Posts tagged dumb
Yahoo vs Google: why Yahoo lags behind?
Mar 7th
You wanna know why Yahoo lags behind Google? Look at the image below that I took from Yahoo’s careers site today (WW10.4). It shows all open reqs, sorted by date (descending).
As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! 
), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?
Is Windows XP the right OS for an ATM?
Jun 10th
Have you ever wondered what the ATM runs on? Most 0f the ATMs in India (and all around the world) run some flavor of Windows. Nowadays they use XP (some with SP2, if the technical team is good) but I remember seeing Windows 98 (saw BSOD once in one of the Chennai ATMs); Also read somewhere that they used to have embedded Windows NT, OS/2 and sometimes even Windows CE! I know what you must be thinking now – How safe is it, right? A good design should put the ATMs in their own private network, if so I only will be worrying “Who is going to reset the ATM when Windows crashes? 
 ”; now I realize why the security person in ATM seems to be knowledgeble on the machines…talk of all the ways one can gain some IT gnaan!
Above is an ATM of the famous VTB bank of Russia, powered by an unactivated copy of Windows XP. 
Look at a closeup of the activation dialog box below.
I wonder why ATMs don’t have their own OSs! When we talk so much about security / WORMS & malware stuff, does it make sense to use a general purpose OS for something so critical as an ATM? Even a cellphone costing a mere INR 4000 has so any OS flavors to choose from, why is the ATM you withdraw that INR 4000 from is stuck with a most-often-unpatched version of Windows? As Obelix would have said – “These ATM makers are crazy!!”
Check out these interesting links related to Windows Crashes:
- Windows crashes on Flight information screens and ATMs
- ATM crash here and here
- Slot machines too…
- Gallery full of Windows crashes on ATMs/slot machines
- Oh no! Even trains are not spared & other Public computer errors
Chessbase Light 2007 Activation – eh?!
May 11th
I love the work being done by the good folks in Chessbase; IMO they have the coolest jobs, they get payed to develop software for CHESS Ohhhh, I wish I had some kinda day job like that! I know video game development is as interesting, but anyway gaming has never been one of my serious interests. Anyway, coming back to CB…I check the Chessbase site more than my Gmail, sometimes, which reminds me of the lack of RSS in their site…but I am not going to complain about that ever, as I feel it is worth visiting their site for the excellent articles they post. I am not sure if Fredrick Friedel ever thought of creating a business model out of the Chess news network they can easily build. Ok, again I am digressing…
I read with interest the article on their Chessbase Light 2007 software. It provides nearly all the functionalities of the full-fledged Chessbase DB software, one of their flagship products, for FREE. Of course, the catch word in the above sentence is “nearly all“. BW, CB Light allows only viewing, you cannot create databases or save games using that. For that you need to upgrade to CB Light Premium, which I guess is the same as Chessbase starter pack minus Bigdatabase 2007/Player encyclopedia/CB Magz.
The activation screen looks like the above screenshot (NOTE: I am using the screenshot provided by CB). When I saw this I was like ‘Eh?? What stupidity!!”…Do you see the captcha field in that window? Captcha are used for preventing the bots doing automatic signups, spams et al. Is there any sane reason why the user has to type the code shown in the image????
“Oh, ok…may be this code is part of the activation process”, I thought.
When I went to the site meant for generating Activation key, I didn’t find a field for entering the abovementioned captcha code. Then why the heck the CB Light programmers decided to show the captcha code in CB Light? Beats me!
Note that I may be totally missing a valid reason behind having that captcha in a desktop program, if so I’d appreciate if you’d enlighten me!
Indian shopping sites – Need to improve a lot!
Apr 25th
I wanted to buy this shaver, but Amazon said it wouldnt be possible to ship this to India, due to some export regulation blah blah blah. So, I decided to check the local online malls. I am not new to online shopping in India, but It has been a long time since I visited them, especially Fabmall (now renamed to indiaplaza.in).
The site took sometime to load, but the thing that got my attention was - The interface hasn’t changed at all.  I guess the store name is the only thing that has changed (kinda like selling the same shampoo in a new bottle with the tag “New formula”). The site looked neat, though I personally hate fixed-width layouts. Why can’t they make use of all of my 19″ monitor space? A simple fluid layout would have been nice.
“Cut the crap, do what you came here for”, I thought. Since I couldn’t find something like “Personal care” or “Beauty products” (?!) in the available products section, I decided to do a shop-wide search. The real irritation started!
[Click the image to open it in a new window, enlarged. For convenience sake, I have put a dim filter on the image, except for the areas of interest.]
As you can see from the image, the top bar lists out more product categories than the items in the search drop box. WTH? Doesn’t Indiaplaza know how to search in the other categories? Or probably it wants us to manually go through all the product listing pages to find ours. This made me very curious, I decided to check out the other famous (or atleast, whatever shopping stores I know!) online shopping sites.
Top Ten George W. Bush moments
Apr 24th
Even after seeing this video for the 10th time, I tell you, I cannot stop LMAO. This video captures the top 10 goofy moments of George Bush. Really funny!
My first cartoon – Performance appraisal
Mar 29th
I stumbled upon this interesting site today. It allows you to unleash (?!) your creativity by creating simple drag/drop operations. Above is my first cartoon, which is inspired by the happenings in my company Do let me know what you think!
Dumb Error Messages
Sep 20th
I use Intel VTune performance analyzer with VS.NET 2003. Today, when I opened my solution, I got these really dumb error msgboxes from VTune…
First this one… EmbeddedHtmlHelp.cpp??? Very helpful!
Next it told me there was something wrong with VT projects, as if I didnt know that!! (Sorry, if this doesnt make sense, this is an in-house joke! ) More >
Dumb Code – 1
Apr 27th
Recently, I was helping a friend debug an application debugger. In one of the report/UI modules, he had to log the date execution started + more process meta info. For date conversion, instead of using one of the inbuilt CRT functions, with the true spirit of a good (!?) programmer, he decided to implement it himself. When I saw the code, I couldn’t help asking him “How many years have you been programming?”!! Check out this so called production-quality (??) code…
define MONTHS_SIZE 12
typedef struct __monthNoPair
{
char *strNoMonth;
char *strMonthName;
} monthNoPair;
More >
Me & My Big Mouth!
Oct 11th
One of my elder brothers has started learning computers, you know, all the basic stuff that everyone goes through when first exposed to computers – “Using DOS/Windows“, “Microsoft Office applications“, “Fox pro” et al. Yesterday, he was exploring my old machine (1 GHZ Celeron, 384MB SDRAM, 2 x 40GB + 17GB HDD, nVIDIA TNT2 64M) and was bragging about how his instructor goofed up one of the practical sessions and how he corrected him (typical statement from a person who has just entered in to Computer-adolescence! ). Usually I do not allow the conversation to go in to subjects that I don’t remember or I usually suck at! But, probably because of the heavy lunch I had just before this conversation, I answered “Yes” when my brother came up with “BTW, Kanna, Foxpro theriyuma unakku?” (BTW, Kannan, do you know Foxpro?). Immediately, he opened Fox pro 2.6 and asked me to explain how to do this, that, blah blah…
Gosh, that was one hell of a test for my poor memory. It got stretched beyond all sane limits But, I really enjoyed talking about those old beasts once again. Kind of hanging around with your school friends !
Here are some interesting links about those neanderthals we dealt with in our past life. More >
