Posted by: Aamir Attaa on September 3, 2008 at 6:31 AM
Geo TV has been airing a famous Islamic TV Show named as “Aalim Online”, which in fact inspired me to name this post as “Peer Online”. (I just took the name, other wise there resembles nothing between this particular show and my this post)
Businesses in Pakistan are in state of transformation, which are turning their concentration towards the internet now, where they obviously get more target audience, hence more leads converting into sales. Though we lack extensive e-commerce infrastructure in our country, but even though medium and large sized businesses are demonstrating their existence on web.
Similarly, our Peers have started adopting internet too, and now they are broadcasting their publicity messages on internet; mainly through BULK emailing; but soon we may expect plenty of websites dedicated to these Peers and their quick solutions to every problems.
Apparently, these Peers spend handsome amount of money for broadcasting their email messages (let me mention here that many email broadcasters charge Rs. 5000 for 10000 emails). These heavy advertisement budgets actually leave a question mark on their legitimacy and the claims they make in emails such as
Solution to Every Problem
Meet your love in only 7 days
Make your husband obey you for rest of life and so on…
These emails normally leave a Mobile Number at the end as a point of contact…! While one must provide a physical address while doing a remote business. So things are quite confusing here…!
This is a very sensitive issue, so I don’t want to discuss it more, but I advice my readers to act sensibly when you get such an email with high claims and low rates.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 19, 2008 at 7:07 PM
As we see internet usage tremendously growing in developing countries, which have normally confined bandwidth to share with its users. Pakistan is one of such countries, which is putting a lot of (traffic) pressure on its international gateways, which at times exceeds the available limits in terms of capacity, consequently slowing the browsing amongst the masses.
Technology Review has published this article which reveals that computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. The basic idea behind the research is develop a system that chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.
Here is the selected excerpt from article
In developed countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) create Web caches–machines that copy and store content locally - to boost their customers’ browsing speeds. When a user wants to view a popular website, the information can be pulled from the cache instead of from the computer hosting the website, which may be on the other side of the planet and busy with requests. Similar services are offered by content distribution companies such as Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA. High-traffic sites pay Akamai to host copies of their content in multiple locations, and users are automatically served up a copy of the site from the cache closest to them.
Umar Saif’s team at LUMS is developing DonateBandwidth, a system inspired by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol that is popular for trading large music, film, and program files. With BitTorrent, people’s computers swap small pieces of a file during download, reducing the strain placed on the original source.
DonateBandwidth works in much the same way but lets people share more than just large files. When users try to access a website or download a file, a DonateBandwidth program running on their machine checks first with the peer-to-peer cache to see if the data is stored there. If so, it starts downloading chunks of the file from peers running the same software, while also getting parts of the file through the usual Internet connection. The software could allow people in countries that have better Internet connections to donate their bandwidth to users in the developing world.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 15, 2008 at 8:03 AM
Hanif Khan Pars (one of my devoted readers) today sent me an email asking me to help him setup a blog where he is interesting in sharing his views and thoughts like i am doing for last couple of months.He is not the only one, i got couple of mails from my other readers including Maria and Syed Asad who were looking for a blog but didn’t know much about it.
This much interest in Pakistani readers about having their own blog is very encouraging and i can envision huge activity from Pakistani bloggers in coming months. By the way i was inspired too, by Babar Bhatti and started this blog. And believe me blogging is a fun thing to do. It helps your personal branding, make a community of readers around you, and also you can earn good money out of it. (One thing, don’t expect happenings very soon, i will discuss this point latter, but be sure that you are not going to get traffic for 3 months, but afterwords… Its fun)
Getting back to Hanif Khan’s query, in response to what i have decided to start a series of posts in which i will try to make readers familiar with steps and must do things for a (successful) blog. Input from experienced bloggers (in comments) would definatly help us all.
So lets start with very first thing that you should think about, and it is “Topic of your blog”
Choosing a Topic for Your Blog
This is going to be the the first and most crucial decision in your blogging career. Yea think atleast 10 times before your finalize your blog’s topic. Keep reading to know why it’s so important….!
Many of bloggers try to do variety of stuff on their blogs. For instance a blogger is trying to cover Search Engine Optimization topics and at the same time he/she is discussing some sports, entertainment and the fashion.
