As a web developer, I have been disappointed, disheartened, frustrated, and mostly infuriated by IE6. If you don’t know what is IE6, most probably you are using it right now. Now, I don’t want to get into the technical details of IE6 and why it sucks. I’ll just logically prove to you why supporting IE6 won’t help your business. Without any doubt we can assume that the only people who use IE6 are:
1) People who are just plain stupid (aka fools): These people don’t know what a browser is, and just click on the start button of their XP boxes and click on “Internet”.
2) Grandmas (aka grandmas): I wouldn’t say they are stupid, but they are likely to use IE6 for the same reason as above.
3) People who surf the net from cyber cafes(aka ‘poor people, hungry people’ or pphp ): They don’t have any other options in many cases. Too poor to own a computer, and too naive to demand a better browser. Some references to pphps can be found here and here.
4) People whose companies have blocked installation of other browsers and applications (aka handcuffed): Tch tch… sometimes these good old normal people (even internet savvy, you may say) might not be able to use another browser because of their companies. Enterprise apps are many a times built for IE6.
5) People who develop and test their sites on IE6(aka developers): Poor people like us, who have a job to protect their site on IE6, and still make it work on other browsers.

After we have established the users for IE6, we can analyse the web to see why it’s used. And why making your site work in IE6 is not helping you in any way. Let’s consider the broad categories of websites/web applications one is likely to encounter:

1) E-commerce – Suppose you’re running your e-commerce site, do you think anyone using a paleolithic browser like IE6 is going to run his/her card through your payment gateway? E-commerce doesn’t work for fools – they would select mastercard instead of visa. It doesn’t work for grandmas – they won’t know what a credit card is. Of course it doesn’t work for pphp- Remember, they are poor people, hungry people. Handcuffed people won’t be allowed to visit an e-commerce site anyway, and developers are too busy making that site.

2) Building a Brand: Rolexes and Ferraris don’t sell on the web, but still have well maintained websites. The reason is that they want to build or enhance their brand through a slick website and substantial web presence. Branding doesn’t work for fools – that’s their definition. Might work for grandmas, but they would forget the brand name during lunch time. I’m assuming no branding is necessary for pphp, as they’re not in any target group – they never are. Handcuffed people won’t be allowed to visit a branding site anyway, and developers are too busy making that site.

3) Content: People also use internet to read some free content online. If you have any serious content that’s not about fools or grandmas, then your site is not going to be used by them anyway. Pphp may come to your site, but being too time conscious, before they click on an ad which helps you earn profit,  they’ll either pack up and leave or use their remaining minutes watching desibaba. Handcuffed people won’t be allowed to visit a content site anyway, and developers are too busy making that site.

4) Networking: Who wants fools to be a part of their social or business network? You got it – other fools. If your site analytics shows that IE6 users make 40% of your total users, you know that your networking site is going to die – soon. Grandmas and pphp- ditto. And of course Handcuffed people won’t be allowed to visit a networking site anyway, and developers are too busy making that site.

5) Mail, apps and other useful sites: You can hold IE6 users to ransom and refuse supporting it. If your product is good enough(e.g. youtube, google apps, 37signals), people will upgrade their browsers and come to your site anyway.

Moral of the story: Let it dIE

Orkut wtf

So orkut tried to “Find a match in my community and profession“. These are three epic stupidities in just one sentence! The girl they choose to titillate me with is Ms. Shah, a Gujarati (while I’m a marwadi), who is an MBA (while I’m an Engineer). And of course I’m MARRIED! The probability of me being interested in marrying Ms. Shah would be lesser than me surviving two thunder strikes and dying off a coconut falling on my head. So much for the targeted ads.

Oh, by the way: Facebook isn’t doing too good in terms of targeting either. The post on pluggd.in which talks about Indian matrimonial websites stooping too low also notices this.

1) Start with finances. If you don’t have the money to make the down payment, delay it for as long as possible. Don’t think that you’ll arrange it someday. Arrange the money now. Earn, borrow, steal or rob, but have it right now. If the house you’re eyeing is unfurnished, account for shiploads of money (usually >10% of the house price itself) or plan to go for another house furnishing loan.

