Website reviews

As I have mentioned here I am planning to do reviews of some government website. This gave me a fair idea of how to proceed.

I guess for government sites what matters most is the eservice been provided. No matter how ugly the design or content is, you will still go there if some thing needs to be done. So I guess my main focus would be on the services available on those websites. Currently most of our egovernment sites are static. One reason is that the back end is not IT enabled yet.

Never the less hopefully (inshAllah) I should be posting the first one pretty soon.

Usb wireless adapter in Ubuntu Linux

I had to buy a usb wireless adapter for my ubuntu based laptop since it does not have a built in one. So I went to the local market here in Khobar (Dossary tower) and made a list of available ones. Here is what I got:

• TPLINK TLWN321G
• ALFA AWUS036H
• PLANET WL-U356M
• EDIMAX
• MSI

I did some research on the Internet regarding which one would work natively/out of the box with ubuntu. TPLINK seemed to be the best bet. It was also the cheapest option available some thing like SR 50. So I took my chance. What a perfect fluke :) Its working like a charm since then. Lucky me!

Here is the lsusb output for the device

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501USB Wireless Adapter

Pakistani government websites

For some reason I am always digging for our official government websites. Probaly cause first it roughly gives me an idea of how well a certain government department is doing. Secondly cause it always feels good to see our country progressing. Though most of the time I am a little disappointed with the portals.

InshAllah soon I will try and write small reviews for all these sites which i visit.

Corruption (Bribe)

I was flying out of Islamabad on April 30th 2009 with my family. The airport was least crowded and suddenly the customs officer stopped me. Well he asked me "Can I open your luggage?". I replied "No" in a cheeky manner. I said I have family with me so please "meharbani karaain". The reply I got was "aap hum per meharabani karain hum aap per kardaain gay". vow even my wife was shocked at this. Well I said no and moved on.

At a time when our country is falling apart these guys are still busy doing their stuff. I thought of complaining but was afraid that he might suddenly "discover" narcotics in my luggage. What a pity.

Saudi electronic banking

It is always a pleasure to write some thing good about Saudi Arabia. I have always appreciated Saudis electronic/internet banking. Especially the way you can pay bills for almost everything under the sun. I often noticed the word SADAD while making my payments on line so I decided to "google" it.

It turns out that this SADAD thing is the result of a very positive initiative taken by the saudi government a couple of years ago. There is a whole web site dedicated to this. I wonder why Pakistan cannot implement some thing like this. The idea is not that complicated.

Contributing to open source

I always feel that people do not contribute back to open source products. For example here everybody uses putty but I don't think any body have ever thought of supporting the product in any way. In fact you might hear a lot of them grumbling about the features it lacks :) I guess most of them do not even know that the software is open source or what open source means in the first place.

For some time now I have been trying to do what ever I can to contribute back to open source. This blog itself is an example. I also at times have filed bugs for the OSS I use. Recently for the first time, I actually donated money to a project which I felt was lacking in linux from the time I started using it. It is fully compatible mail client for M$ exchange. I have been looking for this since my university days (my uni had exchange which they could not handle and eventually switched to free mail for educational institutions from google).

For the time being I am using evolution OWA microsoft exchange support. It has a lot of problems but never the less some thing is better then nothing. A couple of times I thought of using outlook under crossoffice but for that I would need a licensed copy of outlook (M$ office). I decided against that when I looked at the cost of Microsoft office professional :)

Finally some time back I discovered this. Looks very promising and thats where I have made my first donation to open source. I hope that I will continue doing this with softwares which makes my life easier :)

Update 25th March 2009
A few days ago gnome 2.26.0 was released. Native MAPI support is included in this release. So most probably next release of ubuntu code named Jaunty should have it. The only quick review I could dig up of this support is from some one who tested it in February.

Exit re-entry status

Expats living in saudi arabia know what all this is about. Luckily you can check status of your exit re-entry online now. Though it does not always work :)

Mobily Internet via Nokia E51 as bluetooth modem

Well consulted too many sites to get this working so cant really mention all of them here :)
I will just put the main one here

AFAIK this was performed on Ubuntu 7.04. So in 8.10 it turned out to be a lot easier.

I will only post the differences here :) Yeah they call it laziness

In step1 you just need to left click the bluetooth icon and select "Set up new device". Make sure bluetooth is activated on your mobile and its publicly viewable. It will give you the code which you need to enter on your mobile to complete the pairing.

Step2 remains exactly the same. Be sure to restart bluetooth service after editing rfcomm.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

In Step3 I used wvdial instead of what this guy is using. Since I am familiar with it. Mobily does not require a username/password but I had to put dummy values since wvidal does not accept wvdial.conf with out it.

Here is my wvdial for mobily, Saudi arabia.

[Dialer mobile]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=, ,"web1"
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Phone = *99***1#
Username = A
Password = B
New PPPD = yes
BAUD = 460800
Stupid Mode = 1