There is a lot of debate on the influence of movies in our lives. Can violent movies or games be responsible for increase in crime?  There are people who want a complete ban on such material. But then there are those who support these citing freedom of speech. The struggle between them has a long history and is not going to end any time soon!

In India, attack on freedom of speech is much more violent and is on the increase. As you can guess, every movie is going to offend someone. If the villain is of a specific color some people get offended. If the hero is muslim some others get offended. There are even guys who get offended when they see love between a man and woman!. There is no end to such madness

I am always on the side of freedom of speech. But when you see all the latest english horror movies (for example - saw series or hostel series) I get doubtful. These take violence into its most vulgar form. Most of us may see it and then just forget it. But there could be psychopaths who would want to simulate the movie and that isn’t pretty.

That is exactly the problem with freedom of speech. Above I have written that I somehow find Saw and Hostel movies repulsive enough to warrant a ban. But another person might find other movies equally repulsive. See? It is a catch 22 situation.

Movies have affected my life in various ways and mostly it is in a positive sense. My career in software development is a direct result of the movie terminator 2. I still remember staggering back home after watching T2 lost in thoughts about artificial intelligence. It has motivated me to jump into programming and soon I realized a machine like terminator is not going to built in my lifetime :-). Another movie that left a lasting impression is American Beauty (especially the character Ricky Fitts).  If you haven’t seen it yet I suggest you rent the movie for this weekend.

It is funny how we humans are good at twisting things. The latest trend(possibly started by americans) is to sugar coat unpleasant truth using formal jargon.  Let me illustrate with a few examples.

You are a policeman in charge of an area. You decide that it is ok to use third degree methods in interrogation.  But while using some of the harsh techniques, a couple of suspects die in your custody. Earlier you would have said - “The policeman used illegal torture and three suspects died during torture”.  But now in the changed political climate you say - “There were some collateral damage during terror investigation”.

Notice how the sentences hide the human factor involved. It even appears that the collateral damage is essential to keep us all safe.  We all become just parameters for some process. It is like applying six sigma or CMM5 to human life

The reason why I wrote this post is this news item.  Current american government believes that torture (simulated drowning to be specific) is legal. But there is one problem with this approach. There is no difference between the ‘good’ guys and the ‘bad’ guys!!

In one of earlier posts I had written that I don’t believe in God.  But at the same time I amazed at the wisdom of Jesus Christ when he said,

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?

I am not a ‘human rights nazi’.  I do believe that strong and decisive action including death penalty is needed when you are dealing with evil.  For example, consider what happened in Rwanda. But the sad part is that nobody cared about Rwanda at that time.

Consider this scenario - you are a police officer who is entrusted to protect people. Suddenly a mob goes around killing people. There is no doubt in my mind, you must shoot and kill if necessary to protect people. It is worth noting that as per Indian law you can kill someone not only for self defence but also to defend others.

But this is quite different from dropping bombs on a country to feed them ‘democracy’.

Most of us don’t think that we will probably die tommorrow. But it is quite different for soldiers who are on the battle field. I had always thought that someone must be really stupid to join to an army.

Today I came across this blog post written by Andrew Olmsted. He was killed on January 3rd,2008 in Iraq. This blog post was written earlier by him and was to be published in case he dies in the war. It is a very touching post and the following paragraph struck me most,

Soldiers cannot have the option of opting out of missions because they don’t agree with them: that violates the social contract. The duly-elected American government decided to go to war in Iraq. (Even if you maintain President Bush was not properly elected, Congress voted for war as well.) As a soldier, I have a duty to obey the orders of the President of the United States as long as they are Constitutional. I can no more opt out of missions I disagree with than I can ignore laws I think are improper. I do not consider it a violation of my individual rights to have gone to Iraq on orders because I raised my right hand and volunteered to join the army. Whether or not this mission was a good one, my participation in it was an affirmation of something I consider quite necessary to society. So if nothing else, I gave my life for a pretty important principle; I can (if you’ll pardon the pun) live with that.

