Umar F Khawaja

How can Pakistan be reimagined?

What are the motivating thoughts? * The average urbanization in OECD countries is 67%. * Pakistan's population is 220 million in 2020. * By the time the ideas in this note come to fruition if it is put in practice, Pakistan's population might be 300 million in 2040. * A

How-To

How to Setup a Blog with Ghost

Create a user for the blog to run under $ adduser --shell /bin/bash --gecos 'Blog' blog Deploy the blog to its own folder under /var/www $ cd $ wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip $ unzip -q ghost-latest.zip -d blog/ && rm ghost-latest.zip $ mv blog/ /var/

How-To

How to Configure OWIN Self-hosted Web Application with SSL

An SSL certificate is required to allow a web application to serve HTTPS traffic. Usually, a self-signed SSL certificate is enough to implement HTTPS. Modern browsers present an error, pointing out to the user that the SSL certificate is not trusted (because it is not in the set of trusted

How-To

How to Write Unicode Characters on a Mac

A friend of mine posted a method to write glyphs for ﷺ and ﷻ in Microsoft Word, on Facebook recently. Inspired by that, I investigated how to do the same on a Windows or Mac OS X machine in general. These two glyphs correspond to Unicode characters U+FDFA and

How-To

How to Create a Custom Configuration Section for .NET Configuration File

.NET configuration files are a versatile way for .NET applications to store configuration information. They are hierarchical and use XML syntax. More importantly, they are also extensible fairly easily. You can read more about them on MSDN [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1xtk877y(v=vs.110).aspx]. Now, by

How-To

How to Add or Modify Windows Environment Variables

Go to System and Security under Control Panel. Select System under System and Security. Click on Advanced system settings available on the left panel; a dialog box called System Properties will pop up. Step 1Click on Environment Variables... available on the bottom-right corner of the dialog box; a dialog box

How-To

How to Add NuGet Packages to a Visual Studio Solution

There's 2 ways you can add NuGet packages to a Visual Studio solution. Add a package via the Package Manager Console Start the Package Manager Console within your solution. What you get is a PowerShell [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell] console window inside the IDE. It

How-To

How to Create a Windows Service Using TopShelf, Ninject, OWIN and ASP.NET Web API

Recently, at work, I had to put together a Windows service application. The knowledge regarding putting all these components together is quite scattered, so I thought I'd collect my findings in a single article for future reference both for others as well as myself. I was inspired to