Rashid Saeed

It seems like everyone’s talking about the Google’s latest hit to the market. A brand new browser, built from scratch as claimed by Google. Google has launched the secret project days after the rival Microsoft released its revolutionary IE8’s beta 2 release. Features are pretty much the same for both the products; we’ll see what Chrome is actually supposed to offer:

Stable

Browser crashes are new to none. Google always seem to have realized the value of saving an email draft from getting vanished due to browser crash by enabling auto save in its Gmail application.

Faster

Google Chrome is always ready to listen to a click. Click it and it open in a blink which proves its minimal memory consumption and fast performance.

Secure

With its built-from-scratch release, Chrome already ensured security being new-to-world technology. There are warnings at every step to make sure that users enter the secure place at their own risks.

Clean

No extras! Google Chrome is clean and has all the space available for web pages. There’s no title bar, no status bar and no toolbars, just one tabs bar that also works as title bar and all of remaining space belongs to the page you’re opening.

Simple

With simplicity transferred straight from Google’s homepage Chrome delivers Google’s trademark simplicity and usability.

Efficient

Whether it’s opening or closing the tabs or opening heavy web applications, Google Chrome is efficient and puts everything in front right when ordered.

Open Source

Being an open source application, Chrome invites and accepts contribution from global community. So your feedback and contribution is welcome.

Multi-threading

Ever heard of a browser that based on multi-threading? Chrome is the one! With its threaded approach it resolves the issue of browser crashes by keeping heavy applications allocated in a separate thread so that it doesn’t affect overall browser functionality and performance.

Multi-processing

Every window and every tab of Chrome opens as a new process. If you see in task manager, every instance of Chrome, whether a tab or window has a separate process, with different processing and memory allocated to it, and if one process stops responding, it doesn’t affect other processes unlike in legacy browsers.

Got this email regarding NTS Commonwealth Scholarship Test held on Sunday September 21, 2008 from a friend of mine who attended the test and shares his bitter experiences:

It is indeed a regret to say that the standard of NTS has fallen down to the worse. In the “Blue Book” which I took in Common Wealth Scholarship 2009, there were questions wrongly written in the book especially the choices given were blunders especially in Analytical portion.

For instance the reprinting of same choice more than once in the same question and in another question all choices negates the fundamental clause of arguments thus making whole question unanswerable. In Math portion one question states that “If there are 50 students in class, 28 are female and 27 are male…….”

This defies the credibility of NTS of such responsible job. If possible award full marks for all wrongly placed questions/choices in exam sheet.

This addresses one of(many) minor issues that NTS has always found to be incapable of combating with.

Dear Uncle Pakistan,

Its an honor writing to you on your 61st b’day. I’ve been quite busy but I knew how badly you needed a wish from me so I am here to clap and cheer for you, after all I had my patriotism at sake. I’ve really been excited about the day, I have been riding on one wheel to avoid your roads the friction of second wheel. That way I also managed to browse through you more quickly.

My one-wheel journey was also an attempt to learn horse riding since I’m planning to replace my bike’s engine with a horse’s stomach. I’ve taken this step in inspiration of Government’s campaign to help making the environment green and pollution free. This step will help making things more greener, not only that the roads will get greener as our green-bikes pass over them but we’ll see greenery everywhere. We already drink green water and now will wear green gold.

All these green happenings are meant exclusively for you since you’ve come to your retirement age of 61, we’ve been striving for your peaceful departure from this world and will continue our attempts at that.

May Allah be with us!

Image Courtesy: Dawn

Goodness! What a week … I’ve been traveling through the week, new day, new destinations, new assignments, new people and new ME[yeah!]. Events make life pass by so quickly, haha well week’s almost over and unlike last week I couldn’t realize how it went by. August’s always eventful one for me and, like January, brings so many b’days. haha yeah I’m surrounded by Leos and Capricorns, huh arrogant beings, I love ‘em.

Soo .. here I gotta make some belated wishes, Here’s the list of grown *further* ups:

Ash[3rd Aug] - Have a good one and hope you’d have recovered from the accident. Cheers girl!
Bish[11th Aug] - I remembered! but was nowhere close to networks, so apologies for delayed wish.
President Musharraf[11th Aug] - You remain my favorite leader figure no matter what goes around. I like the way you’re approaching the things, stand tall Mr. President! Hardest day will pass away.
Shoaib Akhtar[13th Aug] - Have a good one. Stream in and blow!

and finally .. Uncle Pakistan .. well not here, you deserve a separate one, an exclusive wish.

Like with every first thing, last things also last, and last longer. If the first breath has a significance, so has the last breath. Have you seen something as it was your last sight of them? It evokes as many sentiments as does the first sight, or even more. If you remember a first meeting, you’d be remembering last one as well. Last match of a tournament indulges as many spectators as does the first match.