There are a lot of people who blame George Bush for the war. But the reality is that he is a democratically elected president and had the majority support in US for going ahead with the war. The soldiers who fight the Iraqi war are just doing their duty.

People die every day due to diseases, accidents and due to old age. But people also die due to human stupidity. There cannot be a better example for human stupidity than Iraqi war. For any conflict, war must be the last choice, not the first!

Personally I don’t believe in God. But most of the time I strongly wish that there is a God who values goodness in men and who punishes those who perpetrates violence and war.

There is no hope and no justice if there is no God.

Planning to buy a new computer or laptop? In my place (trivandrum, india), if you don’t know the basics, vendors will take you for a ride. In this post, I will look at the essentials for a new pc.

Every day I see advertisements for laptops in newspapers. The price ranges between $600 to $1200. What is surprising is the amount of RAM offered in these models. The best ones have got 512MB RAM!!  Now in order to run the mammoth (Windows Vista) , you need a minimum of 1GB RAM, ideal being 2GB. None of the laptops/pcs in the market offer this.

So here is the first tip. Ensure that you have a minimum of 1GB RAM whatever model of computer you buy.

Most of the branded PCs in indian market doesn’t have the latest components that are available. This means that what you buy as a branded PC is probably made using components available 6 months back.

So here is the second tip. If you want a good PC which is affordable, you will have to assemble one.

Now if you just visit a local shop to get something assembled, chances of you being cheated is 99.999%, unless you are an expert on computer components.  Once I had asked the computer shop guy to fix a Sony DVD writer and forgot to check it during assembly. After a month I realized that he had actually used a cheaper LG DVD writer!

So the third tip is that if you are planning to assemble a PC, ensure that you have a reliable/knowledgeable guy who will choose the components for you. Also never change a component once you have decided on one. Vendors typically try to push something else down your throat.

Good luck!

SiCKO is a documentary film by Michael moore which looks at the American healthcare system. I think this is the best documentary moore has produced. While other documentaries are drowned in “anger” (Fahrenheit 9/11), in this one you see a much subdued Michael moore. It is a comedy which makes you laugh at the misfortunes of other human beings.  It is emotionally charged and will make a lot of people to “think”.

Now why is this interesting to me if it is based on american health system and americans?  The problem is that we are (in india) slowly adapting American ways here. 5-10 years down the lane we might see insurance/hospital/doctor mafia formation in the health sector. You could already sense the problems in the so called “network hospital”  and “cashless hospitalization”. 

In the movie Michael looks at healthcare systems in other countries such as UK, France and Cuba. I have some experience with NHS in UK. It may not be perfect (for some operations, waiting time is long),  but people do have a “choice”. In UK, private hospitals co-exist with NHS just like in India.

The “terror” detainees at Guantanamo bay military base enjoys free healthcare. So this guy takes a couple of sick people to Guantanamo bay asking for medical help! In another interesting scene a drug which costs $120 in US is bought for 5 cents in cuba!

I have a feeling that Michael moore may get a bigger place in American history after 50 or 100 years. He may be one sided, but surely his documentary raises a lot of valid points.

SiCKO is a must see movie and is scheduled for release on 29th June 2007. Check out the following trailer,

It was not long ago that Indian Railways started online reservation of railway tickets. Earlier booking a ticket was a tedious chore. You had to stand in the queue for hours and it was not easy to know whether there is ticket available or not! All that changed with the arrival of online reservation.

Unfortunately, the online reservation service has its own evils. First, you end up paying a lot of “transaction charge”, “service charge” and “reservation charge” for your ticket. Here is an example,

Suppose you try to book a ticket from Trivandrum to Ernakulam. Ticket price is Rs. 110.  On top of it there is something called “reservation charges” which is Rs. 20.  Now on top of it there is a Rs.15 service charge!  And then add Rs.10 as “bank transfer fee” and an additional service charge of Rs. 1 !!!  So the total now comes out to be Rs.156.  That means you end paying 40% extra for using the online reservation facility.

Remember, Railways is earning a lot through advertisements on its Web page. In fact, it is very difficult to find the login fields among all the ads on the home page as you can see below.  Interestingly irctc.co.in has an Alexa rank of about 2000! So it is an advertising gold mine!

