Notes from a Desi Geek

And no I am not talking about mandatory .NET Passport sign in to post comments! Two little annoyances I found with MSN Spaces:

1) Accessing Permalink

I was browsing Shaded’s space and I wanted to copy the permalink of a particular entry. So, I right clicked on Permalink and selected ‘Copy Shortcut’. And what do I get?
A Javascript link which doesn’t work for my purposes!
It looks like you have to left click on ‘Permalink’ text which opens a ’section’ where the actual Permalink is displayed. Not only that, the whole page scrolls up to display Permalink at top! Now you can see the Permalink [for the original post], above a prior post [to your original post]. I find it extremely confusing (Try clicking on Permalink in MSN Spaces to understand what I am talking about), I am surprised that no one has noticed this before (May be people don’t really tend to use Permalinks.]! I wonder why MSN Spaces team has to make accessing Permalink a two step process?

2) Comment field - Number of characters limitation

I was trying to leave a comment on Shaded’s space and after entering few words, I copied bunch of text from clipboard. Suddenly, I was unable to type any text. I thought that may be my keyboard got stuck, so I kept trying and trying. Finally I realized that JavaScript on the page is not letting me enter more than ‘certain’ characters. But I can work around this check if I were to copy/paste text from clipboard. So having realized that, I created my complete comment in Notepad and pasted in the comment box. When I pressed ‘Publish Comment’, it gave me following error:

The comment you entered is too long. Please shorten your comment and click Publish Comment

No indication about what is the maximum number of characters one can enter in comment and how many extra characters I have typed. Very unhelpful.

Upon checking HTML source, I found that you can enter maximum of 1024 characters (Shaded, here is the sign of a geek!).

Suggestion for MSN Spaces Team:
Display how many characters are allowed in comment. And as a best solution, display live count of number of characters entered/left (just like many of those sms sites do).

JD

Post title is interesting, isn’t it?

Check this video.

I am sure you will love the message being communicated!

There are few more videos which you will love.

Find all other videos here.

If you are a geek and your girlfriend is also a geek, then these HTTP Panties makes the perfect gift for this Valentine!

Buy them from ThinkGeek.

Btw, I am going to get this tee myself .

It looks like Wipro, one of the leading IT Companies in India, has launched WiproWeblog. [via ~ via Suman]

I click on the WiproWeblog link with great expectation and what do I find?

1. They do not have RSS Feed for their weblog! According to me, this renders wiproweblog.com a non blog site as it doesn’t offer RSS Feed.
2. Check out their lengthy comment policy. It states that they might alter your comments before posting it. What is the point? Either post comments ‘AS-IS’ or do not post comment. Do NOT alter them.
3. It has no PERSONAL voice. It’s all usual PR Speak, e.g.

Organizations are increasingly finding that leveraging the latent synergy between these areas yields far …. Link

Latent synergy.. hm…what’s that?

Global Sourcing has resulted into unlimited possibilities for IT driven enterprises ……… Link

Looks like all the posting are from the very senior people, like Business Development Manager/Chief Marketing Officer/General Manager/ etc. I can’t help but wonder if they really wrote these posts themselves.

I think idea to implement weblog is good, but implementation leaves lots to desire. Hopefully they will learn soon.

JD

A very happy republic day to all desis… err… Indians out there!
Jai Hind!

JD

If your customers are happy, they will be loyal to you, they will recommend you to everybody they know. They will give you great business for coming years. And how do you make them happy?

Here are the 101 ways.

1. Care for your customer.
2. Care for your customer.
3. Care for your customer.
..
…
….
…..
……
101. Did I say, care for your customer?

Yes, you can say it 101 differnet ways but the truth remains.

If you care for your customer, your customer will be happy.

As Hillel said, everything else is commentary.

Updated:
My friend Christopher gifted two books from my wishlist. Books were delievered by USPS on Thursday, Jan 20th. But I never recieved the books. Looks like USPS left package outside my door once again and some f*cker flicked it! So I called up Amazon Customer Service and explained the situation. The customer representative re-ordered the book for me and upgraded shipping option to Next Day shipping from UPS! Remember, I didn’t ask her to re-order neither I asked for upgrading the shipping option! That’s a Customer Service! Will you be surprised if I tell you that I order ALL my books from Amazon, even if someone offers it slightly cheaper?

rocks!
JD

P.S.: Inspired by this post by Seth Godin.

