Sharna in AKTEL Ad

It was very funny incident to me. There was a full-page advertisement of AKTEL on the occasion of World Women's day which had a photo of Sharna. She told me that she was not prepared at all for the photo like all others. She did not even know that she was going to be photographed for an ad. It was a direct order from her superior to pose for it, so she could not deny. However, she didn't do bad at all, though any kind of smile is missing from her face :D. She is the only representative from Technical division, all others are from Human Resource and Marketing.

Here is the ad below, I marked her with a blue circle:

Hacker turned Anti-Hacker

Here is an interesting story on Kevin Mitnick, an FBI most wanted computer terrorist, who turned into an anti-hacker after his five years term in jail. He found George Bush's social security number and driving license number in 15 seconds in a conference as demonstration of his skill. It costed FBI three years manhunt to find him. Now, he is the boss of his own IT-security consultancy firm.

Sharna in AKTEL ad

On the occasion of International Women's day, AKTEL published a full page advertisement in almost all major dailies of the country. The funny thing is Sharna's photo is in the ad :-D. Yesterday, she reluctantly posed for the photo and that seems evident from it. However, she is not looking bad!!! ;-)

A spat with a well-known person

Today I engaged in a tiff with Mustafa Jabbar, the proprietor of Bijoy keyboard layout. It was in bdresearchers yahoo group. Actually, I just gave an innocent reply to one his mails regarding Bengali keyboard layout. I just suggested that we should reach a consensus on which layout to use, whether Munir layout or Bijoy layout. After that, he suddenly turned violent towards me and started to attack me and my company. In total 9 mails have been exchanged so far. Because of the moderated nature of bdresearchers group, other members missed the live argument. In fact, they have not seen all the mails yet. This is a negative side of moderation, if the moderator is sleeping in U.S., members in Bangladesh has no way to see the new mails and replies. However, I think, so far I am successful to fend off his immature personal attacks. Let me see what happens next.

Bangla bhai has been caught

After only a few days of capturing Shaikh Abdur Rahman, Siddiqul Islam, alias Bangla Bhai, of the outlawed Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) was captured at his hideout in Mymensingh district. How did the law-enforcement forces catch him so quickly? Did they get vital information from Abdur Rahman?

In my opinion, this incident shows how quickly government can capture a criminal if they really want to. May be Abdur Rahman gave information, may be not; but that is not important I think. Because even if he has provided information, it would be of no use as the information will be useless. Bangla bhai must have known the capture of Abdur Rahman. After that he must have changed his location, so Abdur Rahman can only provide info about his location at the time of his capture at best. He can't have any knowledge about where Bangla Bhai went after his capture. So, I think that security forces found him with their own effort. Why am I telling all these? Because, I want to tell that government knew about these two's whereabouts always, they just didn't arrest them because of ... well I think everybody knows it. Now when they have decided to nail them, they took only a few days to get Bangla Bhai.

You can read a news about it here.

A nice article on Ashraful

I, like most of the Bangladeshis, am fond of Ashraful's batting. He is a genius, no doubt about it. But he is terribly inconsistent as the article here says. After one good innings, he becomes over-complacent, he throws his wicket in the following few innings. This has been his trend since he made an scintillating debut. All his fans just pray that he becomes more attentive, careful and consistent. He should not waste his talent like this. His mere average of 25.11 (as of today) just don't reflect his precocious talent and exceptional ability. He has the necessary skills to belt reputed bowlers around the park frequently but he has to be cautious in his shot selection. All his fans, including me, can only hope and pray that Ashraful will realize these too.

Severe penalty for a corrupt lawmaker

After reading the news, I became disappointed thinking about when such things will start to happen in our country. Can't our politicians be brought to justice like this?

Fire Fire!!!

This was the first of this kind of experience to me. Suddenly our office was filled with smoke smell. People became frantic. Someone was shouting to switch off the lights and fans. People ran out of office leaving the computers open. All on a sudden, the staircase was filled with people. Most of them were rushing out of the building. A very few brave ones were searching the source of the smoke. At last, the fire was discovered in the 12th floor. A careless irresponsible guy has left his half-lit cigarette in a pile of waste paper and the inevitable happened. The fire was extinguished with the most natural extinguisher "water" :-). People began to return to office slowly. This was a not-so-nice but necessary experience for me. A good rehearsal for a really dangerous one!