Now the most funny part of the online reservation site is something called the Shubh Yathra. It is similar to a “frequent flyer” programme. But unfortunately it applies only to upper class travel (even 3 tier AC is excluded!!) and there is an annual fee of Rs. 500! Look at the following equation to see what you get,

Assume you get Shubh Yathra membership card for Rs. 500. Now you get points only for your own personal tickets. Assume that you spend Rs. 10,000 for tickets (excluding family members). That means you earn 4*10,000/100 = 400 points. This translates to a bonus of Rs. 400.  Now remember you have already paid Rs. 500 as subscription fee. So the net profit out of Shubh Yathra for you is = (-100 rupees).  Aaha, you are paying them money ?  Funny indeed!

Yesterday I saw an interesting english movie - “Blood Diamond” starring Leonardo dicaprio and Djimon Hounsou. This film was nominated for oscar awards in 2006. Essentially it is a look the diamond business from the african conflict zones (Some would argue there is no conflict zone, entire africa is the conflict zone!). Check out the following trailer,

Leonardo plays the role of a mercenary who trades arms for conflict diamonds. Djimon is a native fisherman looking for his family. Both team up to find Djimon’s family and to retrieve a rather “costly” diamond.

I like the movie, but not as much as apocalypto or the departed. But the movie is worth watching just to see leonardo’s superb performance.

The movie also contains some memorable quotes,

Soldier: Archer! You’re a dead man!
Archer: Yea, yea.

Archer: So you think because your intentions are good, they’ll spare you, huh?
Benjamin: My heart always told me that people are inherently good. My experience suggests otherwise. But what about you, Mr. Archer? In your long career as a journalist, would you say that people are mostly good?
Archer: No. I’d say they’re just people.
Benjamin: Exactly. It is what they do that makes them good or bad. A moment of love, even in a bad man, can give meaning to a life. None of us knows whose path will lead us to God.

According to wikipedia,

De Beers Group, which is the largest player in the diamond trade, has expressed reservations about the film, believing it could reduce public demand for diamonds. De Beers maintains the trade in conflict diamonds has been reduced from 4% to 1% by the Kimberley Process. It has been suggested the company pushed for the film to contain a disclaimer saying the events are fictional and in the past; however, De Beers has denied this.

In the movie, rebels are shown as barbarians and brutal. But the fact is in africa, government forces can be as bad or worse than the rebels. Or are you naive enough to believe that UN forces are angels when they go to africa? I wonder why so many people forget that any army is just a killing machine.

My rating : 7 out of 10.

PS: Do you know that if you resell your diamond jewellery you get only a small fraction of the original price?

This site is hosted on Dreamhost - the so called “employee owned” hosting company. Dreamhost hosting is cheap and their customer service is pretty good.  But lately they seem to having real problems with the infrastructure. Today they had the ultimate problem - all DNS servers were down for over 5 hours! It is pretty funny that a company which hosts 400,000 websites cannot keep their DNS server up!

Now the real fun is on the dreamhoststatus.com site. This is a blog by Dreamhost which tracks the problem affecting their services. Whenever something major happens with Dreamhost, you see a pattern of response from the customers. It is very predictable and at the same time very funny as well!

John : help! All my servers are down! I am loosing all my customers. Why is this happening every day?

Anna: It is funny that this problem is rated as medium. Do you call an issue critical when the data centre is bombed?

John’s Mom: Shut the f* up John. You are on a shared server and it is damn cheap. Be happy with whatever crap you get.

Chris: I am happy with DH. Please fix the problem whenever you have time.

Lis : I am devastated. Today I got the biggest business and my client says the site is down.

Dreamhost fan: Hey Anna, your site is up. Where are you from? Looking for a date?

DH Guru : for (int i=0;i<400,000;i++) {nslookup i; print result;}. It seems still some sites are down. Maybe we all should go for advanced custom DNS solutions.

Mike: Hey check out Lunarpages. They have some good schemes and they might even kick some DH ass. I also recommend registerfly.

