It’s been a really long while since I wrote on my blog I think, was time I should update this baby of mine.

I’ve been in Karachi for about more than 2 months, and to tell you the truth I love it here more than I liked it there, sure I had drums and all, but this place is a blessing I tell you, for one I can enjoy Bar B Q’s till the morning instead of having to wrap it up by 11pm, that seriously sucked.

Anyways, I got my new Macbook sometime back and boy it’s awesome, it’s like super awesome, plus it looks even better with my magic mouse. My old Mac I handed to dad since he had fallen in love with this machine. So he’s finally getting on the internet you ask ? Internet.. he’s on Facebook, imagine that.. within a week… He was on PC for more than a year and hated it.. now he loves it and he’s metting up new people, it’s awesome.

I have also managed to escape a close iPhone snatching.. I swore at the guy.. how cool is that

Also I’ve been made a Founder at a deviantart group ‘dA-Pakistan‘ , if you’re an artist and are on Deviantart, you should definetely join us.. the crew involves Umar and Anam.. awesome people I tell you.

Coming back to the present times, I attended the blog awards yesterday, man it was awesome, even though I wasn’t feeling well, I decided I would go.. I had some suggestions on some of the topics being discussed, but I decided not to speak, again I wasn’t feeling well.. But I should’ve screamed about them. Pictures here.

Thats all for now.

Tags: awards, blog, fun, incident, iPhone, karachi, mac, snatching

It’s been a long time since I wanted an Apple computer of my own, but since these are the expensive machines and not quite in everyone’s budget, I had to stick to the PC for as long as I know, except a few times at I used at my work place, and for quite some time when I was in Dubai.

I had demanded for a Mac when I joined Xuqa, and they finally got me one recently, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and not only did they get me a Mac, I bought one of my own too. Which is a nice deal to happen anyways, now that I’ve been using it like crazy, and loving the details, I m surprised how I have lived on PC and Windows for so long.

I m not really spending alot of money on the mac yet, but even the freeware softwares I have, which are mostly open source, the apps are beautiful, these are superb creatures on their own. They work effeciently and smoothly, and thanks to the Apple GUI guidelines, they look cooler every time I have to use them. But oh, one thing, I noticed that the brand new iMac that I use at work is a little slower than my macbook, which is more than a year old, and used obviously, this has come as a surprize also considering that the Macbook is a ‘Core Duo’ machine, while the iMac is a ‘Cure 2 Duo’ machine, and also the fact that my macbook is with a built in Graphics card and the iMac has a dedicated graphics card. Other than that these are pretty decent machines.

The best app for me has been Adium and Skype, along with my graphics toolkit, infact all my communication softwares have been the best, and yes the best thing is the application installation and uninstallation. Beautifully done Apple. Love you !

Tags: apple, first, GUI, imac, laptop, loving it, mac, macbook, my own

I ‘ve been trying to write a blog post since 3 days, but you can’t do that when you’re occupied with lots of work plus you’re tired and sleepy.

So any how, I just found time to write about things that are going around in my life (other than constant electric breakdowns).

I had been working on a start up company’s website lately (TimeSvr), and was at their office the whole yesterday, since there were things that needed to be completed and the best way was to interact with their team directly, they had offered me to come work at their place, since they know about the electric conditions of the city, but I had turned down their offer a couple of times, before giving up and finally going to their office, honestly and no buttering, I really enjoyed it there, not really the way I enjoyed at my last job, but it was fun, atleast they did not have any electric problem, even if it did happen their were UPS and standby generator, which reminds me I have to call the guy who repairs the generator, because mine isn’t functioning !

So what I was saying is that they have a brilliant team, not only is the management good, they have strong, and confident Virtual Assistants (Aides) too. Getting to know these people and helping them get the company a good online presence was a pretty good experience, not only that, I also got to know some tiny bits about Ruby on Rails, and I have been tempted to learn than too (desheikh thanks for that !). I’ve started to look for resources now.

I’d like to thank their staff for such a nice time, specially Osama Sehgol, Zulfiqar Ali Sheikh, Farheen Iqbal, Zaki Mohamed and Angel Bernadine.

Thanks so much guys.

Tags: ali, angel, awesome, farheen, osama, related, shahzad, timesvr, work, zulfiqar

A day or two back, my friend H-N was at my place for some work reasons, and guess what, he got Najam‘s external HDD with him, which had his files, a dozen and more bunch of viruses..

My antivirus (avast), instantly recoginized these viruses, and stopped most of them, some were too quick and planted them in my OS drive, which is absolutely a primary drive to run the operating system of the computer..

2 days later and my computer was still infected, I actually was occupied with work that’s not related to computers so this dis-infection of the computer was delayed. DAMN !

Any how, this particular night, I had enough of this virus pop ups from my AntiVirus scanner, and I decided to get rid of it, with a little help from the internet (my little form of research), I discovered it was a Rootkit virus, which generally are a bit hard to remove. Any how I guess most of it or a 100% of it are gone now, since all the dsoftwares I used to disinfect my computer say that there’s no more virus in my 320 GB HDD..

I m going to list all the softwares and methods below so anyone who gets something as nasty can get some help from here.

My Antivirus is Avast Home Edition 4.8, and prompted that I had some infected file in <System Root>\system32\drivers folder which was called klif.sys, I moved it to the antivirus chest, in other words quarantined it, and then deleted it from the chest, means making it ineffective and deleting it, obviously even deleting this would not help, since it had spread a bit. So I also ran a boot time scan of my computer, after I had run a thorough scan.

