With the situation in Pakistan being what it is, Pakistani blogs are becoming increasingly important both to people living in Pakistan and to those of us who are stuck outside. I’ve already written about a couple of these blogs. This here is a more comprehensive roundup of those two and some more useful blogs. Thanks in particular to Aman from bringing some of these to my notice.

First off we have four student blogs:

• LUMS Blog: Written by LUMS alumni about things concerning Pakistan and LUMS. I haven’t contributed to this blog yet but this is the one that I’m associated with.
• FAST Rising: The excellent FAST-NU resistance blog.
• The Emergency Times: An independent student initiative that provides updates on the emergency situation and publishes a newsletter by the same name.
• ALE Xpressed!: This is a personal blog that doesn’t “report” on events but approaches them from a personal perspective.

Then we have the two I talked about earlier:

• All Things Pakistan (Pakistaniat.com): The intention of this blog is to “talk about [Pakistan’s] problems constructively and to celebrate enthusiastically that which deserves to be celebrated”. It’s not a news blog, but an excellent views blog.
• Watan Dost: This is both a news and opinion blog but is particularly good for news about Pakistan from all perspectives and from many, many sources.

And finally, we have the Metroblogging sites (the first two have more coverage than the third):

• Metroblogging Lahore
• Metroblogging Islamabad
• Metroblogging Karachi

Oh, another useful thing to do is to create a Google Alert with the search phrase “Pakistan” that sends you a daily e-mail with all news, blog, web, and video entries posted about Pakistan over the previous 24 hours. You can, of course, narrow your search term down to “Pakistan emergency” or something.

UPDATE

A few more resources have come my way:

• Emergency 2007 on Wikia
• Academics for Freedom
• Rise of Pakistan
• Emergency 2007 blog
• Pakistan Blackout
• Democracy and Freedom
• Pak Lawyer
• Pakistan Politics
• Pakistan Politics.net

Jason Pontin has a good article in the November/December 2007 issue of the MIT Technology Review on the phenomena of microblogging.

I’m not much of a microblogger myself, at least in the strictest sense of the word, because I don’t use Twitter or Jaiku or any of those specialist services. I do, however, update my “status” on Facebook every now and then. And by “every now and then” I mean whenever anything interesting happens in my life. I find it very hard — and, in many ways — pointless to be constantly updating some web service with what I am doing, feeling, or thinking at that time. People have better things to do with their lives than knowing, for example, that I am now at the market buying eggs. Or, of course, “watchin’ the game, havin’ a bud“…which, naturally, begs the question “what are you doing?“…which, in turn, happens to be Twitter’s tagline.

My criteria for updating my status, then, is anything going on in my life that can lead to an interesting comment or discussion. Or, if not that, at least something that is funny, interesting, or unusual. Basically, anything that is not mundane, boring, or (blatantly) unoriginal. Unless, of course, that mundane, boring, or unoriginal thing that I’m doing is something I really want to share with my friends and family. In which case, that thing — in my opinion, at least — isn’t mundane, boring, or unoriginal after all. You get my drift, right?

Start Aside: Blogging (Not of the Micro Kind)

In many ways, I apply the same logic to my blog. Though I do add one more criterion to what I blog about: I blog about things that I don’t want to bookmark or don’t want to remember to tell people in the future. This post is a case in point. I read a good article on the web that I found interesting. I thought other people would find it interesting too.

In the past, when this happened, my default action would have been to bookmark the site if the article was really interesting (otherwise bookmark volumes get out of hand really quickly), save a copy of the article on my computer (should I want to read it later), and compose an e-mail to friends and family members (who’d be interested in this) in which I’d include a link to the article and my comments. Nowadays, though, I just blog about the article instead. This provides automatic bookmarking (since the article is linked-to from my post), categorization (through tagging), and archival/storage (that too, online). It also makes it easier for my friends and family members since they don’t get extra e-mails from me, they can read the article and my comments whenever they want to, and they can comment on my comments as well. Additionally, the group of people that I offer my comments to has also been expanded considerably. Yes, it’s fun all around :)

End Aside: Back to Microblogging

That said, there are a lot people out there who love the mundane, the boring, and (really) the unoriginal…which maybe I should now abbreviate to MBO! Which brings me back to Pontin’s article:

Sending microblogs broadcasts, “I am here!” Reading microblogs satisfies the craving of many people to know the smallest details of the lives of people in whom they are interested. Already, new-media intellectuals have coined a term to describe the new social behavior they say microblogging encourages: they talk of “presence,” a shorthand for the idea that by using such tools, we can enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence.

