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Imran Sheikh, 19 has developed, what is considered the fastest IE-based browser to date, Xtravo Explorer. Though still in its beta version, this browser has caught the attention of not only the local media but also has gained mass popularity worldwide. The explorer is powered by IE, and its requirements include 10 megabytes (MB) of hard disk drive (HDD), 128 of random access memory (RAM), Net Framework 2 (Compulsory) and Windows Operating System.

Salient features of Xtravo are tab browsing, short cuts, fast browsing, Integrated RSS feeds and Integrated DOM introspection. its advanced pop up blocker, provides its users with safe and secure browsing. However, The individuality of this explorer is not only restricted to loading heavy websites within 10 seconds, but the special features for web designers: Document Reader, which allows one to review the websites coding and Image Grabber, which permits saving multiple pictures at the same time. Also, the improved ftp uploader through which webpages can be uploaded by simply typing: ftp.yourdomain.com.

User reviews on various websites have termed Xtravo as user friendly. However, Sheikh Imran is yet to attain larger mainstream recognition on this remarkable breakthrough of his in the information technology sector of Pakistan. With such a vast list of evangelists while still in its beta version, the explorer is sure to head for great success.

Sometimes doing something you believe in too much, or have vested too much of your time in, becomes personal. As it becomes personal, you build for it a lot of idealistic expectations. As that idealism bubble is built, you start seeking out external events and people to behave in a way you might behave in their position. Eventually people or external events dont behave as expected and bubbles burst. The pain isnt just a professional misjudge of character but its personal. It hurts deeply, makes you lose faith and belief in the potential of the change you had hoped to be.

If you’re ever been in a situation like this, just reboot. Stop the task, get away from it all, stop thinking…. use your holidays to your fullest.

Happy holidays! See you next year?

Aamir Attaa from ProPakistani asked Badar Khushnood here whether or not I was being invited to an upcoming Isb Blogger’s meetup.

Here’s his official response:

Gnw is more than welcome… If you know them directly, plz request them to share their success story with me for consideration.

Umm…. yea, so either Badar doesnt know that my email address is written everywhere on this blog, that he’s a friend of the greenwhite facebook profile, AND follows our twitter account (twitter.com/greenwhite), that we’ve exchanged emails in the past, and he has genuinely never heard the term "Startup Insiders" before…

…. OR he’s deflecting the question because he doesnt want us there.

…. OR he’s using distancing language by just saying "if you know them…" even though Aamir asked about me specifically…

…. OR he’s just talking generally about anyone who wishes to join.

Either way, without reading too much into the comment, I’ll make it easy for him - I wasnt planning on attending anyway… I dont want to get into why but some ugly emails were sent to some of my friends who voiced their opinions about the event (that Badar’s not aware of) which would make me refuse to attend even if asked.

But I’m more interested in the second part of this response - "Please request them to share their success story for consideration".

As always with Green & White - I’ll let the community decide for itself.

Do you think Green & White is any type of a success story? If so, what would that story be anyway?

Please share with the community what you think GnW’s success story is. 

(P.S. I’m not checking emails or following online activities or planning on blogging for a week or more - trying to live offline to get some rest and reboot over the holidays)

Joel on Software always has good insight to share but sometimes his writing style transcends beyond the post and the text and becomes a masterpiece. His article "The Development Abstraction Layer" is just that.

Take this hilarious paragraph for instance:

Programmers need a Subversion repository. Getting a Subversion repository means you need a network, and a server, which has to be bought, installed, backed up, and provisioned with uninterruptible power, and that server generates a lot of heat, which means it need to be in a room with an extra air conditioner, and that air conditioner needs access to the outside of the building, which means installing an 80 pound fan unit on the wall outside the building, which makes the building owners nervous, so they need to bring their engineer around, to negotiate where the air conditioner unit will go (decision: on the outside wall, up here on the 18th floor, at the most inconvenient place possible), and the building gets their lawyers involved, because we’re going to have to sign away our firstborn to be allowed to do this, and then the air conditioning installer guys show up with rigging gear that wouldn’t be out of place in a Barbie play-set, which makes our construction foreman nervous, and he doesn’t allow them to climb out of the 18th floor window in a Mattel harness made out of 1/2" pink plastic, I swear to God it could be Disco Barbie’s belt, and somebody has to call the building agent again and see why the hell they suddenly realized, 12 weeks into a construction project, that another contract amendment is going to be needed for this goddamned air conditioner that they knew about before Christmas and they only just figured it out, and if your programmers even spend one minute thinking about this that’s one minute too many.

