Reunion After A Decade

Everyone gathered around after a decade. All thanks to Baber for this effort. It is tough to find a place and time where everyone agrees. After a week of discussion with the class group, we finally reached The Canvas. 

A decade changes a lot. 

Everyone has grown up. We all were students in one class. Now someone is an entrepreneur, a team lead in a giant tech company, whereas someone has been a great mommy at home. But everyone seemed to win their lives.

1. Muhammad Usman is now Usman Ajmal, works at Techlogix
2. Baber didn't change, works at Huawei as a compiler engineer
3. Hamza grew a beard, running his own company named PyFlow labs
4. Ahmed Majeed's belly wasn't visible. Can't comment
   
5. MOhammed AHmad PErvaiz still jokes about Sajawal and why he dropped Islamiyat. Ahmad visits Georgia every other week. No visa for people living in Dubai/Abu Dhabi
6. Hafiz Asrar is same. لم يتغير شيء. Lives in Bahrain
7. Apparently Imran Baig's eyes were still red for some kind of bloodshed. Luckily Salu didn't come
8. Nauman Zafar is now within NaumanZafarWrapper
9. Kamran Azmat still smokes and now is running his own setup
   
10. Hassan Mujtaba has a gaming studio
11. Anum works in Techlogix
12. Rabbia has 3 beautiful daughters
13. Hammad Khan has a YouTube channel
    
14. Haseeb works with Baber and are bootstrapping their own company (MA)
15. Usama is running his own company
    
16. Kashif works at Techlogix
17. Zillehuma teaches CS students

Disabling Some Argument In Shell Command (Linux)

To disable any shell command's argument, all you need to do is to add following code in any of the initialization script of your shell/terminal.

cats_dont_meaow() { 
  if [ $1 = "meaow"]; then
    echo "Cats don\'t meaow in parallel universe."
  else
    cat $*
  fi
}
alias cat=cats_dont_meaow

Thanks to https://cdn.meme.am/

Consider the application of the script in case you have cached your git credentials and you accidentally hit enter after randomly typing some keys that may become git push origin master. This function will save your gits (pun intended).

block_git_push() {
  if [ $1 = "push" ]; then
    echo "\"push\" is blocked temporarily to prevent volcano eruption."
  else
    git $*
  fi
}
alias git=block_git_push

Gist: https://gist.github.com/fahadsiddiqui/ecb81755ae19eb5add1fce17bf7c730a

Customize Your Linux Dude

How can you use Unity without any tweaking? Why don't you feel the need to change your desktop appearance? I think it is time for me to write something that can put a new cloth on your lets-not-touch-it-we'll-break-it OS. I know you fear. I know your fingers shake when you type sudo. I know you are a coward and think you will break something like apt-get or you will get like 374 error messages and 34 warnings next time you boot. Nothing is going to happen. Try these.

1. Numix

Numix is an open-source project having icon sets and appearances for Debian/Android for free. You can go to their website and install (its pretty straight forward). Just add their PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:numix/ppa

For more information go to https://numixproject.org/.
To change the theme/appearance you must install some tweak tool first. I prefer unity-tweak-tool, easily available from default repository

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

You are good to go.

2. Hyper
Do you like the default terminal? That's okay. But I would suggest you to try Hyper once. Built on top of Electron (by Github) framework, Hyper provides you much customization. I mean who wouldn't want to watch a YouTube video on your BASH terminal just by pasting a YouTube link? Interesting? Okay, go for it then. https://hyper.is/
A word of advice, do install node package manager and node itself before installing plugins in your Hyper terminal. Hyper internally uses node.js to install its packages. It also has its own package manager named "hpm". Try these packages https://github.com/bnb/awesome-hyper.

3. Atom
I wouldn't suggest this if you are a geek. Sure you'd want VIM or EMACS. But if your pokemons are evolved, and you have heard of Sublime text, you should try Atom (by Github). Click https://atom.io/.

4. f.lux
Do your eyes feel tired working straight 8 hours a day? They should be, you are wasting them.
Try f.lux (https://justgetflux.com). The reason why I recommend everyone to use f.lux is the blue screen hazard. It blinds you over time. You should read the research over here https://justgetflux.com/research.html.
Installation instructions are pretty straight forward, you just have to install the application indicator and run some scripts. See https://github.com/xflux-gui/xflux-gui.
Another option for screen color temperature adjustment is redshift-gtk, but it sometimes goes too off while adjusting (too warm for eyes).

