbers: 3, 4 or 5 where 5 is the highest and 3 is Pass. You have to pass the labs separately in addition to the final exam (some courses have an oral exam and some others may just have presentations). There is a slightly stricter grading criteria adopted by European Union countries, knows an ETCS, so that the grades from different universities and countries can be compared.

So, here in Chalmers, the result is put up on the notice-board before it becomes officially available in the student portal and before being sent to you via email. But there are no names on the posted result. Each student is given a code which he can get by logging into the student portal.

Enough with the boring background! I got an email from a friend, Danko Ilik, giving me his code and saying that I should check his result when I would go to check mine. I sent him this email:

I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that you have got 23.5 which is a 5 and you are second in the list. The bad news is that I have got 24 and I am the first one.

Cheers!

/Ali

So, if you are not bored already and left my blog, I got 5's in the two courses I took in the 2nd term: Computer Security and Mathematical Logic, Alhumdo Lillah. The email is copied here just because I enjoyed writing it and he enjoyed reading it.

I intend to take Software Engineering Using Formal Methods, Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems and Concurrent Programming in the third term. I'll have my Swedish Language classes starting from 17th.

I studied a little bit during the vacations and I feel I am interested in Distributed Programming specifically Grid Computing, Transaction Processing and Workflow Engines more than anything else. Perhaps, my thesis will also be about one or more of these topics.

Regarding the push-ups, I have started cheating. Actually, I was going very fine but started getting a little pain in my shoulder joints, specially when I stretched my arms backwards. I realized that I should do more stretching or perhaps, should mix with other exercises. So, I had done 6106 pushups in 48 days till 31st Dec. But now I have started counting two reps of any other exercise, at the local gym, as 1 pushup. This way, the score till 8th Jan is 6933 and I am still lagging by 683 to maintain the required run rate! But the good thing is that I have started going to the local motionhall (Swedish word for fitness club for sports and weight training).

"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white

Tarski was the first person who argumented in this manner. Considering this from a purely software development point of view (and not as a Logician or Mathematician), this corresponds to the difference in the following two statements:

string s = "2+3 > 5";
bool b = 2+3 > 5;

As you can see, the two statements look alike but they are very different. The first one is just a sequence of symbols and the later is actually a comparison. However, one can write an eval function:

bool b = eval (s);

This can be thought of as interpretation of the syntax into semantics.

Trivial as it might seem, many people forget the difference while designing systems and realize this only some time later during development. For example, many times I have heard people saying, "we can store the names of the functions in a database table and call appropriate function by searching the name in the table." This really happens when people are naively designing a workflow engine kind of thing. How on earth are you going to relate the code with the string from the table? You need reflection!

I wanted to say a lot more but while writing this and looking for appropriate links, I found out this pdf. Too bad for me; nowadays, it's hard to come up with stuff people have not already thought of. I was trying to relate the completeness property of logic with software.

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I just finished my second term here. The exams went pretty well, Alhumdo Lillah. My push-ups count has reached 3,597 in 30 days and I am lagging by 483 now! Exams are to be blamed.

پڑھ پڑھ لکھ لکھ لاویں ڈھیر، ڈھیر کتاباں چار چپھیر
گردے چانن، وچ انھیر، جاندی عمر نہیں اعتبار
اکو الف تیرے درکار

(Bulleh Shah, Sung by Junoon)

Status Update

I have been here in Sweden for more than three and a half months now. About a quarter of the total time has passed. Within a week the final exams for the second quarter will start.

I took two courses -- Computer Security and Mathematical Logic this term.

The first lecture of Mathematical Logic was quite exotic for me; almost as exotic as Discrete Mathematical Structures was for me in the undergraduate days. Now, I can differentiate among Number Theory, Algebraic Structures and Logic. Jan Smith started the course with discussion on Foundations of Mathematics. Quite honestly, I couldn't understand even a single word from the lecture but it was very surprising for me as I believed I already knew Propositional and First-Order Predicate Logic that constituted more than half of the course.

When I came home after the first lecture, I opened up Firefox and started looking for the Foundations of Mathematics. Really, to my surprise whatever Jan Smith had said was available on Wikipedia as well. I have been studying till now, have learned quite a few things and might continue my exploration of the foundation after the exams.

