Resurrection...

This blog will "soon" be resurrected.. ah.. hmm, well let us just say that my "soon" usually means about 5-6 months as far as this blog is concerned..
So, here I am, itching to resume writing, rants and random musings on this very blog.. During this period I have actually "bookmarked" a few thoughts in my mind to blog about.. and now that I have got some time I am surely going to publish them here, before I start loosing track of them, So you can expect some posts about (in no particular order)
- Cricket World Cup 2011
- A Phony Interview Call
- Leap Of Faith
- At the Top
- Music
- Places to hangout in Abu Dhabi.. (Especially Sheesha Cafes)
- Reconnecting with School Friends
- Pakistani Passport Renewal and Visa Renewal in Abu Dhabi
- Movie reviews
- Living in an over-connected world
- Spot fixing and views of some of my friends..
- Dead Memories..
- Emptiness
I am not sure about the last two points... but let us see how things pan out, and let us kick things off..

Dad is here :-)

This blog will soon be resurrected. Stay tuned :-)

Don't give up on me

Against all odds,
I've come this far,
I've shed my blood,
I've fought my wars,
they tell my story,
these deep,dark scars..
but looks like now..
whatever I've been through
whatever I've faced...
has taken its toll...
and here I lie now..
plagued by the pain
in sheer great agony..
my eyes are blurred
I see you though..
turning your eyes away
and just as you walk away
I muster my strength..
do you hear me say ?
"Dont turn your back...
Don't give up on me"
my breaths are shallow
my wounds are deep
but don't tell me
that my chances are low
do you forget ?
the odds I defied
despite everything..
I have survived..
I walked so proud
I did stand tall..
can't you help me ?
with this tragic fall ?
I might just not die..
while my hope is alive
all I want from you
is just another try
and your belief in me
don't turn your back
don't give up on me..

With Love.. Pakistan

Raja - March 19 2010

Opportunities

"Our life is defined by the opportunities, even the ones we missed."

The Divide

My Faith is Righteous
and yours is Void
My Book is Holy,
and yours is flawed
I say my Prayers
and you do too
but yours are worthless
and mine are True
the Light is mine
and yours is Gloom
I will taste the wines
Oh, you will doom
I do not hate you
but, Can I love you ?
Can I mingle with you ?
The way, the brothers do ?
Oh maybe no
I am not allowed to..
My brothers are those
who follow my faith
and no, not you,
I do not discriminate
among people of my faith,
yet,I do so strictly...
between us and you,
and I am baffled,
by the way you dress,
the food you eat,
the things you do,
the words you recite,
all of it.. is nothing..
nothing but fallacy..
even if you do..
all the good deeds..
even if you pray..
ten times a day..
even if you keep
every one happy..
still, oh my man
you have little chance..
because there is one thing
which you do lack..
you will find out
when you rise back.
until then
we will live like this..
you and me..
till the end of time..
on either side
of this grand divide

(Raja 10-FEB-10)

Pity The Nation

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not ept among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Khalil Gibran - The Garden of the Prophet (1934)

Bulleh Shah.

Masjid Dha Dey, Mandir Dha Dey...
Dha dey jo kuch Dhainda

Ek Banday Da, Dil Na Dhaween
Rab Oday Vich hi Rehnda

Translation

Break down the mosque, Break down the temple
Break down everything which you can ..

Just don't break anyone's heart
because God lives there ...

Avatar

I watched Avatar last weekend.

There was a tremendous hype and buzz about this brand new flick from James Cameron. After all, it is the most expensive movie ever made, and it has taken about 10 years or so for them to finish it.

So naturally, my expectations were quite high.

Overall, the movie is a Technical Masterpiece, graphics and special effects are awesome - spellbinding, something we have never seen before. Great attention has been paid to the little details, and it really shows on the screen. Within first few minutes, I was totally blown away by the breathtaking views of Pandora, and as the movie progressed, it all went bigger and better, culminating in war-scene which literally shook me.

It is rightly said that, James Cameron has yet again raised the bar, as far as the action and special effects are concerned.

Now let me discuss the most important thing - The plot - I expected something novel from James Cameron. But sadly, the plot of the movie is a major MAJOR disappointment. It is almost very predictable. It is the same old plain, brave-hero-does-it-all and good-vs-evil stuff. There was no drama, no surprises at all in the story. Maybe, maybe it would have been a good story 10 years back, but today - No Way.