2) Beware of banks. They say that they will give you 85% (or even 90%) of the sale value of the price, what they mean is that they will give you 80% of the market value (which the banks calculate themselves, and is quite lesser than the sale price). Finalize which bank are you going to go forward with, and start the procedure ASAP. It easily takes 3-4 weeks for any sane bank to actually give you the cheque of the remaining amount from the time you approach them for a housing loan.

3) Actually this should have been point # 1, but here it goes: Maintain a good CIBIL score. Remember the credit card you once defaulted? Or the one you thought was extorting money by asking a lot of stupid ‘finance charges’ and decided to shout at the call centre girl to get it settled for half? My friend, you’ve destroyed half your chances to get a housing (or any other) loan. If affects your eligibility more than anything else. Stay clean, pay your credit card bills, don’t have bounced cheques, don’t make settlements with a bank EVER, pay the full amount.

4) Get married. No seriously, being married gives you a host of advantages. Your credibility in the eyes of bank increases. Your loan eligibility increases if your spouse is working. Your CIBIL score is offset by that of your wife, who has religiously paid all her CC bills always, and never let her bank balance drop to zero. Also, she has most probably spent more time in her present company than you have in your present organization

5) Before paying any amount to the seller, figure out whether you are eligible for the loan that you are looking out for. This is the step when you finalize your bank, submit documents for loan application, and manipulate the seller in delaying the token amount payment. The most amount of hurdles occur at this step. Have you been in your present company for less than a year? Problem! Are you asking for a loan whose EMI exceeds half your monthly salary? More problem.
Make sure you have your identity proof, address proof. PAN card, salary slips, bank statements (for all accounts you hold) for a year. Working in a startup doesn’t exactly help your cause.

6) Assuming that you’ve signed the sale agreement (different from a sale deed), and made the down payment of 15% (or whatever percentage) of your house price, now is the time to get everything fixed in your new house. The seller has smelled blood with the few lacs you’ve paid him, and will be willing to fix anything for the remaining. Check all the switches in the house, any trace of seepage, broken tiles, drainage system, your parking lot, any remaining dues. Lots of stuff to check, really. But its important that you do it now, because once you’ve paid the entire amount… most probably the seller will forget that you or the house exist.

7) Go sign the sale deed. Reach your registration office on time, and keep every document ready. Don’t act over smart and just comply. Do whatever you’re told, pay any overheads (yes, another term for bribe) and you’ll be done in a couple of hours. Your banker will keep the original registration documents and give you a photostat. Make sure you don’t give any more docs to the banker than required. Do not, for example hand over your maintenance agreement or your clubhouse membership to him. You’ll need it.

8 ) If you get a vanilla house, with no wood work whatsoever, you need to also get a house improvement loan. Well that’s for some other day, but the only thing I’d suggest is: Plan the amount you’ll need for getting the furniture done, multiply by 1.5. These things are never cheap, and they aren’t only as expensive as you had planned initially.

1) My best friend’s weeding
2) Beauty and the breast
3) Mobsters, Inc.
4) Fight cub/ Flight club
5) Top gum/ Toy gun
6) Jurassic pork/ Jurassic dark/ Jurassic bark
7) Malice in wonderland
8 ) School of cock
9) French Kids/French piss
10) Porn on the fourth of July
11) Fat and furious/ fast and curious
12) Apocalypse, wow/ Apocalypse, how
13) Terminator 2: Judgement gay
14) The deported/ She departed
15) Full mental jacket
16) No country for bold men
17) Boy story/ Joy story
18) Shaving private Ryan (Although Shaving Ryan’s privates is a better title)

Just a couple of hindi movies as well :

19) Jab we met becomes: Jab me wet (Okay, technically it’s two letters but who cares)
20) Gandhi becomes Aandhi (Okay, technically it’s not a hindi movie but who cares)

Tell me which ones were the best, and which ones were humorless. Also add some more in the comments, if you can come up with a #oneletteroffmovies list as well.

Three weeks was the allotted time for the completion of the project in which the design (and its thousand iterations), development, and QA and all the tweaks would all had to be completed. And my team, i.e. Mayur (a.k.a the designer), Kanupriya (product manager) and myself (the developer) were given the responsibility for the web application. It was definitely a roller coaster ride; new designs being discussed (and partly implemented) daily, new functional requirements and the architecture slowly but surely building up.

