Quick GMail Tip

Do you use GMail? What? You've never heard of it? Don't give me any more lame excuses to not do so, go on over to http://mail.google.com, and create your own account now. I mean, NOW!

For those of you veteran GMail users, the benefits of this webmail service are quite obvious: it's fast, it's got terrific spam filters (I'd swear it's the best I've ever seen in a webmail service), the conversation view of emails is an example of superb innovation that the Google guys have become known for and, this tops the list, you can even use the service to read and compose emails when you're offline (though you have to go online again to send mail)! Yes, Google's got the offline Gears too, so all you have to do is click on the link (if you use Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox), and install Google Gears (if you use the first-named of the browsers, you don't need to: it comes pre-installed).

Then, head on over to this excellent tutorial to learn how to create your own Labels. This new feature now comes with colour-coding too, so if you've set up filters and labels, you can tell at a glance whether your new emails require your immediate attention. That's what I call helpful.

Quick Windows Tip - 1

Have you often wondered why you couldn't select a bunch of files / folders and then send them to a different destination with just a click or two? I have, and have never failed to find a registry trick that can do it, whatever version of Windows I was on. On Windows 95 through 2000, there was PowerToys, and on Windows XP and Vista, there is an equivalent technique which is, alas, not as user-friendly. Nevertheless, here it is (you may also click on the Related Article link at the bottom of this post, or on the title above).

It is tweaks like these that make Windows sometimes indispensable for the average user. Of course, Unix / Linux geeks have always enjoyed the ability to do much, much more with a few lines of well-written shell scripts - that is more a testimony to the maturity of those Operating Systems, in my humble opinion, than to any inadequacy of Windows.

Anyway, have fun with the registry tweak!

Free Software

And I mean "free as in freedom, not price". Yes, I'm talking about Richard M Stallman's (abbreviated to RMS) Free Software Foundation and its philosophy. The guy's ideology is far-reaching and inspiring. The following are excerpts from an interview.

JA: What if your job requires you to use non-free software?

Richard Stallman: I would quit that job. Would you participate in something anti-social just because somebody pays you to? What if the job involves hitting people on the head in the street and taking their wallets? What if it involves spreading the word that Democrats should vote on Wednesday instead of Tuesday? Some people seriously claim that you can't criticize what someone does if it is part of their job. From my point of view, the fact that somebody is being paid to do something wrong is not an excuse.

JA: Do you consider it proper for people who are trying to only use free software to utilize...

Richard Stallman: To connect to a server that's running non-free software?

I don't feel I need to refuse to connect to a server that is running non-free software. For that matter, I won't refuse to type on a computer that's running non-free software. If I were visiting your house for a little and you had a Windows machine, I would use it if it were important for me to use it. I wouldn't be willing to have Windows on my computer, and you shouldn't have it on yours, but I can't change that by refusing to touch the machine.

If you connect to a server that runs non-free software, you're not the one whose freedom is harmed. It's the server operator who has lost freedom to the restrictions on the software he runs. This is unfortunate, and I hope that he switches to free software; we're working to bring that about. But I don't feel you have to boycott his site until he switches. He isn't making you use the non-free software.

Cogent and brilliant arguments. You can read the complete article in the link below.

Moving passages

A couple of paragraphs that I came across in Arthur Hailey's "Final Diagnosis".

[An obstetrician reflects on the little ones in a hospital's nursery:] These, he thought, were the normal, healthy animals who had won, for the moment, their battle for existence and in a few days more would go outward and onward into the waiting world. Their destinations were the home, the school, the strife of living, the competition for fame and possessions. Among these were some who would taste success and suffer failure; who, barring casualty, would enjoy youth, accept middle age, and grow old sadly. These were those for whom more powerful and glossier automobiles would be designed, in whose service aircraft would wing faster and farther, whose every whim and appetite would be wooed by others of their kind with wares to market. These were some who would face the unknown future, most with misgiving, many bravely, a few craven. Some here, perhaps, might breach the barriers of outer space; others with the gift of tonues might move their fellow men to anger or despair. Most, within twenty years, would fulfil their physical maturity, obeying, but never understanding, the same primeval craving to copulate which had sown their seed and brought them, mewling, puking, here. But for now these were the victors - the born and urgent. Their first and gratest barrier was down, the other battles yet to come.

