Dua for Guidance

Everybody thinks he's right. Found a wonderful prayer-- let's pray Almighty for enabling us to see (and accept) truth-as-truth.

O Allah!! Enable us to see the Truth as Truth, and give us the ability to follow it.
And show us the falsehood as false and give us the ability to refrain from it

Dua o Khatm-il-Quran

I was looking for this Dua, when I completed reading Holy Quran last time, but could not find it, so thought of publishing it.

Ubuntu 14.04 Fresh Installation: Wi-Fi Issue

This was long pending...

So, I once again thought of getting serious with my Linux skills and installed Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS on my Dell Latitude D830.

After the fresh installation, I was not able to:

• See the Wi-Fi icon blinking on my laptop
• See the "Wi-Fi Networks" in the network list
• Connect to the any Wi-Fi network

After spending many days and 2 nights, a small five-liners helped from this post.

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo modprobe -rf b43
sudo modprobe b43

sudo iw reg set GB
sudo sed -i 's/^REG.*=$/&GB/' /etc/default/crda 

Mushtarakah / Ijtamai Qurbani (Badi Qurbani)

Background:

Qurbani (sacrifice) is mandatory for every sahib-e-nisaab; largely the person who’s eligible to pay the Zakat. Now, even if we are capable of affording the cost of lamb / goat sacrifice, there are certain elements which make it a little challenging. Starting with unavailability and unreliability of butcher; people residing in flats find it difficult to get adequate space where they can offer qurbani; less number of people who can help you in offering the qurbani and distributing the meat to the needy people. These are general limitations, and we have no choice but to live with them. This is where mushtarakah / ijtamai qurbani comes into the picture where 7 people can participate and offer sacrifice of one bigger animal. This qurbani is generally offered by some organizations on our behalf.

What you need to know

There are certain criteria and meeting them is extremely necessary:

• The animal should be at least 2 years old
• The animal should have all the body parts intact, including horns
• All 7 contributions should come from halal income
• All the contributing members should have the sole intention of Sacrifice, and not just obtaining the meat J
• The meat should however be distributed EQUALLY among all participants

What MIGHT happen

Most of us generally pay the amount to the organizations who offer to sacrifice the animal on our behalf and we remain assured. With all due respect to all those organizations who take utmost care in offering sacrifice, I would still take liberty to say that there have been misses and are reported quite often.

• Quite a few times it is seen that the animal is not 2 years old.
• It is also seen that meat is not distributed equally, meaning—meat of one specific animal should be distributed equally and only to those who participated in it; however what is generally seen that the meat of all the sacrificed animals are mixed together and then distributed as per choice—this is not correct.
• Butchers take away the skin (khaal) as a part of their compensation, this is completely unacceptable.
• It is also observed that these “counters” for collecting the contribution money are open till Asr till 3^rd day of Eid i.e. 12^th Dhul Hijjah (or Zil Hajj)—this takes away the entire credibility whether the sacrifices are being offered at all or not.

What we can do

We contribute for a part or two and rely on them to arrange for remaining 5 participants, and remain assured that everything would be alright. This is where things may go wrong.

• Talk to your 5-6 other like-minded friends / relatives who are planning to take part in mushtarakah qurbani and make sure your group own the entire animal.
• Make sure that the intention is to make sacrifice for the sake of Allah and not the intention of just obtaining the meat.
• Go to the organization well in advance and ask them the show the animal they are going to sacrifice on your behalf. Verify if the animal looks 2 years old. Get it marked.
• Insist on sacrificing the animal yourself; of-course in their / government designated area.
• Divide the meat equally among all.
• Make sure that you donate the skin to eligible people, rather than the Butcher taking it away.

What triggered this blog

This year, since we had all 7 contributions, I happened to visit the “Kamela”, the government slaughter house, for sacrificing the animal myself—and what I saw was not very convincing, though it was under observation of so-called “zimmedar” people. I realized it’s now my duty to share what I feel, that’s how this unusual blog came up.

Issues with Lenovo ThinkPad T430s

I was facing two weird issues with my laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T430s).

Hibernate:

The battery was working fine normally but when I used to hibernate it in the night / EOD, and next morning when I used to wake it up, I used to find the battery completely drained. Lenovo guy installed few softwares and update many drivers but didn’t help.

After analyzing I realized that the “Power Plan” is creating the issue. If the “Power Saver” option is selected and the laptop is hibernated, it used to resume normally; but while hibernating, if the “Green Desktop” option is selected, it used to drain out entire battery. So, if you are also facing same issue, whenever you hibernate, select “Power Saver” option then hibernate—problem solved J

Audio not working:

This was again weird: normally we keep our system on mute, using the “Mute” button for speaker on the laptop.

 Whenever we need to enable the sound, toggling that button on the board disables the soft button for speakers. This always required machine restart, which is irritating.

I found a work-around that, if you open up device manager (run “devmgmt.msc”) >> go to “Sound, video and game controllers” and disable and then enable the “Realtek High Definition Audio” driver, it will restore the sound– well, that’s it J

Feel free to leave your comments, if you have found out proper solutions for these issues.