I had an option of choosing Ruby on Rails or php or Java EE to build this application, and for a two weeks time frame the former two would have definitely been faster. But we decided for Java, and built the entire application using jsp/struts/tiles/spring/hibernate/postgresql/jboss. It’s a standard web application: A home page which briefly introduces the application, some static pages which explain the competition in the detail, a registration page (with forgot password functionality), login, user profile page, category page, theme page and upload image page. Image storage and thumbnail generation have been given a lot of importance, and is pretty scalable. But to get the thing work in IE6 was a real pain. IE7 didn’t play too nice either but they all eventually fell in place

A javascript library is needed in every modern application, and although a big fan of YUI I decided on jquery this time. And I am amazed by the variety and support in jquery plugins, and slowly becoming my favorite. Although this is the first application where I hadn’t used any AJAX in the whole application, the whole experience is pretty smooth in my opinion. The image upload could have been a little smoother(and it will be, I promise ) with the flash uploader. Some more small features like an ajax feedback modal dialog box and editing image details might follow soon.

Coming to the competition, there are actually three of those. Photographer of the year(POY for brief), Young photographer of the year(YPOY), and Wedding photographer of the year(WPOY). YPOY and WPOY are being organized for the first time this year, and as you’d have guessed, YPOY is only for people under 18.

There are eight themes each for the photographer/young photographer of the year: Family and friends, Natural elements, life on streets, man/environment, twilight magic, still life, wild life and landscapes and a maximum of four photographs can be uploaded in each theme. For wedding photographer of the year, the themes are: Bridal portraits, couple portraits, family and friends, behind the scenes, emotions and photo series of a single wedding. All competitions are open for amateurs and professionals alike, so just pick up your camera, shoot some cool shots and go uploading!

All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience developing the application, in which arguably the best Indian photographers, young photographers and wedding photographers will upload their best shots! I hope that the best photographers in India would find participating in the contest simple and enjoyable.

According to me, Hero Honda has come up with the stupidest names ever for bikes. Now, what kind of a loser names his bike Achiever? No seriously! Why would anyone in the world want to buy a bike which is named Achiever? Ditto for Glamour, unless you are a yellow-pants-orange-shirts wearing Govinda yourself. With Hunk, they reached a new low, which I didn’t even think was possible. Well, maybe they thought of building an hunky Indian version of the Harley Davidson, but named it so that everyone understands what the name stands for.
Ambition, in my guess would be for the 50 year old virgin who still thinks he could marry a princess, but manages only to buy an Ambition in the end. And don’t even get me started on Splendor(and the thousand versions of it: Splendor plus, super Splendor, Splendor NXG)!

Glamour might be for Hunks who have the Ambition of being Achievers of Priyanka Chopra. Speaking of bollywood and HH’s naming of bikes, I think there is a definite correlation. In my opinion, Hero Honda names most of its bikes keeping one bollywood star in mind. If Glamour=Priyanka Chopra, Hunk=Hrithik Roshan, Joy=Joy Mukherjee, Ambition=Imran Hashmi, no points for guessing what’s Karizma for. I can actually read through the mind of the person responsible for Karizma. “Hmm.. I need to name this bike in English… I think Charisma is a good word, which although I don’t understand, would look nice. Moreover it sounds like Karishma Kapoor (big grin). But people would think it’s a lengthy version of “chashma”, so let me make it more like Karishma.” Hence the name Karizma.

With Passion, they forgot that they are selling a bike and not viagra on wheels. And I can only assume that Passion Plus would be an ideal name for a stronger medication.

Maybe I was a little harsh on Hero Honda, because other companies like Bajaj, TVS, even Yamaha sometimes name their bikes idiotically. Like Dawn or Boxer etc, but come on. You have to give it to Hero Honda for the maximum number of ridiculous names.

When Hero met Honda, a cycle company met a motorbikes company, and you can only be sure that cyclists are nothing more than stupid people, hence the awesome bike names. I could go on and an, and take a dig at pleasure, sleek, street, and the endless other ludicrous names, but I should just stop and let you know that such names not only grind my gears, but make my blood boil.

p.s.: I ride an Avenger, and if you think the name is awful, you are wrong.

