THINGS I'LL NEVER SAY

My Take on the Capital

2010-06-13T17:57:00.001+05:00

It has been just a little over a month that I shifted to Islamabad and now finally that I am settled in (well not actually) I am getting time to write a post about the experience. As everyone would agree with me that it is very hard to leave behind family and friends it was even harder for me. I had to leave behind my beloved family and my only best friend. This was a big change for me and I was not at all expecting what was coming next for me.

Little over a month ago I was happy that I had got a new job on great terms and I will get to live in Islamabad, a peaceful city. Probably this was another step towards what I wanted in life but only time will tell. My experience here so far has been below average. What I have faced after coming here may be just a figment of anyone’s imagination.

The First Week

I had hotel stay from the company for the first week so life was somewhat better. But it really hit me towards the end of that week as by then I still had not been able to arrange any accommodation for myself. My be my standards were too high! Daily routine was get up, get dressed, go for breakfast, wait for friend to pick me up, go to office get to know people, do some work, some discussions, in the evening go on hunt for a place to live. It was all a mess! being unable to find any place, being unable to talk to my best friend. The stress of all that! My smile went away gradually.. I became more and more serious, more and more stressed.

The Second Week

So at the end of the first week one of my former colleague who had also shifted to Islamabad a couple of months back agreed to take me in for a week or two until I can arrange somewhere to live. This got me to relax for a little but. But it was not meant to be for long. I still kept hunting for a place to live, even involved the former colleague into the hunt but this one was a hard kill.

By this time I was getting the feel of Islamabad. The city is not that big in comparison to Karachi though the people are friendly. There is no night life the likes of Karachi has. Shops start closing around 9 pm. Roads are almost empty by 10 pm. No one goes to shopping centers all that much, well there aren’t many to tell the truth. Though the sectors are very organized so one is not likely to loose their way while going from one place to another.

Probably the worst week of my life. Felt real bad. Had a fight with my best friend and lost my best friend. No comments on this. Other than that terribly missed my family. Had the accommodation in the works and finally luckily found a guy who was willing to share. Made plans with the guy and decided where ever we decide to move we will share for the time being. So finally got an apartment and decided to move in on the weekend.

The Third Week

Moved in to the new apartment on one fine Sunday. Well didn’t have much to move one suitcase, one bag, a hand carry and a mattress which I had bought on moving to the colleagues apartment. Next came getting to know the roomy which I must say was a discovery of its own. Anyways we are still adjusting. So one tension gone another one remains. This is where I must say I hadn’t smiled or laughed for days or was it weeks? don’t remember. Being away from the family and loosing the best friend was so much for me. Other than that, office was going fine. I had been assigned a new project and was working on that, redesigning an existing system, getting the high level architecture approved, discussing various options, and at night at the apartment wondering what the heck should I eat.

Well got the roomy to get cooking stuff and finally got him to cook regularly.. I consider it an achievement. We are cook for sure now on and off but I got it done and it is good so far.

The Fourth Week

It was real busy! Don’t ask me about the personal half but the office was damn busy. Re-designing, trying to meet deadlines, I had time for no one, not even myself. It just went in a flash.

The Fifth & Sixth Weeks

Have started executing the project and I barely get time to do my normal activities during the weekdays i.e. watching TV Shows, chatting, reading, sms, nothing at all, and friends are not happy.

Well quite a few details have been skipped above. Things I cannot discuss, since I am still not open to the idea of writing everything on the blog. Just like to keep it all in. :)

So that was my experience of Islamabad, give or take.

Installing Oracle 8i Client on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4

2009-12-29T19:30:00.001+05:00

Oracle 8i was discontinued by Oracle in 2004 and not so long ago a condition so arrived that I had to somehow find and install Oracle 8i client for Linux on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4. No one I knew had a copy of the software and on top of that i was hearing rumors that even if i find it somehow it is impossible to achieve what i want, that many a people have tried and failed!! Big motivational advantage that was! (Sarcasm). So I looked high and low for it, on the internet, in sharing websites.. torrents.. nowhere was there even a piece of the software.. what to do! no other way but to fail the project and return home!