Computer Security, however, is a very dull course. It's an undergraduate level course and I fail to understand why it is a compulsory course for Dependable Computer Systems. There are two sequels to this course: Language Security and Network Security. I think both of them will be very interesting.

Meanwhile, I have once again started reading Quran. I have done this for the fourth time in the last two years. Last time I had reached uptil para number 8. This time, I am noting down ayaats that I don't understand and those that I could understand and use them for reference sometime.

I should be free from exams after 15th. I intend to visit Stockholm. I also want to learn Swedish Language. And I have prepared a reading list for vacations. It's warm again. Yes, now I understand why Swedes call temperature above freezing point as "warm."

My pushups count has reached 2,815 in 21 days and I am lagging by 41 to maintain an average of 136. This has resulted in good effect on arms and specially on chest. But I must combine this with some other exercise, perhaps reach-ups.

Eid Mubarak

So, everyone's done with Eid? It's getting rather cold here. I went out in 1 degrees celsius for Eid prayers. A Pakistani Association had booked a hall for Eid prayers. Since the time was known to everyone and the city is relatively small, about 30 people boarded the same bus, which to some extent terrified the few Swedes in the bus. As you can expect from Pakistanis, the prayers didn't start till half an hour after the given time.

There were about 100 Pakistanis for prayers and I was later told that there would be 50 more in some other place as there are two factions within this Pakistani Association due to political inclinations and perhaps they don't offer prayers with each other! Well done, Pakistan!


I was invited for a tea party by Irfanullah in the evening in Bergsjön. Irfanullah is an interesting person; he came here in DCS program a year ago. The guy has lots of knowledge and has a very positive attitude towards life and Islam. And there I met one Mr. Tariq. This guy is an encyclopedia of politics. By the way, I was told that there is a new student enrolled in a German university who has made his fellow-students and teachers his devotees. On his first day in the school, he pointed out some mistakes in a research paper of his supervisor. I don't have the details but will surely like to put up here. The whole Europe is like a single country.

Usually, there is a gathering in Bergsjön, at Irfanullah or Umer bhai's place, every Saturday or Sunday. It's like a cultural center for students from Pakistan. Umer bhai came here for MSc. in Mechanics and is now doing his PhD from Chalmers; he is the oldest amongst us.

While we were preparing tea for ourselves, Irfanullah came to know that I had got three 5.0's in my first term; he rose and embraced me, saying "You are the first Pakistani who has done this!" I said, "Well, somebody had to do it." He agreed. It isn't nice when people don't appreciate your humbleness ;)

The rest of the evening, like all other weekends in Bergsjön, was spent in discussing Pakistan and what we can do for it. I know many of the students do this discussion just because they miss their homes and it's an interesting topic on which you can speak for hours. At the same time, I think Umer bhai and Irfanullah are motivated enough to do something! Only time will tell! Ah...the Space-Time cage!


Pushups Count: 410 (uptil Monday, 15th Nov).


Palat kay jo dekha, ankhain hoween num
Aya nazar jab, adhora sa jeewan.
("Bheegi Yadain" by Junoon)

It's a way of saying "what I am here to do"

Yes, that's how people define karma. I have been here for two months. My first term is over by now and I have done well in the exams, Alhumdolillah. The result of the first term would be announced in a few weeks. But, is it why I am here? Yes, good grades are part of me but is it really the "most important thing" that brought me here.

Certainly not. I am here to complete myself - the way I want myself to be and the most important part of that is to understand life which, I am fully convinced, is linked with Islam; yet I am so far away from my goal. But not any longer.

Uptil now, what has made me afraid of saying anything about Islam is my own self which is evil enough not to deserve any acclaim. Yet, I feel that time is running short and I am not doing anything - may be I should just start and I would improve as I traverse this path. Writing makes you formalize your argument and makes your thoughts concise and coherent. And certainly to say something about Islam is a huge undertaking - even Qudurat-ullah Shahab titles his autobiography's chapter on Islam as "chota moun bari baat." What he has written is astonishing, to say the least.

