Firefox vs IE

FireFox or IE?
I made a switch to FireFox as my main browser long time back due to IE's vulnerabilities which installed spyware on my Win 2000 system without my knowledge. FireFox has generated quite a stir among people who were long waiting for an alternative to IE and it is quite impressive with Tabbed-browsing, live RSS reader, search toolbar and loads of extensions which make it quite slick. MS made a lotsa changes/upgrades to IE with Win XP SP 2 to make it more secure with built in popup blocker and an Add-ons manager which allows you to view Add-ons installed in IE. Judging by people's reaction on the net on FireFox v.s. IE, I feel most of them are totally biased towards FireFox cause it's a non-MS product and competing (more than 69,535,583 downloads till date) in a area where MS long held monopoly. FireFox is considered to be more stable and more secure than IE which I agree to somewhat but saying that FireFox is more secure and stable than IE (with Win XP SP2) by leaps & bounds is a mere exaggeration. Stabillty: My FireFox has crashed more often than IE over past few days (those who don't believe me should try http://games.yahoo.com or http://193.151.73.87/games/lemmings/index.html). I know Yahoo Games is more of an issue with JRE rather than FireFox but still for a not so tech-savvy end-user, it's FireFox which crashes whereas IE renders the page without any problem. The DHTML Lemmings game also loads perfectly in IE whereas it freezes Firefox(1.0.4).

Security: I think Firefox is 100% secure is again not correct, no browser is 100% secure, Secunia (www.secunia.com) published 3 vulnerabilities for FireFox (2 of them were across all browsers includng IE). It's just that FireFox is relatively new and hence hasn't attracted the Hacker's attention yet.

Also one has to keep in mind from end-user's perspective is that there are lots of sites which rely on features only supported by IE like ActiveX controls (www.dell.com is one such site apart from MS own site).

Verdict: If you don't have Win XP 2 installed I would suggest FireFox is definitely more secure choice, on Win XP 2 I don't think there is much difference between the two browsers in terms of security and stability, make a switch to FireFox if you can't live without tabbed browsing and live RSS reader and some cool extensions like AdBlock.

Food for thought: Would FireFox have received such rave reviews from the community had it been a MS product? I guess not...

Wish you were here..

I've always wanted to see a live concert of one of my favorite bands/singer but somehow or the other always have missed on the opportunities: last year in May end The Moody Blues performed at Louisville and my flight tickets to India were booked for a week before that, then this year Mark Knopfler performed in Bangalore and I again had to leave a day before to Hyderabad. But the grand-daddy of them all Pink Floyd (not just David Gilmour but Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright) performed Wish You were here today for the LIVE 8 show in London (well I would have never made it there) which while surfing channels on TV, I somehow stumbled upon and man were they awesome? you bet they were! Gimour and Water are like cult figures when it comes to rock music and I really envy the people who had a chance to see them perform live after so many years.
Hopefully one fine day I too would get a chance to see either The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd or MK live in concert.
Pink Floyd @Live8

Year passes by..

yeah I know it's still mid of 2005 but today would mark exactly one year since I met someone for the last time...seems to be long time huh? believe me it seems way too long than one year.

Waltzing Matilda

Guess I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and have been feeling pretty low; not that I've been feeling great off-late but since feeling low is also relative, today has been particularly a bad day. Did nothing today except watch one Adam Sandler's movie: Happy Gilmore, listen to some music(80's stuff) and cook lunch for myself (made egg-korma, the easiest and the safest thing to cook: not much scope of spoiling it, the only thing that perhaps you can get wrong is salt. Ate bread-toast for dinner as had no mood to cook). Happy Gilmore is a no-brainer light movie abt a hopeful Hockey Player who turns a pro Golfer to save his Grandma from being evicted, something that Adam Sandler marvels at, his other 3 movies which I saw off-late: The Wedding Singer (with Drew Barrymore) and Anger Management (with Al Pacino),

can't remember the name of the third movie!

were also more or less the same with Sandler at his comic best.

