Bugs

While going through some Evolution [ a Linux email client ] mailing list today, I came across the following text :

While I was adding debug printfs to maildir_summary_check() somehow this
bug went away (classical heisenbug ;)). I could not reproduce it anymore.


A bit of googling on this "heisenbug" took me to this wiki page that lists some popular but funny ways of classifying software bugs. Few of them are :

• Heisenbug

These type of bugs are the most annoying ones and encountered by most programmers who work with large pieces of code or large pieces of multi-threaded code.  By definition, this is a computer bug that disappears when an attempt is made to study it. Example : You see this bug in production systems but you do not see them in your debug builds !!

• Bohrbug

These type of bugs, once caught can be studied but with great difficulty. The conditions under which these type of bugs occur is usually unknown, or takes a very long time to deduce. Example : a buffer overflow bug that manifests itself only when a particular [ usually large or corrupted ] set of data is used. We had some funny name for these type of bugs. We called them, "scratch the head" bugs :D .. Basically originated from someone trying to explain the scenario when this bug occurred by saying, "I was using this software for doing some work, and suddenly out of the blue, just when I scratched my head, it crashed !!!"

• Mandelbug

These are bugs whose behaviors may or may not be chaotic, but are so very complex that there is probably no practical solution. Example : A bug manifested due to the fundamental flaw in the design of the program.

• Schroedinbug

One of the funniest and most annoying bugs. Usually caused by using the program under a particular scenario [ most of the time its an unusual way to use the program ] and it is realized that the program should have never worked in the first place. And from this point onwards, the program simply stops working for everybody else till that annoying bug is fixed.

Undo fails on Notebook

Biggest learning of the day !!!

While using Google Notebook for storing your information, remember to never hit "ctrl-z" .. Undo never works .. there are high chances of losing data. There is no revision history information maintained in Google Notebook.

If you really want to have revision history, then its Google docs that you are looking for.

You have been Tagged

Here's my small attempt at explaining what tagging is all about.

In the World Wide Web, we come across plenty and plenty of webpages which give us the information we seek. Humans cant remember the IP addresses of the machines. so we have hostnames. From here comes the URL. To remember the webpages that we visit, we "bookmark" these URLs. Now, since we keep on bookmarking a huge number of webpages, we start clubbing them together into categories.

These categories have a small problem. I can have categories like, "blogs", where i bookmark all the blogs that i often vist and categories like "technical", where i store my bookmarks that link to webpages discussing technical stuff. The problem occurs when we have to bookmark a page which is a mix of both the categories. Like for example, this post of mine. Do you want to bookmark it under "blogs" since its a blog, or under "technical" since it talks about some techy things ?

Most of the times, we end up wasting a lot of time digging through the various categories of the bookmarks to find the link we bookmarked a couple of months ago. We try to decipher the possible webpage the bookmark points to by reading the text that forms the URL. Not the best thing to do, but then thats the only choice we have. This basically boils down to the fact that, just plain categories of bookmarks doesnt help us.

This is where tags come into picture. As you must have tagged a single conversation in gmail with multiple tags since those tags describe the contents of the conversation, in the same manner, when we bookmark a webpage, we can give it tags that would be like some meta-data or "indexes", that would describe the contents of the webpage the bookmark points to. So, the next time you want to dig up a bookmark you saved a couple of months ago, you simply use the tags to "index" through your bookmarks thus increasing your chances of finding the bookmark you were looking for in quite less time than earlier.

Now, if you store your bookmarks on your browser, you have the problem of not being able to use those bookmarks on a machine where you did not save them. If you use a workstation at office and another one at home, you need a mechanism to be able to synchronise the bookmarks on these 2 machines. To solve this, there are websites where you can login and save your bookmarks online. some of these sites provide you the flexibility of storing these bookmarks personally for your use, or you can share them with the public.