But the luck was on my side! Friend of a guy I was working with happened to work in an oracle partner company who claimed he had what I wanted. I waited eagerly for the next day to come when the CD was supposed to arrive. It was a long wait, but finally it was delivered. Holding my breath it was finally inserted into the CD ROM, started the setup only to find that it will not start! Even the command line method to run the setup was not working. What was I expecting? that it would just start plug and play! silly..

I knew of a few tricks aka jugarrs as we call them in Urdu and finally got the Oracle Universal Installer running.. Universal eh!.. well it was running and i was once again hoping against hope that it would complete successfully.. but no! it gave a long list of linker errors and exit. After some internet research I found that in the “pre 2004 era” it was made for Linux versions 6 and earlier versions of Linux 7 and even then it was not easy to install oracle on Linux. Believe me installing Oracle 10g on Linux is a piece of cake! So I came to the conclusion that I will have to modify Linux libraries to older Linux 7 versions to even have a chance of installing.. and there was no guarantee that my Linux server will boot again ever if I have done that! Live or die I thought I am going to make this a success. So long story short I came up with the following method to install Oracle 8i Client on Enterprise Linux successfully.

Ingredients:-

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4 Installed and ready to wreck
Oracle 8i for Linux setup.. not available..
compat-glibc-6.2.2.1.3.2.i386.rpm
compat-libs-6.2-3.i386.rpm
compat-egcs-6.2-1.1.2.14.i386.rpm
jre118_v1-glibc-2.1.2.tar.gz – This one was hard to find and I still can’t find it again!
i386-glibc-2.1-linux-20001017.tar.gz

For items 3 to 7 I have written full names as these are still available and one can know what to look for.

Recipe:-

Create the following groups and users for Oracle.

$ groupadd dba
$ groupadd oinstall
$ groupadd oracle
$ useradd -g dba -G oinstall,oracle -m oracle
$ passwd oracle

Make the following entries in the .bash_profile of oracle user

umask 022
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
export GCC_EXEC_PREFIX=/usr/i386-glibc21-linux/lib/gcc-lib/
export ORACLE_BASE=/home/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/8.1.5
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.US7ASCII
export ORA_NLS32=$ORACLE_BASE/ocommon/nls/admin/data
export TK2DEV=ansi
export ORACLE_SID=ICBS
export ORACLE_TERM=vt100
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib/:/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jre
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/libumask:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export CLASSPATH=$JAVA_HOME/lib/classes.zip
export DISPLAY=:0

Now login through root user and first install compat packages

$ rpm -iv compat-glibc.xx.rpm
$ rpm -iv compat-libs-xx.rpm
$ rpm -iv compat-egcs-xx.rpm

Now install the java runtime environment, a pretty old one this

$ tar xzvf jre118_v1-glibc-2.1.2.tar.gz
$ mv jre /usr/local/jre

Now install glibc and place it in /usr directory

$ tar xzvf i386-glibc-2.1-linux-20001017.tar.bz2
$ mv usr/ i386-glibc-2.1-linux/usr

Now remove the existing gcc, cc and ld binaries of RHEL to a directory

$ cd /usr/bin
$ mkdir saved
$ mv gcc cc ld saved/

Now link glibc-2.1 to /usr/bin, this will be used during the install

$ ln -s /usr/ i386-glibc-2.1-linux/bin/ i386-glibc-2.1-linux-gcc gcc
$ ln -s gcc cc
$ ln -s /usr/ i386-glibc-2.1-linux/bin/ i386-glibc-2.1-linux-ld ld

Backup other library files

$ cd /usr/lib
$ mkdir saved/
$ mv libc.so libdl.so libm.so libpthread.so saved/
$ mv libc.a libdl.a libm.a libpthread.a saved/

Give rights to connect to X Server to all users from all hosts. This is temporary and resets once X server is restarted.

$ xhost +

$ su - oracle
$ cd OraclePackage/Disk1
$ ./runInstaller

Oracle Installer starts. Follow the on screen instructions install oracle client. Following are some guidelines.

