Syed Tayyab Ali

PTI Karachi Jalsa - 25th December

2011-12-24T00:19:00.003-06:00

M̶A̶H̶A̶J̶I̶R̶ .. S̶I̶N̶D̶H̶I̶ .. B̶A̶L̶O̶C̶H̶I .. P̶U̶N̶J̶A̶B̶I .. P̶A̶T̶H̶A̶N̶ .

Waseem Akram on PTI Karachi Jalsa

Love U More by Jade Williams (aka Sunday Girl)

2011-11-02T22:42:00.002-05:00

The Limitless- Make It Tonight Vs Pitbull - Give Me Everything

2011-10-27T22:06:00.003-05:00

Limitless or Pitbull

The Limitless- Make It Tonight

Pitbull - Give Me Everything

Stereo Hearts ft. Adam Levine

2011-10-17T00:13:00.001-05:00

iSad

2011-10-06T19:34:00.006-05:00

Steve Jobs changed the computing experience from large computers to personal computers.
He further revolutionized the computing by changing keyboard hits to clicks and then clicks to touches.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

HTC Sensation

2011-08-20T23:25:00.001-05:00

I m writing this post from android application.

Happy Independence Day to all the Pakistanis

2011-08-14T23:25:00.002-05:00

You know you grew up in Pakisan in the ’90s if…

2011-05-25T20:06:00.000-05:00

It is interesting post which I found on Karachi Metblogs.
You know you grew up in Pakisan in the ’90s if…

Daughter and Sons of Moin Akhtar and their views on beloved father

2011-05-11T19:52:00.001-05:00

Moin Akhtar

2011-04-24T02:21:00.006-05:00

Moin Akhtar a.k.a Moin Bhai is no longer with us. He was one of the great and talented actor of Pakistan. More than that he was great man. I grew up with his work and I still remember his role in Rosy.(Rosy was an Urdu adaptation of Hollywood movie Tootsie starring Dustin Hoffman).

First performance on PTV in 1966

Impressive Words By Moin Akhtar

this blog entry will update...

Mein tou Dekhoonga by Strings

2011-04-06T00:27:00.000-05:00

Cricket World Cup 1992 Song

2011-03-30T00:06:00.002-05:00

Who Rules The World

Saqlain Mushtaq explains the Doosra

2011-03-05T01:32:00.002-06:00

Saqlain Mushtaq invented Doosra (the other one) by experimenting table tennis ball.

Here is the video about Doosra invention.

Na Kaho by Aaroh

2011-02-10T23:37:00.000-06:00

Meray Bachpan Ke Din

2011-01-25T22:30:00.000-06:00

Eik thi kahani

2010-06-24T22:27:00.000-05:00

Eik thi kahani uski behan thi mahani
Uska bhai tha basola, dono nay milker basaye teen gaon
Do ujray juraye, eik basa hi nahi
Jo basa hi nahi, us main utray teen kumhar
Do langray lolay, eik ka hath hi nahi
Jiska hath hi nahi, us nay banain teen handian
Do toti totai, eik ka tala hi nahi
Jiska tala hi nahi, us main pakaye teen chawal
Do enthay ethay, eik gala hi nahi
Jo gala hi nahi, us main utray teen mehman
Do rothay rothaye, eik mana hi nahi
Jo mana hi nahi, usko lagaye teen papoosh
Eik dain, eik bain, eik laga hi nahi

[Remedy] How to avoid Sneezing attacks

2010-06-23T00:56:00.002-05:00

Sneezing and Sore Throat always make me uncomfortable. I feel very bad during sore throat.

Good and long sleep can protect from sneezing attacks. I noticed that late hour sleeping and restlessness are major symptoms. Various studies also suggest that good sleeping habit create strong immunity system against sneezing attacks.

What do you people think about it. Lets share with me. Your comments are always welcome.

Ashton Kutcher Explains Twitter

2010-05-21T23:52:00.000-05:00

Enjoy another great video from Late Night Show. Asthon Kutcher is convincing David to accept twitter social networking....

Programming360

2010-04-23T12:56:00.002-05:00

Creating Understanding and Educating Programmers, Developers and Technical Communities, one post at a time.

Blog - Programming360

Cult of Zaid Zaman Hamid

2010-03-28T02:05:00.005-05:00

It is our right to know modern cult. Please read more about Zaid Hamid Exposition.

I will update this post time to time, and provide the link of some notable blogger, who also opposes the Zaid Hamid Cult.

Dr. Awab Alvi(a.k.a Teeth Maestro) is clearly opposed to Zaid Hamid and Yusuf Kazab.

Norman Finkelstein

2010-01-30T14:47:00.003-06:00

Michael Jackson - Remixed version of Billie Jean

2009-12-17T23:52:00.002-06:00

I love this remixed version of Billie Jean song.

Happy Eid al-Adha & Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T01:11:00.006-06:00

I would like to send my warm greeting to everyone. As 2.5 million of Muslims are in the most holiest city of Islam called Makkah and performing Hajj. This Hajj event is based on Prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son(Ishmael) for his God (Allah). Event is purely follow the fundamental right of human equality. Anyways, I want to make long story short, Eid Mubarak!

At the same time people of United States are also paying tribute to initial pilgrims or new comers to land of opportunity in 1600s.

Sesame Street turns to 40

2009-11-04T12:37:00.007-06:00

Today, Sesame Street is turning to 40. Happy Birthday ! Hurray!!

Sesame Street is one of the popular show. When I was at the age of 6 or 7, Pakistan Television (PTV) broadcast it on evening. I still remember that our siblings sit together and take cup of tea and enjoy the amazing show. Sesame Street show was not only provide entertainment, but also educate us.

Enjoy birthday video over here.

Let me know, if you have any special thought about Sesame Street.

Libra

2009-10-30T08:42:00.001-05:00

Libra, also known as "The Scales" or "Balance", is the only symbol of the zodiac that is represented by an inanimate object, rather than an animal or human.

Champions Trophy

2009-09-30T15:03:00.005-05:00

It is good news that Pakistan reached in the semi final of Champions Trophy.
Pakistan play with New Zealand at Johannesburg. It is expected that Pakistan will able to reach in Final and play with England/Australia. I hope England could beat Australia. Then Pakistan and England could play final easily. In that case Pakistan could get victory. Let see what happen in next few days... till then sign off!

Update: Pakistan was defeated by New Zealand, and as usual Australia again become champion.

President Obama Gives Ramadan Message

2009-08-21T15:36:00.006-05:00

President Obama is delivering Ramadan greeting to Muslims in United States and around the world.
My opinion on President Obama is about his business mind. He always think about $. He always encourage partnership in term of science and technology, Islamic faith based organizations, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). He know the key thing, obviously culture. He never feel any kind of un-comfort to send his message to his intended audiences(Muslims).

Anyways, I would like to give Ramadan Kareem greeting to all Muslims.

You can also watch President Obama Message on Ramadan.

Account Sign Out option on Amazon.com

2009-08-17T08:57:00.003-05:00

I want to share my feeling on Amazon.com, every time when I need to sign out from website, it take me quite long time for sign out option. Amazon people don't provide such option on every page. You need to go in account page, and then sign out.
I hate it.. What are your saying on it? Or any such experience..

[14-August-1947] Independence Day of Pakistan

2009-08-14T08:34:00.002-05:00

Enjoy very beautiful patriotic song of Pakistan, Yeh Watan Tumhara Hai.

[Book] Muslim: A Moment in Time by Sumayah Rose

2009-08-02T22:48:00.009-05:00

Here, I have a news for my blog readers. Sumayah Rose, who reverted to Islam is planning to write a book on her reversion story, she will also write the reversion stories of other new Muslims. She regularly posts video on her video blog. Recently, sister Sumayah also started her blog, you can read her post on Sumayahrose's Blog.

I want only thing from readers that they just visit on Sumayah blog. Comment on her posts. Give your ideas, so she can put those ideas on her new book.

You can read more about her Dawah Book Project.

Edit: This book is not just a convert story, but will cover overall life of a new Muslim with each and every aspect of life.

Twitter is waste of Time

2009-07-25T12:48:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned in my earlier posts that Twitter sucks.

Letterman is also thinking that Twitter is waste of time, while Kevin insist that twitter is free and don't cost. Kevin also said to him that you are not only the cheapest man in show business, you are laziest man in show business.

Googel Vs Bing

2009-07-10T09:01:00.004-05:00

We all are witness of the google's unbeatable search from decade. But now, time is changing and Microsoft is spanning its muscles. I found Bing as a good search engine and it is able to challenge Google.

Read Google vs Microsoft: A Guide to the Battle

Opera Browser 9.6

2009-06-20T13:42:00.002-05:00

Usually, I use Fire Fox for my web browsing. Today, I was searching something then I reached to opera website. I downloaded the Opera Browser 9.6. Now, I am writing my blog post from Opera web browser. Immediate features which I experienced at first run are tab browsing and speed dial. It looks cool to me. Let me know if you are using it.

My little reaction on the message of Mufti Taqi Usmani

2009-06-16T23:27:00.009-05:00

Peoples who live outside the Pakistan are also worrying about current situation of their native homeland. Most of the people are taking Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab's Message seriously. I also read the Surah Ash-Shams couple of time. Usually, it is not good practice to tell everyone, but my intentions are made everyone comfortable and encouraging.

I strongly encourage everyone to read Surah Ash-Shams according your capacity.

[Random Thought] Rule of the Game

2009-06-16T23:15:00.002-05:00

You move him from his play ground to your play ground. You move him from his battle into your battle, and play by your rules. Now, it is making more sense. It sounds more simple. Don't underestimate your power.
When you move into this playground, when you start playing by your rules. They have no defense mechanism. You leave them dumb found.

Why Twitter Sucks...

2009-06-13T00:54:00.010-05:00

Last year I sign up with Twitter service, but now I am sick and tired with Twitter. I don't know why people are crazy about it. In my opinion, it is time consuming with no sense of online security.

Anyways, you can enjoy following comic video on Twitter.

President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo, Egypt

2009-06-07T00:32:00.001-05:00

Important Message from Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab

2009-05-28T23:21:00.014-05:00

On Sunday 24th May 2009, Hazrat Maulana Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab Damatbarakatuhum said during his bayan at Darul Uloom Karachi, that one of Mufti Sahab's Buzurgs saw Prophet Muhammad(peace be upon him) in his Dream. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said in the dream, that Pakistan might soon be caught in an Azaab(punishment) from Allah(SWT). Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, in the dream, that the people of Pakistan should recite Surah Shams at least 70,000 times to avoid this Azaab(punishment).

Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab Db has asked everyone to recite Surah Shams as much as possible and also to recite Ayat e Kareema frequently.

Hazrat Mufti Sahab has also asked people to spread this msg to as many people as possible.

You can listen to the Audio file yourself.

Pakistanio Kay Naam Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab Ka Aham Peghaam (VERY IMPORTANT)

Sunday 24 May, 2009 - Bayan after Namaz e Asr at Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi by Hazrat Maulana Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani Sahab Damatbarakatuhum

Please spread this message to other Pakistanis

Jazak Allah

www.deeneislam.com

Native Deen - Not Afraid to stand Alone

2009-05-21T22:02:00.003-05:00

A new track, Not Afraid to stand Alone, from Native Deen.

Did you Know?

2009-05-17T15:32:00.003-05:00

This video is about the exponential growth of available information in our society and what might happen in the future.

Urdenglish or Minglish as an official language of blogger

2009-05-16T11:50:00.012-05:00

Cyber arena of modern world is heavily influenced by English language. English is still dominant language in the current free states of former British Empire. Urdu is national language of Pakistan, but English considered official language of Pakistan.

Satellite and Cyber world is forming new language which use the mix of Urdu and English. Some define it as Minglish or Urdenglish.

I personally think that it should be added in the list of official languages of the world with either Minglish or Urdenglish.

UTP defines it as "Minglish is a language famous with South Asians which mix Urdu or Hindi while basically speaking English on the outlook. It is a combination of Mix or Mingle with English to come up with the Portmanteau Word , Minglish"

Houston Rockets Vs Los Angeles Lakers

2009-05-14T22:57:00.007-05:00

With all typical stereotype regarding the Houston Rockets from southern state Texas, will rock on home ground.

I am being the fan of Cricket, but Basketball still offer me more obsession in the absence of it.

I am hopeful for Houston Rockets. I am thinking that Rockets will win today game. Lakers are extremely good, but still there is a chance for us. Just in case if we lose the game, we would still in good condition, at least team like Lakers struggle with us for their victory.

My new blog on Programming and Development

2009-04-18T02:34:00.012-05:00

If you remembered my blog post on New Blogs, where I was planning to make few more blogs.
One of them has now created. It is all about programming, development and software engineering. It is also my professional blog. My brand new technical blog will not only focus on programming and development, but also discuss different innovative concepts and ideas.

I was lucky that I got very unique name of it: http://programming360.blogspot.com

Now, my personal blog is http://syedtayyabali.blogspot.com

Beautiful Golden Sunset

2009-04-14T22:17:00.007-05:00

Source: Ayesha's Photo Blog

What is Islam

2009-04-11T04:21:00.007-05:00

Do you know the Muffin Man?

2009-04-07T22:05:00.002-05:00

Do you know the Muffin Man?
The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man.
Do you know the Muffin Man,
Who lives on Drury Lane?

[Sayings] Life and Death

2009-03-23T22:15:00.005-05:00

"Imagine how debased our thinking has become that we are afraid of hunger. What may happen, at most we will die." - Haji Abdulwahhab

Video Camera

2009-03-22T15:43:00.002-05:00

I am planning to buy a camcoder. What I am looking in it. It should be cost effective. Its result should be good.
Which brand of camcoder is good?
What are the key features I need to focus on?
Do you have any suggestion for me?

I will welcome your precious comments...

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-02-23T20:53:00.010-06:00

"Slumdog," which was shot in the streets and slums of Mumbai bagged eight golden statuettes in total and won Oscar race, including two award for music composer A.R. Rahamn(one for the song "Jai Ho" and the other for Best Score.)
A.R. Rahman is very famous in bollywood. He reverted to Islam from Hinduism in 1989 along with his sisters. Rasool Pookutty is also Muslim and worked as a sound engineer for slumdog, under the supervision of A.R. Rahman.

Two great Muslim child stars also contributed in the global success of movie.
The child actors, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali, 9, were flown to Los Angeles for the Oscar award ceremony. Irfan Khan, another muslim, was also acted the role of police inspector.

Here are some pictures of Azhar and Rubina. May Allah bless them, Aameen!

Obama quotes Hadith during National Prayer Breakfast

2009-02-08T03:16:00.003-06:00

President Barack Obama is telling the National Prayer Breakfast that even though faith too often has been used "as a tool to divide us from one another," there is no religion in the world that is based on hatred.

In his prepared remarks, President Obama quoted the prophetic tradition, or "hadith," which states: "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." That hadith may be found in Sahih Al-Bukhari, one of the most respected collections of the Prophet Muhammads(PBUH) statements and actions.

Here is the speech video,

A Strong Middle Class = A Strong America

2009-01-30T11:43:00.002-06:00

Today, I was reading Obama's new administrative order about middle class development.

I am happy for this news. Now, at least somebody would hear the shouted voices of middle-class. It is beginning towards prospect future of an average American.

Eid-ul-Adha Mubarak

2008-12-08T09:58:00.000-06:00

Happy Eid-ul-Adha to all brothers and sisters of Islam.

New Blogs

2008-11-30T19:12:00.001-06:00

Well, I am planing to create two more blog. This blog will remain my personal activities.
One of them would be dedicated to programming, technical post and Second would be on Islam.

But before I create them, I need your suggestions and answer of the following question.

Do I really need those two new blogs?
Can I use my present blog for technical and religious posts?

Twitter

2008-11-30T00:14:00.005-06:00

Now, I am using twitter service. It is status based service. You can follow me on twitter.

Three Things I Learned About Software WHILE NOT in University

2008-10-25T14:39:00.006-05:00

I learned some stuff in University, but here's the thing "Three Things about Software WHILE NOT in University " as well.

Things I Learned about Software in University

ITC teacher, Hilal Qureshi (Dean of CS), used to say that we (instructors) will not teach, we will just help you. (Have to have read text book before lectures)
Necessary fundamentals like data structure (specailly C++ pointers, and how to use copy constructor), object oriented programming, relational database theory, algorithm, compiler construction, and math classes. Pascal/C, C++/Java are good languages.
Computer Science generation (student) will destroyed if they don't know about latest development in CS world. (Have to have read at least one article from any research journal of CS)

Things I Learned about Software WHILE NOT in University

Software Engineering process/tools/methodologies/good architectural designs/N-Tier implementation are blessing for Software Development.
Requirements are always weird because life is also weird. Always code weird task with basic functionality, and then add features according to requirements.
Code writing is an art which become fine and tuned day by day through experience and and contact with experienced peers.

Hi guys, share your three IN and OUT about software in comment area.

Duwa - Multazim Par

2008-10-07T14:10:00.000-05:00

The following is a beautiful Hamd/Duwa of Junaid Jamshed’s Multazim Par, which is based on one of Mufti Taqi Uthmani’s beautiful poems.

Ilahi Teri Chokhat Per Bhikari Ban Ker Aya Hoon
Sarapa Faqr Hoon, Ijz-O-Nadamat Saath Laya Hoon

Bhikari Woh Ke Jis Ke Paas Jholi Hai Na Payala Hai
Bhikari Woh Jisey Hiras-O-Hawas Ne Maar Daala Hai

Mata-E-Deen-O-Danish, Nafs Ke Hathon Se Lutwa Ker
Sakoon-E-Qalb Ki Daulat Hawas Ki Bhent Charha Ker

Lutta Ker Sari Poonji Ghaflat-O-Issyan Ki Daldal Mein
Sahara Lene Aya Hoon Tere Kaabay Ke Aanchal Mein

Gunahon Ki Lipatt Sey, Kaynat-E-Qalb Afsurda
Iraaday Muzmehehal, Himmat Shikasta Hoslay Murda

Kahan Se Laoon Takat Dil Ki Sachi Tarjumani Ki
Ke Kis Jhanjhal Mein Guzri Hein Ghariyan Zindagani Ki

Khulasa Ye Ke Bass Jull Bhun Ker Apni Roo-Sayahi Sey
Sarapa Faqr Ban Ker Apni Haalat Ki Tabahi Sey

Tere Darbar Mein Laya Hoon Apni Ab Zaboon-Haali
Teri Chokhat Ke Laeq Har Amal Se Hath Hein Khali

Ye Tera Ghar Hai Ye Tere Mehr Ka Darbar Hai Maula
Sarapa Noor Hai, Ik Mohbat-E-Anwaar Hai Maula

Teri Chokhat Ke Jo Adab Hein, Main Unn Se Khali Hoon
Nahi Jis Ko Saleeqa Manganey Ka, Woh Sawali Hoon

Subah Ghalt-E-Nadamat Dil Ki Na'kas Tarjumani Per
Khudaya Reham Meri Iss Zaban-E-Ijz-Zabani Per

Ye Ankhein Khushk Hein, Ya Rabb Inhein Rona Nahi Aata
Sulagtay Daagh Hein Dil Mein Jinhein Dhona Nahi Aata

Ilahi Teri Chokhat Per Bhikari Ban Ker Aya Hoon
Sarapa Faqr Hoon, Ijz-O-Nadamat Saath Laya Hoon

Translation:

O my Lord, I come to Your door as a beggar
In complete indigence, bringing only my humility and shame.
A beggar who has neither a joli nor a begging-bowl
A beggar slain by his desires and cravings.

Having squandered the treasure of Deen and intellectat the hands of the ego;
Having sacrificed contentment of heart at the altar of lust and pleasure
Losing my wealth in the quick-sand of heedlessness and sin
I have come to seek refuge under the covering of your Kaaba.
Through the stains of sin the heart’s world is suffering
Aspirations are weak, the will broken and hope is dead.

From whence should I find the strength to express the heart truly?
For in this snare have I passed every moment of my life
In short, having been burnt at the stake of my own ill-deeds
In abject poverty due to the evil of my state

To you have I brought my ill-stricken fate
Empty-handed of any deed befitting your House.
This House of yours, which is your court of Love and Grace O Lord
Tis wholly Light and the repository of all Lights O Lord

Being completely ignorant of the manners of your Doorstep
A beggar knowing not how to beg
My tongue fails to convey my heart’s feeling
O Lord, have mercy on this wordless speech!

These eyes are dry, O Lord, knowing not how to weep
Festering spots in the heart that can’t be cleansed out.
O my Lord I have come to your door as a beggar
wholly indigent, in abject humility and full of shame.

Eid Mubarak

2008-10-07T01:50:00.002-05:00

I am really very sorry, I was quite busy. Eid Mubarak to all my friends, family and rest of the world. Eid is one of the biggest Holy festival among two. It celebarated after the month of Ramadan.