Websites like del.icio.us, bring together these 2 thoughts of "sharing bookmarks" and "tagging bookmarks". Once you login and create an account for yourself, you can install a button on your web browser, and everytime you come across a webpage you want to bookmark, you can click on that browser button, and it will save that bookmark into your account. While doing so, you can give this bookmark some tags that would decribe the contents of the webpage. The main intention being to create useful "indexes" that will help you in searching through your own bookmarks at a later point of time.

Things start getting a bit interesting when you start bookmarking and tagging blogs. People write blogs and there are very few ways in which they can publicise their blogs so that more and more people on the World Wide Web can read through their blogs. When you visit an interesting blog which you want to bookmark, more often than not you would give the name of the person who owns the blog as a tag for this bookmark. This is called "tagging the blog". Websites like del.icio.us, have a public list of these bookmarks and tags. People can surf through these tags and thus increase the chances of them visiting your blog. So, tagging of blogs can help you popularise your blog !!! I have already "tagged" the blogs of my friends whom I visit so very often :)

The confusion about tags starts creeping in since lots of blogging sites provide you a feature where you can add tags, or labels to your posts in the blog. There is no easy way of linking these labels with the bookmark tags :(, well atleast for blogspot. Guess, this is another thing just waiting to happen in the near future ...

Whats your limit anyway ?

Yahoo has announced that Yahoo Mail users will get limitless storage space !!!

Its almost 10 years since I created my yahoo account. I remember creating it in my college. And in those days, creating an email account was like the most toughest thing on earth and you needed support from people to help you create it. And if you were the unlucky one who was late to join the party and didnt have an email account, you were looked upon as inferior souls who were missing the most important thing in life !!!

Well, in a way now email has become ubiquitous and is everybody's second identity [ or should I say first ? ]. Its really so hard to imagine a world without email. But hey, emails have been around, atleast in my limited world, for only about 10 to 12 years !!! Technology can certainly paint this world in a completely new color :-)

The interesting part of the announcement was in the details given there about how the industry has started creating goods that can just store more and more data. I liked the way he has depicted the growth in stages for the past 10 years. Imagine storing a 100 hours of video, thats like atleast 35 Hindi movies, in a small iPod that can fit into your pocket. Compare this with the delimma we had in college when we had to store 2 pdf files in our 1.44 MB floppy !!! Will one floppy be sufficient to hold them ? or should I just borrow another floppy from my friend ?

Moore's Law rocks !!! If anyone had any doubts in the value of compounding returns, they just have to take a mathematical look at how the storage space on a single device has grown from 1.44 MB to 80GB in a span of 10 years. Infact, on taking a more closer look we have even beaten the 18 month cycle and reduced it to 10 months !!!

Strangely enough, even with these huge jumps in memory storage capacities, I still find instances where I end up having the same delimma of less storage space I had in college. Will one memory stick of 1GB be sufficient to store these 2 movies ? or should I just borrow another 1GB stick from my friend ?

Parkinson's Law rocks too :-) Wonder how soon/long it will take for Parkinson's Law to dawn on Yahoo Mail's unlimited storage space. Is there anything bigger than "limitless" ...

Upgraded

After almost more than 6 months, I atlast found the time to go buy a new "Wetern Digital 160 GB Hard disk".

I already have a 80GB HDD. I had to now configure this to be the master drive and add the new HDD as a slave. It was fun doing it myself. Before I went to the vendor, i read this nice blog post and got some information on how the jumpers have to be set for different configurations of the HDD. While purchasing the disk, I asked the vendor to explain me about the jumpers. He was kind enough to explain me that Western Digital comes with 5 possible settings and not 4, as is the case with Seagate. That was some knowledge. The various jumper positions were very clearly written on the Hard Disk itself. So it definately made things a bit easier.

Came home and opened up the computer box, and took around 15 minutes to actually fix the hard disk into a proper slot. Then, I had to just connect 2 chords, one for the bus, and the other probably power [ not quite sure ]. Thats it, 20 minutes, and I had the HDD installed in my machine !!!