Susan : You all are gay.

Now the above conversation is almost identical whenever Dreamhost posts a problem. Names and the words used may change sometimes

I have been really busy for last few days. On the professional front, I am looking for some challenge. Couple of interviews,  but I am still to find a better job.

The other thing that kept me busy was the Ruby programming language. I had gone through python language couple of months back and wasn’t much impressed. So when I started on Ruby, I was very skeptical and it seemed like some Japanese propaganda.

But 2 days of Ruby programming had me fully excited. You can  say I am on the “programmer orgasm”. Ruby is a very compact language and you will be amazed at the code reduction when you convert something to Ruby.

I will soon be writing a quick reference on Ruby for a Java/C++ programmer like I did with PHP. After a month of programming in PHP, I think it is a very badly designed language. I think PHP became popular due to two major reasons; Almost all web hosting providers support it. Also for a novice Web programmer, PHP was an ideal choice.

If you were to develop a Java web application, you had to study the entire J2EE stack. Then after that you find out that not many Web hosting providers give Java or JSP support!

Now that is where Ruby shines. Ruby on Rails is a Web application framework built on top of Ruby. Interestingly, Dreamhost provides Ruby on Rails support. I am yet to dig deep into Ruby on Rails, but from a couple of simple tutorials it looks very promising.

Die hard movie series is one of my favorites. It is always good to see someone kicking some serious “bad ass”. Now the latest installment in the series , Live free or Die hard is scheduled for release on 29th June 2007. Check out the following trailer. Seems to be pure action entertainment.

Some of you may say that using a car instead of a bullet to bring down a helicopter is too much, but hey he was out of bullets! Yeah, Bruce Willis is getting old and I don’t think we will see a Die hard 5 movie with him in the lead role.

Thankfully I didn’t watch Superman 3. It is a shame that such bad movies go on to become box office hits. I overheard a girl saying that “she cried towards the end” while watching Superman 3. Sigh… 

Blogging guru Darren Browse is currently running a group writing project called “Top 5“. He is offering $1001 for the best blog post on “Top 5″. With the rise in the value of rupee, $1001 is not worth much, but still will fetch a decent laptop. So I decided to give it a try.

Top 5 ways to love your wife

1. Listen to her - This is one of the most important things that husbands normally miss. Listen to your wife and it is something guaranteed to improve your family life! Here is a tip - don’t pretend to be listening, trust me, it won’t work.

2. Express your love - It is something which is easily overlooked in our busy life. But expressing your love is so much important for the warmth and closeness of a married life. You know, sex is good for your health and mind

3. Share responsibilities - There is a saying that “a man is incomplete until he is married”*.  Giving your wife responsibilities is an effective way to show that you trust her. Also help her in taking care of babies or in kitchen work.

4. Respect her - “Respect” has an unique property. You give it, you will get it back. So if you expect respect from your wife, first show it to her!

5. Surprise her - There are a lot of ways to surprise her. Throw a surprise party, go on an unplanned vacation or just buy her a simple gift. The smile on her face is worth a million bucks!

After writing this I have decided to change what I planned to buy with Darren’s gift. I would probably buy an all paid family trip to singapore

*- the complete quote is “A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished.”

One  of the simplest software to manage personal finance is the Acemoney lite from MechCAD. If you don’t want all the fancy stuff offered by Microsoft money or similar tools, Acemoney is the ideal choice.

My basic need is to track all the expenses over a period of time and then analyze it to see where my money is going. For this purpose I found Acemoney extremely useful. You can also export your expense/income details as a csv file or XML file.

The installer itself is less than 2MB and there are no adware or spyware with Acemoney lite. Only limitation is that only one account can be created on the lite version. For me, that is not a limitation at all!

The Digital Photography Book: The Step-By-Step Secrets for How to Make Your Photos Look Like the Pros’! By Scott Kelby (240 pages, $12).

Scott Kelby’s book is an interesting read for a digital photography enthusiast. He takes the reader through digital photography techniques in different shooting scenarios with a humor touch.