Apart from that the day for me has been pretty much murky, I know a lot of people have told me that I cling to the past for too long and don't move on along with time..I really don't understand what they mean by moving on, does it mean stop thinking, stop feeling, stop dreaming, stop hoping, stop doing what matters to you most? If that what moving on means then yes I would never move on with life, I would never stop dreaming, never stop feeling and having lived my life for 27 years I really don't think it's possible for me to change now anyway.

Bharwan Bhindi

Bharwan (hindi): Stuffed
Bhindi (hindi): Lady's Finger or for the ppl. with "Americonish" accent- Okra!
Bharwan Bhindi: Stuffed Lady's Finger/Okra.
People who know me well know that I just love bhindi in any form: even half cooked bhindi seems pretty good to me. So today I thought of trying out my oh-not-so-great culinary skills and decided to prepare my version of Bharwan Bhindi. The recipe was more or less mine & knowing how good I am taking shortcuts I didn't stuff the bhindi with masala that I prepared but added it along with the bhindi. In the end it came out pretty fine though turmeric and chilli powder were a little on the higher side...anywez I was pretty much pleased with my preparation & hopefuly one day would make it for someone special (no prizes for guessing who!).

I've got a secret....

http://postsecret.blogspot.com ...what's your secret?

Open source

On my system I decided not to install any "pirated" stuff, so thought I should give some open source/free softwares a try, here's what I have on my system : -

• OS: Windows XP Professional (I am very tempted to install Debian Linux also; just pushing it back as I only have 40GB HDD, perhaps I should look at installing Linux on External Hard Disk).
• Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox, firefox wins over IE in leaps & bounds. It's more lightweight (only 4.7MB installer), more stable, and above all keeps spywares and those annoying pop-ups away (more so with Adblock extension installed). I was very very flustered with IE after getting idiotic pop-ups even after installing Google/Yahoo pop-up blocker (servustats.com is one such site for instance on which the Google/Yahoo pop-up blocker fails) . I think the other reason why lotsa users are switching to Firefox from IE apart from the above features is due to the fact that Firefox's look & feel and keyboard shortcuts are more or less similar to IE which makes transition pretty simple.
• Development Tool(s): MS C# 2005 Express Edition CTP, Web Developer Express Edition CTP. I love .net and all those folks who think Java is better than .net, I think both are good in their own way. (aside: I would love to install Mone once I get Linux installed, it sure seems promising!)
  
• Database: Sql Server 2005 Express Edition CTP (new avatar of MSDE).
• Office suite: Open Office 2.0 Beta, another cool open source app with backing from Sun. I have been able to open all MS Word/Excel 200x documents in Open Office w.o. any loss of formatting. The only drawback is that even though OO Base opens MS Access files, it doesn't allow you to save it back, you can only save it in Oasis format (some open source frmt). Also the look and feel of Open Office is very much like MS Office making it pretty easy to use for MS Office users.
• Email Client: No prizes for guessing, has to be Mozilla Thunderbird with Calendar extension installed :-). It has pretty strong Junk/Spam filter which you can make better by training it. The biggest drawback is that the keyboard shortcuts don't map to Outlook or Outlook Express so Outlook users have to search for Keyboard shortcuts! Though it does a good job in synch-ing Tasks/Events from Outlook (which I use in the Office).
• Anti Spyware: MS AntiSpyware, guess it's the best though I would also recommend Lavasoft.
• MP3 Player: MusicMatch Jukebox basic with DFX installed.
  

Isn't life strange?

sometimes life just goes in one direction and the harder you try to change it the further it goes in that direction. Off-late I've learnt that at times not doing anything is better than trying to do something to change things. I guess it's alright to let life drift sometimes and let it go where it has to go. Last one year has been really crazy and today was the day which started it all.

Life, what is it but a dream?

