Posts in rant Category

Apr 3, 2009

Just Write The Software And Give It To Us

“We have found out what the software should do for us. Here are the requirements, which we know you will ask for; and here is the systematically documented design specification!”, says the client. “All you have to do is write the software and give it to us!!”. [Continue]

Mar 15, 2009

Being Compatible With IE8’s Compatibility View

IE8 is almost like two different browsers - one in the backward compatibility mode, and the other in standards compatibility mode. The unfortunate part is the IE8 using the compatibility view is not the same as its predecessor IE7. There is a good news that IE8 is CSS 2.1 compliant and that it does offer a standards mode. [Continue]

Feb 16, 2009

IE8 To Have Compatibility View To Beat The Standards

Microsoft seems to be hell bent on making the standards secondary in the name of compatibility. Not a while back, Microsoft had agreed to use the standards mode by default for IE8 after many had opposed the degradation. If enough users vote a site into IE7 compatibility mode, it will be displayed using that, even if it was built using the standards. [Continue]

Feb 10, 2009

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem In India

Sramana Mitra has a good discussion going on about what is lacking in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. Contribute to the discussion, we need more such pieces to bring about a change. Here are my thoughts. [Continue]

Feb 4, 2009

Our Rs. 500 Laptop Is Not A Laptop After All

The wait for our Rs. 500 laptop is over, because it is not going to be a laptop after all. It is being called a computing device. [Continue]

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]