Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

Update:(15-Aug-2006) Well, it seems that the Bcc filed is displayed only if you are the sender of the message. The confusion is because in Gmail even the sent mails are displayed in Inbox itself for conversation view. Thanks Rajiv for pointing it out.

Recently, one of my friends brought up to my notice that in Gmail even the Bcc field gets displayed. My initial reaction was “No it’s not possible!”. Then I tried to test it by sending myself a mail and to my surprise, even the Bcc field got displayed.

Here is the screen shot.

I tried Googling around but couldn’t get a satisfying answer. So can anyone throw some light on this and let me know whether it is a feature or a bug or am doing something wrong.

PS: Yuvi, can you gather any information about my browsing activities from this screenshot as you did for Aswin?

Tags: bcc, Gmail

From the day I started programming, I have been on different camps on the battle between strongly typed and weekly typed languages at different times.

For close to 2 years I was working on a java project and at that time I used to wonder why it was designed to be so strongly typed. I have to declare each and every variable, initialize them, cast them properly if I am converting their data type etc and at times I used to get frustrated at the type of errors the complier throws at me every time I try to compile them. I wished I could tell the complier to stop guessing what I was trying to do and that I am smarter than it.

But now I understand their importance. I have recently started working on an ASP project (yes it is not migrated to ASP.NET yet!) and in last week I spent around half a day trying to figure out what was wrong in my code. All I got was just a simple ‘type mismatch’ error. The same lines of code were working perfectly in another page but not on this particular page. It was just an assignment statement which was calling a method and was assigning the return value to a variable.

After hours of debugging (with lot of head banging’s and nail bytes) I found out that I have forgotten to include the file in which that method was declared. If it had been my Java dear then it wouldn’t have thrown the apt ‘Method not found’ error the very first time I complied it. And I would have saved some a couple of hours of my time (and also my head and nails)

Ohh my dear Java, I miss you very much dear..

Tags: ASP, Java, programming

Just popped up to let you know about my viral fever. Have been under complete bed rest for the past week. No emails, no blogs and no computers either.

Fever went up to 106 F and the funny part was the temperature jammed the mercury inside the clinical thermometer that we had at home. Have to get a new one now

Tags: fever

This is just a continuation of my thoughts on iTunes and even now my opinion on iTunes hasn’t changed much.

ID3 Tags

Well as my quest for organizing my music continues I keep bumping on the short comings of iTunes. Recently I found that some of my files were having incorrect Meta information (ID3 tags) in my iPod. So I opened iTunes to check them and I found that they were wrong even in iTunes. But I was pretty sure that I corrected the tags of these MP3 files using a MP3 Tag Editor. I checked the tags of the original file in my hard disk and it was having the correct data. Out of frustration I clicked the file in iTunes and it started to play and the tag got automatically changed. Then only I released that there was no refresh/update option in iTunes and when you edit the ID3 tags of the files outside of iTunes it will not get reflected until you play the file in iTunes. What a great optimization design!!

In order to make my iTunes happy I started editing the ID3 tags in iTunes itself and iTunes was happy to refresh it and were updated in my iPod too. Little did I know that it was not getting changed in the original file and it was just getting updated only in the iTunes library. And I was searching for an option to write the tag information to the file only to find that even this was not present.

So the lesson learnt: update the tag information of the files using some other tag editor outside of iTunes and then double click all those files in iTunes and play them so that the correct tag information gets updated both in the library and also in the file. How user friendly!

Podcast

I bumped again on the short comings of iTunes when I was trying to download some podcast.

No resume option for downloading podcast: Some of the podcasts that I have subscribed are more than 100 MB in size and when downloading, half way through the connection gets lost or iTunes freezes and the download process start again from scratch. Bandwidth is pretty scarce here and also costly and I end up wasting my precious bandwidth (and some bucks too).

No scheduling option for downloading podcast: if it’s available then I can schedule all my downloads from 2:00 am to 8:00 am every day when my ISP gives me free bandwidth. (Those who are having BSNL Broadband could feel the pain)

No way to subscribe to more than one podcast from a search result at iTunes Music store. You have to select only one at a time and have to perform the search again if you want to subscribe to more than one.

Giving reviews about podcast on iTunes: If I have to write a review about a particular podcast then I have to have an apple id and in order to have an apple id I need to have a credit card and I don’t have a credit card (yes seriously, believe me) and so no apple id and no reviews too.

