my  block

where uzairs roam

I’ve been busy lately, what with school finally starting and Ramadan and all. I’m just posting a few bullet points for now, and then a description of life at LSE so far will follow tomorrow, IA.

• You need to read this article by Uri Avnery. Go ahead, read it, I’ll wait. It’s worth your time. (Thanks for the link, SAA.)
• Thank God for Dreamhost! These guys are by far the best webhost I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a few now), and they keep sweetening the pot. The latest? They’ve 10x-d both storage space and bandwidth, so that you now get 200GB of storage, and 2TB of bandwidth each month with their basic hosting plan, for $7.95 a month! Click here Enter the promotion code UZAIRSDISCOUNTS when you’re signing up to get it for just $30 for a year.
• I’ve posted a couple of articles on the Nairang Foundation blog about Ghulam Bhik Nairang, the man the Foundation is named for (and also my great-grandfather). Hopefully we’ll get more articles going, as I start inviting more people to write there. Again, if you’re interested, please let me know — the goal is to make it a general Pakistan/politics/development blog.
• I’m preparing business cards. My old business cards are pretty nice, but the script is hard to figure out, and the paper isn’t the awesome expensive paper I wanted, and there’s nothing on them except my name, and … So now I’m preparing new ones, and putting the name of my company on them, website, email address and phone number on them. Now I just have to go set up the website…
• I’ve switched from Firefox to Opera. Mostly because Firefox’s memory footprint was getting worse and worse — at work, I saw it take 1100MB of RAM once, and on my laptop it was regularly taking upwards of 200MB, something I can’t afford with my measly 512MB. Opera has been a very pleasant surprise: it does just about everything that made Firefox so cool but in a more visually pleasing way (and it’s all already built in, no extensions required), and adds a bunch of stuff that FF doesn’t do. Extensions for Opera aren’t one of its strong points, but there does seem to be some stuff available, through userland JS controls and widgets. Actually, I’ve found the latter to be useless, because when I’m Alt+Tab-ing, they show up with a generic icon and no description. But Opera itself has been awesome: just one example of the ways it beats Firefox is its tab-management; you can drag-and-drop tabs between Opera sessions (which is mind-blowing for FF users) and, something I always wanted, can ‘duplicate’ a tab, complete with history. There are some shortcomings, the most glaring of which is the fact that URL auto-completion doesn’t pick the first item in the list when you press Tab — that’s something I’m really very used to and miss *all* the time. Also, I downloaded all my GMail into Opera to see what the mail client’s like; that was a big mistake, it bogged the browser down for well over a day, till all the mail had been downloaded. But the feed manager is great, the UI is completely customisable (as are keyboard shortcuts), there’s a BitTorrent client built-in, a notes manager for copy/pasting stuff from websites, and the trashcan feature is incredibly incredible. I really like this browser, in a breathless sort of way. As you can now tell.