Posts in rant Category

Nov 17, 2008

We Need Firefox Inside!

How do I convince these sites that I do use Firefox? It gets called something else because of some stupid reasons, but it is really Firefox and nothing else. Every time I visit hotmail or orkut or some site which thinks that it is doing something so special that it needs to warn users about their browsers, these messages that make a mockery of my setup. [Continue]

Nov 4, 2008

PHP Backspaces

So, PHP gets namespaces, and a namespace separator, and a lot of complaints with it. Is \ (rfc) a good choice as a namespace separator? I can’t say, but it sure is not what I expected for a namespace separator. [Continue]

May 7, 2008

Back To The Future

A college decides to build a web site. The full web site involves offering multiple services. A part of the team has had horrible experiences with downtimes because of too many database calls. [Continue]

Mar 10, 2008

My Mom Is Not Going To Read This Code

Somehow a lot of software professionals believe that my Mom will read this code. Or at least they want me to document it such that even she could read it. Why don’t they see the problems? [Continue]

Sep 27, 2007

We Need More .txt

Everytime someone requests me to send my resume or a small document in .doc, I remember the long forgotten, simple yet versatile format - the text file. While we have been fighting over standardization of office documents, we have neglected it enough to make our lives difficult by hovering around resource-hogging proprietary tools and formats even for most basic tasks. The text file is like a meta format (though format is not exactly correct, I assume it is enough for our purpose), that lets you easily create your own schema and use any extension to build your own type using it. [Continue]

Aug 31, 2007

Superficial Standards

Surprising stories are coming out of the effort of making OOXML as a standard. The one creating the hype is the one from Sweden. However, the vote has been retracked. [Continue]

Aug 23, 2007

IDs Should Be Easy To Remember And Passwords Difficult

You would think that after spending two or three years on the Internet, users would know the significance of an ID and a password. Of course not! I just sent an email to an ID, something similar to mynmx862134 (changed, but I do not think giving the original one would make it easy for anyone to remember). [Continue]

Aug 11, 2007

On Web Versions

Shelley Powers uses descriptive terminology to explain the evolution of Web, and not the dumb numbers. I agree, numbers are not a good way of tracking concepts and ideas. They fail to convey the value and leaves everything for interpretation. [Continue]

May 3, 2007

HTML 5, Runtimes And Vendors

Roger Johansson notes that HTML 5 compliant browsers will treat all content served as text/html with the HTML 5 specification. And this means that all of today’s HTML and most of XHTML will be HTML 5. Of course, this is what W3C wants. [Continue]

Apr 19, 2007

Windows In $3

Microsoft is going to provide a low-cost, that is for $3, Windows and Office bundle for governments. This is an effort to reach the next 1 billion users. It is commendable that Microsoft has realized that it is expensive for a lot users to keep upgrading to newer versions. [Continue]