Ramadan - month of Fasting

2008-09-20T22:55:00.002-05:00

It is one of the Holy month among several. Peoples dont drink and eat any food from morning till sun set. This whole month provide good medical benefits to body. Satans are also captured by God.
Desire is one and only enemy during this month. Person who defeat desires, considered most successful.

Unique Name

2008-05-09T00:56:00.003-05:00

I am looking for a unique name. It should be related to software industry.

My experience with Safari 3.1 browser

2008-04-20T12:29:00.004-05:00

I would like to share my experience with Safari 3.1 browser. I am frequent user of IE and Fire Fox. Recently, I downloaded the latest version of safari. I found it very fast. It give me good performance than Fire Fox. I would like to recommend it to all of you.

You can download it from here.

Page Execution Lifecycle

2008-04-13T12:45:00.003-05:00

Here is the sequence of events that are raised whenever you request an ASP.NET page.

PreInit
Init
InitComplete
PreLoad
Load
LoadComplete
PreRender
PreRenderComplete
SaveStateComplete
Unload

Return to Houston, TX

2008-04-04T01:39:00.004-05:00

I'm writing this post after 28 days. Reason: I was very busy. I will also write my reason of business. Now, I'm going back to Houston (town). Here is the map of my tour. Total estimation is 1,546 mi – about 21 hours 43 mins. I will drive alone.

Surprise

2008-03-06T23:30:00.004-06:00

Here is very good surprise to all of you. For more detail read this. I will reveal fact next week. Till then you can think.

SDLC

2008-03-05T19:00:00.002-06:00

One of the main concept behind every software solutions. It uses different approach. Most of you guys know about this process but I'm interested in some unique method of it. Keep eye on my post. I will reveal facts about it.

Sneezing and Sore Throat

2008-02-23T12:17:00.003-06:00

From last 2 days I'm sick. I'm feeling temperature, sneezing and sore throat. I'm taking tylenol after each 6 hours. I can imagine the paian of others. Oh God! relieve me and others from every kind of pain. Aameen!

Random Thought

2008-02-21T22:33:00.009-06:00

"Increase your income rather than cut your expenses and expenditures.", My father said.

Hoor : a princess of paradise

2008-02-17T17:56:00.004-06:00

Can I make a wish for a Hoor in this world? Or Do I need to wait for Heaven's Hoor?

Crystal Report and BI

2008-02-17T00:33:00.011-06:00

Few days ago I wrote a blog on Business Objects as an SAP Company, and described their future plan on Crystal Report product. I emphasized on BI module integration with Crystal Report. Now, they officially published the forward-looking statements which describes it only product for report designing. Currently, It is working parallel with BEx Report Designer. But very soon, Crystal Report would be only solutions for report designing.

Here is more detail view in pictorial form,

i m very happy!

2008-02-13T18:04:00.002-06:00

I'm very happy. I'm feeling good. After a long time I am seeing so many opportunites. Who will guess my happiness??

r@nd0m th0ughT

2008-02-11T21:43:00.000-06:00

These are my top ten random thoughts.

My plans about Business Intelligence.
Community service
Interviewes
My dream state is California
Houston is the Hyderabad of United States.
I'm missing 4 years.
Hammad Bhai's thand.
What about bacha (Shaikh Mohsin Zaki).
Hey, Omair Siddiqi, whare are you?
Ali Raza Shaikh, I'm motivated by you.

BusinessObjects as an SAP Company

2008-02-11T12:12:00.000-06:00

Transforming the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses

You all heard about Crystal Reports and Business Objects. Now, It is a part of SAP AG. I'm seeing this tool as an integral and important component in SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0.

It will change whole scenario of reporting and optimize with other module of SAP.

It could encourage non-SAP companies to implement BI 7.0. Most of the old crystal report developer, who are not fimiliar with BEx Analyzer, Now easily shift to SAP reporting.

Poem : Programmer Life !

2008-02-10T22:34:00.000-06:00

Here is very interesting poem about programmer life.
You will enjoy, click here.

Visual Composer

2008-02-09T00:41:00.000-06:00

It is my first experience to deliver lecture in front of audience. My friend announced my name for Visual Composer and I was not ready. Meanwhile, I managed by myself because earlier I had done some research on it. During VC session I faced some challenging question that flunked my mind. I just enlisted the key points regarding question and then provided my analysis on it.
I know most of you don't know about Visual Composer. It is new tool for SAP Enterprise portal and used to desing interactive web pages with database connection. While, RFC and ABAP worked on backend side.

.NET Framework

2008-02-06T19:19:00.000-06:00

What do you think about .NET Framework? Is it huge monster?
What are .Net 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 ?
It is nothing but a code library in manage form and use same COM concept. One simple word, it is marketing strategy of same stuff.

Process Chain Architecture

2008-02-02T20:25:00.000-06:00

You had read my earlier post on Data Flow in SAP Netweaver BI 7.0. If you notice the diagram on the right hand side, you will find Process Chain label. Actually, It automate and schedule the whole data flow process. Following diagram show typical data load cycle. It will help to design Process Chain.

I would appreciate your say.

Data Flow in SAP NetWeaver 7.0

2008-01-26T19:21:00.000-06:00

Yes. I like this graphic. Because, it contains a lot of information. It depict overall data flow from source system to target system.

I'm waiting for your comments.

FAST-NU Alumni Network (FAN)

2008-01-04T22:50:00.000-06:00

Thursday, January 03, 2008

FAST has established its own alumni portal as FAN(FAST ALUMNI NETWORK) and can be accessed at www.nu.edu.pk/fan .

the 2.5% make the difference

2008-01-04T15:25:00.000-06:00

One of my senior share her mother-in-law thoughts about this world. You can read post from here.

Blogging in 2007

2008-01-01T22:41:00.000-06:00

I started my official blog in April 2007. I had no idea how to operate this blog and what kind of content do I need to post on it. Read my first post on blog.
Surprisingly, 13 post were pure technical. Its mean I have to show my own work.
Now, I'm planing to expose some of my personal life on this blog.
I hope that I will be publish all of happening of my life on it.

New Year 2008

2008-01-01T00:55:00.000-06:00

This year will bring happiness and joy in my life and other peoples too, Aameen.

Aggregate Improvements

2007-12-25T16:52:00.000-06:00

Are you taking full advantage of the ability to presummarize your data?
By Lawrence Corr

"The single most dramatic way to affect performance in a large data warehouse is to provide a proper set of aggregate (summary) records ... in some cases speeding queries by a factor of 100 or even 1,000. No other means exist to harvest such spectacular gains."
Those are Ralph Kimball's words from "Aggregate Navigation With (Almost) No Metadata" (DBMS magazine, August 1996). If the results are so spectacular - and I don't hear anyone arguing they aren't - why then is aggregation so underused?
First, I believe that the answer lies in our relational database culture or folklore. We were all taught not to redundantly store what could be calculated. This, by the way, is a restriction that users of multidimensional databases have happily ignored. Second, many of us are not clear on what constitutes a good set of aggregates.
One way to get more comfortable with aggregate tables, and to see how mandatory they are, is to think of them as indexes. We would not dream of implementing any significant OLTP or data warehouse database without indexes. These traditional indexes usually duplicate the information content of indexed columns, yet we don't disparage this duplication as "redundancy," because of the benefits.
Traditional indexes get us very quickly to a small number of qualifying records - enough to fill a screen in an OLTP application or satisfy an operational report. However, in the data warehouse, the vast majority of queries ask for millions of records to be summarized, in many cases causing the database to bypass indexes altogether and perform table scans. To speed up these queries, we need another kind of index that can quickly and logically get us to millions of records. I say "logically" because we need only the summarized results of these millions of fact records, as no one but the data miner wants to see the individual records.
Fresh Perspective
Once we start thinking of aggregates as summary indexes we get two tremendous benefits:
First, we stop talking about data marts as containers of only departmental, summarized data and the data warehouse as (the slow) holder of atomic, detailed transaction data. Instead, we naturally think of the summary indexes (aggregates) belonging in the same database as the low-level atomic data that is indexed. We can then reclaim the term data mart to more usefully describe the logically complete building block that we use to incrementally deliver high-performance enterprise data warehouses one subject area at a time.
Second, we become very clear about how aggregates should be used. We don't expect to tell the database to use a particular index when we construct a query, barring the occasional use of hints in the hand-tuned SQL within production systems. What we do expect is for the database optimizer to quietly choose the best combination of indexes behind the scenes. Such transparent use of indexes allows a DBA to drop unused indexes and rebuild better ones.
Ideally, aggregates should be used and administered in exactly the same way. We should not point our queries directly at aggregates. Instead, we should take advantage of aggregate navigation that automatically rewrites queries to access the best presently available aggregates. For a detailed description of how aggregate navigation might work, take a look at Ralph Kimball's aforementioned article. We can now view aggregation navigation as another form of optimization that should be offered by database query optimizers or intelligent middleware.
If we continue to view data marts as mere departmental summaries, we fall into the trap of hard-coding access to these aggregates in queries written against the specific marts; it then becomes unclear how they might drill through automatically to detail data in a different structure in a more atomic database. This obsolete take on data marts is an example of design that hasn't kept pace with technology as aggregate navigation has become more widely available.

Full Advantage
Once we start to see aggregates in their true light, we can start planning to take full advantage of them. Although aggregates can profoundly improve query performance, their advantage must be balanced against the cost of storing, building, maintaining, and administering them. The legendary retail data warehouse that collapsed under the weight of more than 2,500 aggregate tables and that took more than 24 hours to refresh is a particularly dramatic example of imbalance. Guidelines can help decide the right number of aggregates for each situation.
Set an overall aggregate storage limit. Consider setting aside a reasonable amount of storage for aggregates, increasing the overall storage by a factor of two. This limit initially might seem high, but we are willing to consider this kind of overhead for traditional indexes, so why not for summary indexes? Significantly undershooting this figure leads to more money spent on additional processing power and memory to speed up queries. Significantly overshooting it leads to diminishing returns from your storage investment because you lack the time to maintain so many additional tables. We must let the DBA provide a dynamic portfolio of aggregates that can be adjusted to match changing demands as the data warehouse matures.
Define aggregates that are small enough. Each aggregate should be 10 to 20 times smaller than the fact table or existing aggregate on which it is based, while still containing enough information to answer common queries. An aggregate's size determines its performance improvement; in the final analysis, it is the reduced I/O activity that provides the performance gain. If the aggregate table is only two or three times smaller than its base table, the limited improvement will not justify the cost of maintaining it.

