The World's most popular web browser

The worlds most popular operating system "Windows" comes with the most popular web browser in this globe. The introduction to the almighty "Internet Explorer" is totally unnecessary. Statistics show that more than 65% of the Internet traffic is from Internet explorer, the remaining shared by Firefox, opera, safari, etc. What really made it to be so popular?? Yes, it is Windows, since Windows comes with built-in Internet explorer many people don't even think about installing an alternate browser. But is this Internet Explorer (a.k.a. IE) really worth this popularity?? I would say a big "NOOOO" and I really feel it be the worst piece of software one can ever write. Next time you get a chance just look how smoothly other browsers render the page and how IE does it, you will realize what I mean.

I have been developing web based applications for the past 2 years and writing a piece of code that would work in IE is always a PITA (Pain in the A**). When a organization called W3C is defining standards that the web browsers should follow for rendering the content, what would it cost for M$ to follow them? Every time you write a code one has to do special checks for IE and handle it specially. So at the end of day the code looks like

if (Internet Explorer) {
do something big and complicated to achieve something small
} else if (any other browser) {
write a simple code that work on all browsers.
}

Alright, I write this code and the next step is debugging. Browsers like Firefox provide so much facilities to add 3rd party plug-ins into the browser. Many of these plugins are for developers to help them in debugging HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Network traffic, load time, etc. But unfortunetly the most popular web browser doesn't have any of these abilities and it just dumps with the most idiotic error messages in the world. Some of them i encountered are

• 'null' is null or not an object
• Unspecified Error.
• 'undefined' is null
• Syntax error
  

and the list goes on. How would a developer know what went wrong when a stupid message like this pops-up without any other info like proper line number or statement? In most of the cases the issue is not with our application but with IE. So we are forced to hide the IE's bugs by adding fixes in our code because M$ will never fix it and we cann't do a release with these bugs showing up. There are so many versions of IE that was released IE-5, IE-5.5, IE-6, IE-7 and soon IE-8. But to me they just mean this

IE-5 = (Some functionality + Bugs)
IE-5.5 = (IE-5 + Some more Bugs)
IE-6 = (IE-5.5 + Some more Bugs)
IE-7 = (IE-6 + Some more Bugs)
IE-8 = (IE-7 + Some more Bugs)

and none of them shows any improvements in its functionality and this is not acceptable.

Long live Internet explorer!!!

P.S: This post just contains my personal view about the mentioned products and in no way represents my employer or colleagues

Life under the Knife

Having a medical condition is not a uncommon scenario and almost everyone of us would have been under some medication, the reason for it could be a simple cold or it could be a disease with a weird name which can be pronounced only by doctors. But not everyone has undergone a surgery, I had a chance to undergo one few days back and my Grey cells gave me a idea to write that experience in my "new" blog and here it is. Let me try keeping it minimal.

Stomach pain was not something new to me and I had been experiencing it right from my childhood. I used to get this pain 2-3 times a year during my schooling and the frequency was increased during my college days. In fact, this pain came in the form of Jaundice few years back. All these days the doctors diagnosed it as Acidity, Heat problem, Indigestion, etc. But when I got this severe pain on 27th August'08 for the 3rd consecutive day I didn't knew it would turn this big. I was forced to push myself along with my roommate Peeps at 9.30 PM to a famous hospital near by my house and I was made to rest among few others patients suffering with different form of pain. A general physician attended me and gave a injection, after half-an-hour the Doc came back and was surprised that the pain is still not relived, the dose was repeated again and still no relief. The Doc did some examination and I was sent for a Ultrasound scan, after the scan I was asked to come back the next day to meet a specialist. It was 3AM when we came back home and the pain continued till the next day morning. The next few days we were bounced between Doctors, blood tests and scans. Finally on the third day a senior doctor confirmed that I suffer from a problem called "Choledochal cysts" a disorder right from birth and he suggested surgery as the only solution, if left untreated it would lead to liver cancer. I was not really shocked about it, in fact I was happy about the fact that someone has diagonalized the reason for my 23 year old stomach pain. But it was tough for my parents to accept that their only child has to undergo a major surgery. Somehow my parents were convinced and they rushed to Bangalore the next day.

The next few days were spent on fixing the surgery date, insurance coverage, simple formalities in my office, etc. I got myself admitted to the hospital on September 4th after a nice yummy dinner, preparations for the surgery started right away. The next day I was happily sleeping till 7.15 AM knowing that my surgery is at 7.30 AM. I was taken to the operation theater at the right time and some 7-8 doctors surrounded me to fix my errors. They told the surgery is expected to last a maximum of 4 hours and I was given my anesthesia, within seconds my vision started to pixelate, voices started to fade away and I was entering a dark state leaving my senses behind. I knew that my beloved ones are waiting outside with their fingers crossed.

I woke up at 4.30 PM with a lot of people surrounding me and I was told that 4 hour surgery was extended to almost 8 hours creating panic among my parents and relatives. I couldn't feel any big pain because of anesthesia but I saw a lot of tubes and valves attached in my nose, neck, abdomen and hip. My next 3 days were hectic with pulse rate almost doubling, high temperature, 5 injections a day and extra tubes connecting my stomach and nose, this made me feel as if I am a computer program put in debug mode with lot of breakpoints and watch variables . My recovery was quite fast after that and I started off with some slow walking. I am a guy who loves walking and used to walk miles happily, but at this stage walking a few meters made me tired and I realized just being healthy itself is a big gift from God. Even after 5 days after surgery I was not given any food or not even a sip of water and I was just living with drips. This diet along with the blood loss during surgery made me loss more than 12 kg of weight. After 7 days they first gave me half a sip of water for that day, on the next day it was some liquid food and day by day they increased my diet and I was also getting rid of all my tubes. Finally on the 10th day I was back at home continuing my recovery process for the next 1 month.

Homemade food from my mother along with little medicines was giving me the required calories to pass my days. TV and books were my weapons to kill my time, I started watching all the movies including the dubbed ones in KTV, Sun, Vijay and what not. It was tough for me to get sleep when my body was in full rest, so books and music were my sleeping pills. I visited the hospital for dressing and review once in a week, after 4 weeks the doctors gave me green signal for regular activities and office.

As a token of memory for all these things I now own a big 'L' mark on my abdomen and will be carrying it throughout the journey of my life.

"My First Blog" or "Hello World"

This topic is not something new to the era of Internet. Everyone of us would have received tons of mails marketing their new blogs, messenger status messages notifing their blog updates.

When I first came across the concept "Blog" I had wondered what so interesting about it? After all, a blog is going to be just another HTML page decorated with colors, photos, videos, etc. among the billions of pages in the ever growing web. But looking at my friends and collegues I realized that its not just another chunk of HTML polluting the web, its something more than that, but what is it? After a long delay I decided to explore/experience it myself and here I am to write my own version of the trendy "My First Blog". But before penning this I went out researching the net trying to find out answers for many of my curious (may be stupid) questions like, Why write a blog? How to write a blog? What not to write in a blog? What makes a very good blog different from a good blog? Where to blog? and a lot more. For my first question "Why Blog?", I found the following reasons very acceptable

• It's a place to express "yourself" and it's where I can think, plan and reflect my thoughts
• It’s a method of communication
• Network and relationships with other bloggers
• Know yourself from your fellow bloggers point of view
• Learning from others blog
• And of course, gain a little popularity

With these factors in my mind I am now writing my first blog and I hope this is not my last blog like the many others I have seen. I am hoping to learn a lot here and shape myself.

Let the journey begin.