AptraXpress Partnership for Avanza Solutions

Avanza Solutions has recently been approved as AptraXpress Gold Partner by NCR. This places Avanza Solutions as the first third party solution provider in the entire subcontinent to develop products for NCR. The partnership has been awarded after a successful audit of the products, processes and software development methodology of Avanza Solutions by NCR Scotland team in Karachi. The main driving force has achieving this partnership has been iSuite line of products which are developed for NCR ATMs by the company in coordination with NCR Pakistan.

Some Less Pondered Lessons from Karbala

What do you do when you know that the end is inevitable, and you are all set to embrace it? Consider, for example, a person suffering from a painful disease and he/ she is known to die; the only thing unknown could be the time frame he/ she has to bear the suffering. Most of the people would prefer ending the suffering, even if it entails something like death. The earlier the better.

But there is an example in the world history where such suffering was willingly elongated: the night between 9th and 10th Muharram---despite having no water for 3 days and being very clear about his choice and the events which would follow, Imam Hussain (alaye-hissalam) requested the Yazidi forces to allow him and his companions one night's opportunity.

To the apparent eye, the Imam might have wanted to spend his last night praying and offering supplications, which is of course true but there was a side-affect of this one night's delay: one of the commanders of the Yazidi forces, Hur, changed sides the last night, and martyred from Imam's side in the morning---martyred by the forces he once commanded.

Ask yourself: when do you change sides? When the competitor has something higher to offer: a better rank/ authority, more financial rewards, etc. Yet, here is an example of going to the other extreme when Hur made up his mind to get killed in the battle to succeed. The request for spending another night living in Karbala was actually an opportunity to the people on the evil side to make up their mind.

Karbala was a demonstration, and Hur is a symbol of humanity, who got purified by this demonstration.

Zombies!

First, it was parthenogenesis of Komodo dragons, and then I came to know about the same for sharks. Now, we have zombie cockroaches and spiders.

There is a creepy video on YouTube which is a must see (if you can stand creepy stuff).

Programming MS Outlook

I always hate when I send somebody an email without a subject; and it happens too often with official emails when I am using MS Outlook.

There are various ways to program Outlook: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), COM Addins and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). As far as VSTO is concerned, the idea of programming add-ins in C# or other .NET languages may seem fascinating but the requirements of a heavy runtime, as well as the idiosyncrasies of .NET framework versions (and frequent API changes) will cause you enough trouble to drop the idea.

Then we are left with COM Addins and Visual Basic for Applications. While the preferred way in terms of security and redistribution is COM Addins, VBA isn't bad either. Nevertheless, you need to understand Outlook object model, no matter what paradigm you adhere to. So, here is a very quick solution to trapping blank subject of outgoing emails using VBA. It isn't hard to convert the code to a compiled COM Addin.

Private Sub Application_ItemSend (ByVal Item As Object, 
     Cancel As Boolean)
    If (Not Item.Class = olMail) Then Exit Sub
    
    If (Item.Subject = "") Then
        answer = MsgBox("Do you want to send the message without entering a subject", 
   vbYesNo + vbSystemModal)
        If (answer = vbNo) Then
            Cancel = True
        End If
    End If
End Sub

Where to put in this code? Hit Alt-F11 in MS Outlook to open up the VBA editor, and copy n' paste this code. Make sure that you set the macro security to Medium so that Outlook asks you before enabling/ disabling a macro.

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Programming Outlook 2007 by Ken Slovak from Wrox is a no nonsense book. If you have ever participated in the Outlook newsgroup, you already know who Ken Slovak is. You should get it if you want a head-start in Outlook programming. The only caveat is that the book discusses Outlook 2007, with very few lessons on programming older versions of the office application.

Book Review: Rebel Code

One of the books I purchased recently is "Rebel Code, Linux and the Open Source Revolution"; written by Glyn Moody, the book is around 320 pages. It's available in paperback form, and is easy to carry and read when you are traveling, for example.

A lot is discussed and I'd agree with Eric Raymond's comment that this is the best history of the open source movement. It starts off from Richard Stallman, GNU and "Free Software Foundation" and goes to the Mozilla foundation and the new trendy name of "Open Source Movement." The best parts are the email excerpts from various mailing lists, which take you back into history when things were still being defined.

Below is the table of contents and a brief overview of what various chapters contain:

• The Coolest Year provides some background on the university years of Linus.


• The New GNU Thing talks about the famous AI Lab at MIT which are the earliest traces of "hackers." It tells how the group was disbanded and how Richard Stallman took onto himself to write a "free" Unix.


• A Minor Rebellion starts off with Linus' interest in 386 processor and how he gradually went onto writing Linux, after working on Minix. The chapter takes excerpts from the famous flame war between Tenenbaum and Linus.


• Factor X talks about various contributing factors which made Linux a hit, including XFree86 and NFS. It also discusses 386BSD. Linus is quoted as saying that he wouldn't have bothered with writing Linux if 368BSD had come out a few years earlier.


• Patching Up is all about contributions to the kernel in the form of patches; the most interesting part is the fork in TCP/IP stack -- when Linus finally preferred Alan Cox over Fred.


• Boot then Root covers the origins of Linux distributions, specifically SLS and Caldera, and how their maintainers became famous people.


• Linus 2.0 is about Linus getting a job in Transmeta, and he moving to the US from Finland.


• Learning from Berkeley is about Internet revolution and Perl. It covers a lot of background information on Larry Wall, the author of Perl.


• The Art of Code discusses the importance of a paper by McVoy at Sun for having a unified Unix release. It also talks about Eric Raymond and Donald Knuth (and of course, TeX).


• Low Down in the Valley discusses how Linus' family life and work started interfering in the open source work; it also talks about the most dangerous point in the history of Linux development---when people started talking of having a different leader to take over kernel maintenances.


• Mozilla Dot Party tells you how Mozilla came into being, starting from the origins of Netscape to the open source project, heavily inspired by the writings of Eric Raymond. The most interesting part is the one that discusses Jamie Zawinsky. By the way, I personally think Jamie Zawinsky is very, very cool.


• A Foothold enlightens you how IBM dumped its own HTTP server and adopted Apache for all its products


• Distributions and Shares is about companies which started working on Linux distributions, most notably Redhat.


• Open for Business talks about the various business aspects of the open source projects, and how most of them contributed back to the open source world. I think Glyn Moody didn't do justice with this topic, and a lot is left to be desired. Perhaps, the later editions of the book provide more insight.


• Trolls Versus Gnomes is about the desktop on Linux.


• Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks truly represents the chapter title. It's one of the things that proved to be demoralizing for the hackers---various tests, which talked of Windows being superior to Linux, proved to be true on multiprocessor machines.


• Tomorrow's Hothouse discusses the trends as the author foresaw them at the time of writing.


• Beyond the Market is also about future.


• The Postscript is a little bit on Python and related trends.

I got hold of a very old edition of the book; it discusses events till 2001. A lot has happened after that which isn't discussed in my copy. I'd give it a 4 out of 5 rating---a must have.