Unfortunately, it is very easy to define aggregates that are much larger than you anticipate. How many times smaller would a monthly product sales aggregate be than a daily product sales fact table? If your answer is 30 times, you are forgiven but you are likely to be wrong. The reason is "sparsity failure." Is every product sold every day? Probably not. Is every product sold at least once a month? Much more likely (or we stop offering that product), in which case the monthly aggregate may not even be 10 times smaller.
Spread aggregates. Our goal should be to accelerate a broad range of queries, including a few that will be 1,000 times faster. To meet this goal we need to spread our aggregates. We don't just want 10 aggregates that offer a 10-fold improvement; we need a few relatively large aggregate tables that offer 10X improvement and a larger number of small tables that are 100 or 1,000 times faster. It is useful to plot the performance improvement factors of your aggregates against the amount of space used. To visualize aggregate spread, I use an Excel pivot table, so I can see the aggregate space used for the whole warehouse or drill down on specific fact tables. (See Figure.)

This example shows a poor spread - with less than half the allocated space for aggregates in use - and of that, far too much taken by aggregates that are less than 10 times faster (smaller) than the base fact tables. I need to work on increasing the two green slices.
Think of aggregates as indexes. Planning a good spread helps enormously, but in many instances aggregates are still not as easy to define or maintain as traditional indexes, even with the latest DBMS features. The good news is that if you have adopted dimensional models for your atomic detail data, it becomes easier to recognize the opportunities to use aggregates and to then describe them.

Reference: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/011004/415warehouse1_2.jhtml;jsessionid=YWWFNKZ4LUVBEQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN
Guest columnist Lawrence Corr [lcorr@decisionone.co.uk] designs large data warehouses through DecisionOne Consulting, based in the United Kingdom.

Eid-ul-Adha Mubarak

2007-12-21T11:43:00.000-06:00

Google Maps Street View

2007-11-23T18:44:00.000-06:00

Street View is a new feature of Google Maps that allows you to quickly and easily view and navigate high-resolution, 360 degree street level images of various cities in the US

Which SAP Skill is More in Demand, BW/BI or ABAP?

2007-11-19T13:00:00.000-06:00

June 4th, 2007

This is not even a close question at this point. BW/BI is much more in demand than ABAP. In this comparision, BW/BI is the DVD player, and ABAP is the VHS video tape.That may not be totally fair, I guess, because SAP is including full support for ABAP in the NetWeaver 2004s technology platform. Essentially SAP has figured out how to “wrap” ABAP in web-based integration protocols, and that has extended ABAP’s lifespan dramatically while keeping ABAP more in the spotlight than it would have been.

So if that’s true, then where do I get off saying that BW/BI is in much more demand than ABAP? To understand the consulting market, we have to look at every source of supply for a particular skill set. Yes, there are a lot of ABAP projects out there, but remember, ABAP is the most commonly outsourced SAP project area.
The thing about offshoring is that it increases the overall supply of consultants, since the pool for consultants is effectively globalized. Demand for ABAP then goes down. It may be unfair to say that ABAP is “dead.” A better way of putting it is that ABAP is globalized. That’s what’s hurting ABAP rates the most. Yes, there is room on project sites for top notch ABAP-Java “hybrid” programmers who can really make the latest SAP tools hum. But for the most part, ABAP demand is flat and so are rates.
BI, on the other hand, is one of the hottest areas of SAP. What are the reasons for this? First, the usage of BW is more and more common across SAP projects, so the demand is high. When we consider that as of NetWeaver 2004s, SAP BI (the new name for BW) ships with the core NetWeaver platform, usage of BI is just going to increase. So, the demand for BI is high and looks to remain so as the upgrade waves continue.
And here’s the other thing: the supply of Business Intelligence (BI) consultants is not what it needs to be. As consultants have learned the hard way, most companies won’t hire you unless you have worked in the latest releases. And there aren’t that many consultants who have been through a BI 7.0 implementation yet. So anyone who can get the BI 7.0 skills first should have an edge - especially if they have a deep BW background.
The ideal way to succeed in SAP is always to combine a deeper expertise with relevant, project-proven skills in something hot and new (such as BI). I’m not as skeptical on the future of ABAP as some, but when ABAP goes head-to-head with BI, there’s no competition at all. BI is without question the better career path.

Reference: http://www.jonerp.com/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,20/p,5/

SAP BW/BI Extended Star Schema

2007-11-06T19:34:00.000-06:00

Could you believe how SAP use the surrogate key concept in its Extended Star Schema Model.
Before, I explain this concept. I would like to say some basic design information about model.
This model have only one Fact Table and and few dimensions (maximum 16, among them 3 dimensions are predefined.).

Each dimension has one or more characteristics(It could be simple object or Master Data (attribute, text, hierarchy)). But these characteristic is referenced by SID.
The characteristic values are not stored in the dimension tables. A numerical SID key is generated for each characteristic. This foreign key replaces the characteristic as the component of the dimension table.
SID table is separetly maintained and primary key of this table comes from characteristic table.
Its mean SID take cares to each characteristic, and if any characteristic contain master data then those characteristics could be independently used by any dimension to avoid replication of master data. This is the great advantage of SID in Extended Star Schema.

Fact Table contain key figures (fact, numerical values) and dimensions ids as foreign key.

And fact table and dimension are connected relationally, and form Info Cube.

I think, this is very interesting post and I m waiting for your question.

OpenSocial - A continuous Rocking on Orkut

2007-11-06T18:51:00.000-06:00

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Server optional

OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google's gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.

References:
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
http://opensocialapis.blogspot.com/2007/11/campfire-one-taking-social-applications.html
http://opensocialapis.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-is-better-when-its-social.html

Orkut start to compete Facebook

2007-11-06T08:31:00.000-06:00

Due to recent popularity of facebook features, lot of orkut users started facebook network for their social networking, Google open its door for 3rd party developers to add new features and enhancements.

Reference: http://en.blog.orkut.com/2007/11/orkut-opens-to-developers.html

Tagged

2007-11-05T18:53:00.000-06:00

1.Name one person that made you laugh last night?
Hammad

2.What are you doing at 8:00?
8:00 AM – I was in the office.

3.What were you doing 30 minutes ago?
Reading guide of SAP BW

4. What happened to you in 2006?
Completed my BS (CS) from FAST, started working for Education Service Center Region 4 as Database Developer.

5. What was the last thing you said out loud?
“abay ullu”

6. How many beverages did you have today?
Water

7. What color is your hairbrush?
Brown

8. What was the last thing you paid for?
Subway Vegi Sandwich

9. Where were you last night?
Bear Creek Mosque

10. What color is your front door?
Silver

12. What’s the weather like today?
Clear 70°F

13. What’s the best ice-cream flavor?
Strawberry

14. What excites you?
All things in right direction

15. Do you want to cut your hair?
No, they already shorten.

16. Are you over the age of 25?
No

17. Do you talk a lot?
Listen a lot

18. Do you watch the O.C.?
No

19. Do you know anyone named Steven?
Yes, a funny character from JBJ.

20. Do you make up your own words?
I do, ……… button :)

21. Are you a jealous person?
No, to some extent.

22. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘A’:
Ali

23. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘K’:
Kamran

24. Who’s the first person on your received call list?
My Friend

25. What does the last text message you received say?
“ASAK, brother I'm leaving now. Let's talk”

26. Do you chew on your straw?
No

27. Do you have curly hair?
No

28. Where’s the next place you’re going to?
Home

29. Who’s the rudest person in your life?
Me

30. What was the last thing you ate?
Banana

31. Will you get married in the future?
As soon as possible, if my mother find girl, then YES

32. What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the past 2 weeks?
None.

34. When was the last time you did the dishes?
Today evening

35. Are you currently depressed?
Yes

36. Did you cry today?
No

If you’re reading this then you’re tagged, let me know after writing your post.

1973 Constitution held in abeyance

2007-11-03T19:29:00.000-05:00

Musharraf imposes ‘emergency plus’; PCO promulgated; parliament, provincial assemblies to continue functioning; superior judiciary’s powers clipped

By Shakil Shaikh

ISLAMABAD: Chief of Army Staff General Pervez Musharraf on Saturday imposed emergency throughout Pakistan, promulgated the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) by holding the Constitution in abeyance, and placed the country under one-man rule.

In an extraordinary move, which many termed supra-constitutional and equated with martial law, Army Chief General Musharraf promulgated a proclamation of emergency and in pursuance of it issued a PCO holding the Constitution in abeyance.

The army chief took the step to arrest the worsening law and order situation and intensification of violence to unprecedented level which posed a grave threat to the life and property of citizens. He also referred to other grounds justifying such extraordinary measures by pointing to the “working of some members of the judiciary at cross purposes with the executive and the legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism, interference by some members of the judiciary in government policy”, adversely affecting the economic growth in particular, “overstepping” of some judges of their limits of judicial authority, making the Supreme Judicial Council entirely irrelevant, and “humiliating treatment” meted to government officials by some members of the judiciary on a routine basis.

Despite this proclamation and the order, the Majlis-e-Shoora (parliament) and the provincial assemblies shall continue to function.

The entire nation received this development as a bombshell as it shocked everyone that instead of the Constitution the country would be governed by President General Pervez Musharraf.

This seemingly supra-constitutional step was taken at a time when the 11-member Supreme Court bench was to announce its verdict on the nomination of President General Pervez Musharraf as candidate for re-election in a week’s time.

The PCO has taken away powers of the superior judiciary — the Supreme Court, the Federal Shariat Court and the High Courts — and any tribunal or other authority to call in question the order of PCO, the Proclamation of Emergency, the Oath of Office (Judges) Order 2007 or any order made in pursuance thereof.

“No judgment, decree, writ, order or process whatsoever shall be made or issued by any court or tribunal against the president or the prime minister or any authority designated by the president,” said Section 3(2) of the PCO, though the seven-member Supreme Court bench issued a two-page counter order restraining the COAS, corps commanders, staff officers and all concerned civil and military authorities from acting under the PCO. They were also restrained from undertaking any such action, which was contrary to the independence of the judiciary.

With the Islamic provisions of the Constitution to remain in force, the fundamental rights as enshrined in Article 9 (security of person), 10 (safeguard as to arrest and detention), 15 (freedom of movement, etc.), 16 (freedom of assembly), 17 (freedom of association), 19 (freedom of speech, etc.) and 25 (equality of citizens) shall remain suspended.

Enforcing the emergency at once, the army chief ordered and proclaimed that the “Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan shall remain in abeyance”. It put Pakistan under one-man rule to govern it through the PCO.