[One of the protagonists eyes his son who was born prematurely and who has been kept in an incubator.] Once more het let his eyes stray back to the tiny figure. For the first time the thought occurred to him: This is my son, my own, a part of my life. Suddenly, he was consumed by a sense of overwhelming love for this fragile morself, fighting his lonely battle inside the warm little box below. He had an absurd impulse to shout through the glass: You're not alone, son; I've come to help. He wanted to run to the incubator and say: These are my hands; take them for your strength. Here are my lungs; use them and let me breathe for you. Only don't give up, son; don't give up! There's so much ahead, so much we can do together - if only you'll live! Listen to me, and hold on!This is your father and I love you.

Nice Translator is ... good

This is what I call an innovative product: a translator that not only helps you translate phrases into multiple languages, but also auto-detects the source language. Go on, play with it!

Windows 7 - First Impressions

Fast! That's the first word that comes to mind after using Windows 7 for just a few minutes. The OS feels snappy, and things are noticeably quicker. The user interface also seems somewhat, um, smoother.

After trying the whole of yesterday to download the public beta of the latest version of Windows (a first for Microsoft), I finally managed to see something other than the "Due to high volume, blah blah blah" excuse for the absence of the all-important download link at night. And it made sense for me in a weird way too, since my broadband service provider had some server trouble yesterday, and connections were crawling in the afternoon (4 or 5 kB/sec); so, there was no way initiating a download in the afternoon would have been of much use. In contrast, the download kicked off at nearly 220 kB/sec in the night! I started the download and went to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the download was done, and that my faithful Opera had maintained an average speed of 213 kB/sec. Not bad at all!

I set about installing Win 7 after duly burning the huge ISO to a DVD (yes, the ISO is about 2.5 GB). Installation was relatively painless, and after the initial questions, went about doing its job without bothering me (I took the time to finish my housekeeping chores). After about half an hour or so (I didn't really notice the clock), it was done. One small glitch though: the DVD didn't eject after the installation was complete, and so, had I not been there, another installation would have started.

Setup wasn't finished entirely, however; the initial boot took some time "setting up the computer for the first time" routine that we're all so used to now. To its credit, however, it didn't ask me too many questions, and the questions that it did ask were relevant to me. Like, what did I want the user name to be, which network did I want to connect to, and so on. I was happy to notice that it had managed to install all the necessary device drivers without my intervention at all. All in all, a tremendous improvement from the days of that trusty software steed, Windows XP.

I went about installing my usual bevy of programs and utilities, Opera being the first in the list, of course. I did notice one peculiar thing though: I installed Startup Monitor (a program that runs in the background and alerts you when some program is trying to put itself in the list of programs that Windows starts after a reboot), and yet, it failed to notify me when Adobe installed its user rights-trampling "Acrobat speedup" to run after reboot (it was a Registry entry). Hmmm, curious, and seems to indicate that something in the startup routine has changed in Win 7.

This one blew away Win XP. I'm talking about USB device recognition. It seemed to me that no sooner had I popped in my Flash drive than Windows had installed the drivers for it, and the device was available to me in, like, two seconds! It's all the more amazing when you consider that a. it was a fresh Windows installation and, b. this was the very first USB device that I'd popped into Win 7. Awesome, and this is the right way to go! Note that I haven't transferred anything to and from the USB drive yet, and my future posts would cover it.

One more thing: programs seem to start noticeably faster. There are these icons on the task bar that have replaced the Quick Launch paradigm. In fact, confirming this view is the absence of Quick Launch in the Toolbars menu in the task bar's context menu. Clicking on the Windows Explorer icon opened up Explorer almost instantaneously. Likewise for other programs. Score!

That's it for now, folks. I'll start commenting on the other improvements that I can notice. All without scientific testing, of course :-)

You've slipped, Google

Oh, how the mighty slip (even if they don't fall)!

:-P Hype aside, I was taking Google Chrome out for a spin by pointing it to Gmail, and here's what hit me.