Last night I had an Iftar at Rymdtorget in Bergsjon from some Pakistani PhD students. Amongst others, a Bosnian, named Raghib, who was in his late 20's was also invited. The man, though young, seemed to be a religious scholar and later I came to know that he taught Arabic as well. He was asked about the situation of Islam in Bosnia-Herzogovina. The man replied, "The atrocities on Muslims by Serbs had been a blessing." According to him, the Muslims before 1991 genocide were no different from other nations of Yugoslavia. "It was common to marry with non-muslims and people hardly offered prayers. Yet, it's this systematic eradication and the sufferings that has made us look deeper into our identity and thus, our religion. The situation is very different now. And we look towards nations like Pakistan for guidance."

How is a Pakistani supposed to respond to the last sentence? Certainly there is something wrong somewhere. But what is it? I am going to find out and it would be very different from the regular stuff told to you by everyone.

A month ago, there was a dinner by Chalmers Muslim Students Association in which the guest speaker talked about "The concept of Saving the Environment in Islam". One of the questions put to him was, "How much of what you have said is practiced in the Islamic world and if not, then why not?" The speaker responded by saying that till the time Muslims followed the teachings of Islam they were the best in the world. It's a very typical answer that we have heard so many time from our teachers and religious scholars. But ponder on the question once again, "Why aren't the teachings followed?" Putting it in other terms, I would say, "If Islam is so good and the teachings if followed can make our country/ place heaven then why aren't they followed?" Perhaps, no one has a satisfying answer.


It's just an official start of a journey which unofficially started quite a long time back. I would be talking about very many things (most of which will be esoteric and thus, unheard of) and would appreciate if I get some feedback along my way!


I do not look for holy saints to guide me on my way
Or male and female devilkins to lead my feet astray.
If these are added I rejoice - if not, I shall not mind
So long as I have leave and choice to meet my fellow-kind.
For as we come and as we go (and deadly soon go we!)
The people, lord, Thy people, are good enough for me.

Thus I will honour pious men whose virtue shines so bright
(Though none are more amazed than I when I by chance do right)
And I will pity foolish men for woe their sins have bred
(Though ninety-nine percent of mine I brought on my own head)
And Amorite or Eremite or General Averagee
The people, Lord, Thy people are good enough for me
(A Pilgrims Way by Rudyard Kipling)

Masquerading Attacks, Roy A. Maxion and The Ego Trip

A few weeks ago, Roy Maxion of Carnegie Mellon was here at Chalmers University to talk about his recent paper on Masquerading Attacks. But wait, what is masquerading?

The term, masquerading, is usually used in context with Network Address Translation (NAT) but in more abstract terms it means "to wear a mask or to disguise." Related to computer security, one idea of handling masquerading attacks is to note down a user behavior and compare it with his past. A simple idea may make things clear. Suppose, I have designed an authentication system that notes down users' typing speed. In such a system even if you know my password, you might not be able to login because your typing speed won't match mine.

People have habits and most of us are very predictable. This concept of security can be extended further to note any "diversion" from normal behavior. For example, a user might have the habit of checking his email as the first step after logging in. A computer system might detect any diversion from this habit and report the matter to system administrator. Computer Science students will at once recognize that it will require huge amount of data to note anything even as simple as that and it would be very error-prone. Still, research is being done in this field to improve the detection of positive cases and to decrease false alarms.

So, what did Roy Maxion say? Nothing! I was so eager to listen to this man, not only because the idea of using "user behavior" in security is interesting and he had used a new Bayesian Algorithm for categorization but also because he is the head of Dependable Systems at Carnegie Mellon. For two hours, this guy talked about how good his research has been and how silly mistakes the other researchers had made. He didn't say a single word about his algorithm. He repeated the same thing so many times that he reminded me of the lectures at FAST.

At the end, somebody asked Danko Ilik, "How was it?" "This guy was on an ego-trip," came the reply. And the worst thing is that he was traveling through various universities in Europe, saying the same useless things over and over again! I fail to understand how can such a high-profile person do this? Wasting resources and time of so many students and teachers...

But do I have a point to make? No, this is an incomplete post. For quite a few days I waited for it to be complete but it didn't. Finally, I posted it like that. I will be back after 21st (after exams), Insha Allah.


