a mARTIAN dIARY

The nEW Forest Part 2

Filed under: RaNTs@eARTH — cafm @ 11:24 am December 29, 2006

For those who came in late (YAY…finally i used it with proper sense…for those who did not understand anythinG google Lee Falk)….read the first part otherwise this wont make any sense. Okies…so if you actually took the pain to read the other post there is a good chance that you might have come to one of the 3 conclusions….my replies to each are as follows…

(1) This guy is totally mad!!! -> no comments, its for me to know(right?) and for you to ponder about.

(2) This guy is a total WWF( not the wrestling one ) freak and cares enough for animals to write so much about them…Godspeed to him… -> Ok I don’t mind that…and now you know who to nominate for any wildlife conservation awards the next time you chance to see a nomination form lying around.

(3) This guy is taking a cheap shot at the very industry that’s feeding him… -> this is what this post is for….please read on… I know I was being really sarcastic and even more pessimistic in the last post and trust me the major reason for that is not because i am pissed off @ IT or anything but on the contrary i am having a wonderful time in the industry (ok that would be a bit of a overstatement though i am enjoying it but let the last posts negativity be canceled out) but there are some similarities between real life and the story. But there is light at the end of the tunnel yaar…. What I want to talk about here is about the intangible thing called job satisfaction or happiness. I know I am no veteran but something’s I can certainly see…. You may really love a subject…but that never means what you know and your ability is going to help you be the best or even survive in. Take for example the elephant in the squirrel’s post. If his job were to collect nuts from BIG tree’s i am sure he can do a better job that squirrel. Similarly as a fresher i think we just need the learning attitude. the rest will come naturally, what ever field we are in. Of course you could ask if the elephant is happy? now that is something specific to the elephant. he can forever think that if he were put in as a elephant he could have gone on and become the herd head and even if he gets the chieftain post of squirrels he might not be happy. Also he always can jump back into the elephant post if hes able to show his attitude and intent..though this might not be possible in real life all the time. so one possible ending So what I have to say is please take the other post for what it is….a humorous look at the industry….

Look before goog-le-ap

Filed under: RaNTs@eARTH, TECHbabble — cafm @ 11:23 am

if you cant see all the images in google while opening click on View All Images link..

In other words ->>>>>

Google has become so inbred in our lives that its incapacitating ourselves……WAIT!!! What am I saying here? Most people would advice to google out a solution before spending hours on it rt? blah blah about reinventing the wheel BUT one lesson I learned today is that sometimes there are more obvious solutions that googling.

Gmail in all its glory is one of the best things to happen to mail in a long time (IMHO)… yes there are arguments this side and that side..but for me it is one the the few quality products FrEE products out there. So when it started misbehaving recently by not showing all the pictures, I was…annoyed… For people who came in late, recently ("recently dates to the volatility period of my memory" )  gmail has stopped loading ALL the images that you get as attachments in you forward and non-forwards, instead it loads only 2-3 images and the rest are replaced by tiny boxes that will have View and Download options and file name with them. Ok it economizes bandwidth but can be an annoyance especially if you need to click 10 times to see the 10 images coming with forwards.

Ture to my nature, I just let it annoy me for a while…but ones the level of annoyance passed the threshold set high by my laziness, I jumped to googleing… i googled and googled..and found 100s useless things , like arguments on whether the secret agenda of google is to conquer the world :P

but nothing to answer my question "How to get set a option to view all images"….I even found the same question in a forum, but not answer

defeated and dejected i went back to gmail….back to clicking for images….but….whats this? at the top of the images list a small option

"View All Images" woila….a mouse-click later…i see all the images in a separate window…ok not exactly what i wanted…but fine for me…and actually now the feature seems good due to the bandwidth considerations…..

learning?

"look before goog-le-ap"

oh and google might actually be able to takeover the world but maybe thats good? :p

MS aint my misus

Filed under: RaNTs@eARTH, the 'I' factor — cafm @ 3:47 pm December 5, 2006

The origins of usage of computer for typesetting of documents can be traced to the legacy of the veteran iron war horses known as typewriters. While computers were being developed for number crunching scientific (and military) applications, cranks with an eye for money minting realized the potential of this semiconductor baby to revolutionize the publishing industry. Thus was born the first word processing software and its connected professionals, born-again typists. The potential of this young prodigy was only superseded by its ruthlessness in outperforming and thus eliminating its competitors, which can be testified by the relic status given to typewriters now. Except for the aged writer, who is too stubborn or superstitious change his trusted tool, we will be hard pressed to find a typewriter anywhere else. But just as in the melancholy of defeat comes new learning; in the heavy march of victory valuable lessons are trampled without witnesses The tremendous success of word processing software over its predecessor lead to a ‘no prisoners’ strategy, where in most of the focus related to word processors was into excelling its predecessor. That is focus was totally on creating the ultimate tool that could handle the whole processor or word-processing ‘for printing’ child’s play. The italicized words convey the focus! So even when computers started becoming so common and cheap that, it was easier to read these documents from the system rather than a print out, the old tools were reused. So much to prove the laziness of man! There was motion in some direction leading to development of PDF and eBook formats. But still they lingered around the age old principles, too afraid to go for a radical change. It is needless to emphasize that a hardcopy of any document has its own advantage, at the countless ways it can be physically positioned, the psychological inertia coming from reading of books during the academic years and easy navigation up and down at the twist of a paper. But along with those lie its various disadvantages too. It presents information is a mundane non interactive way. The linking between the different concepts is usually inferred by language constructs or formatting. The occasional picture in the document does help reduce this disadvantage to a level, but a part remains. On the contrary, reading from the system monitor offers no flexibility as far physical positioning is concerned, except for some new age paper-like display devices but they can be a case or taking the river to the horse rather than vice versa. Also it does not offer (at lease current reader GUIs) much flexibility in terms of navigation that a book affords except for the search feature perhaps. And where paper is weak, the system gains a strong hand, its excellent environment for linked interactive interface for data from a book. It can present info the exact way it’s mapped in our brain. This brings us to the concept of concept mapping and related software. Watch this space ;)



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The thoughts expressed in this blog are mine and should in no manner be linked to the organization(s) with which I am (or have been) associated.