Now, I had to format this new hard disk. There, started my search for a disk partitioning tool for windows partitions. I primarily wanted to use the second disk as a back up disk and for my video editing sessions, and so it had to have a primary Windows partition with ofcourse enough spare space for all the various Linux versions i am planning to install and fill up the 160 GB space :D

While "googling" i came across this very well articulated cool solution about partitioning on Linux. Ofcourse, it didnt help me a lot, but was very good information none the less. It struck me that i could perhaps create a windows partition from my Linux partition !!! Well, i tried it and then realised that i could not format it :-( Also, it was recommended to always format the partition with the native OS. So, i didnt venture much into this.

I downloaded a trial demo version of Paritition Magic, and after spending an hour on downloading and installing and configuring my hard disk parittiions with it, when i clicked the option that actually would write the new configuration on the hard disk, it gave me a very innocent popup message which read something like ... "This is only a demo version. Please install a paid version to perform this operation." I was like, oh no, it really said "demo" version ... AAArrrgggghhhh X-(

After some more googling, i found this very good article that taught me to use the disk partitioning tool already present on Windows XP to create partitions on my new HDD. I was contemplating on buying a new software for partitioning and thanks to this article, i saved getting fooled.

Now, my machine is more fatter :-) upgraded and ready to go .......

Merry Christmas to you all !!!

Blog This !

Playing around with digg.com i really found it interesting to just click a single button and say "Blog This", for any digged article that i licked. But, soon digging became monotonous and less interesting for me.

And today, after scrapping off my .mozilla directory [ ofcourse, after taking backups !!! ], and restarting firefox 2, I was able to atlast install the cool, firefox 2 themes, like "MacFox II", and add my google notebook extension , and by the same time came across "Google toolbar". A new release for firefox on Linux has happened recently.

Ofcourse, the common thing between the last 2 paragraphs is "Blog This" :-). Yup, google toolbar now has a "Blog This" button, which you can click, and it opens up your blogger home page [ after having 2 sign in twice because my blog is moved to Beta blogger .. how dumb of these guys to have not taken this into consideration. Hopefully, they should have this fixed soon. ]. And then i need to click on "New Posts" and then enter the story that i want.

Damn, this is so uncool of google to do this. First, they ask you to have a single login account for all their services and then they dont seem to be seamlessly working among themselves :-( ... Guess, size really matters. The earlier slimmer google team had better integration among the products compared to the fat team now. I have started believing on the saying that "Your products are as integrated as your teams". Heard a lot about this in my previous company, but i only seem to be realising it now when i see things not working well integrated from google.

I would have preferred something on the similar lines to "google notebook". You visit a site, select the text you want in your blog, and click "Blog This" and you are taken directly to the composer window of your blog with the selected text including the link to the original article already typed. Hope to see this coming soon ...

Another good thing about this google toolbar in the "Bookmark". Now you can keep your bookmarks centralised with your google login id. Few points to improve on this as well ... Guess, this is a new product from google, and so can be pardoned for now. But, would really like to see an import option. Also, the google toolbar doesnt seem to be having the "bookmark this page" button as is suggested in the toolbar features page.

Integrating diversified teams is really a daunting task :-)

Workrave

Have you ever worked on your comp for so long relentlessly that you started experiencing pains in your knuckles and fingers or wrists or neck ? Beware, this is a very good symptom of RSI. One of my roommates had this very bad habit of sinking into his seat with legs stretched out and crossed, bending his back. This caused him pain in his lower back and ankles. This is another very good symptom of RSI.

RSI can be called as the bane of computers. The only good thing about RSI is that it can be avoided but it needs very regular and disciplined attention of yourself. Frequent breaks, small walks, lots of water to drink, moving your limbs, all these so called "exercises" should be mandated at regular intervals to prevent RSI.

I searched for a lot of timer/alarm applets that could help me in maintaining these mandatory breaks, but none were useful. In last week's edition of Deccan Herald, I came across this killer app called "WorkRave" which does exactly what I was looking for.

Fortunately its available on Linux too. It is a very simple app that examines your key strokes and mouse movements and tabulates the time you spend using your keyboard and mouse with breaks not more than 5 seconds. It accumulates the time you spend using the input devices of your comp. The only problem is that it doesn't include the time you spend reading on the web :) . which I think is fine to ignore.