One amazing fact about last things is that you never know if that was the last one. You’re never certain of something happening for the last time. Perhaps that is why we believe in things like “first impression is last impression”? Which definitely is true with people whom we don’t expect to meet again. But for the people whom we meet time and again, first impression theory is put in serious doubts as our thoughts and impressions change frequently. What’s important to us is, how someone behaved first time, and how they behaved last time. We draw character of people, not solely but to great extent, based on answers to these two questions.

So the last things are as significant parts of memories as are the first things. Whatever they hold, be it joy or pain, they hold loads of it. And when we know its first and last, its memorable and lasting first thing that we carry and cherish all our life.

We spend years in planning something that actually takes months to get done. We plan hard, prepare plans, b plans, c plans and so on …. There are plans, plans for the plans and the chain continues. May be its because we want to achieve in steps or may be its just an attempt to make things more systematic, more planned and more organized. It gives us cushion if a plan is series of plans fails and we can proceed with b plan. Uhh It wasn’t meant for planning thing today, I’m in terrible mood, writing mood that is. It was about the unplanned plans. I wouldn’t even have started if Twitter didn’t have stopped twittering due to “unplanned maintenance”. While I’m not sure if anything called unplanned maintenance actually exists, a management student could elaborate that I guess, I’m more of a tech geek. Otherwise I’ll consider it a creative addition to the “dumb world of ours” since its coming from Twitter. Here’s the screenshot I got while trying to twitter:

It’s strange to hear from a service where people express their plans. Anyways, they told it would take “about an hour”, but that one hour has prolonged itself to 180 minutes by now. I’ll finally come to know today that how long one hour actually is, web hour that is. twit twit twit!

What’s the most decisive part for every startup? Of course it’s the decision to start backed with intentions to stay persistent with your decision. As they say, the courage to start and willingness to continue brings the success. However it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Start-up decision could be one-time act of braveness and courage but what’s more important is to back your decision. Taking a brave step is not as difficult as it seems, how would the coward of people will commit suicide otherwise? All it takes is to put brakes to all your thoughts, stop thinking, close your eyes and jump! Be it the fire or the water you land in but that’s the ultimate solution for your problems at that specific time. No-one cares for what happens afterwards.

Once I had a chance to meet a suicide survivor, he regretted his decision. After a decent talk with him I realized that even the people who commit suicide start fighting for their lives once they’re caught in the trap. This is, perhaps, what makes suicide more of a coward end than a brave start-up. Hence every bold decision is a suicide where you burn the boats and jump in. Every decision that follows gets more and more important. What remains important is the willingness to continue in moments of despair and backing your decision.

You can get anything doesn’t mean that you can have everything. Life has so much on offer that none can have all of it. Even with unlimited resources, whether financial or social, our unlimited wants don’t seem like being fulfilled. Everything comes with a price tag, price that money alone can’t meet. Its price of emotions, price of resources, price of relations, price of other less important wishes; paid with sacrifice, paid with fears, paid with compromises and paid with money. Sometimes, even when we had all of resources to get something; we can’t get it. How more selfless human could be?

Wishes are like closed doors opening to new doors, each having numerous locks, each requiring number of keys to get opened and each one has keys(to next door) stored in it and nothing else. We keep on collecting keys, keep on opening the doors but never achieve anything, never get satisfied, never get complete. Our only satisfaction is to unlock the door, its sense of success that we get. But it doesn’t last longer, we get attracted to next closed door and yet again we begin collecting keys for the door. Keys are like resources required to un-lock the wishes.

It seems like life keeps on making us fool. It never takes hope away from us. We wish to savor sense of satisfaction beyond every unlocked door. We strive for every wish like it was our last but no-one is. It continues on, till we meet the final door, the death. Perhaps it’s the ultimate sense of completion that we’ve been looking for throughout our life. But how could it be? It’s completion of life, not ours. What have we been striving for? Our destination or that of life? Our completeness or that of life?

Our life and our self are different, entirely different things. Life keeps on driving our self in a way that we feel incomplete just because life’s incomplete. We keep running after life’s wishes and aim for satisfaction of our self, how could it be possible?

FaceBook has restored SocialMe after a ban of almost two weeks. SocialMe was earlier suspended by FaceBook for privacy issues assuring that the ban would be lifted once the application fixes the privacy issues followed with review and approval by FaceBook. I’m not sure what privacy issues it was violating but was really disappointed at its removal as it’s been most-used FaceBook app for me. I’m glad that it’s finally back, was curious to see what changes they made if either of those were “visible”.

As I tuned it on and clicked for first tag of the day, a little message popped in asking me to enter personal info followed by a privacy notice that you can see in the graphic below. I already was a member so this info wasn’t needed I thought. Intention here would certainly be to get a checked box on privacy agreement declaring user’s willingness to share the private information (s)he enters. So, that was just the formality work to me.

I couldn’t notice any other changes as yet. May be it was an explicit privacy notice to its users that FaceBook needed from SocialMe. There may be some hidden privacy concerns so I’m not challenging FaceBook’s decision to suspend the application ;).