Even if you don't believe in astrology you have to read this article by Kevin Burk on Neptune being retrograde, it's got the mix of astrology, metaphysics, quantum physics and a bit of philosophy et al. Didn't you have a sense of deja-vu?

Fate or Luck?

Isn't it funny that everytime something bad happens in life it's fate & everytime something good happens it's luck? Isn't anything supposed to happen good in life by fate?

Time

One of the funny things that I find about life is whenever you are doing something "trivial" (trivial things vary person by person: for some watching TV might be trivial whereas for someone online chatting might be) you get the guilt feeling that you're wasting away your time and perhaps you should be doing something worthwhile, the problem atleast with me is if am not doing the "trivial" stuff I dont even know how to kill time. Anywez all the gyaan apart here are few things that I do to kill time when I'm not working these days:
a. Read books (I don't consider this to be at all immaterial, I *think* reading opens your mind).
b. Play minesweeper (I owe this to Subbu who got me hooked on to this crap).
c. Play TextTwist on Yahoo! Games : This is my new found interest.
d. Listen to music: I love music.
e. Aimlessly watch TV.

More or less that's how I kill my free time, I am still trying to figure out though who is killing who!

and when all the wars are done...

Sumit wrote this excellent review on Ruskin Bond's "Time Stops at Shamli" at mouthshut.com (http://www.mouthshut.com/review/Time_Stops_at_Shamli_and_Other_Stories_-_Ruskin_Bond-70645-1.html). Very very recommended if you haven't read Ruskin Bond's work yet.

Unit Testing with nUnit

In case you're into unit testing: TestDriven .Net(www.testdriven.net) is an addin for VS.Net which allows running of nUnit test cases from within the IDE without having to run the nUnit GUI. A nice tool which saves you a lot of debugging time along with nUnit. Another add-in which is a must have atleast for VS.Net 2003 and below is Resharper (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/), makes refactoring a lot more easier.

Dot Net (.Net)? Not Yet

UPDATE: I've posted the VB.Net code sample in another post.

Off-late I've learning quite a few things about .net (mostly asp.net) the hard way (actually that is true as of now for almost everything in life). Anywez here are few more things that I found out.....

One of the requirement in this project is to show a list of RadioButtons within a DataGrid (could be a DataList or Repeater for that matter). Now the user gets to see the list of conferences in a grid and he can choose one (only one) from that list. So basically all I had to do was define a templatecolumn in the grid, include a RadioButton within the template and give it a groupname (the groupname ensures that the radiobuttons rendered are mutually exclusive). Seems to be a 5 mins job but guess what? I did exactly the same and when I ran the code, I could select all of the radio buttons within the grid at the same time. I checked the source html and found out that all the radio buttons rendered had unique names, thought I did something wrong so I debugged and debugged but couldn't figure out what was wrong so I resorted to my ol' faithfull friend: Google and voila MS has confirmed it to be a bug (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316495)! (aside: while typing I sowehow lost the entire content after this so have to type in everything again!!, very very bugged!). Googling further I found a workaround on CodeProject, the code basically creates a custom RadioButton which derives from the RadioButton and overrides Render method to ensure that same html name is rendered (using the GroupName property) and implements IPostBackDataHandler to persist the state of attributes on postback. The only problem was that the code was in C# and my current project is on VB.Net, converting C# code to VB.Net or vice-versa is a pretty trivial matter and generally does not take more than a minute per line of code or so I thought! this is where I learn another subtle but very big difference between C# and VB.Net, though C# allows you to re-implement an interface(in my case IPostBackDataHandler) already implemented in the base class (RadioButton), VB.Net does not and generates compile time errors!