First day at Grameen Software

Sazzad and I joined Grameen Software today. After waiting for 3 hours, we were given two laptops to work with. This was a temporary solution. Tomorrow we are supposed to get two Intel 3.0 GHz hyper-thread PCs. Today, we mostly browsed websites for some RFCs. I was given the laptop of the C.T.O. which by the end of the day I messed. I don’t know what happened and how but suddenly I found that all the executable files are infected with virus and Trojans. Our lunches were provided free. We went to the very same place in 12th floor where our good old office was. There were same partitions and same cubicles. Actually, Grameen Software bought them from Eyeball Networks. We felt nice to be there, that place will remain in our memories for the rest of our lives. We have very nice memorable incidents there. However, after lunch Shakhawat came and we had a good chat. At 5:45 we came out of office, 15 minutes before end of office time. We went to a tea shop nearby and had tea with some snacks. After that we dispersed to three different directions. In a nutshell, the day was neither good nor bad. Hope we will enjoy working here.

New email address

Today, I got an official email address from my new company. I know it is not anything worth mentioning. My new address is like this ****@grameensoftware.com. I also had an official email address in my previous job. It too is not worth mentioning. The email address was like this ****@engr.eyeball.com. Now, I think, you have got a hint why I am writing this. There is a difference between the two email addresses. The one Eyeball gave me uses a sub-domain. All the members of Dhaka team used to get such email address whereas people in Vancouver got email addresses like this ****@eyeball.com. This fact is enough to summarize our position in Eyeball. They always treated us as their inferior subordinates, no matter how successful we were in our duties. They celebrated successes made by us in Vancouver by lavish parties but they never asked us even to have some snacks for the same purpose. We were always neglected slaves. They expected us to work day and night whenever it is needed, but back there they used to leave office at most after 6 pm. They used to enjoy three weekends once in a month and two weekends in other weeks. But here we were not sure whether we are going to get our only weekend on Friday until it is Friday morning. However, I should stop here lest this blog becomes a tirade. I am very happy to get rid of Eyeball now, I think I should not bring back the unpleasant memories and make myself unhappy any more.

A very funny news :D

I burst into laughter after reading the news. Click here to read it.

Aweful score in AWA

I got my AWA score of GRE yesterday. It is beyond my imagination. I got a mere score of 3.5. I thought that I would get at least 4.5. After finishing the AWA section, my impression was I have done fairly good. But it seems that ignoring advice of my friend Mehedi proved fatal. He asked me to practice this section very seriously but I thought I can get a good enough score in this section without practice. My TOEFL writing score led me to think in this way as I did not practice a bit for that too. However, my advice to other people is every section in GRE is hard, so no section should be looked down upon.

Chris's interview at VON

Chris Piche, C.E.O. of Eyeball Networks Inc., was interviewed by the VON Spring 2006 (A VoIP Trade Show) organizers. There he speaks of Any-Firewall Server as one of his two key products. I am very proud of being the only developer of that server. I designed and coded it from scratch. And considering the fact that I have to code the server in absence of any client program, I am particularly more satisfied with the server. Client program was being developed very late and when it communicated with my server, very few bugs were being found. Almost all the features were working fine. You can hear the podcast here.

Resigned from Eyeball

After one and a half years, I have resigned from Eyeball Networks. May be my release date will be the 15th instant. After sending my resignation email, I signed a job contract with Grameen Software. My joining date is the 1st March, 2006. They offered a very good compensation package with lots of facilities. Among them weekend on alternate Saturday fascinated me most. On those weeks, I can pass full two weekends with my wife.