[spoiler alert]

And in the climax scene, when the girl finally kills the bad guy, when he is about to kill Jack, well it almost reminded me of the endings which I used to see in bollywood flicks many years back.

[/spoiler alert]

One more thing, which irritated me, was the love between our hero Jack Sully and the Na'vi girl. I mean, it is not really illogical or anything, but I am not a big fan of "Aliens-in-love" kind of stuff. For some reason, I really find it very boring. Why do they even try to throw in that much romance in a science fiction movie ?, It is really beyond me.

Overall, the presentation is awesome, the treatment of the plot is great, but the plot itself is not very original. Great visual spectacle, not a great movie.

Go watch it just for some good 3D fun.

Kuch to...

Kuch to tanhai ki raato mein sahara hota...
Tum na hotay, na sahi, zikr tumhara hota..

Will you dance with me tonight ?

It’s been so long
Since I’ve known right from wrong
Got no job,
sometimes I just sit down and sob

Wondering if anything will go right
Or will you dance with me tonight !!

When the sun departs
I feel a hole down in my heart
Put on some shoes
Come down here and listen to the blues

Wondering if anything will go right
Or will you dance with me tonight !!

I’m looking at you
You’re looking at me
We’re the only two off the dance floor
Do you see what I see
Two broken lives
working in harmony
Might make for a decent time
So get up and dance with me

I know that it seems that the grass will grow
Better on the other side of the barb wire fence
But that other side is not in sight
So I’m fine with what I have now

If you’ll dance with me tonight
What’s the point of life
If risk is just a board game
You roll the dice
But you’re just hoping that the rules change
What’s the point if you can’t bring yourself to say
Things you wanna say

like Dance with me tonight
Or will you dance with me tonight !!
Or will you dance with me tonight !!

From the movie : Music and Lyrics
Starring : Hugh Grant & Drew Barrymore.

How SMS works, quick and dirty.

OK, the main purpose of this post is to streamline and consolidate the bits and pieces of my knowledge about the SMS technology and how to go about sending SMS from your program, So here goes a quick and rough overview of what I know about the SMS technology.

When you send an SMS from your mobile, it is first submitted to an SMSC (Short Message Service Center).
SMSC is an entity in wireless network of a telecom operator, which is supposed to handle all the stuff related to SMS, The address details of the SMSC are pre-configured in your SIM card by your network operator (like Etisalat in UAE) hence the SMS reaches the SMSC first, with all the details like the source number (originating party), SMS text, the validity period, the target number (terminating party), date-time, size etc.

Usually an SMS consists of 160 characters but if exceeds it is classified as a long sms and broken down into more than one part, but all those parts have a particular identifier (which remains same in all the parts) which indicates that the parts are actually one SMS. SMSC recognizes it and concatenates all those parts.

The job of SMSC is to route the SMS to the target number, SMSC queues and routes the messages to the desired numbers. If the target mobile number is offline, the SMSC stores the SMS for a certain time period and then again forwards the SMS when the target number comes online. This "certain time period" is actually called Validity Period and there is a default value set for every SMSC for this (but you know what, you can increase it while sending your SMS).

The underlying protocol which is used for this data exchange is SMPP (v 5.0 is the latest one). Short Message Peer to Peer protocol. The mobile device and SMSCs exchange data through this protocol and the basic unit of data here is called PDU, (protocol Data Unit). This of course has a certain header and body and a particular format.

Now let us explore sending SMS through your code, when you are writing program to send the SMS from your application, you are basically using an API which is an implementation of SMPP protocol. The two common Java based APIs are SMPPAPI and OpenSMPP.