(end aside) I really don't understand why such a feature would be only supported in one language and not another when MS is pushing both the languages equally now!! So this option was also ruled out but not to be deterred I thought of inheriting the custom control from one level up than RadioButton and then perhaps I could re-implement the IPostBackDataHandler well no luck, cause RadioButton inherits from CheckBox which actually implemnts the interface, so had to go one more level up: WebControl..now creating a RadioButton by inheriting from WebControl is no trivial matter..that's when suddenly a tool amazing tool called Reflector(www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/) came to my mind, basically Reflector allows you to reverse-engineer .Net Assemblies. Downloaded it and installed it and reverse engineered the code for radiobutton and checkbox and with few tweakings here and there, I had my custom radiobutton control ready which were mutually exclusive when placed within the grid or for that matter any container which implements INamingContainer in VB.Net! And am I pleased about my feat, you bet.

A tech post at last!

ASP.Net 1.x flames:

I've been working on a asp.net web-site project which has to be cross browser compatible (it is supposed to support IE 5.x+ and Netscape 6.x+) and it is something which I never had chance of working on before on .net. Few things that I found out, the client side validation for asp.net validation controls don't work on Netscape or for that matter on any other browser except IE! (including Mozilla & FireFox) not that these "new" versions of mozilla based browsers don't support the latest Javascript standards but it's due to the way these validation controls spit out Javascript which is very very IE specific (and that btw doesn't follow any standard!). First of all the client script by these controls is only thrown if the browser is listed in Machine.config as a "supported" browser (even though mozilla based browser do support latest JS standards, the config file only has IE listed). Second problem is the way WebUIValidation.js is written which uses document.all (a feature only supported by IE, the standard is to use document.getElementById) to find a control on the form. Fixing these two is easy but that doesn't make the client script validation run on mozilla based browsers! the biggest problem is the little script block that is emitted by the base validator control (all the validation control extend it) on the OnRender event, which again uses document.all! So basically it's impossible to add client side validation for non IE browsers unless you're willing to extend the base validator control, override its OnRender method and write validation controls which extend from the custom validation control!

Second thing that I hate about ASP.Net 1.x is the Postback feature, I think GMail revolutionized the way postbacks are handled by using remote scripting. It's really illogical for the entire page/form to post itself back if the user changes a value in a dropdown list (can you believe it ASP.Net also has a server event for TextBox.Text_Changed, imagine the user typing a character and the page posts back, nice way of making sure that the users don't visit your site ever!!!). The good news is that MS has finally woken up with ASP.Net 2.0 and most of the control support remote script callbacks for e.g. the GridView (successor of DataGrid in 1.x) uses remote scripting to refresh the grid for sorting/paging. ASP.Net 2.0 uses XmlHTTP for remote scripting and the irony is all Mozilla based browsers have XmlHTTP built in whereas in IE 6.0 you have to use an ActiveX control. Hopefully IE 7 would have XmlHTTP implemented w.o having to use ActiveX and praying users would lower their security settings to allow ActiveX controls so that the page can function properly....MS are you listening?

Apart from the flames read a nice article on Google vs MS (http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1050065-2,00.html) and the popularity of GDS, infact I myself am trying to build a plug-in for Yahoo!IM Archive: more or less there just have few frills to add..hope to have it rolled out at Sourceforge by next week some time.

PS: When would google wake up and add Category support for blogger?

Find your ESP using ESP Cards

http://www.mdani.demon.co.uk/para/esp2.htm

Thunder Over Louisville

April 23rd was Thunder Over Louisville, I remember the last year when I was there with Chhavi. Had some amazing time over that weekend (thanks to Debbie, btw talked to her couple of days back, was a nice feeling). Just went down memory lane today thinking about the event and that weekend...