If you want the same fact statistically analyzed even more, I am willing to oblige. This year, 637,578 students – 264,248 female and 373,330 male – took the Class 12 board exams in the country and abroad. If I ran a daily: the headlines would be:
1) 288957 boys and 243282 girls pass this years CBSE. Boys outshine girls, yet again
2) 19% more boys pass CBSE than girls, buck up females!
3) Mass hysteria in women as CBSE 12th girls fail to pass (as much as boys)

For one more example of selective statistics for empowering women, now bring your attention to something we’re so used to seeing that we hardly notice the prejudice. Do an exercise: Grab today’s newspaper and search for any news which mentions an accident (where > 10 people died). I bet you’ll be able to find the pattern, “52 people died in a bus accident near blahblahland. 19 women, 3 children and 4 senior citizens were identified dead in this horrible accident”. Yeah right, what happened to the men, Sherlock?
The newspaper almost wants to say: “Some men also died, we’re too lazy to count. If you’ve attended kindergarten, do the math yourself. Anyway, they deserved to die. They were not cute little children or helpless women or old dying senior citizens. We won’t evoke any sympathy from the reader if I mention such trivial details.”

And this really grinds my gears.

The first one is of a guy selling gay milk. As simple as that! Now I’m no Dubey that I can even try to figure out what was going through this guy’s head when he wrote that.
And forget writing it, he earns his living out of selling the homo milk, have a look:

Now this one is a little less hilarious, but definitely noteworthy. How does an merchant sell a product meant for foreigners (or pseudo foreigners) without knowing their language? At the least he’ll try to use a couple of words, which make the foreigner understand about it’s availability. Here’s what hamara hero writes:

If I were a mineral water bottle, I would do the same. i.e. Hang myself to death(see pic above, again) rather than being avelebal hear.

Actually why the name asklaila?
No one amongst us knew that this one question would need so much explanation, even after 2 years of starting up.
When we started up we knew that our business will be all about local information, and how well and efficiently we expose that information to the seekers. So there we were – working non-stop, defining the product and the usability, features and security, scalability and performance, uptime and scalability and all that jazz. And of course, a name!

The developers (4 in number then) were least concerned with the name, but the CXOs won’t let us rest without coming up with some. And then they would choose the best of the lot. Amogh had a natural instinct of coming up with the weirdest names and he came up with a list of names, which he thought were suitable for our baby. His list reads: searchwala.com, merafind.com, sahihey.com, sefigo.com(SEarchFIndGo), jstfnd.com and some others. Birla congratulated Amogh for his creativity for SEFIGO.com and topped him by suggesting sahibatao.com.

Some other names were toyed with in the meanwhile, 58989.com being the one which was closest to become the ONE name everyone agreed upon. Why 58989? Because that would be the sms shortcode for using our local search service. And we could not violently react against the bland website name 58989.com, naturally, who can hate a number? We actually got mockups from UI guys, and got our logo made for 58989.com. I thank the chinese guy who had blocked the actual domain 58989.com, and never replied to Sukrit’s emails for buying the domain.

In the meanwhile, our three CXOs were slowly nourishing their loves for 3 different website names. Kiran would not let go of totallocal.com. It was the exact name our website was all about! It was short, it was easy to remember, contained the word ‘local’, had an easy spelling and a host of other advantages. Birla was specially fond of SeFiGo.com(SEarchFIndGO), it was short too, but not too easy to remember, contained both words ’search’ and ‘find’ (although partially). But we had to convince him that you don’t want your customer to GO after they search and find. You don’t want a negative connotation in your brand name, do you?

Shriram had come up with ‘asklaila.com‘ in the same time, which was the naturally the most controversial one
Q) Why Asklaila?
A) When you want to know about a good bengali restaurant, how do you find it? Find a good beauty parlour? Search for an electrician? Which is the best gym in my locality? Naturally, you ask a friend. We wanted our service to become that one friend, who knows everything about your city, gives the best suggestions, is up-to-date, is omnipresent and is very reliable. And it doesn’t hurt if the friend is female, and has an enigmatic name The name sounds Indian, and would be good enough to take us international. asklaila.com would have an awesome recall value. People could love it or hate it, but won’t forget it!  Laila would replace the friend whom one could just call or dial for local information.

So Kiran organized a poll for the best name amongst five.  He eliminated Birla by not even having sefigo.com in the poll, smart move. To please Shriram he included only one of his own horses (totallocal.com) in the race and three of Shriram’s (asklaila.com, lailaknows.com, lailasays.com) and one neutral (4india.com, didn’t know how that cropped up). Even though he voted thrice, and we heard later that the booth was captured, in the end laila prevailed.