The PCO’s Section 1(3) says: “Subject to clause (1) above and the Oath of Office (Judges) Order, 2007, all courts in existence immediately before the commencement of this Order shall continue to function and to exercise their respective powers and jurisdiction, provided that the Supreme Court or a High Court or any other court shall not have the power to make any order against the president or the prime minister or any person exercising powers or jurisdiction under their authority.”

According to the proclamation of emergency, “the situation has been reviewed at meetings with the prime minister, the governors of the four provinces, and with the chairman joint chiefs of staff committee, chiefs of the armed forces, the vice chief of army staff and the corps commanders”.

Reference: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=10974

The Origins of Pattern Theory

2007-08-23T19:40:00.000-05:00

the Future of the Theory,
And The Generation of a Living World
by
Christopher Alexander
The following presentation was recorded live in San Jose, California, October of 1996, at The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA).

Introduction by Jim Coplien
Once in a great while, a great idea makes it across the boundary of one discipline to take root in another. The adoption of Christopher Alexander’s patterns by the software community is one such event. Alexander both commands respect and inspires controversy in his own discipline; he is the author of several books with long-running publication records, the first recipient of the AIA Gold Medal for Research, a member of the Swedish Royal Academy since 1980, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of dozens of awards and honors including the Best Building in Japan award in 1985, and the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Award. It is odd that his ideas should have found a home in software, a discipline that deals not with timbers and tiles but with pure thought stuff, and with ephemeral and weightless products called programs. The software community embraced the pattern vision for its relevance to problems that had long plagued software design in general and object-oriented design in particular. Focusing on objects had caused us to loose the system perspective. Preoccupation with design method had caused us to loose the human perspective. The curious parallels between Alexander’s world of buildings and our world of software construction helped the ideas to take root and thrive in grass-roots programming communities world-wide. The pattern discipline has become one of the most widely applied and important ideas of the past decade in software architecture and design.
We can trace the path of influence through three primary sources. The first is the Design Patterns book by Gamma et al., a book that helped people conceptualize beyond individual design relationships to grasp important structure of micro-architectures, and to value proven solution strategies over raw innovation. The second was the series of pattern conferences (PLoPs) that provided a forum for pattern enthusiasts to support each other in creating a new body of software literature. The PLoPs were also a forum where the community could struggle with growing from individual patterns to pattern languages that engender systems thinking.
But growth into the deeper and more fundamental aspects of patterns has been slow and difficult. And even as we struggle with the growth from patterns to pattern languages, there is a level of the pattern discipline that the software community has yet scarcely touched: the moral imperative to build whole systems that contribute powerfully to the quality of life, as we recognize and rise to the responsibility that accompanies our position of influence in the world. And that leads us to the third inspiration for the direction of patterns in our discipline: Christopher Alexander himself, who directly engaged our community in this keynote speech at OOPSLA ‘96. The timing and audience of the venue afforded Alexander the chance to reflect on his own work and on how the object-oriented programming community had both hit and missed the mark in adopting and adapting his ideas to software. As such, the speech was a landmark event that raised the bar for patterns advocates, for object-oriented programmers, and for software practitioners everywhere. Beyond that, this speech has timeless relevance to any engineering, scientific, or professional endeavor.
* * *
… I'd like you all to very heartily welcome Professor Alexander as he addresses us.
Keynote Address
by

Christopher Alexander
"Thank you very much. This is a pretty strange situation I find myself in. I hope you sympathize with me. I'm addressing a room full of people, a whole football field full of people. I don't know hardly anything about what all of you do. So – please be nice to me.
My association with you -- if I can call it that -- began, oh it must have been two or three years ago. I began getting calls from computer people. Then somebody, a computer scientist, called me and said that there were a group of people here in Silicon Valley that would pay $3000 to have dinner with me. I thought -- what is this? It took me some time to find out. I didn't really understand what had been going on, and that my work had somehow been useful to computer science. Only now I'm now beginning to understand a little bit more of what you are doing in your field and the way in which it comes, in part, from some of the things that I've done.
When I faced the question of addressing you, I wondered what on earth I should talk about. And, earlier, a few months ago I faced a similar thing when I was asked to write an introduction to Richard Gabriel's book (Patterns Of Software) and again the question for me was what in the world should I write about? What is there that I could say that would be of interest? And, because I, in a way, myself started out in computers many years ago in the late '50's, this question became quite fascinating to me and quite absorbing. But still, I wasn’t given much to go on. Take Jim for example. When he invited me, he was very friendly and I said to him - look what do you want me to talk about and so forth. He said “Oh that doesn't matter. Just talk about anything. Because it's you, and because of the history of this pattern problem, people will find it interesting. But still I thought, What should I really talk about?
What is the connection between what I am doing in the field of architecture and what you are doing in computer science and trying to do in the new field of software design? That is the question I must talk about. What I'll do, in the time I’ve got here, is to tell you where my thoughts went as I stepped through the invention of the pattern concept, and where I have gone since then. In addition, I shall reach a conclusion which may surprise you. As I've been preparing for this speech during the last few months. I ended up with something that may startle you, and you may find quite strange. But, I'm not going to tell you what that is just yet.
In effect, I'm just going to do three things.
(A) Pattern Theory. I'm going to talk first of all about patterns and pattern languages, what I did about that, a few little points about problems we encountered, why we did it, how we did it, and so forth. That is a historical survey referring back to the late 60s and early 70s.
(B) The Nature of Order. Then, I'm going to summarize the theoretical framework which has evolved out of the pattern work: a framework which is about to be published in a series of four books collectively called The Nature Of Order, four books that will be put out by Oxford University Press in the year 2000. That framework is a fairly radical departure from what the pattern language in the earlier theories contained, although it is consistent with them. That'll be the second thing. And, I'll just try and sketch that out in the hope that there might be some carryover or you might possibly find it interesting -- even though of course I will have no way to apply this to your field directly when I tell you about it. However, there are undoubtedly abundant connections between the two fields that can be drawn.
(C ). What the future holds in store: The Generativity Problem and the Generation of a Living World. At the time I wrote the introduction for Richard Gabriel's book, that was really as far as I had gotten in trying to trace the connection between my work and your work in the field of computer science: I tell you what I'm doing, and maybe some of you folks might find it interesting or be able to extrapolate. But I couldn't really find that sufficient to be satisfying. I felt that there is some more significant connection between your field and mine. Or at least that there perhaps is. And that finally brought me to the third point.
The third thing I'll talk about is how I now perceive that connection. I suppose that some of you know what I do for a living. You know I'm an architect. All of my life I've spent trying to learn how to produce living structure in the world. That means towns, streets, buildings, rooms, gardens, places which are themselves living or alive. My assumption here – a sad one -- is that for the most part what we have been doing for ourselves, at least during the last fifty years or so, perhaps starting somewhere around World War II, has virtually no ability to produce that kind of living structure in the world. This living structure which is needed to sustain us and nurture us and which did exist to some degree in the traditional societies and in rural communities and in early urban settlements has disappeared. It is drastically gone. We don’t know how to create it or generate it any more.
Of course, especially for architects, that is a debatable matter. Some professional architects might say, What are you talking about? What we are doing is absolutely fine, the buildings we are building today are excellent, very good, no problem!! I suppose the architect of this particular huge and nauseating conference hall we are in, here in San Jose, where we can hardly understand each other, would say that, too. But, actually, it isn't fine. It's a hell of a problem. It's a serious problem. It affects every man, woman, and child on Earth. We are so ignorant about how to do this, to make living structure on Earth, it is lamentable. And it is very, very serious, becomes more serious every day, because the population of the Earth is growing, and the Earth is being damaged more and more – and with the damage to our towns and buildings, we too are being damaged.
The fact that we don't know, really do not know what we're doing, and the fact that the built world is not nurturing is a very, very drastic matter for all of us. This is my concern. That is what I try to deal with every day.

A. Pattern theory
The idea that materialized in the published pattern language was first of all, of course, intended just to get a handle on some of the physical structures that make the environment nurturing for human beings. And, secondly, it was done in a way that would allow this to happen on a really large scale. And, what I mean by that is that we wanted to generate the environment indirectly, just as biological organisms are generated, indirectly, by a genetic code. Architects themselves build a very, very small part of the world. Most of the physical world is built by just all kinds of people. It is built by developers, it is built by do-it-yourselvers in Latin America. It is built by hotel chains, by railroad companies, etc., etc. How could one possibly get a hold of all the massive amount of construction that is taking place on Earth and, somehow, make it well, that means let it be generated in a good fashion and a living fashion. This decision to use a genetic approach was not only because of the scale problem. It was important from the beginning, because one of the characteristics of any good environment is that every part of it is extremely highly adapted to its particularities. That local adaptation can happen successfully only if people (who are locally knowledgeable) do it for themselves. In traditional society where lay people either built or laid out their own houses, their own streets, and so on, the adaptation was natural. It occurred successfully because it was in the hands of the people that were directly using the buildings and streets. So, with the help of the shared pattern languages which existed in traditional society, people were able to generate a complete living structure.
In our own time, the production of environment has gone out of the hands of people who use the environment. So, one of the efforts of the pattern language was not merely to try and identify structural features which would make the environment positive or nurturing, but also to do it in a fashion which could be in everybody's hands, so that the whole thing would effectively then generate itself.
What, now, of my evaluation of what you are doing with patterns in computer science. (Bear in mind, as you hear my comments, that they need to be taken with a grain of salt; I'm ignorant; I'm not in your field.) When I look at the object-oriented work on patterns that I've seen, I see the format of a pattern (context, problem, solution, and so forth). It is a nice and useful format. It allows you to write down good ideas about software design in a way that can be discussed, shared, modified, and so forth. So, it is a really useful vehicle of communication. And, I think that insofar as patterns have become useful tools in the design of software, it helps the task of programming in that way. It is a nice, neat format and that is fine.
However, that is not all that pattern languages are supposed to do. The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.
I don't know whether these features of pattern language have yet been translated into your discipline. Take the moral component, for example. In the architectural pattern language there is, at root, behind the whole thing, a constant preoccupation with the question, Under what circumstances is the environment good? In architecture that means something. It means something important and vital that goes, ultimately, to the nature of human life. Of course, there are plenty of people who will debate whether the question is objective. Some architects are still going around saying, It is all a matter of opinion. But that is a dying breed. The moral preoccupation with the need for a good environment, and for the living structure of built environment, and the objective nature of that question, is largely accepted. I do not know whether that sort of moral component exists in computer science, or in software engineering, or in the way in which you do things.
I understand that the software patterns, insofar as they refer to objects and programs and so on, can make a program better. That isn't the same thing, because in that sentence “better” could mean merely technically efficient, not actually “good.” Again, if I'm translating from my experience, I would ask that the use of pattern language in software has the tendency to make the program or the thing that is being created is morally profound -- actually has the capacity to play a more significant role in human life. A deeper role in human life. Will it actually make human life better as a result of its injection into a software system? Now, I don't pretend that all the patterns that my colleagues and I wrote down in A Pattern Language are like that. Some of them are profound, and some of them are less so. But, at least it was the constant attempt behind our work. That is what we were after. I don't know whether you, ladies and gentlemen, the members of the software community, are also after that. I have no idea. I haven't heard a whole lot about that. So, I have no idea whether the search for something that helps human life is a formal part of what you are searching for. Or are you primarily searching for - what should I call it - good technical performance? This seems to me a very, very vital issue.
People have asked me what kind of a process was involved in creating the architectural pattern language? One of the things we looked for was a profound impact on human life. We were able to judge patterns, and tried to judge them, according to the extent that when present in the environment we were confident that they really do make people more whole in themselves. Of course you may ask, How in the hell did you test for that? But that is too long a story which I cannot cover in this speech. The important point is that such testing was going on continuously.
A second, almost more important thing was going on. Whenever we had a language under development we always asked ourselves, To what extent does that language generate (hence produce) entities (buildings, rooms, groups of buildings, neighborhoods, etc.) that are whole and coherent? In other words, suppose I write a pattern language for a campus, and, I think I've got some sort of a language that looks as though it will actually do the job. To test it, I let it loose by giving it to people and asking them (in simulated form) to generate different campuses with this language. Let’s see what the resulting campuses look like. And we test it ourselves in the same way, by using it to generate designs, rapidly, and only for the purpose of testing the results for their coherence. As it turns out, many of the languages that one creates do not generate coherent designs or objects. That is, they contain a bunch of good ideas. One can use these good ideas to (sort of) put something together from them, and a few fragmentary structural ideas will be present in the result. But that does not yet mean that the campuses created (in the above example) are coherent, well-formed, campuses? We were always looking for the capacity of a pattern language to generate coherence, and that was the most vital test used, again and again, during the process of creating a language. The language was always seen as a whole. We were looking for the extent to which, as a whole, a pattern language would produce a coherent entity.
Have you done that in software pattern theory? Have you asked whether a particular system of patterns, taken as a system, will generate a coherent computer program? If so, I have not yet heard about that.. But, the point is that is what we were looking for all the time. Again, I have no idea to what extent that is true for you and whether you are looking for the same thing when you work on software patterns.
So far, as a lay person trying to read some of the works that have been published by you in this field, it looks to me more as though mainly the pattern concept, for you, is an inspiring format that is a good way of exchanging fragmentary, atomic, ideas about programming. Indeed, as I understand it, that part is working very well. But these other two dimensions, (1) the moral capacity to produce a living structure and (2) the generativity of the thing, its capability of producing coherent wholes -- I haven't seen very much evidence of those two things in software pattern theory. Are these your shortcomings? Or is it just because I don't know how to read the literature?
So much for my short historical survey of what we have been doing with pattern languages during the last three decades.