Sixth Sense

Recently watched the TV show "The Mysterious world of Alain Nu", Alain Nu (www.alainnu.com) is a mentalist with very strong ESP. Some of the things that he performed on the show were: (a) He hands out a deck of cards to a volunteer, who shuffles and re-shuffles and re-shuffles, Alain takes 15 seconds to "read" the ordering of the cards by looking at them and then tells the cards in exactly the same order as they were stacked first from top to bottom and then from bottom to top! Atleast I can't memorize 52 cards' order in 15 seconds. (b) He hands over a deck of cards to a volunteer and him to call any two digit number (volunteer calls 22), asks another volunteer to calls any card (the volunteer calls 9 of clubs) and voila the 22nd card turns out to be indeed 8 of clubs (he doesn't touch the cards after the volunteers have made their choices). (d) He bends metal spoons w.o. even touching them by just moving his hands around the palms of the volunteer who has the spoon within them (c) Another one: He has 2 clean slates and a piece of chalk, he sandwiches the piece of chalk between the two slates and asks a volunteer to think of the name of a person and behold the name was written by an invisible hand even though the volunteer never said it aloud! There were quite a lotsa feats which were quite unexplainable by using "normal" logic and laws of physics. Almost all the feats that Nu performed were mentioned in Brunton's book "A Search In Secret India".

I know the first thing that comes to the mind after watching such "magic" feats is that it's just a magician's trick or an illusion. Is it really an illusion or the fact that since childhood we've been taught to use only 5 senses and anything which cannot be felt by one of these sense makes us call it as an illusion, just because we can't feel these things doesn't mean that they don't exist. Why do we have at times such a strong sense of deja vu? Why do we at times feel positive vibes when we meet someone for the first time and sometimes vice-versa? I think at times it's good to put aside the laws of physics and "normal" logic to understand certain things and events that happen in our lives, remember that all laws of physics are based on assumptions!

One year with Blogger.com

It's been one year since I've been blogging at blogger (seems to be a long time!) and am more or less pleased with the service that they provide..yeah it's a little lame when compared to other blogging site like weblogs but blogger.com is actually meant for not so tech-savvy bloggers. Few things sure need revamp: features like category support, a calendar with links to the dates you've blogged (I really like this thing in MovableTypes/weblogs), better commenting system etc. apart from that the interface is pretty decent and you can change the look n feel of your blogs with skins and has now pretty nice support for posting your pictures using Picasa. Life has changed a lot over the past one year since I started blogging which I think is reflected in my blogs over the time; they have been less tech-centric and more focused around my personal life not that nothing is happening in my professional life it's just that it doesn't matter to me any longer.
Started reading An Ordinary Person's Guide To The Empire by Arundhati Roy, hits you right between the eyes kinda book, should be able to finish tonight.

Good decisions, bad decisions

Off-late something has got me thinking: what is classified as a bad decision and what is classified as a right decision? Is it that if the outcome is good then it is a good decision and if it is not then a bad decision? or is it that if you do what others would have done then it is a right decision else if you decide to back your own instincts and do what you feel is correct then it is a bad decision? Well, according to me no decision is right or wrong at its face value, we generally tag a decision as bad or good based on the results, since results are the future events while you are about to make a decision how can you know the result? so I feel that no decision is right or wrong, yes you can perhaps make more "sensible" decision by following what "others" who were already in the same situation did. I've a problem with following "others" too, everyone has a different set of priorities in life, everyone has different endurance levels and everyone has his own unique circumstances to deal with...to me a good decision is a decision which is made by the person keeping in mind his circumstances, endurance levels and above all his priorities or things that matter to him & things that don't, irrespective of the outcome.
I took a decision some time back to move to US which some feel (no prizes for guessing) is not the most correct decision. They feel that it's gonna "screw up" my life, well according to me you can't screw up a life which is already screwed up! worst come worst I might have to write off the year(s) that I would be in the US but hey what if things work out? Doesn't it then seem to be a sensible decision? I know a lotsa people would have given up hope at this stage but as I said everyone has his own endurance level and everyone's got his own priorities and to me this is the thing that really matters something for which I don't even mind writing off my entire life forget about few years. So just keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that one day things would be back on track just like they used to be nearly an year ago (seems to be long time!).
By the way read a book called The Monk who sold his Ferrari by Robin Sharma, how is it? who knows, who cares.