When asked enter Unix-group name as oinstall.
Select Oracle client version to install.
Select programmer version.
When it asks to run root.sh from root user… first edit and correct the errors in root.sh from root login.
Search RMF=/bin/rm -f and change it to RMF=’/bin/rm -f’
Search for and change

RUID=`/usr/bin/id|$AWK -F$ '{print $2}'|$AWK -F$ '{print $1}`
RUID=`/usr/bin/id|$AWK -F$ '{print $2}'|$AWK -F$ '{print $1}’`

Run ./root.sh and press enter at next prompt

Continue with the oracle setup
Perform Net8 configuration on typical settings. Select connection for Oracle 8.0 server

After completion of Oracle 8i Client setup perform the following tasks from oracle user. First make the following changes in .bash_profile

#umask 022
#export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
#export GCC_EXEC_PREFIX=/usr/i386-glibc21-linux/lib/gcc-lib/
export ORACLE_BASE=/home/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/8.1.5
#export NLS_LANG='english_united kingdom.we8iso8859p1'
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.US7ASCII
#export ORA_NLS33=$ORACLE_BASE/ocommon/nls/admin/dataexport
export ORA_NLS32=$ORACLE_BASE/ocommon/nls/admin/data
export TK2DEV=ansi
export ORACLE_SID=ICBS
#export ORACLE_TERM=vt100
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib/:/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:
#export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jre
#export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/libumask:$JAVA_HOME/bin
#export CLASSPATH=$JAVA_HOME/lib/classes.zip
#export DISPLAY=:0

There is supposed to be an entry done in this file below which I am forgetting.. I will update it later..

$ORACLE_HOME/precomp/admin/pcscfg.cfg

Now the most important part! restoring original libraries that are necessary. Without this step Linux may get corrupted on reboot and may not even boot.

$ su -
$ cd /usr/bin
$ rm -f gcc cc ld
$ cd saved
$ mv * ..
$ cd ..
$ rm -rf saved
$ cd /usr/lib/saved
$ mv * ..
$ cd ..
$ rm -rf saved

Now last but not the least use the sqlplus command line to verify the connectivity to the Oracle 8.0 server which in my case was already installed at some remote site which could not be upgraded as there were more than 80 instances of that server.

This took me more than a couple of days to research and test and I hope someone can benefit from it if need arises.

P.S. What a relief to get it out finally…

My Blog Is Fabulous

2009-11-07T19:03:00.005+05:00

Hmmm… so I got to know sometime back that my blog is considered fabulous!! Well ahem.. ahem.. with so many posts that I have and the quality!! well.. Intricate is the one… Thank you Thank you so much. It is good to know that someone likes my writing.

The award itself

So Rules of the Award as I have been asked to place. It is another thing if I will follow them... a little rebel that I am :

List five current obsessions.
Pass the award on to five more fabulous blogs.
On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them.
When you post your five winners, make sure you link them as well.
Don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by leaving a comment on their blog.

So Five Obsessions.. let’s see what I can come up with…

First and Foremost - TV Shows

I never watched TV shows!! well not like I do now.. I used to watch Automan, The Flash and a few others but then… there was no NTM... and then there were no TV shows for me!!! until over a couple of years ago, when I was introduced to Heroes. And then it began! I watched the entire season 1 over the weekend all 23 episodes. And then I acquired the 2nd Season and the I started downloading every episode as they were released. My internet connection was not good and for this very reason I got it upgraded.

Since then at the peak of every year when all my favorite TV Shows are on, that would be around start of the year, I am watching up to 14 TV Shows per week!! quite an obsession isn’t it

The 2nd one – Farmville

One day I received an invitation that one of my facebook friends wants to become my farmville neighbor. Well I asked a few people what it was and got to know it was some online farming game. I didn’t give it much thought initially and I even refused the invitation. But soon enough I started noticing that all my colleagues around me were playing farmville in their free time!!! and it seemed like a very good time killer. so lo and behold I joined farmville with a message being published on my wall something like.. “Salman has left the city life to live in farmville..” Then as I got to learn the ropes of playing the game I became very good at it (really it is all just click click click… believe me) and suddenly I was blazing up the stages in the farmville. Some of the people I know who were playing farmville actually commented that we saw Salman going past us from 1st level to the 21st over the weekend.