B. The Nature of Order
The pattern theory was followed by a deeper theory. I began to notice, by the late 70s, some weaknesses in our work with patterns and the pattern languages.
(1) Under the circumstances that I was most interested, when we and others were using these patterns to generate buildings, the buildings generated were okay, but not profound. There was often a lot of nice stuff going on in them. People were improving certain features, perhaps the daylight was improved, or perhaps the entrance of a building was improved or the characteristics of a street might be improved or an alcove in a bedroom might make it more intimate or something like this. So, there were various isolated features of buildings that were improvements in building performance. The existence of the patterns also allowed people to have better control over their own environment. It succeeded in embodying that control in the real buildings that they made with the pattern material. That was good. But, nevertheless, were the buildings profound structures? To what extent did they really have coherent living structure as wholes. By the late 70s, I had begun to see many buildings that were being made in the world when the patterns were applied. I was not happy with what I saw. It seemed to me that we had fallen far short of the mark that I had intended. But, I also realized that whatever was going wrong wasn't going to be corrected by writing a few more patterns or making the patterns a little bit better. There seemed to be something more fundamental that was missing from the pattern language. So, I started looking for what that thing was.
(2) At about the same time I began to notice a deeper level of structure and a small number (fifteen) of geometric properties that appeared to exist recursively in space whenever buildings had life. These fifteen properties seemed to define a more fundamental kind of stuff; similar to the patterns we had defined earlier, but more condensed, more essential -- some kind of stuff that all good patterns were made of.
These were simple ideas. I can't take you through all 15 but they areproperties like "boundaries" which will not only delineate but connect theinside to the outside, or "positive space," as when you look at a Matissecutout and see that the space between the colored paper is not amorphous but also has form. Anyway I began to notice that particular individual patterns seemed really to come always from the 15 deep properties that kept occurring again and again.
(3)
Another thing that was happening around this time (late 70s early 80s), my colleagues and I began toughening up our ability to discriminate empirically between living structure and not living structure. During the years of doing the pattern language we'd really been intuitive about that and not very rigorous. We were just trying to get patterns written and learning to apply them without asking rigorously if they made buildings with more life in them. But, at this point (about 1980), we felt it was pretty important to get a fix on the difference between a chair which has a more living structure and a chair that has a less living structure. And the same for a building or a room or for a main street in a town. If you want to say this one has life, this one has less life, how do you say that with any degree of empirical certainty? Can it, in fact, be made a relatively objective matter which people can agree about if they perform the same experiments.
Indeed, we did find such experimental techniques. The use of these techniques greatly sharpened our ability to distinguish what was really going on and what structures then correlated with the presence of life in a bit of the environment? The use of these techniques also helped us to refine the fifteen deep geometric properties, as necessary correlates of all life in designed structures. These fifteen properties turned out to be a substrate of all patterns, and began showing up more and more clearly in our work as the main correlates of living structure in places, buildings, things, space and so forth.
[Side-remark: I need to say a word about the existence of objective criteria and experimental methods. In my discipline there are tremendous vested interest. Many architects claim, and want to claim, that in architecture there is no such thing as truth; that is because everyone wants to do their own stupid thing and get away with it. So, depending on who you talk to, they'd say well this stuff Alexander's been discovering is a lot of nonsense. There is no such thing as objectivity about life or quality. this and so forth. But, I am here today, and they are not here, so I'm telling you that there is objectivity. They are simply mistaken. Let's suppose that we’ve got a sidewalk somewhere on a bit of a street and we’ve got another sidewalk somewhere else on another bit of a street. We are trying to come to conclusions about which one has more life, which one is a more living structure.
My belief, by the way, when I began trying to find these experimental methods, always was that there really is such a thing, and that actually everybody knows it, but that it has been suppressed. That is because of the world view that we have and the way of looking at things and the nervousness about intellectual rigor...that people of our era have. Although they have these judgments within them, somehow are separated from their ability to make these judgments correctly. In other words, what I'm trying to say is....and this is just some sort of instinct that I had going in was that this was something childish really that everybody knows. But, for some reason, we are so messed up that we can't see it. So these experiments were, in effect, designed to penetrate that end result through.
The essence of the experiments is that you take the two things you are trying to compare and ask, for each one, is my wholeness increasing in the presence of this object? How about in the presence of this one? Is it increasing more or less? You might say this is a strange question; What if the answer is Don't know or They don't have any effect on me? Perfectly reasonable! That can happen. But the resolution is easy. What turns out to happen is that if you say to a person “Yes, it is a difficult question, it might even sound a bit nutty. But anyway, please humor me and just answer the question.” Then it turns out that there is quite a striking statistical agreement, 80-90%, very strong, as strong a level of agreement as one gets in any experiments in social science. The really strange part is that the things which are then measured by experiments of that sort will not.....you say it sort of.... all of these different experiments have to do with something like that. Do you feel more whole? Do you feel more alive in the presence of this thing? Do you feel that this one is more of a picture of your own true self than this thing you know whatever? It is always looking at two entities of some kind and comparing them as to which one has more life. It appears to be a rank bit of subjectivity. In other words, it sounds like well okay, fine. I mean maybe this is the truth about human beings in the sense about our coordination or about our perception or about our feelings. But that is not necessarily the same as saying living structure as such is a real thing that resides in those objects. But anyway, to cut a long story short. It turns out that these kind of measurements do correlate with real structural features in the thing and with the presence of life in the thing measured by other methods, so that it isn't just some sort of subjected I groove to this, and I don't groove to that and so on. But it is a way of measuring a real deep condition in the particular things that are being compared or looked at.]
What is odd about this, and in a way as our work went further and further, it kept bringing big functional and practical matters back to the human person. So, in other words, you take a parking lot. There are lots of technical problems in the parking lot. You have got to make it work. Cars have got to be able to move around. You know there are security problems. There are in-and-out problems. There are maintenance problems. As a whole, the way a parking lot works is essentially a technical thing. The question is, Is it working well or not well? And yet the functionality of the thing measured by these various ordinary bits of technical discussion correlates with the condition measured by the question, Do I feel myself to be more whole? It works well when you are getting a positive answer to this question. Thus there is a hint of a profound connection between the nature of matter and behavior of material systems, and the human person. Even in engineering design, as for instance where one considers the structural behavior of a bridge. Or the patterns of movement in something where a lot of cars are moving about, and there are complicated questions about how they move and so forth. In these examples very, very practical matters are nevertheless correlated with these apparently personal questions about whether the thing has life and whether it promotes life in me and you.
So there began developing, in my mind, a view of structure which, at the same time that it is objective and is about the behavior of material systems in the world, is somehow at the same time coming home more and more and more, all the time, into the person. The life that is actually in the thing is correlated in some peculiar fashion with the condition of wholeness in ourselves when we are in the presence of that thing. The comparable view, in software design, would tell you that a program which is objectively profound (elegant, efficient, effective and good as a program) would be the one which generates the most profound feeling of wholeness in an observer who looks at the code.
The important thing is that -- in architecture -- this is not merely a hunch but a testable empirical result. It means that the objects that are most profound functionally (when I say objects, I mean buildings, streets, door knobs, shelf, room, dome, bridge)… the objects that are most profound functionally are the ones which also promote the greatest feeling in us. This is a very peculiar thing. At first it sounds like rank sentimentality; and you just say, It can't be true. Why should it be true? And yet, it's a discovery which accords very well with the era that we live in. Because we are living in a period where that is perhaps the most noticeable and most problematic feature of our world is that feeling has been removed from it. When I make a joke in reference to this horrible meeting hall that we are in, maybe I am beating a dead horse, but I mean really, the problem is that whatever feeling there is in here is obviously not a profound positive feeling. And this is what we have come to expect in our modern world. The failure of that profound feeling to exist in the world around us at small scales, large scales, middle scales, here, there and everywhere, is tragic. It's the thing that we miss. Of course, people have been writing about this for many decades. Writers have, of course, made this known. We all know it. The difficulty is that people don't seem to know what to do about it. If anything, at the moment, (I'm talking now again about my own discipline, of architecture) the problem is getting worse. It's not getting better. The world that is being built is more and more unfeeling. We are in a sense more lost, more fragmented, more sort of wandering about in this lonely desert than before.
If there really is a way of looking at structures which both deals with real functional structure in the ordinary technical and practical sense, and simultaneously has its roots in human feeling, there will be a very huge and positive step. In particular, the fifteen properties that I have mentioned provide us the ability to be precise about the nature of living structure, in just precisely such a way that it is connected, not only to all mechanical function, but also to the depths of human feeling. That is why it is an important structure.
At the root of these fifteen properties, there appears to be a recursive structure based on repeated appearances of a single type of entity -- the primitive element of all wholeness. These entities are what I call “centers”. All wholeness is built from centers, and centers are recursively defined in terms of other centers. Centers have life, or not, in different degree, according to the degree that the centers are built from other centers using the fifteen geometric relationships which I have identified. This scheme, which is at the foundation of all the work in The Nature of Order, provides a complete and coherent picture of all living structure.
Stretching a bit, I think there may even be a little bit of a connection between the geometric centers which appear as the building blocks of all life in buildings, and the software entities that you call “objects.” Centers are field-like structures that appear in some region of space. They don't have sharp boundaries, but they are the focal organizing entities that one perceives at the core of all pattern, all structure, and all wholeness.
Everything is made of these kind of centers. The centers are more living or less living. And, that's essentially the only important property that they have. And the question of whether a center is more living or less living depends recursively on the amount of livingness in the other centers that it is made of, because each living center is always (and can only be defined as) a structure of other centers. This sort of recursion is familiar in computer science. But whether the structure I have discovered and reported in The Nature of Order will translate in any interesting ways to things that you do, I don't know. (It is true, I suppose that all software is made of objects, and nothing but objects. Could it be said that some objects have more life, and others less? If so, there would be a profound correspondence). What is true, I can tell you from my own experiences in these last years, is that when one has this view of things in architecture, it becomes enormously easier to produce living structure in buildings. It has immediate practical usefulness. If you start understanding everything in terms of these living centers, and you recognize the recursion that makes a center, living as it is, dependent on the other centers that it is made of and the other larger centers in which it is embedded, suddenly you begin to get a view of things which almost by itself starts leading you towards the production of more successful and more living buildings.
This insight goes far beyond the power of the pattern language. Although the patterns define relations which might be regarded as specific instances of the recursive interaction of centers, the overall view of centers gives more comprehensive and more powerful results. It directly effects your ability to make good architecture, in a way that pattern language was not yet able to do by itself. This is a much more powerful and beautiful view than what's embedded in the pattern languages, because when one has constructed this view.... you say well what is a pattern really? Then it turns out that patterns are merely a few of the structural invariants that appear within these centers under very, very particular conditions. So they're certainly interesting and important, but they don't have the same depth or the same universal character as these other structures that I'm speaking about now.
Now we come to the crunch. Once we have the view of wholeness and centers, linked by the fifteen deep properties, we have a general view of the type of whole which must occur as the end product of any successful design process. And because we have a view of it as a whole, we are now able to understand what kinds of overall process can generate good structure, and which cannot. This is the most significant aspect of The Nature Of Order, and of the new results I am presenting to you in this Part B.
It means that we can characterize not merely the structure of things which are well-designed, but we can characterize the path that is capable of leading to a good structure. In effect, we can specify the difference between a good path and a bad path, or between a good process and a bad process.
In terms of software, what this means is that it is possible, in principle, to say what kind of step-by-step process can produce good code, and which ones cannot. Or, more dramatically stated, we can, in principle, specify a type of process which will always generate good code.
Of course we have not actually done this for the production of code. We have done it for design and construction of buildings. But it is possible. This is, if you like, the holy grail of software design -- specification of the kinds of process which will (always) generate good, efficient, economical, beautiful, and profound, code.
What are the details? I can tell you in the case of buildings. If one has identified living structure with a reasonable level of objectivity, and if one has identified this recursive center-based structure as being the key to the whole thing, that's all very well. But then of course the practical question arises, How the hell do you produce this living structure? What do you have to do to actually produce it? You can clumsily try to find your way towards it in a particular case. But, in general, what are the rules of its production? The answer is fascinating. It turns out that these living structures can only be produced by an unfolding wholeness. That it, there is a condition in which you have space in a certain state. You operate on it through things that I have come to call "structure-preserving transformations,” maintaining the whole at each step, but gradually introducing differentiations one after the other. And if these transformations are truly structure-preserving and structure-enhancing, then you will come out at the end with living structure. Just think of an acorn becoming an oak. The end result is very different from the start point but happens in a smooth unfolding way in which each step clearly emanates from the previous one.
Very abstract, I know, but the punchline is the following. That is what happens in all the living structures we think of as nature. When you analyze carefully just what's going on and how things are happening in the natural world, this sort of structure preserving transformation tends to be what's going on most of the time. That is why, when nature is left alone, most of the time living structure is produced. However, in the approaches that we currently have to the creation of the built world and the environment; (planning design, construction, and so forth), that is simply not what is happening. The process of design that we currently recognize as normal is one where the architect or somebody else, is sort of moving stuff around, tryingto get into some kind of good configuration. Effectively this means searching in an almost random way in configuration space, and never homing in on the good structure. That is why the present-day structure of cities, buildings, conventional halls, and houses, are so often lifeless. The process by which they are generated are -- in principle -- not life creating or life seeking.
If a process doesn’t go in the structure-preserving way that I'm talking about, the result is never living structure.
In effect you can write theorems which say, Under the kind of conditions which occur in the construction industry today, you cannot produce living structure. So, the poor son-of-bitches designed and built this convention center were stuck with something lifeless, because they were embedded in the wrong kind of process. There was nothing they could do. about it. It was part of the process by which this kind of entity is produced in today's society. As things stand, it cannot come out with a living structure at the end. That is a shattering discovery.
A very large part of my work and that of my colleagues in the last years has been one of trying to define social processes, economic processes, administrative and management processes which are of such a nature that they permit true structure-preserving unfolding to occur in society, thus to allow the generation and production of living structure. This is what I do most of the time is that I'm trying to do real projects of one sort oranother where I'm introducing this unfolding process and trying to make it work under the conditions available to us in 1996. The social and technical shifts involved are large. The shifts in thought, in practice, in administration of money, in contracts, all sorts of real nitty-gritty things that one would much rather not mess with because they are so hard, you must mess with because it is those processes which are undermining the ability for our whole contemporary social process to be structure preserving unfolding. If life is to be created, these processes must change.
That is the end of my part B.

