mere funde

Randy Pausch (1960-2008) - Brilliant orator, awesome teacher, and above all - an amazing person. RIP.

The Last Lecture.

Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and “just so”. Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.

Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die.

~ Hugh MacLeod - Why I’m Writing a Book

The new Facebook interface has screwed the Google Reader Shared Items & Flickr. I think its the error in the FriendFeed like application Facebook has. Is anyone else seeing the same error?

Comments welcome

When I was upgrading the Wordpress installation, I noticed that the particular version was code named “Tyner” after McCoy Tyner, a jazz pianist. Wordpress releases are mostly named after Jazz musicians, like Ella Fitzgerald, and saxophonist Stan Getz.

These codenames have always fascinated me since the good old days of Prithvi and Agni, at the Insti’s IPC - not International Patent Classification but Information Processing Center. Prithvi was the codename for the Linux server, and Agni for Unix. Vi used to be the editor of choice. Pine for email. Cat and Man were commands, rather than species name. Anyways I digress.

I was always fascinated by the way “Valhalla” used to appear on the terminal (screen) when we tried to log on to the network. And since then I have tried to follow these release names for various softwares. Below is a quick look at the names used by RedHat Linux.

1. RHL 7.0 - Guinness
2. RHL 7.1 - Seawolf
3. RHL 7.3 - Valhalla
4. RHL 8.0 - Psyche
5. RHL 9.0 - Shrike

I think post this RedHad became Fedora, or atleast a part of it did, and they used different names. Maybe I will follow up with some other interesting ones later (Ubuntu follows a cool method).

The blog now runs Wordpress 2.6 and I will be in Hyderabad over the weekend and plan to have a lot of fun

“Get into Mallika’s pants”

ABN Amro - India, recently made some changes to its website which renders the NetBanking option unusable on Firefox (any version!). I sent an email to their support desk about this, and am reproducing their response below.

Dear Customer,

This is with reference to your email dated July 09, 2008. At the outset we would like to thank you for the time taken and effort made by you in sharing your concerns with us.

We wish to inform you that currently you will not be able to access our Net banking service through Fire fox browser. However to access our Net banking services we recommend Internet explorer browser version to be 5.5 and 6 and we would also request you to kindly check if your Internet Explorer browser is configured for JAVA applet.

Should you require any other assistance, please feel free to call our 24 Hour Bank by Phone service* in your City and our executives will be glad to assist you.

Assuring you of our best services.

Yours Sincerely,
Service Delivery, Consumer Bank, India

While I appreciate their quick response to my query, I am thoroughly disappointed with the response. For a company of ABN Amro’s size, simply stating that it does not work is not acceptable.

Just for the record, ICICI Bank which runs the same software (FINACLE by Infosys), supports all sorts of browsers and their NetBanking is much easier to use.