The 3rd one is Novels

I have been reading novels since I was in class 7th and that is when I introduced my self to them. But it started even before that!! Class 6th started my secondary, the department was in a different building, and I didn’t know what I was missing until we had that first Library period. I picked a random story book to read and I was disappointed when half an hour later the period got over and I hadn’t finished the book!! I asked the librarian if I could issue the book for home and I was strictly informed that only 7th class and above students could issue books. Well I waited and waited and I got into 7th class and I was very happy on the day I got my first ever library card The day I issued my first 4 novels to take home and read in full!!(we were allowed to issue a maximum of 4 books at a time for 1 week). Well I returned with the books 3 days later to the library. You must be surprised and wondering did I even read them!!! so was the librarian when he saw the issuing date on the card and asked me if I had!! and I confirmed that I did. Well of course he didn’t believe me and opened a book and randomly started asking me who the characters were and what was happening on a particular page and I did tell him exactly. Still not satisfied he picked another one and repeated and again I told him everything. Finally surprised but satisfied he allowed me to borrow another 4 books.

The library card used to have space for around 30 entries and by the time I did my matric I had used up 7 library cards… now that should be around 210 novels!!!

Now I download pdfs mostly unless I get my hands on a paper back some how. And I have a treasure trove of Novels on my PC.

The 4th is Movies

Well I download a lot of movies and these are mostly those that are recently released and have a very good IMDB rating. A lot of them are those movies that I missed previously and wanted to see but couldn’t see previously. And recently I have decided that I am not going to delete any of these until really necessary, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

The 5th and the last Table Tennis

This is the most recent one, started developing when the Table Tennis stuff arrived in the basement of our company and everyone started testing their skills. Well learning it became an obsession, at first I didn’t even know how to hold the racket let alone deliver a smash. But quickly observing and practicing I learned the ropes of the trait. And a few months later I am giving people with good skills a tough time.

Ok so these are my obsessions, everyone is free to comment. Now for blogs that are fabulous for me, they have already been tagged, and I don’t follow that many, but I will mention them here;

Intricate Zone

Random Ramblings

I have been very busy and besides that also didn’t feel like writing anything. But here I am again and I hope people like this.

Thanks Intricate for gracing my blog with the award, it really raises my spirit and compels me to write more posts.

A Visit to Lebanon Part I

2009-08-17T09:30:00.004+06:00

Recently I had a chance to visit Lebanon, the country that has been long at war with its neighbors. The visit was official and I had to perform various upgrades for the client. Our company had been out of touch with the client for so long that no on knew much about the environment and their current requirements. So it was a challenge in it self to dive blind into it and thrive.

People had already started scaring me about the volatile situation in the region, that war could break at anytime, that bombing was most common. And as if it was not enough some wanted to share their thoughts about thugs on the streets, and Lebanese people being sentimental about their political icons. Even at the Karachi airport the FIA guy asked me “Aap kion ja rahay hain Lebanon? wahan pe to jang ho rahi hai” (“Why are you going to Lebanon, there is a war going on there”). And as if he didn’t believe that I was going on official visit he asked me to show all the supporting documents. It felt like I was being suspected of going for Jihad!!

The Beirut International Airport was unremarkable. It was a small airport with one active runway. It was night when the plane landed but from the plane I could see lights everywhere, on the streets and on the mountains. On the 45 minute drive to the hotel it felt just like driving in Karachi. Everyone drives haphazardly, no one follows lanes, over speeding is common. The guy who was driving me to the hotel was a very talkative fellow. He liked to practice his English, which was very bad by the way, all the way he kept talking about bad politics in Lebanon and kept showing me political figures on billboards, which were there as the elections were near.

When we reached the hotel all the surroundings were very quite, may be because it was Sunday night and the people had gone to sleep early, so I couldn’t get the feel of the surroundings. The hotel seemed like an ordinary building from the outside. If it hadn’t been for the sign telling me the name I wouldn’t have believed that it was a hotel. From the inside it was a different story; The staff was friendly and they took no time in checking me in. The room was another experience, it was ginormous!!