Did you notice the missing images on the page, including the Google Mail logo? I was somewhat amused to see the message, "Some of the elements on this page came from an unverified source and were not displayed." Google's browser couldn't verify the authenticity of the images that were being served from their own servers? I wonder what it was that it couldn't verify. Quite ironical, isn't it?

Of course, it's a rather trivial error - some of the images on the page were coming from an http server rather than the https server that the page itself was being served from, as the image below confirmed.

Google Talk Desktop Client - Security Lapse

As I exploited a rare server lapse in my office's network settings, the thought of logging in to GTalk crossed my mind, and I gave in to the temptation. Along came another thought - that of sniffing at the HTTP packets leaving my machine, and I fired up my copy of HTTP Analyzer to do the same. What I found out was not very reassuring.

This is the scene: you have a Google Talk desktop client which you use to log on to Google's chat service. You type in your username and password, and click on sign-in. You wait a few moments, and find yourself signed in. All nice and fine. What you wouldn't know is that, unlike your GMail account, login to which happens through a secure sockets layer (SSL) in addition to client-side encryption, the GTalk client sends your login credentials in clear-text, or the HTTP equivalent of clear text, HTML-encoded text. Of course, as any programmer knows, this is trivial to decode. All you need is a scientific calculator which can do hex and / or a quick Javascript program.

I looked through the Google Talk website for a place to report this security hole and, to my chagrin, couldn't find any. I looked at various Google Groups to see if they have a place where I could report this finding, but I couldn't locate any. A Google search turned up only this: http://www.nta-monitor.com/posts/2005/08/googletalk.html, which is very closely related to my finding. In fact, I was appalled that such a closely related problem had been left unattended for more than three years!

Should you be worried?

No, not unless you surf the Net from an unreliable or unknown cyber cafe / browsing center. If you're logging on from home, then you should be worried only if you're the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack (not very likely, realistically speaking). In that case, your Google Account password would be up for grabs, and it would be time for you to either switch to the GTalk client in GMail, or the Talk gadget, or in the worst case, a new Google ID.

If you're a Google employee reading this post, and would like more information, you can reach me through my blog. However, my guess is that your colleagues would be able to give you more extensive inside information :-)

The secret of how I am going to be a genius

I'd like to be remembered as a genius, or at least someone with an exceptional intellect (it's another matter that I may not possess one). So, it stands to reason that I have to achieve something in my lifetime that will give people a reason to think so about me. Of late, however, I'm more and more vulnerable to the charms of Morpheus, who insists on giving me company no matter where I am, what I am doing, but his presence is not utterly devoid of advantages.

I have observed this rather strange phenomenon: when I am doze off while reading something, my mind seems to continue to read the sentence that I nodded off at, but with a difference: it supplies its own words, different from that in the text, so much so that the striking difference and the ill-logic sometimes jars me awake! I believe that this is going to lead me to a stupendous discovery one day.

At least, I like to think so; how else can I explain away sleeping in the office, right at my desk? ;-)

Not just in India

When disaster strikes, it is usually very painful for the victims. When it's caused by forces of nature that we are often powerless against, the situation becomes even more poignant. Hurricane Katarina received a lot of coverage due to the immense swath of destruction that it left in its wake, and rightfully so. Such coverage normally results in some good coming out of it - more people become aware of the damage to human life and property, and that usually results in more people becoming willing to help those in need.

When these things happen in developing countries, say India, there's a phenomenal amount of press coverage on how badly things have been managed, how the city / district was totally unprepared, how the poor have, as can only be expected, borne the brunt of the damage, how life will never be the same for the displaced and affected victims, and so on and so forth. It's another story, and one that isn't known as widely, that such disasters cause havoc even in developed countries like the US of A. Apparently, according to this article, New Orleans has not exactly bounced back from the depths of despair as readily as we'd like to think. Much of the city seems to resemble a ghost town, and even three years after the hurricane and the resultant floods struck the city, life can hardly be described as having returned to normal.

Having said all that, hope still lurks amidst gloom and painful memories, as it always does when human enterprise undertaken with intelligence is tinged with compassion and benevolence.

