Walk Alone

8,002,530

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

We made it!

Update, 4th July, 2008 - Here’s the page with details. Another thing to note is that this number reflects deliberate downloads. No trick links, bots or scripted attempts. Repeated attempts and incomplete downloads were rejected. Also, upgrades from older browsers as well as the numerous installs on various APT and YUM managed Linux machines were not counted.

The monsoon made a fool out of me yesterday.

When the train started limping from Andheri and halted for a frustrating fifteen minutes just before Bandra, I thought “What the hell!” and returned home. A colleague of mine who was in the same train persisted; and reached office (just 45 minutes late) at 9:45 AM. For that much inconvenience, said colleague (along with those few stubborn individuals who made it to office against all odds) enjoyed a day when few wanted to do any work.

And then, it stopped raining at 10:30 AM and I felt like a fool sitting at home.

Meanwhile, the people who showed up felt good about showing up, had a good time in a fairly vacant office and went home with all the leisure at their command. The roads were empty of traffic and the trains, of commuters.

In other news, the iPhone bubble has burst.

Both Bharti and Vodafone have clarified that they will offer the iPhone at Rs. 21,000 - not 8,000. Their reasoning is simple - AT&T charges 25 cents a minute for talktime, while they charge 2 cents. Against such a disadvantage, they cannot afford to subsidise the iPhone like AT&T.

So if the iPhone goes back to being a status icon and a rich man’s toy, what’s left? The FreeRunner! IDA Systems offers it for Rs. 20,000 all inclusive. It is not Apple. It doesn’t look slim and trendy. But then, if you buy the Neo FreeRunner, its not for status or looks. It is for freedom. For choice.

The FreeRunner or one of its successors is my next phone.

I was going through the WordPress back-end and looked into the comments table. Some statistics…

The top three comment authors are Thite, Varun and Bhise from rank 1 downwards.

I would say there are five regular readers, the rest all are drifters.

I have 23 distinct email IDs (come on people, I don’t spam, so use one ID) in the comment author email IDs list - two users, Bhise and Amey, have used four email IDs each.

There are 32 distinct author names - Amey has used five names!

Thats pretty much all, folks.

The d@#$ graphics card gave out two days ago!!!

My current machine seems to be worst I have ever bought, at least as far as the reliability of its peripherals and the computer guy is concerned. To be fair, the rest of it is fighting fit. But I have blown out at least one USB port by using it to power a USB light. And in the 14 months I have owned the graphics card, I have used it for a grand total of barely one month.

An unused LAN card followed the dead graphics card out of the box. Since I was in the mood, I did a quick inventory of the useless or extra hardware I have stockpiled:

• Two keyboards - Intex, Logitech
• Mouse - iBall
• Asus LAN card
• Taiwanese Bluetooth dongle
• USB light
• NVIDIA GeForce 7100 with 128 MB RAM

Except for the BT dongle and the NVIDIA card, the rest all work, or are salvageable in an emergency .

A certain banking and finance institution whose name begins and end with i and which also has i as the middle letter in its name seems to have adopted the OpenDocument Format for its documentation needs.

Over the past several weeks, I have been called in to help out with the mysterious ODS files that executives and officers from this company keep mailing in to people in my company and its sister concern - AKA the data analytix department. ODS is nothing but OpenDoc Spreadsheet.

You possibly cannot fathom the thoughts running through my head as I calmly changed the file extension from ODS to ZIP and extracted the archive.

There’s your data in those XML files. Get a Perl script to read them and pump it into an Excel file.

Those were my exact words. But then, I’m the best in Perl they have; rather, the only Perl coder they have. And I am not inclined to look up the Excel modules on CPAN and hammer out a script. In the end, I dragged them screaming and kicking to using OpenOffice.org. But those ingrates use it only for its “Save As …” function!

Its still a beginning…