The Prime Minister’s safety claims the life of a citizen
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/PMs-security-claims-patients-life/articleshow/5194254.cms
That, my friends, is how India works. The most important people (VIPs/VVIPs) trample over the “aam admi” (common man). This, in the name of security, is the highlight of the irritation that one faces in India. Why do we have anyone designated a VIP anyway? Why are they important? Why do they get the whole road blocked everytime they move around? Why should the common man have to put up with this nonsense?
If these VIPs have to wade through the traffic, I will bet that the traffic situation in India will get better. It is only because they don’t have to face the music (pun intended) of the honking horns that they are apathetic toward many of the other problems.
Indian Independence
Independence – I don’t understand what it means. Did we gain independence from the British only to be enslaved by our own? Take a look at how corrupt the govt is in all aspects. The Right to Information act has so many holes now that you could call it the only measurable transparent law in the constitution. I also wonder if we gained independence too easily. I am not sure what true independence would mean. Compared to say, Pakistan or even Somalia, I know that we are better off in India. Compared to Sweden or South Korea we are worse off.
One possible reason for this is the population. Everyone is too busy with their life that they don’t want to think about the person next to them. I will give you one example – traffic in Hyd. Everytime I see a lorry taking a u-turn on a road without a traffic signal, I notice people trying to snake their way around the lorry. Wait for 3 minutes and I can guarantee that there will not be a traffic jam. It is quite simple to understand this logic but people do not want to spare that time. Exactly what do they want to achieve? Reach the next traffic light faster? Are they losing millions because they reach the office 10 mins later? Everyday I see a lot people trying to cross the road at Infosys, Hyd office. It is a risky thing because there are far too many vehicles swooshing by at high speeds. For all their reported profits why doesn’t Infosys build an overhead bridge? Doesn’t the company care for it’s employees?
If we reduce our population we might just value individuals a lot more than we do now. I might be completely wrong about this but it is probably worth a shot.
Please comment on the above points.
Optimisations on 5800
I updated my Nokia 5800 Xpress Music and lo behold the whole thing is slow as a snail now. What’s worse? Their own DRMed (Digital Restrictions Management) concked off and won’t allow me to play the songs preloaded in the phone. That did not bother me anyway because they had a terrible set of songs in the first place.
So I am asking Nokia – give me a job for optimising your operating systems (Series 60 Rel 5). I’ve done that on my game earlier and can do it again. On the other hand if things don’t get better Nokia will lose a loyal customer. Watch out for HTC is in town now.
QWERTY keyboards on touchscreen phones
Almost all the touch screen phones and some of the so called “smart phones” have a qwerty keyboard nowadays. It becomes a negative thing if a phone doesn’t have one. What baffles me is these so called “power users” have to use only the two thumbs to type. qwerty was never designed to work with two fingers (other than for Venu that is). So what’s all this hoopla? Why doesn’t a single phone manufacturer invest in new user interface design? It is, after a touch screen … right?
Time to boycott team India in cricket
Dear all.
It’s time to teach the high earners a lesson. Enough with the press coverage. The Indian players have earned well in the IPL2 and let us leave it there. Useless fielding, pathetic plan, horrible bowling and above all a star studded batting line up that got b*** raped in the end tells us all about how lousy this team has ended up. It could have been the fatigue from IPL2. In which case talk to Gilchrist, he did well after 1 yr of break. An opening partnership that was found lacking against bounce is as horrible as things can get. Why bother playing the game if all the chinks in the armour start from the helmet? Tell me one thing that this team did correctly (other than winning the toss). Even before the game started we lost Sehwag to IPL2. Then we lost the team spirit to the following controversy. These player don’t get paid insane amounts to let down a whole fkcing country. Probably Dhoni can now go home and use broadband internet instead of using Aircell’s facebook connection to stay in touch with his friends.
On a positive note (yeah) it’s good that India lost this game though. For the simple fact that they would have been gangraped by South Africa in the next game. Now we can watch the remaining part of T20 without adverts beating us down. Come to think of it why should I cheer a bunch of players who only manage to disappoint a whole country? Why should ANYONE cheer for BCCI (a private corporation) that does it’s best to squeeze money out without doing anything to better cricket in India? Why do all these players get so many chances inspite of failing pathetically? Time to raise the bar and say – If you fail even once, you are OUT of the team.
