Notes from a Desi Geek

Update: Corrected URL to babynamesworld.com for my name.

If you have ever interacted with me, you would know that I always refer myself as JD.
And if you ask me my actual name, I would be hesitant to tell you that my name is Divyesh. I let people know that I prefer if they call me JD as I really hate the name ‘Divyesh’.

Then invariantly, girls will say that ‘Divyesh’ is a cool name. [Yes, if I ask guys to call me JD and not Divyesh, they NEVER, ever say that 'Divyesh' is a good name.] Finally, I have a proof that name ‘Divyesh’ sucks. Thanks to Jatin, I found this site about baby names which tells me that 86% out of 126 people thinks that they don’t like the name.

So next time, someone will tell me that ‘Divyesh’ is a good name, I will give them link to this post.
JD
P.S.: Btw my last name is ‘Jariwala’. So in case you are wondering, JD => Jariwala Divyesh. Yes, yes, I know you are going to suggest that my name should be DJ and not JD! I have had enough of those as well!

John asks:

Mac OS X 10.1 - Puma
10.2 - Jaguar
10.3 - Panther
10.4 - Tiger
10.5 - ?

And I say……

Mac OS X 10.5 - Pussy!
What’s your opinion?

JD

I don’t remember the exact date, but few weeks back, MSDN Blogs backend system was upgraded.

Somehow, the new system has quite a few usability problems. Here’s what I have discovered:

1. Comment Form is missing!
   No, not that there is no comment form, but by default, comment form is not shown at the end of the post. You have to click on a link ‘Post a Comment’ to get to the comment form.

   And btw, this comment link is not even at the end of blog entry (blog entry = blog post + comments), so if you have a blog entry like this one from Larry which has 32 comments, you need to scroll back up to the end of post. Find the ‘Post Comment’ link and then create the comment. I wonder why ‘Post Comment’ link is not at the end of the entry.

   And I am not able to grasp why would they even need this ‘Post Comment’ link in the first place. What’s wrong with a comment form at the end of entry? 99% of blogs have comment form right at the bottom of entry and I think that’s perfect. Why would MSDN Blogs need to take a different (and painful) route?

2. Useless ‘Title’ field in Comment Form
   If you see the MSDN Blogs comment form, you would find a field named ‘Title’. It defaults to ‘re: <Title of Post goes here>’.

   I find this field completely useless. No one* uses it and it just adds noise to the updated blog entry.
   Check the below snapshot of comments on Larry’s blog.

   

   Not a single commentator has changed the title while posting his/her comment. What’s worse is that the entry highlights the ‘title’ of comment which is basically same for all comments! I have been participating in various online communities for last 7 years and I know for sure that no one uses ‘Title’ field related to their comment. They would leave it blank, and if you force them to enter title, they would enter some junk.

   *When I say no one, I mean less than 0.00001% of people who posts comments on blogs.

3. Trackbacks are not displayed properly.
   Here’s how a Trackback is displayed on MSDN Blogs:

   

   Trackback shown above, can be found here

   Instead of treating Trackbacks separately, they tream them as comments. Nothing wrong with that but they way they do it is:
   1. They use ‘Anonymous’ as Author’s name.
   2. The link to ‘Anonymous’ text would take it to the actual post which was trackbacking.
   3. The title of the comment displays the title of post which track backed in the first place.

   Clearly, this is not greatest of implementation. Compare this to how WordPress displays Trackback.

   
   Trackback shown above, can be found here.

   This is much, much better. Here’s why:
   1. You can clearly identify it as Trackback by the words ‘Pingback’.
   2. Title of the post (identified by number 1 in snapshot) and Blog Title (identified by number 2 in snapshot) are clearly displayed.
   3. It also shows the relevant piece of text where the particular entry was referred.

I have a GMail account which I mainly use for all my non-essential mails.

Few days back, I joined a Yahoo! Group using the GMail account and all the mails from that group started flooding my Inbox. Even though GMail groups mails as conversations, it started becoming difficult for me to identify non Yahoo! Group Mail from Yahoo! Group Mail.

I thought, separating these Group mails should be simple. I went to Settings->Filter and created my filter which would apply right label to all the *incoming* group mails and move them out from Inbox. The keyword here is incoming. There is no way you can apply a filter to mails which are already present in your Inbox! I checked the help section and could not find a way around it.