Also, some great insight like this one:

Here’s something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?

Go check it out.

Zigron’s PingMyCompany.com was featured on Mashable yesterday as one of the "24 Most Underrated Websites of 2008". According to the list:

PingMyCompany - Rate your employer with PingMyCompany or any company you have worked for. This is a great way to lure new co-workers or tell them to avoid your place of employment like the plague.

Cool.

Update: ReallyVirtual’s done even more digging and discussed the matter with the parties involved and updated his original post. He’s asked us to update this post accordingly as well.

Update 2 - the reps from the event insist on semantics saying that technically Wateen was just providing internet and giving away mugs - they weren’t a "sponsor" … semantics I’m afraid, but I’ve got better things to do than try to hold people by a standard of ethics… so I’m just modifying the post to keep everyone off my back.

You know, we really are trying our best to cover positive, hopeful inspiring stories about this industry, but then there’s so many cases of people breaking the law and doing something unethical that it becomes important to point it out.

So here’s a couple of events that may or may not be coincidence:

• The Lahore Bloggers Meetup was held on November 23rd, 2008, and sponsored "goodie-bagified" by Wateen. The event organizers collected the email addresses and blog URLs of all the attendees.
• Since then, a number of bloggers have reported that they’ve been receiving spam comments with Wateen promotions. See exhibit A and B in the images.

Is there any relation between these seemingly isolated incidents? I sincerely hope not.

I dont want to imply any conclusions here - you’re all free to make up your own minds about this. But if it is true this is a serious privacy breach.

I did some digging into Green & White and apparently there have been cases of Spam comments here too, which I’m adding below. (Note: they were taking too much front-page space so I’ve taken it below the break)

Read the rest …

In what’s being called a "Huge Breakthrough", Atif Shamim, a PHD Student of Canada’s Carleton University has created a way to increase the battery life of devices like the iPhone and Blackberry by up to 12 times.

He has managed to disconnect all wires that connect the electrical subsystems of the devices to the antenna, and has invented a way for those signals to transfer wirelessly. Doing this has reduced the total power consumed by over 1200%. This work was lauded by European Wireless experts as an "excellent integration of system design, material sciences and electromagnetic antenna design". He has also filed for a patent for this in the US and Canada.

A research paper describing the module that he cowrote with Muhammad Arsalan and adviser Langis Roy of Carleton’s department of electronics, was named the best paper at the European Wireless Technology Conference. Prior to that, the duo won the 2007 Strategic Microcontroller Council Industrial Collaboration Award (the picture above is from that award… video after the jump).

This breakthrough has been covered in Engadget and dozens of industrial publications, but more importantly (in my view) the significance of this invention can be seen from the types of comments it is inspiring from different people, some of which are below:

[An Ottawa inventor has pulled off something the titans of innovation behind the iPhone couldn’t…]

[I am an undergraduate electrical and electronic student and it is pretty much my dream to make some sort of breakthrough like this. What a legend. I hope it is effective and works its way into our devices]

Excellent work guys!

Here’s the video of their prior work.

Read the rest …

This is a guest post by Sohaib Muneer that originally appeared here.

Yes! … while you sleep, there are those who lurk in the dark. Stay in the shadows and make you applications you can only imagine at best. This is a new breed of programmers here in Pakistan. Finally the plague has formed it’s roots here. Yes people, STEALTH has come into the Programmer here now. Let me explain how I got to realize this.