SMPP API
http://smppapi.sourceforge.net/

Open SMPP
http://opensmpp.logica.com/introhtml/menu.htm


Before you can write your program to send an SMS via SMSC, you need to make sure that you have the following information from your telecom company about the SMSC
1- the IP address of the SMSC
2- the port allocated for SMS
3- the username
4- the password
5- Address range
6- System type
7- etc. :)

It is better to use an SMSC simulator while you are writing your code rather than hit the live SMSC each time while you are still developing your program. Plenty of free SMSC simulators are available online.

http://opensmpp.logica.com/CommonPart/Download/download2.html

OK now let us revisit the API (the first one, SMPPAPI). The most important classes which you need to know very quickly are

ie.omk.smpp.Connection
ie.omk.smpp.message.SMPPPacket
ie.omk.smpp.message.SubmitSM
ie.omk.smpp.message.SubmitSMResp
ie.omk.smpp.event.SMPPEvent
ie.omk.smpp.event.ConnectionObserver

In the next post, I ll give an overview of how to actually use these classes to be able to send an SMS from your code to a mobile phone.

to be continued...

Career Jet

http://www.careerjet.ae

This website has an interesting concept.

Their tag line is

Careerjet is an employment search engine.
In just one search access 14.093.197 jobs published on 61.608 websites in the world.

It is quite self-explanatory I believe. You don't need to browse each and every job hunting website and look for job there, this site will search jobs in the databases of those leading job related websites. Infact it redirects you to that website when you click on the job posting.

It is like a 'google' for jobs. It is cool, if it really delivers what it promises.

But there might be some potential (not so critical) issues which I can see at a glance

1- If a job is posted on more than one recruitment websites (say naukri.com and monster.com) the search results will fetch both ?

2- When the user is redirected to the actual website through careerjet, he will still be required to creat an account and then apply. Again user might have to put in effort for signing up on multiple websites, it would have been great had they implemented "single sign on" sort of thing ;) Maybe I am asking for too much here :D

UAE Recruitment Resources

Here is a list of UAE Recruitment Resources. The list is by no means exhaustive, but for the moment I guess this should do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates
http://www.etisalatcareers.ae/careers/english/job_search_form.jsp/
http://www.dxbcustoms.gov.ae/Content/Careers/Job+Opportunities/
http://www.emiratesgroupcareers.com/
http://www.dubaiairport.com/Recruitment/JobSearch/JobSearch.aspx
http://www.gulfcomputers.com/careers.htm
http://www.monstergulf.com/ ,http://jobsearch.monstergulf.com/category/it.html
http://www.naukri.com/ http://www.naukrigulf.com/
http://www.timesjobs.com/
http://www.ask4jobs.com/
http://www.charterhouseme.ae/
http://www.bayt.com/
http://www.gulftalent.com/home/opportunities.php
http://allarabia.com/job.php?pageIndex=10
http://www.ts.eu/
http://www.uaestaffing.com/dubaiITjobs.html
http://www.hiringsolutions.com/
http://www.nellaieruvadi.com/jobs/dxbrecruiters.asp http://www.dubizzle.com/main/DubaiJobs/IT8_Telecom
http://www.careerjunctionme.com/
http://www.binaryberries.com/itopens.html
http://www.gulfboom.com/
http://www.jobsup.com/search_job.php
http://jobs.efinancialcareers-gulf.com/
http://www.clarendonparker.com/
http://www.assamdubai.org/employme.htm/
http://www.webecome.com/index.htm
http://www.indexuae.com/Top/Computers_and_Internet/Web_Design/7 http://www.indexuade.com/Top/Computers_and_Internet/Software_Firms
http://khaleejtimes.com/ShowAppointmentL.asp
http://khaleejtimes.com/ClassNewL.asp?loc=AUH
http://khaleejtimes.com/ClassNewL.asp?loc=DXB
http://khaleejtimes.com/ClassNewL.asp?loc=SHJ
http://www.msidubai.com/
http://www.gulfnews.com/classifieds/index.html
http://www.guide2dubai.com/jobs/jobResults.asp?page=2&strsql=true&OB=
http://www.alluaejobs.com/
http://www.harmonymgt.com/
http://www.resources-recruitment.comharmonymgt.com


IQ Selection
Web: http://www.iqselection.com/
Tel +971-4-3297770

Kershaw Leonard
Web: http://www.kershawleonard.net/
Tel +971-4-3434606

BAC Middle East
Web: http://www.bacme.com/
Tel +971-4-3375747

SOS Recruitment
Web: http://www.sosrecruitment.net/
Tel +971-4-3965600

Bitech ME
Web: http://www.bitechme.com/
Tel +971 4 2715888

City Service Consultancy
Web: http://www.uaerecruiter.com/
Tel +971-4 227 7 444

Krownos Solutions
Web: http://www.krownos.com/
Tel +971 4 3550490

Right Selection
Human Resource
Web: http://www.rightselectionhr.com/
Tel: +971 4 321 5377

