Because “One day’s restraint cannot count all that much, you may say. In that case, you are wrong. Each minute step matters. And here, we are talking about a collective minute step. Let us breathe free on January 30. Let us help our earth breathe. Let us! “

Now while I couldn’t even begin ridiculing the intentions of the “No driving day” guy for almost three weeks, I have come out of shock and began thinking about it. I really tried hard to understand what good can be achieved by a group of people, 1000 or lesser, led by a random person on the internet to give up driving for a day (which, conveniently is a Sunday as well ). Why do people celebrate “earth hour” one hour once a year by switching off their lights? Why do people try to save tigers on the internet by blogging? Why do models go nude for PETA rather than wearing fur? (okay, that I understand)

We all know that the world today is suffering from a lot of problems, all this pollution in the air, the scarcity of energy, the sparsity of tigers and a thousand other things. Some people take these problems more seriously than others, and they know that if they propose any solution to the mass in which each individual will have to get out of their comfort zone, it is doomed to fail. So what do they do?

They just propose something which will make the followers feel that they are contributing to the cause, whereas they are just trivializing it and deluding themselves by going for a self righteous trip. They are just getting rid of their guilt of polluting the environment and congesting our roads very cheaply. Not driving on 30th Jan will not cause even 0.0001% change in overall traffic or pollution this month, this year, or ever. It won’t even make a statement. But participants will think that they have made an impact, while they’d have just made a fool of themselves. And they will gloat and laugh when they see you driving on 30th, and maybe even compel you to join them in this stupid crusade.

Proposal for my followers:
For not letting these people good about themselves, I propose my followers should drive twice on 30th Jan, simple. This way you can reverse the guilt and let them know that they have not done anything good for the environment. All their gloats are belong to us.

Proposal for “No driving day” followers:
Save some water as well guys, If you really want to feel good about yourself and help the environment, stop bathing 7 days a week and do it once a week. That way you will really have saved some water everyday. Too inconvenient?

In the words of George Carlin, “We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. ‘Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.’ And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the fucking planet?”

But I’ve always missed the translate functionality which was available on google for a host of other languages. Finally, it has arrived for Hindi as well- and man it’s awesome!
I tried with a few simple translations from English to Hindi, just to warm up – and to please google.

Pretty cool! So far, so good. And if Google is the big daddy of all internet companies, twitter is the son of all internet companies, isn’t it?

Ohoh… screwed up. Never mind google, the छोटे लला translation for “small sonny” still impressed me a lot
Overwhelmed with the google awesomeness, I gave it one real compliment.

Oops. I guess that’s what google translate really is. :-/ Try it yourself here

Now, assuming you want to create this for each post on your blog (it makes little sense to like a category or tag or the blog itself, although it can be done! ), you just need to add this button on each post that you create. For that, all you need is the php file which is included only on single blog posts, and its permalink. For wordpress, the file is called ‘single.php’ and is included within your theme. So browse to your wp-content directory, then your plugin’s name, and then edit the ‘single.php’ in it.

The code that you will need on single.php can be generated here. Facebook presents to you a widget, through which you can create your custom ‘like’ button. In the ‘URL to like’, include <?php the_permalink() ?>, it’s the wordpress php code for generating URL for each post. Go ahead and change any other values you would like to tinker with.

Finally click on ‘Get Code’, and include this code in the ‘single.php’ of your blog. You’re done!

It’s too simple to be missed even by the people who don’t know abc about php or wordpress, and the kind of virality this feature has is immense. Gone are the days when you used to customize your blog for keywords and optimize each post for search engines just to be seen and get more traffic. Facebook provides us with social sharing outside of facebook, even easier than tweeting, IMHO.

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.