Though what I should really be pointing you to is his conclusion:

I quickly realized that decrying the banality of microblogs missed their very point. As Evan Williams puts it, “It’s understandable that you should look at someone’s twitter that you don’t know and wonder why it should be interesting.” But the only people who might be interested in my microblogs–apart from 15 obsessive Pontin followers on Twitter–were precisely those who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality: my family and close friends. For my part, I found that the ease with which I could communicate with those I love encouraged a blithe chattiness that particularly alarmed my aged parents. They hadn’t heard so much from me in years.

Which, of course, comes with the caveat:

On the other hand, I strongly disliked the radical self-exposure of Twitter. I wasn’t sure it was good for my intimates to know so much about my smallest thoughts or movements, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is a necessary lubricant in our social relations.

So I went ahead and started my new MBA blog, though now it’s more of a professional blog — i.e. both business school and career-related — than just an MBA blog.

I call it Ameel’s Career and MBA Exposition (ACME).

A couple of nights ago, as I was browsing the web, I got a pop-up message from Zone Alarm Anti-virus telling me that it had found and quarantined the Trojan-Clicker.JS.Agent.h trojan in my Firefox cache.

Now the problem with the Firefox cache is that the files in there aren’t indexed by URL name so I had no idea which site I’d gotten that trojan from. The only two sites that were open in my browser at that time were Google Reader and this here blog of mine. This blog, by the way, is installed on my own website which, in turn, is hosted on a shared web hosting server in the US. A server that is expertly managed by my web host’s very competent systems administrators. My website, therefore, is very secure. My blog is also secure since my version of WordPress is almost always up-to-date. This, then, was strange since neither of those sites should really have had a trojan or virus or anything else malicious on them.

Since Google Reader was the less likely trojan-hosting candidate, I thought I’d check my blogs’s HTML page source to see if I could figure out what was going on. However, when I tried to check it through Firefox, the page came up “missing”. That was not a good sign. This meant that it was indeed my blog that contained the trojan since it was this page’s local copy (in the cache) that Zone Alarm had quarantined. To double check, I navigated away from and then came back my blog’s home page. Immediately, Zone Alarm popped-up another quarantine notice. Yep, the trojan was in my blog [1].

Bugger.

Time For Some Research

I then went to the web to learn all I could about the trojan which, strangely enough, wasn’t much at all. This trojan was (and still is) rather new to the ‘net and, therefore, has been minimally catalogued in all the online virus databases. It was, however, mentioned on a few message boards. Unfortunately, the relevant posting on Zone Alarm’s message board was incredibly useless while the message boards that really seemed to be discussing it actively were all in Russian. Google Translate helped a bit with that but, ultimately, I couldn’t learn anything from those pages either.

All I ended up learning from the web was that this is a JavaScript trojan (hence the JS in the middle of its name) that either opens up a pop-up ad, places a cookie in your browser’s cache, creates a connection to a couple of sites on the ‘net, and/or re-directs your browser to a particular page. I wasn’t sure which of these this trojan did because it never got the chance to run on my computer. I also learnt that this trojan was, for all intents and purposes, pretty harmless. The virus databases listed its threat level as low and, really, if no one had even bothered to document it in any detail on the ‘net, how bad could it be?

Still, a trojan is a trojan. So I set about trying to fix the problem myself.

Do-It-Yourself

The first thing I then did was some more research. I started by checking the WordPress site for security documentation. I learnt quite a bit from there. I then went and did all the things they suggested you do to ‘harden’ your WordPress installation. These were things I hadn’t done earlier and that was probably how the trojan had gotten into my blog in the first place.

Next, I went and downloaded (through FTP) all the files from my blog installation to my local hard drive. All the files (mostly PHP files) got downloaded just fine but one of them immediately got quarantined by Zone Alarm. “A-ha”, I thought, “that must be the file that contains the trojan. I must look at this file.” Unfortunately, Zone Alarm wouldn’t let me (duh!).

Fortunately, this was a file that I could look at from inside WordPress’ administrator’s interface. Unfortunately, again, most of what was in that file was gibberish. It contained a few JavaScript functions that were weirdly named (a seemingly-random string of numbers instead of a descriptive name) and some code within those. Now, since I didn’t want to mess with WordPress’ code, I though I’d compare this file’s code with the corresponding code from Nadia’s blog installation (which, according to Zone Alarm, was trojan free). Nadia’s version of this file was, indeed different from mine. As I tried to tweak the code in my version of the file, however (i.e. change my file’s code to make it look like Nadia’s), I must have mistyped something because the next time I tried to view the blogs they had both crashed. That is, every time I tried to load them, I got a 500 Internal Server Error error.