Prayer hall (place for namaz) at Bangalore Airport

For those who don’t know, there’s a prayer hall, a place where you can offer Namaz (Salah), available at Bangalore / Kempegowda International Airport, for domestic passengers too.

Once you are done with security check-in, look for gate no. 1— there’s a seating area near this gate, you can find the prayer hall just behind those chairs. It is located at first floor (next to smoking area), above those boutiques and eateries.

For international travel, you may also look for another one which is closer to gate no. 35. Closer to Shoppers Stop

Update: Many brothers asked if there’s Friday prayer organized here. The answer is No. I checked with those who work here, and they go outside for prayers.

Also, there's no prayer hall at Arrivals. However since it takes considerable time to reach city, it is generally seen that people offer prayers in unoccupied areas before they leave for taxis. 

This is how I interview people...

Let's start with basic question. Why do we conduct interviews?

Well, multiple answers... most of us would say:

• We want to grow our team by getting few more "capable" people aboard.
• We need people who are technically sound; with good communication skills; with good attitude... etc. etc.
• Well, in a nutshell, people who can work along WITH us; and can be "contributing" members to our team.

Now let's see, how we go about interviewing people. Alright, before we even get there-- this is my personal Blog and I take complete liberty to be pretty blunt :-)  [Now, carry on]

This is based only my interaction with fellow panel members. A sizeable number of panel members, typically start with the negative mindset of "REJECTING" the candidate... That is where the game begins with "Cruel-Intentions" [bit of exaggeration in picking this word, but that's okay-- move on].
Now, all our questions are aligned to meet this "objective".

• We'll ask about some remotest, hardly used feature in a specific technology;
• We'll discuss the issues that we faced in last project and spent weeks in resolving them [and we expect him to crack it in 15 minutes. How practical :-)];
• We'll ask definitions [I am serious: I heard quite a few friends swearing about it];
• We'll also ask syntaxes... c'mon... we are in 2014, and in all practical scenarios, how many times would you like that person to work only with a notepad? Without any IDE and without internet?
• Moreover we will leave no stone unturned in letting him know what a treasure of knowledge we possess. Boss!! Who’s pitching for a job? He in your company? Or you in his company?

So in this shameless show-off, core JD (Job Description) is not just left far behind, we also don't talk about his approach towards a specific problem; or a step by step procedure. We all know that developers can always copy-paste *may refer to* the code available on net, but if there approach is not right, then it is disastrous.

Anyway, coming back to the core topic: first and foremost, the intention should be good... that is, to SELECT the candidate! When the objective is good, the questions will flow accordingly; and I personally feel that you cannot extract best out of a person if you don't make him comfortable; if the environment is not pleasant.

So, this is how I would advise [or unsolicited advice] to conduct an interview.

• Take out time to read his resume! Trust me, this will make you comfortable and avoid embarrassing situations like: Oh!! Never realized it is already written on the 1st page of your resume. Oh!! That is there in the opening para itself.
• Start with warm welcome... with a decent smile [NO! limit your imaginations, please. I am not talking about tight hug. Natural smile with a firm, professional handshake should be good enough]
• Offer apology if there's delay.
• Introduce yourself and also begin with some generic topics to break the ice. My favorite one is: Where are you staying? And I hope you didn't it difficult to reach here.
• I try making the atmosphere light; staying within the professional boundaries I crack the jokes too, if need be. However, I particularly stay away from things which might offend candidates.
• [Story time] Once a candidate told my friend that he architected a very-complex-application all alone, and started explaining it. My dear friend went ahead and quipped: “That's the reason you lost all your hair!!” [Boss... this kind of humor is completely unacceptable; YOU are representing the organization]
• [Okay, back to the core] Ask him to introduce himself. Allow him to talk about his projects and then take the discussion further.
• To make him comfortable, I generally set the scope of the interview by saying: What is it that you are really good at? We'll only talk of tools/tech which, you feel, you are good at.
• I prefer to give him a mock case-study, quite similar to what we work in day-to-day life, and then see his approach. I also give some basic hints to see if he can pick it from there... this might look a little generous but tell me, when we "actually" work on a project, who doesn't need some help?
• Not necessarily you'll always interact with candidates with high IQ. In most of the cases you'll have to deal with not-so-great answers and moreover not-so-great questions. Respond professionally, no matter how stupid, you feel, the question or the answer is.
• Many a times, the candidate is a complete misfit as per the JD, and there's no point in taking the discussion further. I trying closing it gracefully saying: Looks like there's a mismatch between the profile you have and the candidate we are looking for. Let me get back to my TA team and ask them to forward your profile to the relevant people and if there's a matching requirement they'll get back to you.

Finally, whenever in doubt, ask yourself: If you have to deliver a project working with him... will you be able to deliver? You'll get the answer.

This is by no means a guide on how-to-take interviews! This is my point of view... I'll be glad if someone gets benefited out of it, because ultimately it will benefit the organization.