My next step was to run a complete spyware scan of my HDD, which revealed I had 2 registry values added or modified, I used Spybot Search & Destroy and TrendMicro Hijack this, for this purpose.

I also had to look up manually if any autorun files had been added, and there’s no surprze they had been done so on all my fixed Hard drives and also my ipod which was connected.. These files would pop up each time even after I had removed them.. so what I did was to run a live version of Ubuntu which I had just downloaded and remove all the autorun files from there.. for those who’re wondering, ubuntu is a free linux distribution, recommended for any home/pro user.

I then booted again in to Windows XP, and reran the antivirus and antispyware and used Sophos Rootkit Remover, this also found something, and cleaned it for me.

I ran an antivirus again and found out that my computer was now been clean, but somehow, I couldn’t still view the hidden files, no matter how many times I enables/disabled it from the folder options, so I searched a bit and found that a registry value could’ve been added/modified, and as I checked indeed, it had been modified, so yes, I modified it again, and you can find the solution to it here. It’s a bit of a registry work, so proceed with caution.

So now I have my computer back, anyone who has been bothered by my “non-presence” this was the reason, I m sorry.

I m hoping everyoen says safe from Viruses, please if you still haven’t got an antiviurs, do so and keep your files safe, and donot connect drives unless they’ve been checked for viruses, getting the viruses off your system is a big hassle, trust me.

Oh and if this helps any one, do tell me.

Tags: avast, computer, crap, f*ck, hassan, hijack this, kill, klif.sys, linux, M, najam, PC, rootkit, shit, sophos, spybot search and destroy, thanks, ubuntu, virus, windows

The new version of WordPress you know includes the Google gears implementation, in case you folks did not know that, this is one big help, no kidding..

Your writing and managing the blog becomes much more easier, not to mention effecient.

The link at the top right of the admin page in WordPress, which says ‘Turbo’ is what enables this option. You will need to download and install Google Gears, which is available for Firefox as well as Internet explorer. sweet..

The new other impressive feature is the Pressthis link. Which is much more sophisticated and categorized  to what you want to put online. Surely wordpress has progressed and groomed itself very well.. awesome.

Here check out this video which has a detailed account of the new features of WordPress 2.6.

Tags: 2.6, gears, Google, new version, wordpress

Oh yes firefox 3 is coming out on the 17th of this month…whopeee

I made this little image to spread the word..

PS. Redistribute the image, if you like it, but please donot modify, or remove the ‘dehog’ logo.

Thanks

Tags: 3, awesome, browser, features, firefox, message, new, opensource, software, sprea, verion

Teabreak is growing, and moving steady, in the right direction, which is definitely a very good thing.

It has a good number of people signing up each day, and more blogs get added and a whole big number of blog posts aggregated every single day.

It’s also a very heavy site, which is good, heavy things stand the competetion longer than the rest

Any how, this post was meant to bring attention to all the folks that there now is a facebook’s teabreak fan page, if you’re on facebook, and you like the rich addition teabreak brings to your blog or webspace, and you think you can return us a small favour, join that fan club

See you all at the fan club, and oh get the discussions started

Tags: blog, blogosphere, club, enjoy, facebook, fan, fun, join, teabreak, words

When you work in a company, no matter what department, you’re actually being paid for thinking, and finding solutions, because that’s what companies do, find solutions to what others can not.

Anyways, so the thing is, I work for a company that takes work super seriously though we keep the freedom and the spirit alive inside, and so the story is, I’ve been working quite a little extra, infact everyone from our department is like a workoholic right now, being a workoholic is normal for people in the design teams btw.

So the thing is I’ve been in the office for very long hours recently, so any of you folks, who I love and I’ve been away from you guys/gals, please know, I m caught up with work, I m not ignoring you.. I love you guys/gals.. ok for guys, not the wrong way, like Asim imtiaz would say, ‘in a pure brotherly fashion’.

Talking of Asim, I m also working with him and Zair on a new project, Tea Break, it’s gonna be a fun project, and more over it’s some kind of a thing, that the Pakistani IT industry more or less needs.

We have Asim, Ammar, Zair and me on this project, take a look at it here.

Oh and btw, I m hating my neighbours and PTCL, for my dead phone line ;(

Much Love.

Tags: abd, amamar, asim, awesome, balance, crap, gals, guys, I love you folks, life, love, office, shit, updates, work, workoholic, Zair

Hello all the net creatures !

Last night I was browsing the internet and talking to some every important people and digging through my old Sticky notes, I knew there were digital versions of sticky notes, except for that on Yahoo Widgets and stuff, so I had to dig a bit, found out Stick it does a pretty good job, I have had no problems so far. Lacks customization though. Stickit.

Any how, I have received a request to post pictures of Ayaan, whenever I snap them, and a demand for them being snapped sooner has already been made. WOW !

H-N, people love you man ! You should be a happy boy more often.

Things with Asim are better now, I expected him to be super pissed, I m happy he’s not and I think I should go and meet people more often too.

enough of the blogging for now, have to dress up and leave for work.

Tags: asim, ayaan, brother, friends, fun, h-n, kid, little, mb, online, sticky

I just found out there’s a chart for web applications, and they’re open for voting. Pretty neat.

Why did I put this on my blog ? Because I m a designer and a coder, and love to see great things see the light of the day, and also receive huge appreciations, that who we are, that’s what we do.

Click the link above and vote for any application, be it flickr, last.fm, base camp, or any other web-app that you love/like.

This is no affiliation or referral, just a thought that great things should well be appreciated.

Click away.

Tags: applications, charts, online, vote, web, work