If you are looking for a good weekend read and want to learn something more about digital photography as well, this is the book for you. I found it very informative and engaging. But don’t expect too much jargon and technical details of digital photography!

Digital Photography book covers different photo shoot situations with a chapter. For example, some of the chapters are - “Shooting flowers like a pro”, “Shooting people like a pro”. I found the chapters pretty focused and informative. After covering “Shooting flowers like a pro”, I tried a few photos and was surprised how good they turned out to be!

Another good thing about the book is that Scott also gives recommendation on the accessories you might want to add to your photography kit. I am a bit short on the money right now, but I am planning to get a lense kit soon. Here is an excerpt from the book on this topic,

Still a fake headline. Don’t let it throw you. Now, although we want pro-quality photos, we don’t all have budgets like the pros, so when possible, I break my suggestions down into three categories:

I’m on a budget. These are denoted with this symbol. It simply means you’re not loose with money (meaning you’re probably married and have kids).
 
I can swing it. If you see this symbol, it means photography is your passion and you don’t mind if your kids have to work a part-time job once they get to college to buy books. So you’re willing to spend to have some better-than-average equipment.

If you see this symbol, it means you don’t really have a budget (you’re a doctor, lawyer, venture capitalist, U.S. Senator, etc.), so I’ll just tell you which one I would buy if I was one of those rich bas*%$#s. (Kidding. Kind of.)  

The chapter I liked most was the last chapter titled - “The recipe for getting this type of shot”. In this chapter, a photo followed by tips to get that kind of photo is given. Following is an excerpt.

Characteristics of this type of shot: the water is very still; you can see through the water because there’s very little reflection; the overall tone is blueish; the lighting and shadows are very soft; you get a full sweeping view.

1. This type of light doesn’t happen at 5:30 p.m.you have to get up early and be in place ready to shoot at 5:30 a.m., right before the sun comes up.

2. To get really still water, you also have to shoot at dawn. If you shoot this same scene at sunset, the winds will have picked up and the water won’t be as smooth……

Following are the main points I learnt from this book,

1. When there isn’t enough light use a tripod else a blurred photograph is guaranteed!
2. Don’t just stand and shoot, explore and find an interesting angle for your shot.
3. Play with aperture priority mode and shutter speed priority mode. Each situation requires a specific mode!
4. When taking photos of people, the most important thing is how you position the subjects in the frame.
5. The relation between focus and aperture. For example, if you just want to focus on the subject with background not in focus, use the lowest aperture!
 
If you have just started digital photography, I highly recommend this book. This book gives a very good introduction to the world of digital photography in plain language and it is fun to read this book.

My rating - 8 out of 10.  Highly recommended.

I think text-link-ads will have to find a new business model soon. It appears that Google is taking the issue of paid links very seriously and according to this Matt Cutts article, you can now report paid links appearing on a Webpage!

In another post, Matt Cutts talks about the disclosures required if you are going to place a paid link. Basically provide a machine readable disclosure (rel=nofollow) and a human readable disclosure.

As you can guess from my previous articles, I am a strong advocate of rel=nofollow. As a leader of search engines, Google has the responsibility to clean up the paid link menace in its early stage itself. This is the only way to ensure integrity of search index.

The explosion in online advertising and the huge interest generated by blogs have begun to pollute the search results of google and other search engines. In fact “how to make money online” seems to be the most searched term these days. I am not against “making money online”, infact I am trying to atleast cover my hosting expenses via Adsense! But I think search engines should strive for achieving this simple statement - “Content is the King”.

It is a shame that other search engines doesn’t support rel=nofollow. 

There are many who oppose the “rel=nofollow” tag used by major search engines such as Google. But I am in favor of this tag, infact I wish we had something called “rel=negative”. So if I link a site with “rel=negative” then Google should reduce the Pagerank of the site being pointed to.

This will ensure that all the spam based sites such as the MFA (Made for Adsense) will quickly get buried (borrowing the Digg terminology!). This opens up a lot of possibilites. For example, Wikipedia could use this tag and create a spam directory!