One politician, One thief & One Programmer died & went straight to hell. Politician said “I miss my country, I want to call my country and see how everybody is doing there. He called and talked for about 5 minutes, then he asked “Well, devil how much do I owe you???? The devil says “Five million dollars” The Politician wrote him a cheque and went to sit back on his chair.

Thief was soo jealous, he starts screaming, “My turn! I wanna call the my group members, I want to see how everybody is doing there too” He called and talked for about 2 minutes, then he asked “Well, devil how much do I owe you????

The devil says “Ten million dollars” With a smug look on his face, he made a cheque and went to sit back on his chair.

Programmer was even more jealous & starts screaming, “I want to call other IT person too, He called other IT person and he talked for twenty hours about various technologies and Project Managers, he talked & talked & talked, then he asked “Well, devil how much do I owe you???? The devil says “Twenty dollars”. Programmer is stunned & says “Twenty dollars??? Only ??”

The devil says “Well if you make a call from one hell to another hell, it’s local”.
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If you have ever worked in Indian IT MNC and slogged for 10 out of 12 months, I am sure you will be able to relate to this joke. I know, I do! (via Sudhir)

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No, this post is not about some news report about killers, it’s about ‘nofollow’ attribute introduced by Google.

Hey, please don

Could someone explain to me why do we need to enter email address twice on user signup forms?

I mean, entering password twice on sign up form is understandable because password is masked. But email? I can see it with my eyebolls and I shouldn’t be needing to type it twice! Even though, I am going to copy/paste my email, I don’t want to hit that ‘Ctrl +C and Ctrl +V’.

My humble request to all websites,
Please DO NOT ask user to enter email twice on your sign up forms. It’s just plain stupid and waste of time.

Reason for rant: Today, wonderful folks at 37signals launched Ta-da list. I wasn’t really expecting them to create sign up form which will ask me to enter email address twice.

Update:
My fellow geeks replied that email address is mentioned twice because people may mistype it. And I say..

I can guess that user may mistype it. But do you really think you can solve the problem by asking them to enter it twice? I don’t think so.

Be honest, tell me how many times you have actually typed email TWICE? Either you copy/paste email OR you have some kind of form filler utility which takes care of inserting the email twice for you.

So in first case where user is copying/pasting, you will have wrong email in both fields AND in later case, email will be anyways correct.

Can you change your sign up script to count how many times error ‘Email address does not match’ is returned? I have the feeling that the number will be very small.

And if you want to make sure that user has typed email correctly, you can have a confirmation screen where app displays email which user entered (it can also display other information depending on your app) and account is created only if user presses the confirm button.

And let’s say that for your site, username is same as email address. In such scenario is makes much more sense to not ask email twice. Why, you may ask. Let’s say user signs up with wrong email and then he/she can’t login. As most of the sign up form send welcome mail after signing up, user will see that he has received none, so if he is smart he can figure out he typed email incorrectly OR he can use password reminder screen to verify that his account doesn’t exist. So now he can sign up again, making sure that email is correct! Does it make sense?

Now for sites which have username (or login id) separate from email, it can be problem as user potentially might loose a username because of using wrong email. In this case, my argument is why in the world you don

This post is in continuation with my earlier post about Default Actions for Web Apps.

Anyone who has used a complicated Web Application will agree that it can really get tiring to click on so many links just to access a particular option or perform an action! The problem is severe if the Web Application is slow. What could be the possible solutions?

1. Default page upon login should correspond to the main action for which user is using the App. E.g. for Blogging software Admin page, main action would be to write a new post. So, it will make sense to have ‘Write Post’ as default page upon login. Now, not every applicatin is as black and white as blogging software admin page where default action is obvious. So, in an ideal situation, user of the application should be allowed to choose the default page. [We see it all the time in desktop apps, where they have checkbox to make selected options as default options for given action. ]

2. Second and more useful feature a web application can provide is ‘Recently Performed Actions’ and ‘Most Frequently Performed Actions’. It should be relatively easy to code ‘Recently Performed Actions’ feature. Though, it will take some effort to code ‘Most Frequently Performed Actions’ as you have to monitor user action for some period of time. But both of these can be real time saver to users and I think it is worth Development effort to code these features. Amazon, eBay and other sites already implement