Bugger.

It All Falls In To Place

Fortunately, our blogs eventually came back online (did I mention that my web host’s SysAdmins were really good?) and, this time, I wasn’t getting any trojan pop-up messages from Zone Alarm when I visited them. However, the next day, the trojan quarantine messages were back. Oh, and now they were coming from both blogs. It was then that it occurred to me: “Dammit! The reason my code editing didn’t work the first time was because I was trying to make my trojan-ridden code look like another kind of trojan-ridden code!” That is, I wasn’t actually removing the trojan from my blog, I was merely changing it to look like the trojan on Nadia’s blog. What I should have done was compare my version of the file to a perfectly clean version of the same file.

To get a clean version of that file, I went back to the WordPress site but couldn’t find it there. I figured I’d have to go into the actual PHP source code (maintained by WordPress’ developers) to do that…but that wasn’t something I really wanted to get into. Then I realized that I did have easy access to a clean version of that file: I could simply install another copy of WordPress on my own website. Since this would be a new install, all of its files would be perfectly clean and trojan-free. I could then compare my file to that installation’s version of that file. So I went ahead and did just that. And guess what? All of the JavaScript code in my file was trojan code. That is, the original version of the file didn’t contain any JavaScript code at all [2].

Removing that was easy and now, finally, our blogs are completely trojan-free. If all now goes well, and with the help of a much more secure WordPress installation, our blogs will stay trojan-free from now on as well. Here’s hoping.

Footnotes

[1] While my web host’s SysAdmins are responsible for maintaining the web server itself, they aren’t responsible for the stuff you install on your site. That is, the fact that my blog had a trojan in it, wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t entirely my fault, either. Nor was it really the fault of the people who made WordPress. It was basically the fault of the hackers who had found a way to exploit a vulnerability in WordPress that let them attach this trojan to it. That’s usually how it happens anyway.

[2] Which, in retrospect, is obvious since it was a PHP file that really shouldn’t have had any JavaScript in it anyway.

I am seriously considering starting a new blog. One about my MBA journey through the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (MBS). It’ll cover my life during the program, the courses I’m taking, stuff about the university/school/program, my job hunt, and basically anything else that is relevant to me, the MBA, the tech industry, and Australia. I’ve already documented part of my MBA journey in my MBA Journal but that only presents a high-level overview of events. I want to get into the nitty-gritty details and, basically, tell more of the story.

The good thing is, should I do the spin-off, I know that I’ll be able to sustain the new blog. I’ve started to blog reasonably regularly now and it’s getting easier to maintain this pace. In fact, I have reached the "I should blog about that" stage thanks to which, whenever something interesting happens to me these days, I start to think about how I’m going to write about it in my blog!

Also, this here blog doesn’t have a proper focus. Yes, it’s about anything and everything that I find interesting in my life and in the world, but having a stronger focus would let me explore my subject more deeply and be more insightful about what I write. I will, of course, continue to maintain this blog in parallel.

Finally, while there are lots of MBA student blogs out there, only one other MBS student, my classmate Birgit (with Birgit in Adventureland), currently maintains a blog of her own. And even that is a more general blog about her adventures through life and around the world that it is about her MBA journey. As for our professors, only two maintain blogs: Chris Lloyd with Fishing in the Bay ("Statistical musings from an Antipodean perspective") and Joshua Gans with CoRE Economics ("Commentary on economics, strategy and more").

Meanwhile, B-Schools from around the world are embracing the power of blogging. Here’s a random selection:

• Inside the London MBA
• Berkeley MBA Student Blogs
• Ivey MBA Blog (2007-08)
• MIT Student Experience Blogs
• Wharton Student Diaries
• HBS Working Knowledge

My blog will be a drop in the ocean compared to all of those, of course, but at least it’ll be a start.

Incidentally, I was all set to convince MBS to start their own series of blogs — authored by students, professors, and the admissions, alumni, and marketing departments — a few months ago. I’d even written a project proposal for it. Unfortunately, I then got an internship so I never followed through with it. If all goes well — that is, if I maintain a good blog over the course of this term — I might propose the idea to them again at the end of this term. Let’s see.

Meanwhile, let me start by thinking up a good name for my new blog. Hmmm…

I’ve already written on this blog that I love Google Reader so you know that I’m into news feeds (lots of them!). What is really cool on the Internet these days, though, is the number and variety of sites and services that are starting to offer them.