In spite of all these short comings I am still using it, just for one thing - My little cute blackie

Tags: iPod/iTunes, iTunes, Podcast

The ability to whistle really loud by keeping the fingers in the mouth was considered as a great skill among my friends circle when I was studying. Every time there was a function at school (or even at college) there used to be a gang of people who will be teaching their extraordinary skill to others and there will be a lot of rehearsals. You could see most of them with their fingers in their mouth and trying to blow in as much as they can only to get a small hissing sound. Most of them will stop trying but a few will be kept on trying till they could get a decent level of sound. Hmm.. that was a short trip down the memory lane…

Well if some of you are still trying then here is an excellent write-up which teaches you how to whistle really loud by keeping your fingers in your mouth.

PS: Make sure that you don’t get into trouble by trying it in a public place.

Tags: whistle, whistling

Well don’t stare at me with that strange look

My latest super hero Dustin Diaz of Web standards with Imagination is launching the first annual CSS naked day on April 05, 2006 in the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures.

If you are brave enough then you can also participate by running your sites completely CSS free for the entire day. The point is to show off the “semantic-ness” of your markup. So if you are participating then just leave a comment at the announcement page. The list of participants is maintained in the official page.

Way to go Dustin! I’m in! Any takers?

PS: I was just wondering what if the webmaster has hard coded all style information using inline style attribute and is not using any external CSS file.

PSS: BTW it’s already on Digg too.

Tags: css, naked, webstandards

I was just informed by Aswin that he has tagged me.

It sounds to be little different. The rules are already established. So I am just coping them.

Rules of the Game

1. The tagged victim has to come up with 8 different points of their perfect lover.
2. Need to mention the sex of the person.
3. Tag 8 (or as many as possible) victims to join this game & leave a comment on their comments saying they’ve been tagged.
4. If tagged the 2nd time, there’s no need to post again.

My Target: Female

• Ability to express herself (No, I can’t make out from signs left by girls )
• Talk Talk Talk !!! (Otherwise it will be very difficult to stop me from talking)
• Should be able to laugh at my poor jokes (or atleast she should bear with it)
• Be herself (at all times)
• Should be bold (Otherwise it will be very difficult to tackle me )
• It will be nice if she believes in God (so that I can continue with my atheist arguments all through out life.)
• Smile .. (it ends all arguments and is the best medicine in this world)
• And above all, to be my good friend (till the last breath)

Spread the word

I am supposed to tag 8 people. But I am falling short of people to name them here. So guys I am tagging all you people who are reading this and so do write about it in your blog.

Happy tagging

Tags: Date, Fun, perfect, tagging

It’s been nearly a year since I moved from IE to Firefox and I never returned back, expect for certain sites that have the “IE Only” tag. Once such website is ICICIBank.com. They used ActiveX heavily and it was rendering only in IE. I installed the IEView Firefox extension to automatically load it in IE, whenever I type the url.

But recently I have noticed that they have started to support Firefox too. That’s really great news for me and for Firefox too. The other day Asa was saying how Korea’s largest portal/search site Naver.com started to support Firefox. Probably he should even ICICIBank.com to that list.

I would be really happy if even the BSNL broadband site also starts to support IE, as it is the only site that I view in IE.

PS: BTW have you ever wondered what is the full form of ICICI, it is actually Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India. Thank Sushhubh.

Tags: Firefox, ICICI, IE

Well I am turning 23 today.

It’s just 12 am now and I have already got a couple of phone calls from my friends. It’s really a nice feeling to know that some one remembers your birthday.

Thank you, guys for the wishes. You have really made my day bright.

Tags: BirthDay, wishes

Matt Cutts, (the-guy-next-to-God for SEO’s) is a asking for feedback about various Google products and services at his blog.
Initially I thought of giving the feedback as a comment in his blog itself. But it was only after I gave the comment I realized that I need more from Google. So Matt here is my feedback

GMail

• Gmail as my default mail application - I want to read mail from my other POP3 accounts
• DELETE button and also a keyboard shortcut to delete the message
• Keyboard shortcut to assign a label to a message.
• Single keyboard shortcut to do a couple of things like pressing D makes all unread messages as read and achieve them
• Ability to add my own custom RSS feeds for web clips

Google Talk

• INVISIBLE mode
• Offline message
• Ability to add my webcam too
• Connect it with telephone like Skype
• Infinite archive of conversation

Google Pack

• Ability to add our own software to the list provided

Google Earth/ Maps/ Local

• Add India and the rest of the world too.

New products/ Services

• Google Calendar
• Google Office
• Google Browser
• And also Google OS

So guys, have you ever felt of giving feedback to Google? If so then here is your chance.

Matt’s Feedback url’s

• Feedback: Webspam in 2006?
• Feedback: Search quality in 2006?
• Feedback: Products/features in 2006?
• Feedback: Webmaster services in 2006?
• Feedback: Communication/Goodwill in 2006?
• Feedback: What did I miss?

Tags: feedback, Gmail, Google, Matt