Based on these usage time data, it forces you to take micro-breaks of 20 seconds, after every 10 minutes of computer usage. It also forces you to take a "rest-break" of 5 minutes after every 30 minutes of computer usage. The best part of this calculation is that it accumulates the time spent on the computer and not just the bare real-time intervals like the ordinary timers/alarms. The duration of these breaks and the interval between these breaks is also configurable though I would suggest not to change these defaults drastically.

I have been using this for a week now and I am surprised to see how fast time flies while working on the comp. Another good statistic this app gives is the total time spent in a day on the comp. I was shocked to see that I was spending only 55 - 60 % of my time at office on the computer !!! That's something like I spent around 4 hours on the computer in the 8 hours that I spend in office. Just compare this percentage to that of the guy sitting at the bank teller counter ? ;-) Ofcourse, you can include another hour for time spent on reading things on the browser and some code, but that too isn't a very great figure to look at.

You like it or not, if you are using computers at your work, you better start using this app. Try it out and you too will be surprised at the things that you will discover about yourself :-)

Inspiring ...

Last week, while going through some blogs I came across this blog on Google Blogs which was very interesting to read.

I liked Chiles' article there and found it inspiring enough to use Google in a still better way. I liked the way this 12 year old girl has described her usage of Google. I even learnt some more new things from her site :-) ... Definately, learning is a never ending process !!!

One good thing was to get the weather of your city. Just type in "weather bangalore" to get to know the present temperature and also the forecast for the coming 5 days. Infact, I found it is even more helpful in combination with firefox since by typing those words in the url finder, firefox directly takes you to the "I'm feeling lucky" site found by Google. Saves me one more click :-)

Another very helpful one, which I use a lot, is "define: typethewordyoudontunderstand". This takes you to all the references of the usage and meanings of this word. I extended this to fit into the firefox features. I dont like typing long words. So, i wanted a shortcut for "define", something like "def". I first did a search for "define: hello". Then saved the link in the url finder. Created a new bookmark, gave it a name and pasted this link for this bookmark. Later on, I removed all the extra info at the end of this URL, and just leaving the following part ... "http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+hello". Then, replaced "hello" with "%s", [ and yeah you can replace %3A+ with a simple ':' too ]. So, the final url looked something like, "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:%s" Then, I gave this bookmark a keyword like "def", and save this bookmark. Then onwards, in firefox I just have to type "def thewordidontunderstand" and it takes me directly to the page with the meanings for this word. Thanks Chiles :-)

I have been using Google notebook too, but it seriously lacks an auto-save feature :-( which is so helpful as in the GMail drafts. Looks like the team working on Google Notebook, never used GMail drafts as notes ;-) and didnt realise the value of having an autosave feature, which even the Google Spreadsheets have !!! Oh yeah, I used Google spreadsheets for keeping a tab on the team scores and statistics for the football World Cup. It is a bit slow, but great none-the-less. I now use it for keeping a tab on my petrol expenses :p. Planning to expand its scope to monthly expenditure chart sheet. The best benefit of these online tools, is that I dont have to carry the copies of these docs when I need to modify them at home and at work.

Another inspiration, was to use Google Analytics to figure out the amount of crowd actually visiting by blog :D I created an account for myself there and updated my blog with the javascript that counts the visitors. Within 10 days of this analyser being enabled, I am some very interesting information gathered. In the past 10 days, I have had 20 visitors visiting my blog, with the highest visits in a single day being 5 and that was on the previous Saturday, 21st. 50% of the visitors are new, and 50% of them have revisited my site. Thats something to cheer about :-)

Another interesting statistic is the names of the places from where people have visited my blog. I have had people visiting from Bangalore, New Delhi, West Hills [ US ], Winnetka [ US ], Mountain View [ US ], Mumbai and even El Recreo, a place in Peru, South America !!! This really is some amazing statistic and if I could relate these visits to money, I am sure I can do a very good market survey of my blog, and find out its monetary value :D