Tag: Web

The www

Election Commission of Pakistan – Live Voter Search

Sohaib Athar

The Election Commision of Pakistan has released their cutting-edge website that allows anyone who can read and type Urdu to search for any 'Live' (and I presume, dead as well) voters in Pakistan. It is no mean feat to develop an Urdu website in Canada (handling a character-set twice the size of the English alphabet is surely twice as hard), especially a completely secure one that lets you search 80 Million (*gasp*) records!

Even though I still don't understand the need for the website (though it can be fun to search for the people you know to get their exact age and/or who they are married to), and even though its on-screen keyboard thinks 'undefined' is an Urdu character, and even though it does not know me, though I have tried both versions of 'hay' in my name along with my old and new NID numbers (which probably means I can't vote – (Yay!)), but I feel I should still congratulate the CEO of Mehndi.com for an excellent 'gift' back to the nation (in all its waving flag animated gif glory that messes up in Firefox), and for showing us backwards Pakistanis that "nothing is impossible if you go for it." (which translates loosely into "you can create projects out of thin air if you know the right people").

Now, can somebody lend me around 50 shell accounts or zombie machines so that I can scrape that database in a couple of days please? I promise to return them.

When you are ‘Needing’ a ‘Helping’ Hand from PTCL

ReallyVirtual

… you should be waiting and cursing and wishing the hand gets the time off from his busy schedule to help you. I have been trying to get through to the PTCL help line for two hours now, with the intention of getting their “broadband” connection… maybe I should get Wateen instead. I don’t understand who writes the content for our official websites! Here’s the funny screenshot:

ptcl-broadband-nohelp

UPDATE:
So, as soon as LESCO allowed me, I went to the Wateen website for some comparison shopping, but their Home Users page (error page) politely told me ‘It seems there is a missing link, we apologies for that.’
I couldn’t help noticing the wii-con-act WECONNECT logo on the page. Thank God ironies are more funny than frustrating, or I would be dead by now.
wateen-connect

Lahore vs. Bangalore vs. San Francisco on Twitter

Sohaib Athar5 Comments

Twitter added a search feature recently. In the spirit of micro-blogging, here are a few quick and interesting twitter search results:

Lahore: 15 results, Karachi: 35 results, San Francisco: 2038 results, Bangalore: 194 results

Translated into Twitterers (or Tweeters or whatever) per 1000 citizens (using Wikipedia), its:

Lahore AND Karachi (both have approximately the same ratio):  1 out of 0.57 MILLION tweeters, San Francisco: 1 out of 396 tweeters, Bangalore: 1 out of 27216 tweeters.

Comments? 

Pakistan’s Haier Edukation Instillations, Kwality Ashorance and PTCL Broadband

Sohaib Athar3 Comments

I read about HEC's discounted rates for the PTCL broadband for people affiliated with their institutes, and was going to ask my younger brother (who teaches at NUCES) to get me a connection, but it turned out that their ONLINE subscription form link is dead. Sad irony. Stripping down the port :88 from the URL takes you to a page with no information besides a login form, but since I'm not a subscriber, so its a Catch-22 situation.

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