Archive for the 'Internet' category

No Testing = FAIL

Jan 02 2009 Published by Niyaz PK under Internet, Programming

For a national paper presentation contest in a reputed engineering college, they developed a website for participant registration.

Before opening the website, they changed the database table name to a better one. (You know, these developers have got a habit of naming tables and variables after their pets).

After one month of operation, they closed the registration recently.

When they checked the database for the details of the participants, they were in for a surprise. Guess what? The database was empty.

Why? They forgot to change the table name in the code.

Two things I cannot understand:

  1. Why did not the application throw any error?
  2. Why they did not test it after it went live?

What are they going to do with the paper presentation contest now? I am anxious.

5 responses so far

On scalability and reliability

Oct 30 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under Internet

I saw the following comparison chart in a web hosting site:

This is just nonsense. Scalability and Reliability are two things which you cannot enable on the flick of a switch. Scaling web applications is a very difficult job. For instance, twitter is still fighting scaling issues. Reliability is hard, very hard, too.

2 responses so far

Why Google Chrome may not be the big revolution you think it is

Sep 06 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under Google, Internet

The web is celebrating the advent of the new competitor in the browser arena – Google Chrome. Here are some points you should note before jumping into the conclusion that Google Chrome is a huge revolution in the browser history.

The bugs

Here are some bugs I saw in the Google browser:

1. The task Manager is a main feature in Chrome. But let us get this straight: It does not work as intended always. Look at the screenshot below:

Google-Chrome

Chrome crashed and the Task Manager option was disabled so that I could not check what was wrong. If the task manager is disabled when the browser crashes, what is the point in having a task manager in the first place?

2. The browser crashes too often. I used the browser in three different machines and the browser tends to crash once in a while. This is very annoying considering the fact that the latest versions of Firefox and IE are rather robust.

There is even a very simple way to crash the browser.

Just type “:%” in the omnibox (address bar). Voila !!!

Google-Chrome-Crashed

Another annoying thing is that when the browser crashes, it crashes every single instance of the browser running, not just the current window.

Other Interesting facts

3. Chrome is not the fastest in terms of JavaScript performance it seems. Two different tests confirms this. In one test Firefox is ahead if Chrome while in the other, Safari is ahead. It is just that Chrome outperforms the other browsers in certain tests which Google handpicked by itself. Anyway it should be noted that Internet Explorer versions are all lagging behind by great margins in every single test.

4. Tab manipulation and the omnibox are not really a big step as far as web development is concerned. Those are just usability tweaks that can be incorporated in to any browser without much effort.

5. Chrome does not support add-ons as of now. This is a very huge drawback when compared to Firefox. Without add-ons, the functionality of Chrome is very limited. We can only hope that Google will incorporate the support for add-ons in the next iteration of the browser. The Firefox tribe (The early adopters) will hesitate to switch to Chrome because of this one single drawback.

6. Regional language support is poor. I still cannot not find out how to render some regional language web pages correctly in Chrome. Especially the option to change the font representing a regional language is missing.

7. There are many other smaller glitches like the absence of Full-Screen, absence of option to restart downloads etc.

So what is there to be excited about Chrome? The multi-threading capability and ability to isolate tabs are not a big innovation either. The IE team have been experimenting with this for IE8.

A much loved feature would have been the support for JavaScript multithreading. But Chrome does not support that also. There is no real innovation in the rendering engine front also. Chrome if just reusing the webkit rendering engine which is powering the Safari browser.

The only big thing about Chrome is the new fast V8 JavaScript engine and it capabilities. I am not sure if we can bank on that for creating wonders in the web.

As of now, I will go back to my much loved Firefox3. The Beta 2 version of IE8 also looks promising. It does have a lot of new features. It will make many Microsoft fans very happy. I will wait until Google comes up with some thing really different, something really game-changing.

13 responses so far

Thank you clicks don’t count

Aug 25 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under Internet

Seth Godin says in his post this Friday:

If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.

Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet.

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

The idea is good, except that it won’t work.

There is an economy behind ads. If the value of a click decreases (it decreases when you click for giving a thank you), the click generates less revenue for the advertiser, and in turn the publisher is paid less. This means that the revenue of the publisher remains the same if you click genuinely or otherwise.

You can cheat for some days (may be), but then the numbers adjust themselves.

4 responses so far

Voidy now in beta

Aug 21 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under General, Internet

Voidy is in beta now.

The basic chatting functionality is working fine.

The good news is that 50+ of my friends are already using it and giving feedback.

The bad news is that since I have not done any PR stunt and since voidy is not featured in any of the techcrunch like sites, I don’t expect many users to know about it and use it. But that is fine; I primarily developed this for a very small group of people who wanted this exact functionality.

Thank you all for your support. If you have’nt registered already, sign-up and help me test the application.

4 responses so far

The Loss of Interestingness

Jun 07 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under Internet

The web is an amazing being. It brings us virtually everything remarkable from all over the world. Anything that is flashy enough catches your attention for a very short span of time and it fades away into the oblivion. Comparatively, the good old days before the wide spread use of the Internet had more to offer in terms of interestingness and we had many things that caught our imagination.

We had heroes and stories and love and emotions and drama. Now we have the world wide mess, and nothing else. We get loads and loads of forwarded e-mails daily which contains some small tiny entertainment value. It may be a photograph, a joke, a video or a link. Whatever that is, it is there for a split second. The next second, it is gone.

Internet has a lot to offer in terms of information, exploration value and variety that we have no time to enjoy any single thing. We are running from one thing to another. One picture to another. One e-mail to another. One website to another. One person to another. Thousands of new articles are being written everyday in Wikipedia. Thousands of new blog posts come out every day to the wild. Thousands of pictures are posted in Flickr. We can only gasp unbelievably at the overload of information coming our way.

Techcrunch reports hundreds of new startups every month. We don’t have time to catch up with the development and progress of them. We sign-up for an account in some of them and we forget.

I remember the days when we will see a snake nearby our house and we will talk about it for days. Or an accident in the road, or a funny incident that took place, or an outing we had from our school. That magic effect is not there in the Internet.

In the Internet, nothing matters much.

The web gives us lots of entertainment value. It promises a lot in terms of technology. It gives us dreams of huge financial incentives.

But the interestingness is fading.

6 responses so far

How to connect your PC to the internet using vodafone connection

May 08 2008 Published by Niyaz PK under Internet, Tips

This is a post on how to connect your PC or Laptop to the internet using your vodafone mobile connection in India (It may work for other countries also).

You need:

  1. A vodafone connection in India
  2. A Bluetooth enabled mobile phone with GPRS facility.
  3. A Personal Computer or Laptop.
  4. Bluetooth Dongle.

Steps:

  1. Delete all the internet profiles (if any) from your mobile phone.
  2. Delete all the data accounts (if any) from your mobile phone.
  3. Send the message WWW to 52586
  4. Save the settings that you receive.
  5. Connect your PC/Laptop to the mobile phone using the Bluetooth software.
  6. In the software select the option resembling “Connect to Internet”.
  7. Provide the number to dial as *99***1# and dial.
  8. You will be connected to the internet.

This procedure was tested from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and it worked fine. If you know of any different procedure for any other locale, please comment below.

7 responses so far

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