There are, of course, the obvious ones:

• Other blogs — all of them!
• News services — like BBC, Digg, and Google News
• Cartoon sites — like xkcd, PhD Comics, and User Friendly
• Netcast (or, if you prefer, podcast) sites — like TWiT and DL.TV

That is, sites that feature dynamic, regularly updated content.

And then there are the less obvious ones. Much to my delight, the two that I’ve recently discovered are:

• Facebook, which gives you an RSS feed of your friends’ user statuses (so you can find out what they’re up to without having to log in and you don’t miss anyone’s status update)
• Flickr, which gives you a feed that contains the latest pictures uploaded by a particular user

Both are really useful and I’m glad they’re there. Thanks, people!

Now if only sites like Ain’t it Cool News, Airliners.net, and McSweeney’s would start offering news feeds too. Some day.

If you read blogs — especially if you read a lot of blogs — and regularly browse the Internet to keep up with what’s going on in the world, check out Google Reader, Google’s web-based news feed reader/aggregator. It’s fresh out of beta and really is quite fantastic.

Other than providing you with the obvious benefits of an aggregator:

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper". [Source: Wikipedia]

it is free, fast, efficient, and very well designed. You can check your feeds online (which is really cool) but can take them offline as well (up to 2,000 posts).

It also has a few extra features thrown in. For example, you can bookmark your posts (by ’starring’ them) though that’s not all that special. What is special is that you can share your favourite posts online as well. You do that simply by clicking on the ’share’ icon that appears at the bottom of each post. Doing that adds that particular post to your personal, automatically generated open-to-the-public Google Reader page (which, by the way, even has it’s own RSS feed). Quite fantastic.

For The Blogger

Meanwhile, if you are a blogger yourself — and you use Windows — check out Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft’s new (still in beta) blog authoring tool. It may make your life a lot easier.

Much like an e-mail client, WLW lets you write blog posts offline in a full-featured rich text editor (which is generally better than what your blogging software has online). You can then publish your postings to your blog with the click of a button. That in itself is really cool: You can be blogging even when you’re not connected to the Internet and you can save your drafts locally as well.

What makes WLW fantastic though is that, when you add your blog account to it (it supports all popular blogging tools and services), it downloads your design template and tags. It then loads those into its editor so, when you compose a post, it actually looks like you’re typing into your blog! For example, this is what I see as I type this post in WLW:

That actually looks like I’m typing into the blog itself. Compare that to the WordPress view that I would otherwise have gotten:

That makes quite a difference, doesn’t it?

Another cool thing is that you can save your drafts online (to your blog) so you’re not tied to that particular computer when composing a post. Again, quite fantastic. 

The Bigger Scheme of Things

In the bigger scheme of things, it’s great that both Google and Microsoft are taking on board the fact that people like doing things both online and offline. And that this is not true for just e-mailing (for which I use Thunderbird offline and Yahoo! online, by the way) but for other things like blogging and composing (and collaborating on) documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Most cool.

Want to Know More?

These days, lots of software development teams that are working on online products and services maintain blogs. The Reader and Live Writer teams are no exceptions:

• Writer Zone
• Official Google Reader Blog

By the way, the big three — Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft — have lots of other product/service blogs as well. You can find them all online but here are three each to get your started:

• Google: Official, Gmail, News
• Microsoft: Live, Search, Mail
• Yahoo!: Search, Messenger, Mail

Enjoy :)

I’ve upgraded my avatar!

It’s gone from this Matrix-inspired, plain black-and-white one:

to this Star Trek: The Next Generation-inspired, more detailed and coloured one:

If you’re interested, I’ve written about this on my website.

What do you think?

Everyone has his or her own way of writing things. This ‘way’ includes spelling choices (British vs. American); whether you use a serial comma (or Oxford comma) or not; which other punctuation marks you regularly use (brackets, dashes, hyphens, ellipses, emoticons, colons, semicolons, slashes, quotation marks, apostrophes, etc.); how and when you use boldface and italics; how you write times (3:15 PM, 3:15pm, 0315, 0315 HRS, etc.) and dates (30 August, August 30, etc.); how you quote material and write titles of published works… The list goes on.