So here I was wondering why the hell I don’t have a portfolio up even after 2 years ? and suddenly it struck me three times, almost like three speedy pats hitting my back simultaneously, the words "and you’ll be like a *stealth* programmer for us". Yes, I recall clearly about 3 clients of mine saying this to me. So what is a "stealth programmer" anyways ? Simple observation reveals that people who wear masks of different companies (some big names like Apple Inc.) are constantly looking for resources. Reliable and efficient resources. People who not only work just so that they earn their kitchen money, but also because they are passionate about what they do. These people are hired by these companies with a promise (technically known as NDAs : non-disclosure-agreements) that they must not reveal their identity and they must not do anything with the code outside their boundaries, may them be virtual or physical, and code them their ideas.

All this commotion about design patterns followed by great frameworks to address them, in most cases, were designed and developed by the "stealth" breed. Authors of languages like Python (Guido Van Rossum) and Ruby (Yukihiro Matsimuto) were stealth programmers. Heck, Linus Torvald had a "stealth" status when developing the Linux kernel. It was this species that lay the foundations of the "open source" community.

Friends, the Stealth virus has officially hit Pakistan. Me, my friends, and a number of "senior" people I know are living examples. And this virus continues to claim people here, as the awareness grows. And I don’t think that I’m referring to "free lancers" here. It’s a big term, a super class that encompasses "stealth" programmers too.

And it’s about time that this "stealth" community should be consolidated in one place. Because most of these people are best of the best in their fields and passionate therefore well motivated. Several companies in the U.S. made use of this breed in the 80s including Apple Inc. and these companies really owe their success to these people indeed. Entrepenuers here can take a hint

Disclaimer: This is not a startup company - These are some bright young students, they only needs encouragement and motivation. Maybe their current solution is not that good but still we all start with low quality solutions and improve it over the period of time. Lets look at this from that point of view.

Optical Character Recognition is a unique approach developed for recognizing isolated character that requires less complex calculations but still giving adequate results. In case of document image recognition, an additional step of detecting lines of text and possible set of character among those lines is a requisite. There are numerous methods available for character recognition. From numerical and statistical approach to AI based approach in an increasing order of their recognition accuracy, respectively. None of the approaches stated has recognition accuracy of 100%.Even the humans are not credited with absolute recognition accuracy. The main objective of the recognition software is to help its user in more physically tiring and cumbersome work of actually typing the whole document especially for a user. The error correction still resides with its user only. Hence, a recognition accuracy of even about 90% gives very satisfactory results. Apart from all this, the image quality also plays a very important role in the recognition accuracy.

So, a research project named Urdu OCR - A Digital Dream from Usman Institute of Technology fulfilling the needs. The team members of this project are Abdul Wahab, Shuwair Sardar, and Muhammad Abdul Sammad Khan. First prize winner of Combat 2008 (Software Competition - PAF Kiet) and Software Exhibition (Software Competition - SZABIST). Great work guys!

Urdu OCR is developed for first time. It has not been developed yet. The need of this product is in the printing media like Urdu news paper and magazines. It is useful in converting the books of Urdu in digital format, the large amount of useful and heritage data in Urdu language which are in vanishing form can be saved in digital format. It can produce electronic books and digital Urdu library online.

Some activities make me smile, and one of them is how quickly people get together to crucify someone based on a simplistic binary assumption. Recently a Facebook group "Is creativity dying in Pakistan" has been spreading an emotional call-to-action to shun the advertising industry on their latest ‘blunder’. I’ve been spammed over and over again both by invitations to join the cause and also by Facebook ads, which goes out of its way to tell me whenever someone else joins the group.

The basic issue described was based on the pictures below, and went something like "ZOMG They Copiezzes from a Book! Haww!!" to deduce that creativity in ads is effectively dead.

I didnt take much note of this because I thought someone out there would probably say the obvious, but now that (today) people have started emailing me to cover this and join the pitchfork parade I thought its time to put in my thoughts.

Ok, so here’s the obvious:

Read the rest …