And for God sake, change the default wallpaper. Huh.

پرندے مر نہیں جاتے

قفس کی ان سلاخوں میں

جو صدیاں قید رکھتی ہیں

پرندے مر نہیں جاتے

نہ اڑنا بھول جاتے ہیں

نہ اڑنے کی تڑپ دل س

کبھی بھی ختم ہوتی ہے

خدا بھی دیکھنے والا

انھیں مرنے نہیں دیتا

اندھیرا کتنا گہرا ہو

انھیں ڈرنے نہیں دیتا

پرندے جانتے ہیں وہ

ہوا کے ایک جھونکے سے

قفس کو توڑھ ڈالے گا

پرندوں کی تو سنتا ہے

میں تیرا ماننے والا

تیری خلقت میں افضل ہو

میری بھی مانلے یا رب

میں خود کو توڑ بیٹھا ہوں

بہت امید ہے تجھسے

میں دنیا چھوڑ بیٹھا ہوں

(فہد صدیقی)

دنیا خواب سی ہو جاتی ہے

پیارے بابا عرصہ پہلے
تم نے مجھ سے پوچھا تھا
"بیٹا تم کیوں جاگ رہی ہو؟"
رات کی چادر اوڑھے دیکھو
سب کی آنکھ مے نیند ہے بیٹا
"تم کیوں نیند سے بھاگ رہی ہو؟"
اتنا سن کر
کالے بادل
رات اندھیری
پھر بھی تیری بات سے میری
آنکھیں بند سی ہو جاتی تھیں
بابا تیری پیاری بیٹی
گھوڑے بچ کے سو جاتی تھی
عرصہ گزرا
بابا اب وہ
نیند کی چادر
روز ہی رات کو کھو جاتی ہے
ساری دنیا سو جاتی ہے
بابا نیند سے پہلے میری
دنیا خواب سی ہو جاتی ہے
بابا میری
دنیا خواب سی ہو جاتی ہے
(فہد صدیقی)

Clean Up Your Git Mess - 1

1. Want to stash uncommitted changes

git stash

2. No, the changes are not tracked (untracked changes)

git add . # all the changes in ./ directory (pwd)
git stash # now do this

3. Want to undo the last stash

git stash pop

4. Again?

git stash pop # its a stack, you got the idea

5. Want to clear the stack

git stash clear

6. Want to know more about stash? https://git-scm.com/docs/git-stash
7. You type password every time you need to push something on remote ref. It sucks.

git config --global credential.helper cache

8. Revert local head upto last nth commit

git reset --hard HEAD~nth

9. Take remote head to some commit because all the commits after this particular commit are wrong?

git push origin +:

Scala Getter/Setter and BeanProperties

Scala provides automatic getter/setter functions for class data members After compiling this piece of code using Scala compiler scalac

scalac Foo.scala

Generates Foo.class file which we can disassemble using Java class file disassembler program javap https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/windows/javap.html

javap -private Foo.class

Disassembling class file shows

public class Foo {
  private int foo;
  public int foo();
  public void foo_$eq(int);
  public Foo();
}

Here we can see int foo() returns foo value and foo_$eq(int) assigns the value to private int foo (works like a setter). Which means we do not have to define private data member, getter and setter explicitly like;

private var _foo: Int = _
def foo_=(foo: Int) = _foo = foo    // setter
def foo = _foo    // getter

Instead, we can only declare

var foo: Int = _

On the other hand, Scala provides an annotation @BeanProperty which you can use to declare automatic getter/setter functions. To define a data member as a bean property you just have to write @BeanProperty before declaring member variable

import scala.reflect.BeanProperty
@BeanProperty var foo: Int = _

This should be implemented when you call Scala code from Java. Java libraries and APIs expect a class getter/setter function names as getMember/setMember. @BeanProperty generates these getter/setter functions too. That is why it is feasible to use @BeanProperty instead of simple public variable declaration when intermixing Java with Scala.