C. What the future holds in store: The Generativity Problem and the Generation of a Living World
Let us now consider a problem of magnitude. There are some two billion buildings in the world, about 2 x 109 buildings. Differently stated, the total amount of built stuff is something on the order of about 1012, 1013 square feet of construction. The total amount of built stuff in Manhattan, is somewhere on the order of 109 square feet. If you include all the exterior space in the world as well, the part of the outdoors that is somehow having to do with human beings and is part of our immediate world, gardens and streets and agriculture and all of that, then -- for the world -- we're somewhere up around 1014 square feet of constructed designed space.
How are we going to deal with all that? How do we create, or generate, living order in 1014 square feet of construction? What process could possibly accomplish this within, say, one generation -- the next 25 years. The effort of architects, no matter how hard we try and no matter how much good will we put in, it does not begin to scratch the surface of that task. All the architects in the world, together, working as they do today, cannot design more than say 1010 square feet per year -- a tiny, tiny percentage of what is needed -- far too small to be effective.
I have, for many years, thought that this could only be solved by a genetic approach -- an approach where deep structure, spread through society, creates and generates the right sort of structure, very much as genetic code creates and generates organisms and ecological systems -- indirectly, by letting loose life creating process.
That is what I still believe. But, today, I am convinced that the equivalent of the genes that act in organisms will have to be -- or at least can be -- software packages, acting in society. If these software packages are life creating, and accepted, and widely enough spread throughout the world, there is a chance we might get a grip on this problem: provided that the software is freeing, liberating, allows each person individual control and decision making power to do the right thing, and to create living structure, locally, wherever they are. This task must fall, inevitably, at least in part, on your shoulders.
The people who were kind enough to invite me to give this speech originally assured me that if I just explained the intellectual history (as I have done so far), there will be those among you who may find it interesting, that somehow they might latch on to it or know how to translate it into something that's more directly relevant to your own concerns. That is after all, just what you have done in the last five years with pattern languages. There clearly is a useful parallelism between our two disciplines.
However, after receiving this invitation, and contemplating the questions I could raise, I started dwelling on a conviction that was growing in me. This conviction led me to feel that there was a deeper coincidence in what you are doing in software design and what I am doing in architectural design. I began to feel that there is a deeper connection, which suggests that the two disciplines might merge in a way that would benefit us both – you in your discipline and me in my discipline. In the next few minutes I will try to sketch the nature of this connection.
As an architect, of course like anybody concerned with these things, I have a passion to try and make these things happen. It's not enough just to say well living structure isn't being produced. I have to ask myself...the question I do ask myself...the question all the time is, OK, well, what are we going to do about it? Here we've got this poor Earth sinking under the weight of all this dross. And, what are we actually going to do? I do a 10 million dollar project here and I do a 10 million dollar project there. But that accomplishes virtually nothing. Life is short. A few of those projects....and what is it? It is an atom in the proverbial bucket. It's nothing. All of the efforts of the architectural brethren, even if I can persuade them of the truth of these things. It is still a drop in the bucket. That by itself, will not affect more than a thousandth part, perhaps no more than a millionth part, of the structure covering the built part of the Earth.
When I started out twenty-five, thirty, years ago, I really thought that I would be able to influence the world very fast. Especially when I got to the pattern language. I thought, boy, I've really done it. This is going to work. No problem. The patterns are self evident and true. They will spread. And, as a result, the world of buildings will get better. Hey presto.
But it hasn’t yet worked out like that. In practical terms, so far, I've done almost nothing. The pattern language, how much has it influenced the environment of the world. A few thousand buildings have been influenced. There are a few people that have lived a few things and been influenced. But, meanwhile, we've still got this gigantic amount of construction out there which is defining the world that all of us live in that is still going on in exactly the same fashion. I believe that the cultural process of influence is simply too slow to be able to take care of this problem. In other words, the process by which one discusses these kind of things, shares ideas about them, gradually influences the way people are thinking so that gradually larger and larger percentages of bits of the environment might turn into living structure. That is a very slow process, and I don't think it is fast enough to do the job. And yet, as an architect, I view myself as responsible for that. Not of course, alone, but as a professional, that is my job is to try to understand how we can get hold of that – the entire structure of built environment, all over Earth -- and do something about it to make it better.
For several years I have been asking myself how this effort can be expanded, and strengthened. It must be our aim to make the world’s environment a living structure, within one or two generations. How, realistically, can be that be done?
So, today, I am standing before you, thinking to myself...right, I'm now talking to people who are in a way the core of the computer revolution. You probably realize, I know you must realize the extent to which the world is gradually now being shaped more and more and more, indirectly, by the efforts of all of you who are sitting in this room -- because it is you who control the function of computers and their programs. It is the programs that control the shape of manufacturing, the shape of the transportation industries, construction management, diagnosis in medicine, printing and publishing. You almost can't name a facet of the world which is not already, to some very strong degree, under the influence of the programs that are being written to manage and control those entities or those operations. And this is still in its infancy. How long has this been really going on? Not long. About 10 or 15 years, though of course, the preparation for it goes a lot further back than that. But really this is quite new. It is going to look a whole lot different, even more powerful in its degree of influence.
And yet, as a professional body, I don't think that you are yet fully aware of it. I'm probably speaking out of turn here but, you know, I've thumbed through the proceedings of this conference, for instance. Jim was kind enough to show it to me yesterday. I don't really see discussion about What, collectively, are computer scientists supposed to be doing with all these programs. How are they supposed to help the Earth? And, yet, the capacity to do that is sitting right here in this room. That is an amazing situation. You have so much power.… but that means that you also have an enormous responsibility.
Is there a chance you might take on the responsibility for influencing, shaping, and changing the environment. Interestingly, I think many of you do also have the inclination. When I had the pleasure of beginning to meet some of the various folks who introduced themselves to me over the last year and a half from the software community, I began to be fascinated by the number of them that were closet architects. Greg Bryant who worked on the 486 chip, is really interested in ecology and is an editor of Rain, an ecological magazine. Bill Joy is writing about workstations in the concrete physical sense that is familiar as an architect. John Gage, chief scientific officer of Sun, is interested in neighborhood schools, and in the process by which people can repair their own physical neighborhoods by working together. Jim Coplien is dealing with social structures in human organizations. Mark Sewell from IBM wants to build houses. Dick Gabriel has as his deepest passion, the writing of poetry: another kind of art. I don't have a long enough list. But my hunch is that an amazing number of you who got into this pattern game in the pursuit of your normal professional endeavors are also very profoundly interested in the real physical world, and its shape and its design, its deep feeling, its impact on human life. That is, the world in which we inhabit. It is therefore conceivable that you, collectively, could change the very drastic situation of a destroyed environment that I described earlier.
Let me just go back to the structure-preserving unfolding process that I described in Part B of this talk. I talked about this structure-preserving unfolding processes.
When I first constructed the pattern language, it was based on certain generative schemes that exist in traditional cultures. These generative schemes are sets of instructions which, carried out sequentially, will allow a person or a group of people to create a coherent artifact, beautifully and simply. The number of steps vary: there may be as few as a half a dozen steps, or as many as 20 or 50. When the generative scheme is carried out, the results are always different, because the generative scheme, always generates structure that starts with the existing context, and creates things which relate directly and specifically to that context. Thus the beautiful organic variety which was commonplace in traditional society, could exist because these generative schemes were used by thousands of different people, and allowed people to create houses, or rooms, or windows, unique to their circumstances.
When I first hit on the idea of creating, and using, pattern languages, I was inspired by these traditional generative schemes, and thought that I was essentially copying them. However, in the huge effort of creating a believable, new, pattern language, in the 1960’s the effort went entirely onto the individual patterns (their formulation ,verification etc.), and the idea that they were to be used sequentially, one after the other, dropped into the background. In fact, both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way Of Building say that the pattern language is to be used sequentially. In practice, however, this feature dropped out of site, and was not emphasized in use. As a result the beautiful efficacy of traditional languages and their simple and beautiful sequential nature, disappeared from view.
In our most recent work, that has changed. We are now focusing on pattern languages which are truly generative. That means, they are sequences of instructions which allow a person to make a complete, coherent building, by following the steps of the generative scheme. We have done this for houses, for public buildings, for office furniture layout and so forth. It works. And it is powerful.
Compared to the pattern language that you've seen in A Pattern Language these generative schemes are much more like what you call code. They are generative processes which are defined by sets of instructions that produce or generate designs. They are, in fact, systems of instructions which allow unfolding to occur in space in just the way that I was talking about a minute ago (Part B), and are therefore more capable of producing living structure. The published pattern language by comparison is static. The new generative languages are dynamic and, like software, interact with context, to allow people to generate an infinite variety of possible results – but, in this case, with a built-in guarantee of well-formed results. The design that is created or generated is guaranteed, ahead of time, to be coherent, useful, and to have living structure.
You know the pattern language (the one for architecture) consists of these objects which are interesting and which you somehow try to put together. But it's possible to have processes or procedures which will go much further, actually generate living structure. Because of the complexity of the situation in the world, and because of the way software is going, software that is designed to do this could very rapidly take the world by storm.
Why would computer scientists and software engineers suddenly become responsible for the form and structure of the built environment? Is that not the province of architects, planners, agricultural experts, forestry people, and civil engineers? It ought to be. But the members of these professions are not taking responsibility for the generative approach to living structure – and so cannot produce it. And, as far as I can see, they do not see it coming, and are not preparing themselves to take it on, mentally or professionally. Therefore it will fall to someone else to do it instead.
In history, this kind of unexpected switch is a common thing. When a paradigm change occurs, in a discipline, it is not always the members of the old profession, who take it to the next stage. In the history of the development in technical change, very often the people responsible for certain specialty are then followed by a technical innovation. And then the people who become responsible for the field after the technical innovation are a completely different group of people. When the automobile came along, the people who built the buggies for the horse and buggy did not then turn into Henry Ford. Henry Ford knew nothing about horse buggies. The people who were building automobiles came from left field, and then took over -- and the horse and buggy died off.
It is conceivable to imagine a future in which this problem of generating the living structure in the world is something that you – computer scientists – might explicitly recognize as part of your responsibility. Such a change, representing a kind of a level of marriage between you and me, is of an entirely different sort from the one that I was invited by Jim Coplien to contemplate. I was brought here to answer the question “Okay Chris, what new things have you been doing that might spin off and be useful to us in our neck of the woods? Parts A and B of this talk were about that. But this Part C is about something quite different. I want you to help me. I want you to realize that that problem of generating living structure is not being handled well by architectural planners or developers or construction people now, and the Earth is suffering because of it. I believe there may be no way that they are ever going to actually be able to do it, because the methods they use are not capable of it. For you it is different. The idea of generative process is natural to you. It forms the core of the computer science field. The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with everyday in the normal course of software design are perfectly designed to do this. So, if only you have the interest, you do have the capacity and you do have the means.
I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in this room have begun to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that is true. But I was told there is an undercurrent of unease as to where all this -- software design -- is going. There is a huge expanding phenomenon of programming as an art, and yet an uneasiness about where it is all headed? What is it going to do?
My comment on this? Please forgive me, I'm going to be very direct and blunt for a horrible second. It could be thought that the technical way in which you currently look at programming is almost as if you were willing to be “guns for hire.” In other words, you are the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. “Tell us what to do daddy, and we'll do it.” That is the worm in the apple.
What I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that. It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.
This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world -- and above all the built structure of the world -- alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure. I realize that you may be surprised by my conclusion. This is not what I am, technically, supposed to have been talking about to you. Or you may say, Well, great idea, but we're not interested. I hope that is not your reaction. I hope that all of you, as members of a great profession of the future, will decide to help me, and to help yourselves, by taking part in this enormous world-wide effort. I do think you are capable of it. And I do not think any other professional body has quite the ability, or the natural opportunity for influence, to do this job as it must be done.
-o0o-
I've enjoyed talking to you very much. Thank you for listening to me and I would be most keen to listen to your ideas on these topics.