Councilor Hamann: Of course... that's it. You hit it! That's control, isn't it? If we wanted, we could smash them to bits. Although if we did, we'd have to consider what would happen to our lights, our heat, our air.
Neo: So we need machines and they need us. Is that your point, Councillor?
Councilor Hamann: No, no point. Old men like me don't bother with making points. There's no point.
Neo: Is that why there are no young men on the Council?
Councilor Hamann: Good point.
(The Matrix Reloaded)

The Local Maxima

Words always fascinate me. So do concepts as well as the link between the two. Once again, I can't resist the temptation to quote another dialog from The Matrix:

Neo: I just have never...
Rama-Kandra: ...heard a program speak of love?
Neo: It's a... human emotion.
Rama-Kandra: No, it is a word. What matters is the connection the word implies. I see that you are in love. Can you tell me what you would give to hold on to that connection?
Neo: Anything.
Rama-Kandra: Then perhaps the reason you're here is not so different from the reason I'm here.

In the last semester at FAST, we had a course on Artificial Intelligence. Though the words "Artificial" and "Intelligence" are themselves so deep and combining them gives an exotic meaning, there were many other exciting ideas within this course.

One of these ideas, introduced to us by the lecturer, Vaqar Khamisani, is that of searching for the Local Maxima. In simple terms, it's like finding a mountain which has the highest peak in the vicinity and climbing that peak. Once you reach there and look around, you might feel that you have reached at the top. But, have you? Isn't there some other mountain higher than this? Would you go on and search for that other mountain or would you become satisfied with what you have?

OK. The mountain example is not so good because everyone knows that The Everest is the highest peak. How about finding the best birthday greeting card in the world? Would you ever try doing that or would you be satisfied with the best birthday greeting card within a shop? Most people will say that they have bought the best card while they actually have found merely a local maxima.

I personally believe that there is nothing wrong with being a local maxima for some time and then one should look for a local maxima somewhere else. But there is no need to be a global maxima - it would require lots and lots of effort and the result won't be equally rewarding. Of course, if you would like to be a global maxima in 3D, why don't add the dimension of time, which after all is the 4th dimension?

Combing back to the present situation, I have found a local maxima in Dependable Computer Systems at Chalmers University of Technology. He is Danko Ilik and he would be really surprised if he reads this :)


To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And be opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
(Hamlet by William Shakespeare)

Dependable Computer Systems

Another average post! It's strange that your thoughts completely depend on your surroundings and your own behavior towards the happenings - in the days of failures and misfortunes, man thinks of higher forms of life and when he gets busy in worldly affairs, the thoughts revolve around petty issues of day to day life!

But sometimes specifics are as important as generalizations. So, on with the specifics!

I am taking three courses this quarter: Cryptography, Fault Tolerant Computer Systems and Functional Programming.

Cryptography is about encryption and decryption as most of you might already be knowing. The course covers classical ciphers as well as modern techniques with some basic concepts in cryptanalysis and the related Mathematical background.

Functional Programming, on the other hand, may be completely new for you. It's very different from programming in structured or object oriented languages. It's a declarative kind of programming where you define what you want to do and not how you want to do it. Those who are familiar with Prolog or SQL will be able to grasp the idea fairly easily because they are used to the environment executing things on their behalf. Still, functional programming is neither like Prolog nor SQL. It's Mathematical in nature where you define a Mathematical function for everything. There are no loops or if-then-else; in fact, there is no concept of a "statement" as such. A function may call another function, as usual. Recursion and set builder notation provide functionality similar to loops and iterators, respectively. The language being taught in this course is Haskell - the best compiler of Haskell is maintained by Chalmers itself!

Fault Tolerance may also seem interesting. Actually, there is only a single idea behind the concept of Fault Tolerance: Redundancy. Just as you can have a spare wheel in a car, you can have a redundant computer in safety critical computer systems. Like many other things, I think the pioneers of the field got inspiration from Nature. However, in design faults, where we don't get any guidance from Mother Nature, the idea of redundancy is useless. This is specially true for software. Such kinds of faults can only be tolerated by "n-versoin programming." The idea is to get the same component/ piece of code made by different vendors/ programmers. There is usually a voting mechanism in such a system. For example, in a 3-version system, 3 functions will perform some computation and provide the result to the voting system. The voting system will match and respond with the answer which is same from at least two of the three functions. If you are skeptical like me, you might have guessed that the voting system may itself fail! Unfortunately, like death, there is no way of preventing 100% failures.

