Walk Alone

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…

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Firefox 3.0 is scheduled for release on Tuesday, June 17, 2008.

Maybe it is true what people say about lonely people being born, not made.

This is just peachy. The world thinks the current food crisis is caused by the US and EU diverting arable resources towards biofuels. But the US President and Secretary of State are blaming China and India for being a more serious contributor to the crisis! And they are not alone.

Guess what? Are you a Chinese or an Indian trying to get “better nutrition”? Oh no, you don’t! Not until the “humans” in US and EU have had their fill of the best nutrition and step out smugly to drive around in their SUVs fueled by non-polluting biofuels.

This is more than a little stupid on part of the current US Adminstration. We, Indians (and the Chinese too) deserve to eat as well as they do. Besides, its our produce. We have first claim to it.

What are they thinking?