What Microsoft taught me today?

Today morning I took out my backup CD-RW, which I burnt about 2 years ago to copy all the files to my laptop. I use a laptop that runs Windows XP on it. A familiar thing happened - since the CD was very old, a few parts of it were physically damaged. If you had ever copied files from an optical media like CD using Windows, you would have faced this: in the middle, Windows will show some useless message and will stop copying. A few files would have been copied to your hard disk when Windows fails to copy some file because your CD is bad. Windows, as a typical Microsoft product, blame you for the situation and stop copying (your disk is bad, what do you think I can do?). As a programmer, I happen to know that it's very easy to ask the program to skip the corrupt file and copy the other good files. For some reason Windows developers have been lazy or irresponsible or whatever, that they didn't do it. I wrote a simple Python script that copied all good files to the hard drive while skipping corrupt files. No, I am writing this post to bash Microsoft. I am writing what I learned from my today's experience. A few people know that my dream is to start a programming school. Today I made this decision about my school: in the school's lab, we would have machines that run Linux as well as some machines that run Windows. We would make sure that every student uses both Windows and Linux operating systems on their day-to-day activities in the school. Apart from the obvious reasons for asking beginning programmers to use different operating systems, I want to show my students how easy it's to develop hopelessly bad programs by being lazy while programming. Windows is a commercial operating system which users "buy" to use. And, it doesn't have a decent text editor (old DOS EDIT was reasonably good). Everyone who knows a bit of Win32 programming would know that Notepad is nothing but a standard text box with menus. Almost everything I see that comes bundled with Windows is primitive and useless. Users of IE would have noticed this. In IE, any ActiveX control embedded in a web page (including Flash animations) is not activated until the user goes and clicks on it. This is Microsoft's style of "security". When the user clicks on an ActiveX object in the web page, probably he knows that clicking on it will run that ActiveX; but how can a user know or guess what the hell that ActiveX is going to do? If that ActiveX does something bad, now the user has to blame himself. "Oh, if at all I had not clicked on that damn thing," he might think. My students, who use both Notepad and Vi, IE and Firefox, CMD (Windows shell) and Bash (Linux shell), can see the difference between these different software written for the same purpose. I guess, they would try not to be lazy while developing some new software. Thanks Microsoft, for you have taught me how painful to use a software written by a lazy programmer!

Google helped me to help Yahoo!

I have always wanted to use the *latest* products. I don't generally mind using beta or even alpha versions of software. Here's my experience with Yahoo! Mail Beta and Yahoo! Help. I usually keep my mailboxes open in Firefox. Whenever new mails come to my mailboxes, I don't take long to check them out. Today, when the new Yahoo! Mail beta changed its page title to reflect the arrival of a new mail, I clicked on its Firefox tab to read the mail. There, I found the first bug. The UI was not consistent as you see in this picture. Well.. bugs are not unusual in any software. So, I wanted to report this bug to Yahoo! so that they can do something about this. I clicked on their Help link, and tried to figure out feedback page using their search feature. I typed in "mail beta feedback" as my query. And, here is the result I got: What the heck.. I am not searching for a person named "mail beta feedback." I had to get back to my trusted friend to search for Yahoo's feedback page. Oh yeah.. the first link Google suggested had the information I wanted. Now I understand why "googling" has become a verb in English, while other search companies are still struggling to get their place on the web. Thanks to Google!!

Match factories in Kovilpatti use MNC approach!!

When I got my first job in that big MNC, I was happy. When I joined the company, I was excited. When I compared it with other Indian companies (especially those I hate), I was pretty much happy that I was in a good place. Of course, that's a good company, in its own ways. But a few things I noticed there were not very much different from a match factory in my native town (Management concept No. 1: வேலை பார்க்கிறவனுக்கு வேலையைக் கொடு, வேலை பார்க்காதவனுக்கு சம்பளத்தைக் கொடு). Those who "knows" how to work have to work day and night and make sure that schedules don't slip. Those who don't know how to code or don't care about the schedules can just come to office, relax, and get back to home earning their salary. Believe me, there are people who don't know how to code (I'm not talking about managers). (Once I had to work with a function that takes more than 135 arguments. True, ladies and gentlemen, people are getting paid to write such code; and it's happening in one of the monster MNCs). If the management believes that they need people in their team, they will recruit whoever is available. All they need is head count. Why bother about quality of the human resource, as long as they can be used to get money from the client. After all, they have few loyal team members who sacrifice their personal life and make sure that project schedules don't slip. Now, when I sit at my home and relax during the weekend, I see my old teammates being online. The whole "responsible" team is online 24 x 7. A few people in the team get paid well according to the company's standards (it's one of the stingy companies in India). Other employees still work for peanuts. (I got 1?00 rupees as my performance bonus for the first year.) Last week when I pinged a good friend of me on a Sunday, he said he was busy. He was there the whole day. For what? There was some project slipping schedules. 4 or 5 memebers of the team were in the office for the whole Sunday. You know what they will get for that? Ugh... let us not talk about that.. they might kill me if they happen to read it. What would happen if it just keeps going? Like me, everyone will quit, but the company's management won't bother. All they need is head count. Quality is something the management has no idea about. They do not know how to conduct interviews; they do not know how to find good people; they do not know how to retain good people. But for sure, they are doing good in the business; and they will continue to do well. It's just that their business model is different; they don't need to worry about quality at all.

What do ye like -- to go out or to sleep?

For the past two days, I didn't go out for dinner. I myself prepared (cooked?) noodles and ate it. For me, it's more convenient to take noodles than to go out to a restaurant to get something. Of course, I will get a lot of variety to choose from and the quality and taste of the food would be very good in the restaurants. But still, I don't want to go out for my dinner. I am more happy with my noodles. What could be the reason behind it? I know very well that I am lazy. In my family, I am quite often called somberi (Tamil word for a lazy person). I wonder if my being lazy is the reason for me to prefer home-made noodles than any restaurant food. I always like to have freedom; and I want me to hold control of what I do. Can this be a reason for me preferring noodles? When eating from home, I am free to choose when I want to eat. I am free to choose if I want to use my computer or I want to read a book while eating. I can eat in the bedroom, kitchen, hall, wherever I wish. So this could be a reason. Now one more thing comes to my mind. Though I like to go out and visit places, I am happier if I relax in my bed room reading something or browsing the net or sleeping. Even when my friends went to the independence day celebration in San Francisco when I was sleeping, I didn't feel bad. I didn't think for a moment that I missed the opportunity to see those celebrations. I have always been like this. I like to relax rather than to go around visiting places. Is it because I am lazy? Or is it because I am matured enough (like a saint) to be not interested in such amusements? Whatsoever it is, I haven't seen someone like me. If any of you are like me, please let me know. I want to discuss this with you. I am curious to know why I am like this....

My New Article

I just wrote an article after a very long time. This article, titled "On OOP Again," is targetted at beginners. It talks about static members of a class. You can read the article at http://wonk.netfirms.com/art/oop-again.html.