Author: Sohaib Athar

Out of the frying pan

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

youtube logolI live near the Lahore Airport, and in the last 5-6 years, I NEVER lost any time due to deliberate traffic blocks on the Sarfaraz Raffiqui Road (the entrance to my neighborhood). Yes, there used to be blocks and “naakas” for checking, and there were blocks due to diverted traffic, but there were no “OMG-MR-XYZ-IS-COMING-BLOCK-ALL-ROADS-LOOK-SHARP-STOP-THE-TRAFFIC-SIGNALS” kind of blocks during “the dictatorship”, (at least in Lahore) – until last week that is… my first night out in a democratic Pakistan.

I was coming back home with my family from Defence at night, and was almost at the end of a long and tiresome drive, when I saw a policeman starting to put up a barricade in the middle of the road a few meters ahead of me. The car in front of me tried to avoid and pass him as the barricade was still not set up, but the policeman got in front of the car, stopped it and told the driver (who was with his wife and kids as well) very rudely to reverse and get back behind the barricade, and this is how I ended up being in the 2nd car in what grew up to be about a 50 car long roadblock on each side. We waited for at least 20 minutes (mentally cursing, there were kids in the car), and eventually, a motorcade with a couple of police bikes followed by 4 or 5 black-windowed cars, a fire-engine (?!) and a trailing set of bikes passed the old airport road. Just as we were getting ready to move, the policemen stopped everyone, apparently there was going to be a repeat performance. Another 5 minutes of waiting, another (smaller) motorcade, and we were finally ready to leave. Luckily, as I was in the front of the block and was able to drive away quickly, but I could see that the misaligned traffic got into another mini-jam behind me as everyone tried to overtake everyone else.

I don’t know who (or what) was in that car, but it cost more than 200 people 25 minutes of their lives each to save 5 minutes of that someone ‘important’. Can I have the dictatorship back please? This is not the kind of democracy I voted for. Hold on… I didn’t vote… Nevermind.

My son demands 5-10 minutes of youtube.com everyday when he wakes up – I’m expecting to have a hard time today as youtube is blocked in Pakistan… so while I am bitterly whining, congratulations to the new government on blocking youtube.com in Pakistan. I’m sure all the 2000 or so Pakistani youtube.com watchers are devout muslims who pray five times a day and would have started a riot after watching whatever blasphemous videos that are being blocked this time. And of course, the rest of us are too lazy or too dumb to find open proxies to watch more important stuff, like election rigging videos, or to use the mobile youtube URL when it works. I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next.

Freelancers and Consultants Must Read This

Sohaib Athar7 Comments

FreelanceSwitch.com is a blog full of insights and resources for the freelancers and consultants of the world (For those wondering about what's the difference between the two, this link provides a good explanation). They conducted a survey last year, and published the results of the survey today. You can download the survey results here. 

A few statistics in the 50+ page report that I found very interesting are:

  •  32.6% of freelancers earn less than they can from full-time employment.
  • 80% freelancers would prefer more money.
  • Only 22% of the freelancers work less and earn more compared to their prior job-oriented careers… and yet
  • 88.9% of the freelancer are happier now that they are freelancing.

Some more interesting statistics, particularly for the Pakistani Freelancers

  • Referrals account for 89% of new work (so keep your clients happy)
  • 15% work comes through blogs (start a blog duh)
  • The hourly average rate for softwre developers is around 73$ (stop charging 13$ per hour Pakis, its the lowest rate in the world (besides Bulgaria and Indonesia) in the survey.
  • UK freelance programmers charge the highest rate (158$)
  • Of the industries categorized in the survey, software designers and programmers earn the most.

Let me know if you find anything else of interest in the survey pdf.

Oh, and do join the Pakistani Freelancers group on Facebook if you are one. 

Memory Hungry PHP Applications on Shared Hosting

Sohaib Athar6 Comments

If you run your WordPress on a shared hosting server like hostmonster.com / bluehost.com (which have excellent service by the way), and have several memory-hungry php applications or WordPress plugins installed, you must have run into an "Allowed memory size exhausted" fatal error a few times. For me it happened yesterday while uploading a mere 12MB of images (1MB per image) and trying to ask the NextGen Gallery plugin to discover them and generate thumbnails. WordPress ran out of memory after 32MB and died with the above exception.  Though one can't ask a lot from a 6$ per month hosting provider, and since 32MB ought to be enough for everyone (hehe), I decided to spend some valuable time in trying to find a workaround to the limitation, before deciding to dump the NextGen plugin. Here's what I found out: Read more “Memory Hungry PHP Applications on Shared Hosting”

On throughput, quality and quantity of blog posts

Sohaib Athar

It has been 10 months since I started this blog. At 50 posts, its about a post a week (a post per weekend is what I aim for in fact) – not a lot by any standards but who cares.

I have estimated that I have spend around 20 minutes on writing an average sized post, out of which, half the time is spent on rereading and correcting spelling, grammatical and structural mistakes in an attempt to make it more coherent. In a brief moment of insight (2 minutes ago), I have decided to do away with those extra 10 minutes, which should double the quantity (though perhaps decreasing the quality, but I can live with that) of posts. This means no more using arrow keys and copy/cut/pastes after I am done writing – I will still use the arrow keys to insert new words where they belong, but no more rereading and editing. I feel liberated already.

On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan

Sohaib Athar6 Comments

I originally started this post to share this spanking brand spanking new report on Broadband penetration in Pakistan by our Ministry of Information Technology titled "Is Entire Pakistan Underserved?", and was just going to write something weakly funny about it like "Yes, you bet it is, you could have asked me instead of wasting money on publishing a 39 page report about it"… but here's what went wrong….

Read more “On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan”