Category Archives: Personal

Kindle Touch Review

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I have got my Kindle Touch a few weeks ago and I have been using it very regularly.

Reading Experience: When I bought it my main question was will I be able to read the PDF books? I knew it is one of the best device for English books reading but I was going to use it both for English and Urdu PDFs. So even before ordering, I was a bit nervous if it would handle it or not. But it is opening and rendering the PDF documents I have in both languages smoothly and the touch system is also a blessing as I have to do a lot of zoom in/out. So I would give 9/10 for this PDF support.

Also, I have used it both in sunlight and power lights at night / room and it is easy on eye and gives a good feeling.


Reading Ashfaq Ahmed's Zavia on Kindle

Touch System: This is Amazon’s first touch Kindle device and I would say it is not bad. I agree it doesn’t match the quality of touch from Apple but at this price and the purpose for which this device is used, I am pretty satisfied with it.

Size and Weight: I really liked this device’s size. One could hold it in one hand and read for hours without any difficulties as this is very light weight.


Kindle Charging

Battery Life: This was one of the high point for me to buy this. Daily I read for about 1-1.5hrs on average and while reading due to the PDF documents, I have been zooming in / out and the battery it consumes is very less.

Experimental: There are some experimental features in this like web browser and mp3 player. Although I am not using them regularly but they worked pretty fine.

Connectivity: Being registering this device in Pakistan and using it from here, I don’t have access to the amazon services directly but via WiFi, I am able to browse Amazon Kindle Store and other websites via its experimental web browser. It was pretty easy to setup my WiFi in Kindle.

Overall I am very satisfied with this and I would recommend this for any one who likes to read. There was only one negative point which I didn’t like was to not have the power adapter included in normal purchase. It is sold separately. I didn’t know this when I ordered it and it was not easy for me to order a separate item again as my friend was bringing this for me from US.

Email Moderation Engine Update

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This is just an update regarding my final year project ‘Email Moderation Engine’.

I have been working on this but till now had been mostly doing the documentation and design document as per the university requirement. I hope to start working on the actual project skeleton and code in 2 weeks of this semester. I plan to share my thoughts and code samples here for those who would like to get an idea.

I am also trying to help a few fellow VU students along the way. I hope we all could make it on time and it is accepted.

Those who are interested in discussing / getting any help in this regard, should contact me via my email address (from Contact) or this comments on relevant posts. Please don’t post your questions on other posts on this blog which are irrelevant.

Murree Tour

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Noor ul Ain - Kashmir Point

Noor ul Ain - Kashmir Point

In February 2011, I started planning a vacation plan in May 2011. I was planning this trip for Kaghan-Naran or Murree with my family and cousin. Later after some discussion with my cousin we finalized upon Murree.

We left for Rawalpindi from village Teri, Distt. Karak on 9th May early morning and arrived in Murree by Zuhar time. I had done my booking at Usmania Restaurant(aka Civic Hotel) on main mall road. We had planned to stay for night in the same hotel and visit the surrounding areas in the day.

9th May – The same day after taking some rest, we left for Kashmir point at afternoon. It was a really fun place to be. We enjoyed the pleasant weather and surroundings. I believe one could spend days there with his family :)

10th May – Next day we hired a hi-roof and went to Nathiagali and Ayubia. While driving there we stopped at many places and did some trekking, photography and other stuff. Children especially enjoyed the bandar point and monkeys jumping in the Ayubia National Park.

On way to Neelum Point

On way to Neelum Point

11th May – We went to Bhurban and Neelum River. We especially enjoyed Neelum River. The river Neelum was on its full swing and it was an amazing view. After spending sometime there, we left Neelum Point at afternoon. We went to Patriata and had a ride on chairleft. My cousin and his family were first time riding in chairleft so they were abit afraid but overall enjoyed it.

12th May – We left Murree back for our village. On way back, we had an excellent weather and had some rain on our way at Jhand. It was simply an unforgettable experience.

Overall this short trip was an amazing and great experience. Last time, I visited Swat back in 2007 with my family and now this time again with family and cousin. Murree and surrounding area is an ideal vacation spot for families. It is good, secure and everything is available at reasonable costs there.

As far as my hotel experience at Usmania Restaurant is concerned, it was good except for one issue which was a bit irrating for me :( as I am an early morning person and I enjoy the sun rising in such places. For my breakfast, I had to wait till 8AM which was not good. It wasted quite some of time as doing breakfast and then leaving would take quite sometime. Due to my family and children it was also not possible to do the breakfast easily on our way. When I asked the staff, they couldn’t do anything about it. So if they could improve this, this hotel is highly recommended.

It was the first time for my cousin to go out on vacation and he really enjoyed it. In fact he asked me to arrange for such programs at least in two years :) I do it once a year already.

Email Moderation Engine

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As I discussed earlier that I am taking this as my final year project. So I have prepared and submitted SRS for this and now working on other documents for this as per VU guidelines.

While working on this, I am also helping a few other students via email / skype. I will try to share some of the details of this project here.

VU Final Year Project

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I am studying for MIT from Virtual University Pakistan. When this semester started, I also had to take a final year project, which would span on two semester. VU proposed 4 projects and also encouraged students to submit their custom proposal. I took the opportunity and discussed a possible custom project with my colleagues and friends. We came up with the idea of an Education CRM, which we could develop on top of existing open source software like Sugar CRM and Moodle. Some of the functional requirements, I proposed were:

  1. Extract customer data from LMS which can be used to effectively manage customers in CRM.
  2. Use CRM to document interaction with LMS users. Interaction includes activities, leads, opportunities, cases, bugs and reporting.
  3. Auto-update customer information from LMS in CRM.
  4. Synchronization of student contact information between the two systems.
  5. In CRM display the list of enrolled courses for every student along with grades in those courses.
  6. Customize CRM to make it ‘Education CRM’ (instead of a generic CRM). For example, instead of calling it “customers”, we may want to call them students.
  7. Auto creation of student account in LMS, when in CRM the lead is “converted” and the status is changed to “Student” from “Lead/opportunity”.

I was very excited about this and was very confident that I would be able to make this by writing a plugin for Sugar CRM and Moodle but unfortunately this project proposal was rejected. I asked our teachers for the reasons but they didn’t like to comment on rejection. I tried to follow all their rules for submitting project proposal but somehow they didn’t like this idea and rejected it. I still believe this is a very good idea but due to lack of time this year, I won’t be able to give it time. However, I will look forward for this and see whenever I get sometime I will start working on it. If anyone has any further ideas and time to take on this project, I would be glad to help in any capacity I could.

Now I am supposed to work on one of the project they proposed. The four projects they proposed are:

  1. Production Rejection Assessment System
  2. Macro Recording System
  3. Robotic Simulation To Detect Explosive Material
  4. Email Moderation Engine

I have now selected ‘Email Moderation Engine’ as my final year project. I am now looking for some good partner and will then start working on this. I will try to keep this space updated about this. I hope to learn quite a few things as I would be trying a few new things.

Prayers and Hope

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I was thinking to write something here but always couldn’t write. I am thinking of many things at the moment and I don’t know if I would be able to implement even one from them.

Let’s pray and hope that I could write a bit reqular here and continue on the projects I have started working on.

I have changed the theme so that it feels a bit fresh on my blog :)

Final Project For CS201

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Our final term for this semester is going to start in the last week of August. I am also working on the final project for my course CS201. The project I am working on is a reservation system for a bus company. It is required to have:

  • New Reservation
  • Update Reservation
  • Delete Reservation
  • Search Reservation

The deadline for this project is 9th August. So I will be busy in this and will try to post the source code, once I get the marking on this project.

I am writing this project in C/C++ and using notepad++ for writing C/C++ code.