(Originally written at Fourint blog, copied with my own permission ) ]]> http://www.anujrathi.com/2009/04/06/why-asklaila/feed/ 7 http://www.anujrathi.com/2009/04/05/mosquito-net-in-the-net-cafe/ http://www.anujrathi.com/2009/04/05/mosquito-net-in-the-net-cafe/#comments Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:51:41 +0000 anupam http://www.anujrathi.com/?p=111 I don’t usually write blogs.
I certainly don’t crib or make fun of fellow human beings, publicly.
So what really grinds my gears here?

Nothing really My bored self couldn’t say ‘no’ to Anuj’s “Dude! You gotta write about this one on my blog“.

So, the motif of this post is an accidental discovery made by me sitting in the confinements of a cybercafé in downtown Kolhapur. Yeah, the birthplace of those famous-but-i-have-no-frikkin-idea-how footwear. So tacky and uncomfortable that I could never get my feet to wear a pair for one hour straight.

Anyway, let’s come back to the cybercafé where I was going to search something in Google. I clicked in the search box to start typing and popped open the dropdown menu with past searches stored in the browser cache.

My eyes and smile grew wider as I moved down the list, till I reached this absolutely breathtaking set of queries. I have seen a lot of bizarre stuff; I have seen a lot of crazy stuff; Heck, I’ve even seen MBAs actually doing some meaningful work. But I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I had never ever seen anything as phenomenal as this:

Yes! I had to pick my jaws up from the floor too!

Mosquito Net! Really???

Our hero was probably looking for fishnet clad females.
He must have seen the photographs or videos somewhere, and must be enamored by it. No surprises there. When I saw something similar in my childhood days, I liked it too! I can distinctly remember spotting those pages, presumably torn from a magazine, thrown on that deserted road over a which my 13 odd yrs old past self was biking nonchalantly. That  sudden visual stimulus prodded my brains hard enough to make my bicycle do a  5-0 in 0 seconds. “Holy cow!”; “What is it that she’s wearing?”;  “This thing is so cool!”; “Is it really what I think it is?”; “Oh my!”; “Why oh why would anyone throw these gems on the road like this?”, were few of the many thoughts that flashed across my titillated mind.
No, I didn’t pick up and stash those pictures. That happened later. and it was a completely different set of pictures, outside the scope of this article.

Now I wonder if I would have done something similar back then if I had the luxury of having Google at my command. The imagery was fascinating, I must admit. But I’m not sure if I was driven enough.

So there are many things that go to this dude’s credit. You just have to give it to him!
A – He’s got taste. An evolved one at that!
B – He’s a fighter. A go-getter! He seeks, fails, and tries again.
C – He’s creative! I couldn’t have come up with something like this. Could you?

It was Google’s job to better its algorithms to understand the need of this youth. Our man did his best. Not his fault.

I’m not taking any credit away from Google though. It’s awesome! But like all the know-it-all smarty-pants it does have fun with you once in a while. Which brings us to my other discoveries that fateful evening. A lot of queries followed this pattern:

Aishwarya hot and necked
Rakhi Sawant hot and necked
Mallika hot and necked

This is huge! Did he really wanna see these women necking?
Why would he need to go to a cybercafé to see necking when they show it on TV all the time. This age old technique has been depicting both love and rape on Indian silverscreen forever.
Not too difficult to guess what would have happened. This one probably wanted to see Rakhi au natural or, probably in his words, ‘neced’ or ‘neked’. And Google threw a googlie: “Did you mean necked?”
In a blink this dude must have gone, “Oh! Yes, exactly… yes yes. That’s what I meant.“  Google must have sniggered while this gullible juvenile browsed through the almost similar results thrown at him anyway.

You too have done this to the naive kids, haven’t you? You insensitive scumbag.

Before I conclude this post, I can’t help but wonder how my english literature professor would have interpreted the mosquito-net phenomenon.I can almost hear his words: “The author is a clever satirist. At display is his snide acerbic wit with carnal overtones. He brings the reader’s attention to the fact that most models these days have assets which qualify as ‘mosquito bites’. Therefore he cleverly weaves his metaphorical mosquito net and tells Google exactly what he does not want to see. Hence he craftily coveys his fancy of the ample curves of the feminine form.”

Hail mosquito-nets!

- Anupam