For most of these things, I prefer one way over the other(s) and I stick with that in all my writing. Though sometimes, I use a hybrid. For example, I will mostly use British spellings (colour) but will use American ones when writing for select words (standardize). Sometimes I switch between the two systems, depending on what I’m writing. Here, for example, I would probably write ‘programme’. For a university assignment, I would probably write ‘program’. On the Internet and in programming, I have to use ‘color’ instead of ‘colour’ all the time. It’s not that hard to switch, though.

There are two style choices, however, I’m not so sure about: writing times and writing titles. And my not sticking with one convention is starting to get on my nerves.

Writing Times

I tend to switch between two writing styles when writing times. I use uppercase ‘AM/PM’ when writing specific times, such as “the movie runs from 11:30 AM to 1:15 PM”. But I use the lowercase ‘am/pm’ when writing times within flowing text, such as “see you at 3pm”. In my opinion, “see you at 3:00 PM” reads too formally.

My problem, however, is that I am tempted to use the lowercase ‘pm’ notation all the time (ha ha, a pun!). I know that’s what some writing style standards use and I am tempted to adopt that all the way as well. Maybe I will. Meanwhile though, I’m stuck in the middle.

Writing Titles

And then there are titles of published works. Which do you think is correct: “I watched ‘Transformers’ on the weekend” or “I watched Transformers on the weekend”?  Both are, actually. It depends on whether you’re using rich text (in which you can use italics) or plain text (in which you can’t).

At one level, I want to use plain text all the time. That is, I would write the movie title within apostrophes. I would also write things like: “The movie was *really* good” instead of “The movie was really good”. By doing this I don’t have to worry about people using plain text e-mail clients or about any font conversion problems (though that’s more for smart quotes in word processing programmes). It’s also pretty clear in the first version that I am emphasizing the word ‘really’ so that’s not much of an issue either. For the most part, though, my choice is determined by the context. If I don’t know which e-mail system someone is using, for example, I stick with plain text. When I know someone uses rich text, I will use the italics (and boldface and bullet points, etc.).

For blogs such as this one, though, things are different. I can use italics all the time with no problems whatsoever. Why don’t I, though? Well, primarily because I’m a bit of a computer snob and I think plain text is the ‘classic’, format independent, platform independent way of doing this (i.e. it’s cooler…in a geeky kind of way). And if I switch over to using italics all the time then…well, then, I should start doing that everywhere else too (i.e. in my e-mails, documents, etc.). Right now, I’m stuck in between the two and am, therefore, somewhat inconsistent. Even on this blog. And it bugs me.
By the way, last year I finally resolved the quotation mark vs. apostrophe issue that I used to have. I now use apostrophes to emphasize words or phrases. That’s why, a couple of paragraphs ago, I wrote ‘really’ instead of “really”. I then use quotation marks only for direct quotes from speech or text. You might, when you read this, be thinking: “Well, duh! That’s the way it’s supposed to be”. But please understand that I come from a computer programming background where only single characters are placed within apostrophes. All other text is placed within quotation marks. It took me a while to finally get that out of my system!

Style Manuals

One way to resolve my dilemma, of course, is for me to choose a style manual I like and then stick with it. Nadia, for example, follows the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). I follow that for the most part as well. The Oxford Manual of Style is another popular one and most publishing houses (academic and otherwise) generally have their own, internal, published or unpublished writing guides. Of the ones available on the web, the two more popular ones are the Economist Style Guide (though that’s mostly for magazine and journal research) and the Wikipedia Manual of Style (which is primarily an encyclopaedia style guide).

I mostly follow Chicago though I do take elements from other style guides. At least I think I do. I havent actually read all of CMS to see whether I’m following it or not! What I do know, though, is that, in the am/pm vs. AM/PM debate, Chicago chooses the latter. And we’re back to my indecision.

I don’t blog enough. One reason for that is that this blog isn’t about one, specific topic. It is, as its name implies, about random things. If it were to be about one topic, I’m guessing I would write more because I would have a focus. Right now, anything and everything fits into this blog and that leaves things up in the air.

I am tempted, therefore, to split this blog into two. Fortunately, I don’t have to kill anyone to do it. (That’s a Harry Potter-related Horcrux reference. If you don’t get it, pretend I never said it.) The new blog will primarily be about technology and tech-related things. That the field I’m in, that’s the stuff that interests me, that’s the stuff I have an opinion about, that’s the stuff I want to write more about.

I don’t think I’m going to do that just yet, though. I can get along for a while with just one blog, except that I’ll probably start posting a lot more tech stuff in it. And it’s only when the tech stuff starts to overwhelm the rest will I consider moving that to a separate blog. Of course, I have to be blogging quite a lot about tech before that happens! Oh well.