I have lots and lots of memories in Eyeball. I know that if I begin to write them, I will become so emotional that I will not be able to finish the writing. So, I would rather want to recollect only the first few months of Eyeball now. After giving the final exam of level 4 term 2 in B.U.E.T., we began to come to office from the following day. The first few weeks were fun, we were dreaming of a surreal job. But things suddenly changed after that. Our C.T.O. came from Canada and we began to stay at office day and night right away. In our university life, we were used to write programs for Windows PCs mostly. But our first project was in an embedded system whose operating system was ucLinux. It was just like firing a machine gun without even knowing how to fire a single-shot rifle. Our experience in Linux was negligible. We first had to familiarize ourselves with Linux, then to cross compilation. Moreover, our software had requirements almost like a real-time software. At first, we thought it was unimaginable task. But our C.T.O. was very brave and prudent man. He kept on pushing. We all had our beds in office, days after days we did not go home. By this time Ramadan came, things became easier to work as there was less hassle for foods. After only one month, we released our first version, I should rather not call it alpha version. It was an achievement beyond imagination. Because only one month ago, we did not know what the hell a Makefile is but after one month we released a software which was capable of doing a video-chat. It was an enormous feat. Our confidence grew exponentially. Rest of the story is coming soon ...

Had no other option than refusing

It all started in one morning. I was working happily at my desk. In the previous evening, I got Indian Visa. It was the only positive thing in my passport after being gifted two visa refusals from Canadian High Commission. I was excited imagining a nice tour to India. But alas! I had not sufficient leave approved. I had only three days of leave but it was too scanty for a tour to India. I needed only three more. After my wedding in 2004, I had not taken a long leave to have a honeymoon. I always dreaded my leave application being refused by my office which is a leader in VOIP but very ruthlessly careless to its employees at Dhaka. However, I mustered all the courage I had, wrote a mail to my project manager to extend my leave. He was online at the moment I sent the mail. Suddenly, he logged out. I kept waiting for the reply. After long one hour, he came online. He knocked me in messenger. At the beginning he was pretending that everything is normal doing some enquiries about my assigned task but he could not continue too long. He burst into fury within a few minutes. He started to teach me what corporate behavior is. For, fifteen long minutes he kept on taking the class, humiliating me at his will.

I reached to the decision quickly. I deferred the decision for more than one year but at that moment I thought "Enough!" I could no longer carry on a job being completely unrecognized, humiliated and ignored. I already had done much sacrifice for this job. I did not go to the honeymoon, was not involved in the preparation of my wedding ceremony because I was staying at office day and night then, refused an excellent offer (better than my current offer by a good margin) from AKTEL in the peak pressure time just because I wanted be a part of Dhaka team to prove its worth, refused another offer from GP because I was promised after the completion of one year in the job my compensation package will be improved but I could no longer afford any more sacrifice for no cause. I clicked the compose button, attached my resume, sent the mail to one of my close friends at ReliSource.

ReliSource gave me a marvelous offer. It is really a nice company with an excellent caring management. The job was really a career job. But I could not accept their offer only for one reason: their office timing. I had to come home after 2230 if I had worked in ReliSource. That would create a huge gap with my wife as she is a working woman. I am really sad to refuse their offer last evening. I hope someday I can work in ReliSource just to experience how a caring management does the immense task of keeping all its employees happy. I am dying for such a management.

Blogger For Word

I am posting it from Blogger For Word. It seems like a good tool which facilitates bloggers to compose their posts in Microsoft Word at ease and then just click a button to publish it. I think I will use it regularly.

One extra email address per yahoo account for free!!!

I just came to know this today. Yahoo is giving one extra email account per inbox for free!!! While sending an email, one can choose an account from a drop-down list box. Mails sent to this extra email address will go to the same inbox. One can also change the extra email address twice a year. Isn't it exciting? I created an extra address just now, you can do it too!!!

Asynchronous network programming in C#

This is a great article by Ashish Dhar on asynchronous network programming in C#. If you are interested, you can go through it, it gives a good introduction.

The Joel Test

An excellent article on software. You won't regret after going through it if you are a software developer. Here it goes:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

A High Tech Prison

I think this is the first in its kind, in terms of using intelligent software to monitor prisoner activities. Here is a photo of a cell:



The cell seems better than any room of BUET student halls to me :D.