Kulpid Manak- One of the prominent punjabi singer died on Wednesday. He was 62. He sang more than 300 hundred songs and was followed by many top singers in punjabi music industry. His last album was with Jazzy B in which he sang 6 duet songs with Jazzy B and his son Yudveer Manak. Whole punjabi music industry came to the funeral to pay tribute to the legendy singer.  His contribution to punjabi music industry will always be remembered.

Its decembers and christmas is around the conner and so is the Christmas Parade. Christmas parade marks the arrival of Santa Clause. Parade is practiced in many countries around the world and includes christmas theme dresses, groups dancing and singing christmas songs. In some cities like vancouver, parade includes a special train which goes around the city collection donations for the Vancouver food bank and other charity organizations.

Batman- The Dark Knight Rises is the third and the final movie to be released in December 2012. Because of the success of The Dark Knight, expectations from this movie are high. In the  third Instalment, we will see Batman fighting against Bane and Catwoman played by Tom Hardy and Anna Hathaway.  The Shooting for the film is done and is now in editing phase and soon there will be a new trailer of the movie which would be played in IMAX theaters during the showtime of Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol Movie.

On sunday, we witnessed the grey cup 2011 between BC Lions and Winnipeg Blue Bombers at BC Place.  It was an outstanding match placed in front of sold out crowd of 52,000 people. BC Lions eon the game with a score of 34-23.  

After the Thanks Giving celebrations comes the Black Friday - day when all the retailers sell their products at less price encouraging people to send more money of different items. Black Friday is similar to Boxing day which is celebrated in Canada after the Christmas eve. Most of the shops open around 4 AM so that they can attend more customers and can sell more products. People would start lining up in front of their favourite stores at night in order to get their desired products before it ran out of stock.

Samsung Galaxy S II , is the only competitive cellphone to Apple's iPhone. It is Android based and has a bigger screen then iPhone 4S. Also Galaxy S II has a 8 Mega pixel camera but is not as good as iPhone 4S Camera. 4S has used Hi-Tech optics which fed in more light to the camera for better picture quality. There is still a long way for cellphone manufacturing companies to compete with Apple who still rules the market with their innovative iPhone.

Sidney Crosby returned to NHL after 11 months after suffering from a concussion because of the hit in the pervious season. Playing his first game after 11 months, he showed no sign of fatigue and scored two goals and earned two assists against New York Islanders. Thats was a wonderful comeback for a player who is considered as the best player in NHL at the moment.

Canadian football league (CFL) is the NFL version of football which is placed on Canadian soil. The Current CFL season is about to close with the final game being played between BC Lions and Winnipeg Bombers in Vancouver, the home town of BC Lions. The favourable team to win this game is BC lions as they have won 11 of their last 12 games.

Ultimate fighting championship (UFC) is the best mixed martial art championship where the top ranked fighters fight against each other and is hosted worldwide in different countries. The latest UFC fight, UFC 139 was held in California with Shogun and Henderson fight was the main event. That fight resulted in one of the best fights in the history of UFC where the fight lasted for all 5 rounds.

Library is the best place if someone wants to have an effective study session. It provides an noiseless environment where an individual can focus on the their study. also library is a big collection of books but now days with the advancement in technology the collection can be a print, audio or a video material. It can be owned by a private company or can be public mainly maintained by city government.

Coca cola and WWF launched "Arctic Home" campaign to raise awareness and raise funds to support WWF effort to protect the polar beer's habitat. Polar beers are at the verge to be declared as endangered species. Global warming has caused the change in temp which have caused the polar ice to melt, effecting largely the natural habitat of polar beers. 

Got an assignment today to make a vdu screen for utility developed for internal use. So I developed a vdu screen which serves as an menu for the utility and wrote an RPG program to call the programs referred in the menu and do some validation checking on the input given by the user. The program is working fine now and is ready to be released in the environment 

Had my lunch at Al- watan restaurant near Fraser street and 42 street. It is a nice pakistani cuisine and had all kind of non-veg items. I liked the chicken seek kabab  and if you go on friday they have special chicken briyani which taste awesome. I would highly recommend that place if one likes to taste pasiktani cuisine.

just installed the Viper in my car. With Viper, I can lock, unlock and even start my car with my Iphone which has Viper application installed in it. Its a wonderful app specially for winters where you can easily start your car before driving it which warms up the engine without waiting for it to warm up while sitting in the car.

Heading towards the Hardeest semester of my program. Planning to take CMPT 300,CMPT 320 and CMPT 470. My only concern is the CMPT 300 as it is the toughest course to take and require programming in C language. Have to brush up my skills before going into the class.

Watched UFC on FOX channel yesterday. They decided not to put the main event on pay preview just to promote the UFC. Unfortunately, the fight lasted only for 1 minute and 5 seconds. One can see the frustration in the eyes of the UFC president at the post game interviews.

The new generation of cars has started to erupt. Recently, Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were launched in Canada. I  haven't got a change to take a ride in these cars but the reviews are that they don't go that faster but are prefect for driving it in city. In years to come we will witness more of electric and hybrid cars and the petrol cars will be disappearing fast.

Apple Iphone 4s best feature Siri had an outrage on Thursday for four hours. I never noticed that until I read the article on CNN. Siri is still a beta version and may develop over time. We can hope apple to come up with a solution soon.

International Students have to change their off campus work permit to a post- graduation work permit after the completion of their studies. The duration of the post-graduation work permit depends on the duration of the study. If a student has studies for 2 years continuously, then he is eligible to get a work permit of 2 to 3 years.

Cancuks are performing really bad this season. They have lost six out of fifteen games and are at the bottom of the north- western conference. They would have to get back in form if they want to seek a place in the playoffs.

Did my presentation on the utility I built for the batch processing. It was a great opportunity for me to present my work before the senior management and get their reviews on my work. The presentation went well and resulted in a healthy discussions at the end.

Just heared about an entry level certification for project management called CAPM- Certified Assosiate in Project Management. It requires you to have high achool diploma and atleast 1500 hours of work experience or 23 houra of Project Management study. CAPM is a great oppertunity for university grad students who like project management but does not have adiquate work experinece to do PMP.

I am planning to buy a Mac book but still confused wether IShiuld go for Mac book Pro or Mac Air. Both seems to be equal in configuration and price with the only exception of hard drive memory. For Mac Pro its 256 GB whereas for Air its only 128 GB. But with iCloud, we don't have to have that much memory as we can still store our data on a remote server or can opt to have an external hard drive.

Just done with writting code for the batch jobs extraction in RPG. It is bit painfull to use RPG as there are so many pre-defined data structures we have to use and more over every loop has an indicator assosiated with it. So in your code you will find more indicators which comes in handy if you know where and how to use them.

RPG Programming language

Programming in RPGLE is quite intense. It is basically an old programming language which is still used in banks for printing reports and accessing the customer information. Machines like IBM iSeries uses AS400 framework which uses RPG 4 for programming purposes.

I learned about Code Page today at my co-op work place. A code Page consists of a table of characters and each character is assigned a unique value in that Code Page. These values are used to store the characters in the computer and are further used for encoding purposes. Code pages were initially developed by IBM and each language has its own code page. IBM iSeries machine used in banking purposes still uses these code pages to implement second language option for specific countries in the MCH cluster.

It was really shocking to hear that Steve Jobs died today. He was an incredible man who built the apple empire of its own and was manage to lead the company to new heights. His contribution to the computer world would always be remembered. May his soul rest in peace.