Pictures are that of the hotel room, taken later when I was getting bored

After getting into the room the first thing I wondered about was what to do. My first thoughts were, “Alright I am here..”, “Now what am I supposed to do!”, “Hmm.. totally blank..”. So finally I decided to unpack and use the empty closet for good purpose, also to familiarize my self with the room!! Every time I looked around the room I found something new. Well of course I found the TV and switched it on only to find that all of the channels were Arabic!! and there were not many of them. Well by time I got done with unpacking and stuff it was very late and thinking about the next day I finally went to bed. But the problem was I couldn’t sleep!! It was a strange bed, in a strange room and in a strange country and I couldn’t sleep for what seemed like hours!! Finally I must have dozed off out of exhaustion because the next thing I heard was the most annoying alarm on my cell phone which I use to wake my self up. And the first thought was ‘where the hell am I’!!! and the second one was ‘here we go, good morning Lebanon!’.

to be continued… soon!

The Bourne Betrayal

2009-04-12T12:47:00.003+05:00

Recently I read the fifth novel in the Bourne Series. Although it was not written by the original writer Robert Ludlum it contained the same nail biting suspense and thrill. The other four I have read in the series are The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Legacy

This time around Bourne is out to save his best friend who has been captured by an arab mastermind right in the midst of a clandestine operation.

Well I'll will not be going into the details of the novel because it will be boring for some ppl. Infact as I am writing this post a friend is getting bored because of just this :) so I am keeping this very very short :)

One thing I want to say is that although the movies were very very good, they are not even near what the novels are... So read the novels :P

CHEETAH

2009-04-11T12:53:00.003+05:00

The term perhaps evolved in FAST but I can't be sure because it was already in use when I joined. Well when I joined I didn't know the first thing about software programming. I still remmber our first software engineering lab when we were asked to write a program that generates a Fibonacci Series.. and I was like what the heck is a Fibonacci Series!! while the "CHEETAHs" were busy writing code...

So CHEETAHs were supposed to be people who were really good at programmming, but as the years passed by the term evolved to include many variations. First it was only the programmers, then it went on to include people with great GPAs :)

There were all sorts of CHEETAHs in my batch alone. There were web programming CHEETAHs, and one could find CHEETAHs for OOP, Operating Systems, Databses, and even Compilers and Automata!!

I never considered myself to be one of them, I was just an average guy with average skills, nothing extraordinary. But there were some who considered me one, which led me to believe that CHEETAH is a relative term. There are so many dimensions to it bacause a person can be a CHEETAH in one thing and not in another, can be to some and not to others.

But it comes down to this that every FASTian can be considered as a CHEETAH. May be it is because of the unique environment that is provided to all students that makes them that way and gives them an edge over people from other universities.

The Manly Ego

2009-03-30T02:36:00.008+05:00

I never thought I would start my blog like this. For quite some time now my friends have been telling me that i should write, because I think they can see the hidden writing skills in me. But the problem was that I had no clear idea what to write about.

I am not the type of person who indulges in commonly grotesque things in every day life; at least I thought I was such a person. But recent events have lead me to believe that, how much I try to be different, how much I try to shy away from such things, deep down there is always that ego that has the tendency to destroy relationships.

It is very shocking and disturbing to realize that even a very small common sentences that pop up in every day conversation, which are often meant as a joke rather than seriously or as a intended insult, can infuriate you beyond all reasoning to such an extent that you don't think and retaliate without the smallest consideration that what it might ultimately result in.

Here I am writing this at 2:30 am in the morning because I am thinking and and I can't sleep as the sweet sleep is far far away fro me. The dilemma is how to correct the unfortunate mistake that is causing great... Being an advocate of change I have realized that I have to mend my ways. Be more positive and to refrain from jumping to conclusions on impulse without considering the possible impact.

Now that I am getting this out of my system. I can only hope that those who were hurt will be considerate enough, unlike me, to be able to let go of what happened.

This will be the only post of sorts and I believe there is some real good stuff to come next.