Rechargeable Mosquito-hitting Swatter

The following text was seen on the packing material of an "electric mosquito swatter" that I recently purchased. The text below was copied from it, verbatim, with punctuations intact. It's one of those "All your base are belong to us" moments.

Main Character:

1. Rechargeable Type: It furnishes 2 pcs. of 1.2V high quality rechargeable batteries which can by recharged in recycle for more than 600 times. It is quite practical and economic.
2. Twice-speed discharge: It adopts an innovative twice-speed discharge circuit which can output 2500V in a moment. So, it has the best result for result forhitting mosquito.
3. Electric Shockproof Net: It can kill mosquito which is sucking blood on human bodies but it is harmless to human. when touching the net on flat surface, without any feeling of electric shock, so, it is safe for use.
4. Leakproof Net: It consists on a special 3-layer net which can easily catch insect and never leak out.

Directions:

1. When charging, please use AC 100-240V, 50HZ power source.
2. Before using, please charge the batteries for 8-15 hours. They can be recharged in recycle for 600 times.
3. When hitting insect, you can easily kill them just by pressing it's switch.
4. When the indicator twinkle, it indicate that the batteries run out. Then, the swatter should be recharged for 8-15 hours.

Warning:

1. For more safety, do not press the switch or touch the ourface of net when swatter is in charge.
2. Please do not finger the medium-layer net.
3. Please shake swatter for cleaning off insect carcasses which remain in net. Be sure don't wash it with water so as to avoid shortcircuit.
4. The swatter may become without high-voltage or in low-voltage conditions when it absorbe damp in wet weather, the effect will be declined. Then it can be dried by blowing with electric blower or shining with sunshine. The effect will be recovered soon.
5. Children must instruce under adult when use it.

Let's save English from cold-hearted, cruel and almost casual murder

la lingua pura, as Dan Brown calls English in his "da Vinci Code", is the perennial victim of cruel, cold-blooded and almost casual murder. Just consider these dollops of excellence in communication that a knowledgeable English speaker must put up with day in and day out (the text in brackets are mine).

NOTE: These are all quoted verbatim from email messages that I have the bad fortune of reading.

• We constantly are trying to improvise the tool to provide additional features. [sure you’re trying to improvise. Now, how about some improvements for a change?] There are a lot of suggestions [are a lot of suggestions, or are lots of suggestions? Make up your mind!] coming from the users like you who would like to have various features in this tool...Please use this facility generously and help us to help you better. [yes, we shall be generous, and will "help you to help us better"]
• Please revert back for any further clarifications in this regard. [shall I also include the negative -5 for clarification?]
• Finally we are got the response from web service & thanks for your co-operation. [all your response are belong to us and thanks for all the fish]
• Can u give the xml request in your Adapter side(Helper Application side) not in the sample xml request ? ( Meaning Helper Application side your handle request, so that request we want.) [now, that parenthetic saved the day! We'd have been very confused otherwise]
• This will be different call. He only requested to setup at that time. I will check with him and rearrange the call. [this was from a manager]
• It is my mistake only I missed out earlier as M is on leave I could not able to concentrate on it. I will see it won’t happen again. [sorry, I couldn't able to resist including this only]
• I am also sending J for raising NAIF's for SDP and Open Zone for Live source application connectivity from R [edited] Platform. So that they will be in place before this will be migrated onto R from D [edited] platform. [phew!]
• We will have small meeting. I will let you know the timings. [The world is full of small things]
• I reviewed the doc, I updated some sentences and added some commends [wonderful! Thangs a dun!]
• Each environment will have different different settings [and each sentence will have different different errors]
• S is not the write contact, Could you please let me know the issue details [ah, he's the "read" contact; now I get it!]
• Currect Implementation : if(manualcbuk != null && manualcbuk != "null" && manualcbuk !=""){ [To be sure, this is an excellent example of how code ought not to be written, still...be very sure while writing code, son!]
• I didn't have nothing more then this to estimation….So the estimation will obviously grow up. [it will, but when will you?]

And on and on it goes!