Now… who should I cheer? West Indies probably for having consistently surprised “top rated” teams. Or South Africa for being a team with so many players shouldering responsibility if even one other player fails to deliver. Heck even Ireland for producing Guinness dark stout… errr
Uranium listed as commodity?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Business/Lehman-Bros-sitting-on-nuke-stockpile/articleshow/4411110.cms
The US cannot entrust nuclear material to democracies but it fine for private parties to trade it in “commodities market”? WTF? So what’s next? Discounts on nuclear fissile material if you buy it in bulk?
Why is this trade not between countries/govts. Why are middlemen entering the scene? And here we are watching Terminator where robots/AI will take over the world and destroy us all. Bah!
Irritating websites
What happens when a website thinks that it is the centre of the WWW? Forbes happens. Why does Forbes (or the guys who made this pathetic website) think that people will look @ their slideshows indefinitely? Even before that, when you go to a story on their website it becomes extremely hard to spot the link that shows the actual story. You get a link (say from digg) and then you are presented with a presentation screen. There is a link, buried somewhere, to the actualy slideshow. This is especially true with the Top N stories. The slideshow is just one of the numerous links on the page AND you cannot easily spot it. Someone, at Forbes, please take a printout of the page and try spotting the link. You will understand what it means to search for a needle in a haystack. Even worse is the slideshow itself. Talk a developer and fix this auto play “feature”. Why do you assume that I will actively look at the link once I open it? Ever heard about TABBED browsing? As I write this story, I cannot help but notice how the slideshow happily moves away from one page to the other. I see three buttons and a “speed” bar. Back, Stop, Next. Now is that graphic for Next actually Next or Play? I click on the stop button and I want to move to the next slide, lo and behold the next is actually play since the subsequent slides are automaticaly appearing.
What is so hard about figuring out how to design a slideshow? Did it even occur to the designer that people might not want the website to switch the slides automatically or that they might want to switch slides early and not have to press two buttons to read an article?
Fixes proposed:
Fire the idiot who believed that the automatic slide transition without my asking for it is a good thing. (Provide Prev, Next links in TEXT or change the graphic to ‘<’ and ‘>’. Not solid arrows. Keep the Stop button and have a separate “Play/Resume” button.. For once pay attention to the VCR/CD/DVD player’s interface.)
Fire the idiot who said that burying links to the slideshow in the main story is an awesome game to play with the visitors. ( Keep the link to the slideshow at the top of the story, at the bottom of the story and in a different font. Even better, let it be static wrt rest of the story. Thus when people scroll through the text, they WILL notice the lack of motion in this text. Make it stand out from the rest of the text)
Fire the idiot who currently does the usability testing. If you have none, fire the guy who owns this website as a product line and then hire new ones.
PS:
By the time I finished this rant, the Global 2000 Forbes Top 25 companies has shifted slideshows to “In Pictures: Stars With A Head for Business”. This thing just gets better and better. I shall never hire the guy who thought that this would be cool. So how am I supposed to go through the slideshow now? I have not read this story and I guess I will not read Forbes stories till they wrap their head around usability and UI design.
My opinion about GUI “Skins”
Winamp, one of the greatest mp3 players of all time, popularised the concept of GUI Skins. Lo behold we had gazillions of skins floating around the internet(s). It was nice in the beginning but the reason I used Winamp for a very long time was because it was small, simple to use and did the job perfectly. However the skins were a feature that I did not miss in winamp. Why? Simple the default interface itself was pretty good and extremely intuitive.
Lately though, skins are considered a must. I get the feeling that the developers implement it because they can then ignore designing a good UI completely. While this is a clever idea, it is a poor substitute to shipping a complete product. End users understand the product by the UI. So it HAS to be polished. Infact have standard UI and THEN provide skinning. If I have to help someone with finding out where so-and-so button is located, skinned GUI makes things worse. So provide a standard way of switching to the default UI.
On the other hand, if you want to go down the path of skins consider it beta testing for the UI. Simply provide a community website where people can upload their skins. Rank them according to their popularity and then make it the default skin.
Fractals in the sub-prime crisis
India, China and the rest of the world lends money to an unworthy country ie USA. American banks lent money to unworthy borrowers. Borrowers in the USA defaulted and the whole of the USA came to it’s knees. Now am I to assume that USA will NOT default? What will happen to the rest of the world?
HPC
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1589
Probably the worlds fastest BSOD. Quite an expensive piece of equipment too.