There are couple of issues with this approach. A determined campaign against any site could potentially bring it down! Also the domain which gets a lot of “negative rank” will eventually disappear from the internet, so bringing it back will not be easy!

Note that Google already does some kind of negative ranking for those sites which link to spam Websites and for those sites which has duplicate content.

But I think there cannot be any substitute for manual filtering. What Google needs is a  dedicated team of 10 guys who will do a daily scan for top 10 spam sites which gets most traffic. Once a site is identified as spam, these guys will simply remove it from the search index.  I am not sure whether such a team exists in Google!

PS: After writing this post, I was going through my RSS feeds and came across two interesting news items. It appears that Google is actively hunting spam sites on blogger and my friend binny got tagged as spam!.  They are also going after spammers on Gmail (which seems to have backfired since they had also deleted some non spam accounts!)

I wanted to create a poll on this blog and then I realized that there is no such thing as a perfect poll! The main problem is, how do you prevent bogus or duplicate votes?

Many existing polling systems use IP address to identify duplicate votes. But this eliminates a lot of valid votes! For example, 1000+ employees at my office use the same proxy server and hence to the polling system will appear as a single voter!

Also different IP addresses can never guarantee perfect polls. Methods used for internet anonymity such as Tor can be misused for bogus voting.

Other methods used are the cookie method and the email verification method. Both these are not fraud proof. Cookies can be easily deleted and multiple email ids can be easily created.

What we need is an internet identity which probably links to something like a passport number!

During my search for a perfect polling system, I came across this link. It claims to build a fraud proof voting system. But in reality it is probably the worst voting system!

When I wake up, I check my Gmail account for emails. Then I scan website feeds on Google Reader to see what is happening on the online world. After that I scan latest news from Google News.

If I have any doubts about anything I straight away go to Google Search. Infact I have set Google Search as my homepage.  Whenever I need an image related to a topic, I do a Google image search.

My friends contact me over Google Talk. Once Yahoo messenger was the IM I used, but not anymore.

My various “todo lists” are now on Google calendar. I maintain various pieces  vital information (passport number, contact numbers etc.) in Google spreadsheet. I rely on Google Adsense to finance this blog.

So if tommorrow Google disappears, I will have a tough time! Let me be clear, I am a big fan of Google. Their products simply kick ass and I am impressed by the way they have adopted Ajax in everything.  But the reliance on Google for everything is frightening…

I came across the story of a small company who had gone out of business simply because their pages disappeared from Google Index (Possible reason? - trying to game google!). For example, 80% of the visitors to this blog come from Google search!

Another problem is the fact that the Made for Adsense (MFA) sites are getting smarter. Instead of just copying content, they are also building links. The net effect is that the original site which actually authored the content will be flagged as spam and may get removed from Google Index! It is a hard job that Google has in their hands!

First, a disclaimer: My movie reviews are full of spoilers. So read it only if you have already seen the movie!

If you are interested in knowing how brain surgery can be done in your garage, Saw III is the movie for you. Want to test the efficiency of headache pills? Watch this movie!

I am a hardcore fan of horror movies. But I am getting bored by the increased gore and blood in the recent horror movies(Saw, Hostel etc.). Saw III is a perfect example of wasting a good plot line on unnecessary scenes such as the long brain surgery in a workshop.

It was long time since I picked up any movie. So with lot of expectation, I watched Saw III today and I am yet to recover completely from the experience. I give it an average rating. Here is a quick review.

Good : Unexpected plot twists and thank god! Jigsaw is dead

Bad : Too much flash back and the whole thing is getting repetitive.

Ugly : Too much blood, gore and surgery details.

If you plan to watch Saw III or already seen Saw III, I recommend you to see first two movies (Saw I and Saw II). Saw III actually connects everything together and should ideally be the last movie in the series. But it appears that Saw IV is already in production and we may see it in 2007 itself!

Saw III starts where Saw II ended. You see detective Eric making the inevitable decision of cutting his foot off. Then there is another game, but this time victim has no chance of escape. That makes Saw III different from other two films. The games are no longer perfect and it appears after all Jigsaw is only human(sigh!)