Have you come across such gems in your career? If so, improve my day by sharing them :-)

404 Funnies

Have you ever faced a situation where a link you clicked on led to a bland "Page not found" error? Yes? Well, here are some funny variations of the same.

http://www.dailymotion.com/404.php

http://home.disney.go.com/error/pagenotfound

http://www.homestarrunner.com/404

http://www.homestarrunner.com/systemisdown.html

http://www.craigslist.org/404/

http://www.happycog.com/404 (I liked this one particularly)

http://www.pen-and-paper.de/404.php

http://jeremyfuksa.com/404

http://www.galiacho.es/404 The blue screen on this page reminded me of something almost everyone has seen at some point of time (if you're a Windows user, that is).

http://www.martinkorner.co.uk/404

http://www.nextwaveperformance.com/404 This one has a cute flowchart that is, well, funny! :-)

http://www.porcupine.gr/404 This page is somewhat thoughtful, and slightly philosophical.

http://kottke.org/404 This one has a frank headline!

Tata Sky channel mess - some help

You might have noticed that the channel bundles offered by direct to home TV service providers are confusing, to say the least. To make things a little less hazy (for myself), I sat down to arrange their channel subscription packs into neat columns so that a side-by-side comparison is possible. Here's the result. Hope you find it useful.

Random PC Tip - How to repartition your harddisk on Windows

Since a few of my friends seek my help often on PC-related matters, I thought it'd be a good idea to post tips and how-tos once in a while. This is the first of such posts.

On Windows XP and Vista, partition management is a pretty simple task, thanks to Microsoft's partitioning tools that are, I should say, getting better and better. That, however, doesn't mean that they have become good enough to obviate third-party partitioning software: tools like Acronis Partition Manager, Paragon Partition Manager, and others go deep where Windows' tool only scratches the surface, but that's a topic for another day. In this post, I'll tell you how to use the built-in Windows partition manager to get some basic partitioning tasks done.

First off, here's a list of what you can't do on Windows XP using the built-in tool:

1. you can't resize (shrink / expand) existing partitions
2. change the partition type (like you can with Linux's fdisk).

What it does allow you to do are:

1. delete a partition
2. add a partition

I think that there are quite a few good articles that explain clearly how to go about these tasks, and I don't think I have much more value to add there. However, there is one thing that I'd like to point out to make life simpler. That is, instead of opening the Disk Management Console through the usual "My Computer->Manage->Disk Management" or "Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management", you could simply go to Start->Run (WinKey + R on any Windows from Win2k onwards) and type in "diskmgmt.msc" (without the quotes).

Now that you're in the Disk Management Console, here's what you should do in Windows Vista if you want to resize a partition.

1. First off, make sure that you see the main disk. This is usually shown as Disk 0 on most PCs - including laptops - that boot from a hard disk (see Fig. 1 above). If you've got your PC from a vendor like Dell (yes!), HP (avoid them!!), IBM (now Lenovo), Acer (good, though low-end), among others, then it's likely that you have just one partition, though it's also equally likely that you have a "rescue" or "recovery" partition which you'll do well to leave alone if you don't know what you're doing. In my case, the main disk is "Disk 0".
2. Now, identify the main partition - this will usually be the biggest partition (see picture above), that is, the partition with the biggest size. In my case, the main partition is called "OS (C:)".
3. Now, you're ready to repartition your harddisk. Before you go ahead, ensure that you have a backup of your important, personal files, in case something goes wrong. And, believe me, I've gone through enough software glitches to know how frequent they are, so please don't risk going ahead without a backup. Make a backup NOW, and verify that the backed up files are readable!
4. Select the biggest partition by clicking it ("OS", in my case). Now, right-click it and choose the "Shrink Volume" option. You'll be presented with a dialog box which will tell you what the maximum size you can shrink the partition to is ("Size of available shrink space in MB").
5. Type in a value in MB (megabytes). Note that 1000 MB = 1 GB (for the purists out there, I'm well aware that it should be 1024 MB, but go talk to the harddisk manufacturers for this, they seem to have eaten 24MB for every GB). Click Ok.

Congratulations, you've just repartitioned your disk! With the free space you have now, you can follow the instructions in this Microsoft article to create a new volume and format it. Once done, your new partition is ready to use.