Now I don’t know about you, but I create filters/rules/labels after I see bulk of emails matching some kind of pattern. I do not envision that I would be receiving particular kind of mails and I should create filter. And in its current form, GMail filters are not so useful for me. What do you think?

JD

Recently, Google is linking to Answers.com for exploring meaning of search terms.

I kind of like the service, it’s neat; it’s fast and gets the job done.

Yesterday, I took a step ahead and installed their desktop application which allows one to click on any word anywhere on your desktop and get its meaning. They even offer integration with Internet Explorer through right click menu.

Today, I was browsing using Internet Explorer[1] and I kept going to Answers.com for no apparent reason. That’s when I realized that they have installed ‘Answers’ menu item as the first menu item replacing the default ‘Back’.

So whenever I tried to use ‘Back’ menu item using right click, I went to Answers.com! This shows how important consistency is in User Interface Design. I am so used to right clicking and selecting first item as ‘Back’ that if you replace it with something else, I will be toast! It’s a bad design decision by Answers to replace the de-facto place of ‘Back’ menu item. They should install menu item ‘Answers’ above ‘Properties’ just like everyone else. I hope somebody from Answers.com reads this and corrects it.

[1] - Yes, I am no Firefox fanatic, I use IE depending on how I am feeling at given moment.

Ever wondered how would you look if you were from different race? Say, Caucasian?

OR say you didn’t evolve and still had Chimpanzee characteristics?

OR if Modigliani, the Italian Painter, drew your potrait?

Wonder no more. Check out The St Andrew’s Face Morpher!

Just one caveat. The page uses Java Applet for face morphing but it’s worth installing Java to see the effect!
The Java applet can morph your face to show how you would look if you were child, teenager, east-asian, west-asian etc.

It’s fun, check it out!

Through Om, I came across product called ‘Smart Folders’ from Blinkx.

Blinx is a prime example of how NOT to do your homepage.
There are too many things which simply makes me want to close the page and run away!

1. Use of Red Color.

   Looking at the page makes me wonder whether this page is for RedHat. Heck, even they don’t have so much Red color on their page. If you try to read the page for more than few seconds, your eyes will start to hurt!

2. ALL UPPERCASE TEXT.

   EVERYONE KNOWS THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPITALS IS RUDE, RUDE AND RUDE. ALSO, IT’S VERY HARD TO READ.

   Woohoo! I just did it! Anyway, the sidebar ‘Blinkx Press’, links to various press mentions and all of them is capitalized! Yikes!

3. Use of images for main body text

   The main text on their homepage uses image to display paragraphs of content instead of using simple text. What more, the all the text inside image has ’shadow’ effect which makes it difficult to read the text. Not to mention that it increases the size of the page, I can not resize the text size and Google can not make sense of your page.

4. Too big homepage

   Their homepage is 1.91 mb in size! Wow, I hope all their users are on broadband! I tried to figure out why their page is so big and I found that they are using flash animation at the bottom (did you bother to scroll down to find the animation?) which is 1.6 mb in size. Still without animation, their page is 322kb. I bet, you can reduce that homepage size to 100kb in total without any loss of information.

5. No product/service message.

   Can you figure out what does blinkx.com offer? Is it mainly online search or mainly about their ‘Smart Folder’ product? Btw, did you read their description of ’smart folder’?

   Smart folders are intelligent folders that automatically and persistently update their content as new information becomes available. Smart folders build over time and can be based on the actual ideas contained within the content of those files, and not on select keywords.

   ?? What the heck does that mean? Is it meant for me (a geek) or is it for use by any computer user? Is it meant for researchers, publishers, students? I really don’t know. And I don’t think I care enough to dig dipper and find out.

Btw, their logo screams ‘unprofessional’. Looks like it’s done by a Photoshop amateur, who has just learnt ‘emboss’ and ’shadow’ effect, doing extremely poor job of copying Google logo.

Suranga Chandratillake (founder of Blinkx), if you are reading this, I sincerely urge you to redo your homepage so that it’s smaller, easier on eyes, which makes me want to learn and explore your product.

JD

Note: If you are not Indian, please ignore this post as you will not be able to relate to it.

Update: Badmaash crew has done it again!
As Anil points out in comment, the animation is not done by Badmaash but Nina Papley. You can find 2 more chapters in this series here.

Check out their latest animation titled ‘Sita sings Blues’. A whole new perspective to look at Ramayana!

Warning: If you are from Shiv Sena or VHP, please do not see the animation. You would not like it.
‘Dishoom’ is another Badmaash creation which I really like.