zikr-e-watan (Remembrance of my homeland): by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The Maqtaa from a beautiful Ghazal by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: (One of my favorite modern Urdu poets).

"Dayaar-e-ghair mein mahram agar nahin koi

To 'Faiz' zikr-e-watan apne ru-ba-ru hi sahi"

It roughly translates to:

"I dont have anyone of my own in this foreign place, but if I can't talk about my country with anyone, I could still talk to myself"

Lucky guy: at least he knew which one is the foreign land and which one is his country.

The Books I have read in the last year (Apr 2008-Mar 2009)

Descent Into Chaos, by Ahmed Rashid. A pretty interesting account of the American War in Afghanistan, with very good historical background. I would also recommend the book 'The Dust of Empire' for a wider geo-political background.
The Federalist Papers, by Hamilton/Madison/Jay.
White Mughals, by William Dalrymple. I had blogged about it earlier.
The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond. A gripping anthropological account of the darker sides of humans and how it can bring about the destruction of the entire race.
The Khyber Pass, Paddy Docherty. The history of the Khyber Pass from ancient Persian-Indian Empires up to the present.
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. A nicely written novel, but left me depressed for a week.
Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler. 'A journey between China's Past and Future'. It gave me a pretty good insight (through western eyes) of the Chinese nation and culture. I really liked the way the narrative goes from the present to the past and back to the present, again and again.
Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, Gary Geddes. A fascinating journey from Kabul to Chiapas, through Afghanistan, Pakistan, China (through the Chinese wild west: Kasghar/Urumqi), the Pacific up to Central America.
The Complete Yes Prime Minister, Jonathon Lynn/Antony Jay. The book version of the brilliant and hilarious BBC Series.
A Random Walk down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel.
The New Asian Hemisphere, Kishore Mahbubani.
When Markets Collide, Mohammed El-Erian.
Flip!, by Peter Sheahan. 'How to turn everything you know on its head'.
A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle.
Swami Vivekananda Reader. A collection of speeches and essays by Swami Vivekananda.
Plus, ongoing reading of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Sir Winston Churchill's memoirs.

The week in review: March 14-21, 2009.

A few interesting things happened this week. Some are trends and some are events that are part of larger trends. Here is a summary:

Political/Economic

• US: The 90% Tax on Bonuses. This is an amazing over-reaction. True, the public has been outraged at the same executives who they think brought about this financial mess being rewarded for their mistakes. On one hand, I don't agree with the argument that 'These people are the only ones who know how to get us out, because their actions brought us here". But on the other hand, I don't like the Congress taking such drastic measures that account for less than 1% of the bailout money just to express its anger. I am worried about the precedent it is setting and at the speed at which this passed, without almost any debate. One (possibly positive) unintended consequence of this legislation will be that the banks will now want to return the bailout money as soon as they can. This makes us question the 'bailout/stimulus' process. It is too early to say whether the bailouts using borrowed (and possibly, printed) money will work or not. But it is quite clear the bailouts that started in the previous administration will go down as a mismanaged government give-away. For example, there is a report on New York Times about how the education stimulus money is going to the school districts that don't really need them. A deeper question that needs to be answered is whether the political systems have the maturity, power and the will to tackle the restructuring of the economic system that has triggered this latest bout of economic malaise. Or, have we come to a point where the economic forces are beyond the control of any single sovereign political entity? Alan Greenspan, in this Wall Street Journal article, suggests that we are dealing with global economic forces beyond the control of domestic monetary policy.
  
• India: Varun Gandhi's campaign remarks. This is interesting: although Varun Gandhi has denied making anti-Muslim comments and said that the video was doctored, he still said (in the denial) that the (Hindu) community is under a siege in its own country. Now, if you read the Urdu newspapers in India, they pretty much say the same about the Muslim community: that they are under siege, under police brutality and under-developed. Assuming both are right (and they may well be); it is giving rise to a very combustible situation where Hindus (~80% of the population) and Muslims (~15% of the population) feel that they are under threat from each other and the government. 
  
• US-Iran: President Obama's video message to Iran. This is significant for someone who believes that the United States should begin engaging with Iran directly. The US needs Iran to stabilize the Middle-East. Along with Turkey, it is one of the few countries in the region that has some democracy: it isn't perfect (or even close to perfect), but it has a functioning, stable system. Iran needs to be part of any solution to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. The initial response from Iran was on expected lines; but the need for closer engagement is there. A very interesting beginning that has to be followed up from both sides.

I have left the events in Pakistan out of this list; because what happened last week (judges reinstated and other deals) is pretty insignificant in the bigger picture and the possibilities of what can happen there.

Technology

• Gartner's 2008 smartphone sales data (press release and summary, full report). The report makes for very interesting reading. It pretty much reconfirms the impact of iPhone on the landscape. It also reports a dramatic growth of smartphone sales (69%)in North America mostly driven by iPhone, Blackberry and to a lesser extent, Palm. Windows Mobile sales registered a small growth, but the market-share slightly decreased. But overall, the iPhone juggernaut rolls on...
  
• Facebook Connect for iPhone. This is significant, in terms of the merger of the most popular social networking platform with the most popular (and effective) data enabled mobile platform. Other social networking platforms will surely follow (actually, twitter's APIs are pretty easy to use, it doesn't need a special set of libraries). It will be interesting to see how many useful apps or services take advantage of this integration.
  
• iPhoneOS 3.0 launch. Significant, because it releases a bunch of features developers and users have been asking for: push notification, system-wide search, copy-paste, MMS, P2P communications, in-app payments, Map APIs, in-app email. I love the fact that as a developer, I get to tinker with the pre-release OS and SDK.
  

Social/Religious.

• The Pope's comments in Africa. The comment on AIDs, along with other messages and information that have came out of the Vatican in the past (including the one about exorcism) makes for some interesting analysis. It is quite possible that Vatican is losing touch with reality. Or, it is part of a religious strategy to make Catholicism relevant in the 21st Century and beyond! In a somewhat related story, the British Governments condom campaign has received some criticsm too.
  

iPhone OS 3.0: Push Notification is here

Well, it is here. It isnt 'background processing' but a '(re)launch the app on demand': very useful if one is building communication applications. I am now worried about all my installed apps doing popups and sounds, even when it is not needed :)
It will be interesting to see how well Apple's push servers scale: apparently that was the reason why it took them longer to launch this. On a different note, Facebook Connect launched for iPhone.

How to deal with the lack of background apps on the iPhone?

In a previous post, I had mentioned 'Background Applications' as one of the five requirements of a mobile development platform. But alas, the iPhone doesnt support it (yet). Apple is working on a push based notification system  and announced  beta versions to some select developers. (See http://gizmodo.com/5031559/iphone-developers-get-push-notification-api  and http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/07/31/apple_seeds_developer_tools_for_background_conscious_iphone_apps.html)

But what until then? This is the best I could come up with:

1) Send a calendar invite to the users' installed exchange email address. Email and calendar (and the ActiveSync client) run in the background. Just make sure that the meeting time is just a few minutes into the future. Remember to set a reminder.

2) The user will have the phone beep as a calendar reminder.

3) If the user notices and unlocks there is a good chance she can be notified that there is something important waiting for her in your app.

Very clumsy. To make matters worse, the links dont work on the iPhone calendar.

Does anyone else have any other ideas?