There is another interesting thing I noticed. The movie reminds me of rooms in Doom 3! They all look  like the ones rendered by John Carmack. There is a scene in which a judge (with his tie on) is tied to the bottom of a container and he shouts “I am a criminal judge, get me out of here”. Only scene where I laughed.

I enjoyed the main plot which is an “exploration of our desire for revenge”. There are numerous plot twists that takes you by surprise! In the end I think I was more surprised than Amanda

My rating : 5 out of 10, which means watch it if you got a holiday and there is nothing else to do!

PS:- Next movie in my list is Borat.

I have 3 broadband networks at home. I use BSNL 900+UL, Asianet WOW 199 and Reliance Netconnect. My main network is BSNL which is quite stable at 256kbps. Asianet is the backup which gives speeds upto 2MBPS. Reliance netconnect using USB modem is the final backup and I use it whenever I am on train or bus or on the beach thinking about hot babes like maria sharapova (don’t worry, it is a gimmick to get more traffic!).

As I have posted earlier, I recently upgraded IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. Also Firefox was upgraded to 2.0.0.3. Everything looked smooth until today.

Today being the last day of the month, I wanted to check the Asianet WOW 199 usage. The maximum I can use is 700MB/month and I just wanted to see what is left and download something (paris hilton photos perhaps?)

So I switched my Wifi connection to Asianet and clicked on the account usage link. The login screen came and I typed in user/password and clicked go. Following is the screen I got on IE 7.0.

As you can see the error is quite informative. It is as useful as a britney spears album is to a seminary (oops I did it again, the traffic bait!).

The error looked suspicious since login page and account page were served from the same server. Anyway I called up customer care and they sweared that the server is infact working!

Ok, probably IE 7.0 has some bug. So I tried the Firefox 2.0 to login, and here is what I got,

Thank god! Atleast it says there is something wrong with SSL! This error is much more useful than the IE 7.0 error. But still I have no clue what is happening. The idiots who coded this error decided that I don’t want to know how to access the site.

But I want to. Otherwise I have no other way of getting my account info. So turned to the ultimate saviour of tech problems. The Google!

Ok. Here is the true picture. IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.0 decided to support only SSL version 3.0 onwards since previous versions of SSL (1.0 and 2.0) are insecure. But luckily in IE 7.0 there is an easy way to enable SSL 2.0 (which Asianet account page is using).

1. Click on Internet Options -> Advanced.

2. Under security, check the use SSL 2.0 checkbox.

The firefox 2.0 hack to enable SSL 2.0 is bit complicated. If you are itching to know about it, search in Google!

Now this incident clearly demonstrates why many Software developers are idiots when it comes to usability. Be it microsoft or the open source community, there are many who fail to understand simple user interface/communication principles.

I guess this also explains why geeks are incapable of getting girl friends like aishwarya rai!

Today I upgraded Internet Explorer from version 6 to the latest version 7. The download requires genuine windows validation 3 times! Apart from that that 20MB download went smooth.

This review is based on my experience of using IE for just one hour! IE 7.0 simply rocks! The interface is sleek and the performance is unbelievable (for a microsoft product, that is  :-)) . Here are some of the interesting features of Internet Explorer 7.0,

1. Improved screen rendering. Now reading a webpage seems easier probably due to enhanced anti-aliasing.

2. Minimal, but effective UI - The UI is similar to Windows media player and is quite intuitive. All the frequently used features are easily accessible.

3. The tabbed browsing - This was probably the only reason I was using Firefox. IE 7.0 contains this feature and is better than Firefox when it comes to opening new tabs (new tab appears just near the old tab)!

4. Reduced startup time - I have a 1GB, 1.8GHZ machine and IE 7.0 starts in a flash!

Another noticeable feature is the Live search which appears on the right of URL field. It is quite tempting to use it instead of Google, nice try Microsoft!

So overall, I am very much pleased with IE 7.0. If you are using IE 6.0, I recommend immediately upgrading it to IE 7.0 (If you have genuine windows  :-))