Other than me, there is no one from Pakistan in this course. There are two students from India, two from Bangladesh, five from China, one from Taiwan, one from Macedonia, one from Romania and one from Poland. Amongst all these, Danko Ilik from Macedonia and Liang from China seem to be the best! But that would be a very pre-mature statement.


Ah...so you have done it that way! You are a very clever man!
(Daniel, the TA of Functional Programming course, responding to the explanation of my answer)

Avancez!

Yootay-bori is how Göteborg is pronounced in Swedish, or Svenska to be more precise. I reached this port city of Sverige (I mean Sweden) on 22nd of August. The city is very much like Islamabad in many ways - it's lush green hilly area with major activity only in the city center. The weather is quite cold (between 10 to 14 degrees Celsius in these days and it will go below zero in December!) It has been raining with short breaks almost continuously since I came here.

After reaching here, the first shock was to learn that you have to literally search for months in order to find a place to live. Fortunately, a group of Pakistani PhD students showed generosity and I had a shelter for a week. They are a very nice group of people - I shall write about them some time later. With an exhausting effort I have now found an apartment that I am sharing with 2 more Muslim students.

Göteborg isn't a very big city and the small, but well-knit, Pakistani community is very hospitable. The most interesting things is that my university, Chalmers, is like FAST in many ways. Chalmers University of Technology has a very strong alumni - it's 175 years old. The students know who graduated which year and are in close contact with their seniors. Also, like FAST it had been established by a businessman, William Chalmers, to promote science and technology in his country - very similar to what Agha Hassan Abdi did for Pakistan when he laid Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Technology (only that there is a gap of 150 years between the two men).

Another interesting thing is the slogan of the university which is Avancez. It means "to move forward" - very similar to the name of my last company Avanza Solutions. Avanza is a Spanish word that means the same.

Though education is free here, there are considerable living expenses. In addition to that there is a little bit of problem in written communication as they always prefer Swedish in written form. There are many other down sides of coming to this place and though the situation is gradually improving, life is extra ordinarily tough for international students in the initial few days. Problems like having no place to live, not knowing your way around, not being able to read sign boards and written instructions, not being able to find Hallal food to eat and below zero temperature with days as short as 5 hours have literally made people cry.

And remember, there are no jobs when you complete your studies!

You are most welcome if you are still interested in coming to this place because life is about "Avancez" and not about winning or loosing. Remember, stagnation is death.


Me: How many languages can you speak?
The boy: 3. English, Arabic and a little bit of Swedish.
Me: And how many languages does your younger brother speak?
The boy: (after a brief pause) Zero.
(Conversation with a very bright 6 year old Iraqi boy in Gothenburg)

Connecting Flights and Transit Visas: Towards Gothenburg

This one is a slightly different post as it's being written from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. In the last few days I had been trying to understand connecting flights, transit visa and the related requirements. I have found Harrow Travels (Regent Plaza, Sharae Faisal) to be pretty efficient folks.

Also, for going to most of the European countries you either need to go through Frankfurt (Germany) or Amsterdam (Netherlands). In both the cases, Pakistanis are required to have Transit Visas stamped on their passport (even if they are not going to leave the airport). The only exception is people who hold a Schengen Visa. The transit visa takes 4 days to get stamped and the fee for Netherlands is Rs. 2700/- (you also need to give 3 photographs with your passport). KLM helps you in the process for Netherlands; I'm not sure about Germany but I think Lufthansa should help.

Before leaving Karachi, I got in touch with Adnan Ejaz, a guy from FAST Lahore who later joined Microsoft, who is also going to the same university. Quite interestingly we had the same flight from Abu Dhabi to Amsterdam and more interestingly though we had never met each other and would not have recognized each other - we had adjacent seats in the KLM flight. More importantly, this is not just an accident. The form and substance are getting more and more clear to me with time. Yes, the journey has already begun!

Meanwhile, I have been reading Mumtaz Mufti's "Labbaik". It's a very good book - in fact a travelogue of Mumtaz Sahab's Hajj. It's a must read if you have a slight idea of Shahab Nama.

Amsterdam Schiphol is a very big airport - much bigger than Dubai, I would say. I shall reach Gothenburg by 3:30 pm, Insha Allah. Let's see how the future unfolds!


Mukhtar Masood wants your authograph on the pages of history. Remember: Ali = Bulund.
(Adil Shah: Karachi Airport, 21st Aug)