This can lead to a very confusing situation for you, specifically, when there will be a time when you wont be able to maintain balance amongst your all covered topics, and your readers may start getting bored (who were actually expecting more from you about this particular topic)
So focus keenly on a single topic, that you feel you are good at. Defining the purpose of your website gives a clear direction to your visitors, thus making them subscribe to your feeds and ultimately you will get more traffic.
Always select the topic that you like, and you feel you have inborn germs about the topic. Don’t write on medicine if you are not a doctor. In case you start a blog with a topic that you don’t know much about, you will run short of ideas very soon; untimely you will start looking for other blogs or Wikipedia to get the content. (Which is not a good idea at all)
Once you are done with these initial things, give yourself a good start and afterwards there is an un-ending world of possibilities for your blog…!
Please make up your mind until Saturday, when we will discuss about the blogging tools (programming free + easy to use tools) that you can use to setup your blog. Let me mention you that blogging website is so easy to maintain (unless you are not looking for advance features) its just like using Microsoft Word…!
Want to discuss anything regarding your new blog, drop your comments below or contact me via “About Us” Page.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM
ITCN Asia 2008 was concluded today after running a three day show at Expo Center Karachi. I hope this mega technology event of Pakistan remained superb. It’s a matter of fact that I don’t know much about what actually happened there, either due to my poor googling capabilities or there is actually no material available online about what went on at ITCN Asia 2008.
Unfortunately, few of my previous post (in row) were not with positive views, and now my readers have started asking me to think good instead of just pointing out the bad elements; so I will try to not to criticize the ITCN Management (PR Department in particular) to higher extent, but I just wanted to ask them “Where is the coverage?”
Expos are meant to popularize business entities and the products they launch there, but you may get disappointed to know that there is just nothing available to know about ITCN. Only few links on google’s first page, and all of those have almost the similar stories. Netxpress Media were their online media partner; they have a corner designated where you can watch one video at a time.
There is maybe another reason, that our media men are so busy in political stories that they are no more interested in covering such issues.
And about ITCN’s official website… don’t ask me about just view the image below…!
By the way, here is another video of LG’s Stall ITCN Asia 2008 – You may regret of missing the expo after viewing the video : P
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 7, 2008 at 6:33 AM
By Jameel Ahmed Memon
We are starting a new series of Career Counseling, in which we will Jameel Ahmed Memon will discuss certain phases of career and how you can perform well in with your Career.
Today’s post is about how to write an effective and winning CV.
Is your CV a “yes”, “no”, or a “maybe”?
The manager recruiting for the position you’ve applied for will be faced with an enormous pile of CVs, which they will put into 3 piles; “yes” – interview, “no” – reject, and “maybe” – come back to later if the “yes” pile fails to deliver. For your CV to be put into the “yes” pile it must very clearly state the skills you have to offer.
It’s important to remember that we’re talking about technical recruitment and our clients therefore want to see technical skills. The recruiting manager may have only a matter of seconds to initially scan your CV, so the skills must be immediately apparent. How can you achieve this?
Put the technical skills in bold. Simple, but immensely effective.
Use bullet points to draw the reader’s eye to the important area of your CV.
Put the most relevant experience first.
The most effective way to demonstrate technical skills is to provide a breakdown of the projects you’ve worked on. Remember that a project should comprise the following pieces of information:
Title
Timescales
Number of staff involved
Technology used
Technology you used
Your role
What you actually did
Sell Yourself
Writing “I was an analyst programmer” does not do you justice. Far more effective is:
“Accounting Project - 6 months, team of 5I worked as a developer on a complete rewrite of an Accounting application. The software was written in VB6 with a SQL Server database using an ODBC and linked to a back end Mainframe running MVS. My role required me to speak to users covering initial requirements and then design the screens. I also talked to the database designer regarding the Entity Relationship Diagram and became involved in writing SQL stored procedures. The majority of my time was spent coding in VB5 using AD02, and I also gained exposure to COM and DCOM. The last month of the project was spent testing the software using SQA Team test.”
Providing this type of breakdown for 3 projects you’ve been involved in will ensure that you submit a CV that tells the reader exactly what you did. If what you’ve done is what the reader wants, then your CV will be put into the “yes” pile
Umar Saif’s 