URL: http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm

Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video

2007-08-16T12:57:00.000-05:00

Help us imagine how an email message travels around the world. Take a look at the collaborative video we started, and then film what happens next. We'll rotate a selection of the clips we receive on this page, and add the best ones to the video. The final video will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.

FAST-NU Convocation 2007

2007-06-18T08:08:00.000-05:00

Convocation has been scheduled to be held on Saturday, July 21, 2007 at Main Campus St-4, Sector 17-D, Shah Latif Town National Highway, Karachi. (Dawn: Sunday June 17, 2007)

A Thousand Splendid Suns

2007-06-13T08:33:00.000-05:00

After best book seller award, Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseni, A Thousand Splendid Suns.
You can get more information about book on this site. http://www.khaledhosseini.com

Hamaqtain (99 Not Out) By Shafiq-ur-Rehman:

2007-05-27T19:17:00.000-05:00

I like following paragraph from Hamaqtain (Urdu Adab Tanz-o-Mazah)

Deer tak yehi hota rahaaur woh dono aik dosray ko wahin thernay kay liye kehtay rahy. Aik gain buddy kay samnay say guzri, laikin uss nay hath tak nahi hilaya. Maloom howa kay janab larkiyon ko dekh rahy thay. Muft ki boundary hogaye. Qalandar sahib nay aik gaind howa main utha di. Shaitan(Rufi) ussay bakhoobi catch kar saktay thay, lainkn unhon nay gaind ki taraf dekha tak nahi. Kuch dair kay bad maloom howa kay siway bowler aur batsman kay, har eik rangeen libasoon aur haseen chehron ko dekh raha tha. Yahan tak kay jab Qalandar sahib nay wicket kay samnay tang aradi aur main nay chilla kar appeal ki to umpire sahib chonk paray. Jaisay jaag kar bolay-ain? Phir aahista aahista say kenay lagy- Bahi maaf karna, mera dihan kissi aur taraf tha- Halankay yeh umpire achay khasay qabar raseedah buzarg thay- Yon maloom horaha tha kay ham saari omer bowling kartay rahain gay aur qalandar sahib aur chnnion miyan sari omer khalty rahian gay-

I m new user for blog

2007-04-24T12:17:00.000-05:00

Well this is my first official blog for my site.
I dont know about this. How to operate this site.
Let see, what happen in next few months.