Just one hack, the wordpress setup said that “newuser@localhost” was an invalid email id… so I edited the \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and added “127.0.0.1 localhost.com” and used newuser@localhost.com as the email id.

I am doing this to setup an intranet blog for the managers and team leads to post messages of general interest everyone to follow up on… should allow employees to follow what the big guys are doing… when they have the time… and should get the big guys things down in writing. (hmm… maybe I should remove the delete_post links!)

technorati tags:wordpress, xampp, hack, intranet

Blogged with Flock

I find this concept intriguing.  There is a lot of coordination.  There is filtering of providers.  The cost per hour shown to buyer is loaded (as in: inclusive of odesk.com margin).  I have seen a bit of their demo… I will use this site when I offshore my work to US!

technorati tags:offshoring, distributed-teams

Blogged with Flock

The feature that no advertising syndicate offers for the simple thought that no one would want to use it… a search of their advertisers…  based on the slogans they had pasted in the banner.

You know, the ads that pop up on google when you search are different all the time.  If a particular ad caught my eye, I may not see it again…

Maybe that would be one thing to do… and there are these other things no one is thinking of doing… browser history and browser cache are grossly underestimated as USPs.  If I had a browser (or if I could hack firefox) which stored every page I visited, neatly tagged with date and time, and everything on that page, as I saw it… it would be great for me.  If the page had client side javascript which fetched ads from the site, that part should be replaced by the actual ad that I saw at that time.  Effectively all javascript is disabled… so are all http refresh tags…  It is of great utility for me, who like most people, surfs like crazy, with multiple instances of browsers and multiple tabs within browsers, and who clicks from link to link.

Google Desktop search does something like this… maybe I could use that because it also becomes browser independent…

Another thing I feel is a long overdue is to be able to take a webpage snapshot…. that is save the entire webpage as one tall jpeg (or whatever).  There are again tools that do this… but I am saying that this should be part of the browser offering (or a plugin for the browser).  I will go off to addons.firefox site to search for something like this, but I just don’t know what to call it.  Webshot?  Save webpage as image?  Html to Jpeg??  What key words describe this concept?

Which is what brings us to another point.  Concept Search instead of key word search.  You know, if you take any book lying near you… preferably some well know one which has sold a huge number of copies….  pickup any page in random and type in about ten successive words from any point… surrounded by double quotes, into google… you are likely to see a link an ebook for that… a downloadable pdf… maybe you will see a pdf which would be a sample chapter made available by the publisher.  That is wonderful… but that is the problem!  I dont know the keywords…  If I dont know the keywords… how then do I search?  I know the concept… I want to convert the page I am seeing in the browser to a image… not a screenshot… because that would capture only the visible page.  Maybe I should call this a pageshot… How do I search for this on google, or on addons.firefox?

Punishment is a deterrent.  If a pickpocket has to spend a night in jail, or two weeks, that is not a strong enough deterrent.

But I can see we are going to have a tough time answering tough questions.  So let me sum it up for ya.

What is a crime?  Or what should constitute a crime?  So far, there have been many reasons to call something a crime.  For example, smuggling is a crime, dealing drugs is a crime… whereas they are actually not.  These acts are classified as crimes because someone thought so.  As far as I can say, if you are doing what you will, you are doing no crime.  However, if part of your “doing what you will” involves stopping others from doin g what they will, that is a crime.

Wonderful.  We are already coming up with holes in that one.  What if the other person wants to kick me… if I stop him, i am a criminal?  Lets keep this real.

First off, there is the tenet of freedom.  Absolute freedom.  Nothing you can do can every be a crime.  If you say, what about murder?  I ask you back: what about murder?  or better still: what is murder?  Taking somebodys life?  Do you think that murder, but the definition of taking someones life should be a crime?  Well, I would agree only if it is an absolute crime.  An absolute crime is if it applies to everyone… every single one.  There is no “license to kill”… a soldier will also be guilty of this crime.  No one can kill.

So if someone is coming to kill me, I can’t kill him first?  Well… you should… if you want to stay alive!  So, even though you murder, you are not committing a crime.  Self defence is usually the excuse for having killed someone.  And a soldier is doing self-defence on behalf of us.  So… whether it is in self defense or not, taking someones life, is a crime… or not?  If you want to make it an absolute crime, I am game… but I am sure that there are exceptions to when murder is not a crime… or should not be a crime.

(contd…)

What I say is, when the processing power increases, the software fills up to slow down the experience.  The speed with which Lotus 1-2-3 ran on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 was more or less the similar to the speed with which an excel 2003 runs on a 2 Ghz p-iv.  granted excel does a lot more than lotus… but how much of what excel is doing is spreadsheet related and how much is look-and-feel related?  it has a lot of new functions, it sorts in many different languages, its charts are sexier… but it is slow.

You know, it may just be me, but installing office 2003 seems to even slow down the startup time and overall responsiveness… even when not using office.

So, poor me has managed to get a 256kbps connection at home, which means from some mirrors I can download as fast as 25KB a second, sometimes faster.  But the time taken for the download remains the same as it was when I was on a dial-up, getting somewhere around 3 KB a second.  huh?  the file sizes have gone up.  It used to take an hour for me to download then, it takes an hour for me to download now.  I used to consider downloading a 1 MB file a challange then, I consider 100 MB a challange now.  But the time it takes for me to get my work done remains the same.

So… my equation.  B0/S0-B1/S1=0  The ratio between bandwidth and size of transfer, previously and currently is identical.  This means time taken for transfer remains identical.

also, P0/C0-P1/C1 = 0.  Similarly for processing speed and consumption of processing by applications.

cheers

The biggest reason i have for calming down is that if it were not for rule breakers, we would be lucky to be still living in caves… or we would be extinct.  the other side of the “creative” coin is “destructive”… something must go for something new to take its place.  moving ahead means leaving things behind. 

I get a slight relapse of these frustrations because these people are breaking the wrong rules, or in the wrong way.

That is quickly countered with the understanding that these people are experimenting and an experiment can fail.

I swing between tolerance and fundamentalism.

This image is from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/mo/mof/mofeo.mspx

How do they do this?  Do they have some secret tool? Is it word? visio? what??

 Anyway, I am making a much more finer point.  The way we write a loop.

for(i=0;i<10;i++)

This manner of writing the loop is popular because this is the way it is taught.  I have always found it irritating because this is a half-open interval.  I would prefer to write it as a closed interval, like this:

for(i=0;i<=9;i++)

Big deal, you say?  What difference does it make, you ask?  They both work the same way, you exclaim!  That just goes to show how difficult it would be to reach quality in the code.  At the level of pseudocode, such things should be standardized ( or recommended)..

when writing a counting loop, always use closed intervals.

This should apply whether you are writing in java, c, python, ruby, whatever. 

Instead we have people talking endlessly about how to name variables and do indentation.  These things do not affect quality, and dont need to be done manually.

How many times do you find yourself frustrated at finding information you need… and wondering why these guys even bother to have a website?

How do you decide what to put up on your website?  You should decided that by looking at your phone history.  What kind of people call you and what do they call about?  This matrix of types of callers and types of questions should give the designer an idea on how to build your site.

So far, webdesign or any kind of interface design on the PC is a new thing and designers are more obsessed with menus, typography, colors and css2 then with anything to do with organising information.