Antal International Network
Web: http://www.antal.com/
Tel: +971 4 397 4541

Michael Page International
Web: http://www.michaelpage.ae/
Tel: +971 4 211 5479
Email: contactmiddleeast@michaelpage.ae

Reach Consultancy
Web: http://www.experts.ae/
Tel: +971 4 2824699

C4AS Advanced Solutions
Web: http://www.c4as.ae/
Tel No: +971 2 6676720

Groups

http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/pakrecruitment http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/jobsinuae/

Disclaimer : This list is published with the sole purpose of helping people, apply at your own risk, I won't be responsible if anything goes wrong :-) Be sensible while applying and go through the laws and regulations of UAE if you are planning to move here from any other country.

Abida Parveen and Bulleh

Sometimes, when I am in mood, I really enjoy listening to Abida Parveen, her mystic style of singing Sufi poetry just makes me forget everything about this world for a moment, and fills me with inner pleasure and peace.

On a flight back to Abu Dhabi from Karachi, I was going thru the in-flight entertainment system
and guess what... I found a song by Abida Parveen and it was that very song which has taken the world (at least Pakistan and India) by storm, it was "Bulleh Nu Samjhawan". Although I had already listened to it in the sound track of Khuda Kay Liay a 1000 times, but this one was even more special, since it was in that classical-folk style, and of course it was sung by Abida Parveen. I was mesmerized by this flavour of Bulleh Shah's "kaafi" so fresh, so original, so passionate, I felt that this is the most suitable way of singing Bulleh's poetry,But don't take me wrong, I liked the version from Khuda Kay liay as well :-)

I searched for this version but was not able to find it on the net, then one of my friends Najeeb, gave this song to me. I will uploadit somewhere soon :)

You know what, there is a little story behind this piece of poetry, The story is, that Bulleh had a Guru or "Peer", who was from Araaeen caste, and Bulleh's relatives used to tell him that You are a Syed and do not be a spiritual student of that Araeen. Bulleh replied that I do not believe in these castes, I just believe in the fact that God creates great people and they can be from any caste. If caste matters so much, then do not call me a Syed, call me an Araeen because I have totally submitted my soul to my Guru.

Here is the translation of this "kaafi"

Original (in Punjabi/Saraiki)

BULHE NU SAMJHAWAN AAINAN BHAINAN TE BHARJAIAN
MAN LAY BULHYA SADA KAHNA CHAD DE PALLA RAIAAN
AAL-E NABI AULAD-E ALI NUN TOON KION LEEKAN LAINAN

JEHRA SANOON SYED SADDE DOZAKH MILAN SAZAIAAN
JO KOI SANOON RAEEN AAKHE BHISHTEEN PEENGAN PAIAAN
RAEEN SAEEN SABHI THAEEN RAB DIAN BE PARWAAIAN

SOHNIAN PARE HATAIAN NE TE KOJHIAN LE GAL LAAIAN
JE TU LOREEN BAAGH BAHAARAN CHAKAR HO JA RAEEAN
BULHE SHAH DI ZAAT KI PUCHNA-EN SHAKAR HO RAZAAIAN

Translation

To counsel Bulleh, sisters and sisters-in-law have come
"Pay heed to us and give up mixing with the low caste Araeen
Why are you bringing shame to the descendants of Prophet, And Ali"

"Those who call me Syed, are destined to hell made for them
Those who call me Araeen, have the swings in heaven laid for them
Low caste and High caste, are created by God who cares not for family

He regards the beautiful and cherishes the not so comely.
If you wish to enjoy the glory of the Garden, go and serve Araeen
Why bother about Bulleh's caste? Obey the command that comes from Saeen

Welcome !!!!

Welcome to my blog... Encouraged by some of my friends, I have decided to resume blogging and this is going to be my official blog space from now on...

And what can you expect here.. ? My random thoughts, ideas, views, interesting happenings in my life, a lot of nonsense maybe.. I intend to post it all here .. So STAY TUNED !!!