• April 2009 (20)

Sat, 23 Sep 2006

Gmail Feature or Design Flaw

Accidentally I noticed a serious problem with Gmail. I sent a mail to my Gmail account from my official mail id while checking the mail forwarding feature. My Gmail id looks like firstnamelastname@gmail.com. But my mistake I put a dot between my firstname and lastname. So I sent the mail to firstname.lastname@gmail.com and there is no such id as far as I know. Surprisingly the mail got delivered to firstnamelastname@gmail.com. I checked it 2,3 times and confirmed that it really works. Gmail automatically forward firstname.lastname@gmail.com to firstnamelastname@gmail.com since the former id does not exist or it assumes something else. But when I try to login to either gmail or gtalk using firstname.lastname@gmail.com, it complains that there is no such user. But only mail sent to this id works fine. Is it a feature or a design flaw? What happens if suppose there are two different persons, one having firstnamelastname@gmail.com and another with firstname.secondname@gmail.com? The mail sent to one guy will be forwarded to the other guy. I could not check if Gmail has any mechanism that prevents two users with same first and lastname to have two different mail ids but only with a dot difference. But if Gmail thinks it is a feature, it gives to its users, then they should also allow login to their services with and without a dot so that it eliminates redundant email creation and privacy issues.

When I carefully examined the mail I received with a dot separating firstname and lastname, Gmail has explained how the email id is being read by Gmail. Gmail don't care about dot (.) in the gmail user name. Even if someone send a mail like f.i.r.s.t.n.a.m.e.last.name@gmail.com, it will work, it seems. But it won't allow the user to sign into his account like this

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Fri, 01 Sep 2006

Zoho, the Good and Bad

Zoho is a web based office suite of useful applications. I came to know about Zoho and thought of giving it a try. I summarize the goods and bads of zoho as below.

Why I like Zoho :

1. Whenever I create documents, spread sheets at my workplace, I have to send them via email or have to copy it in a thumb drive to read/edit them at my home. Most of the time I just forget to copy it. Sometimes I send email to exploit Gmail's 2GB free space but will end up having so many with different dates but with slight modifications and sorting and finding them is another hassle.
2. In my workplace I use Japanese Microsoft Office 2003 whereas I am using english version of Office XP. Though there are not many problems with 2003 and XP versions, sometimes I end up with different fonts, double byte character alignment problems.
3. Zoho is free of course.
4. Very fewer menus which is enough most of the time for normal users.
5. Zoho writer is very fast and sometimes I feel it is a desktop application.
6. Good support for Japanese double byte characters.
7. It is good that a medium sized Indian company has produced a very good and innovative product competing with the stanford brains of Google.
8. Most of the features of Zoho writer are in par with Google's Writely and beats that in few areas.

Why I dislike Zoho (Mostly Zoho Spreadsheet):

1. First of all I hate to create individual accounts to use Zoho writer, spreadsheet etc and remember all the passwords.
2. Some Zoho applications use email id whereas some other applications use just a plain name. I created accounts for all their free applications and luckily got a single user name. But when I try to post a bug in their forum, I was suppose to sign up (Why again ?) but someone else has taken my user name.
3. The application generally takes lot of time and check your patience to load even with a fibre optical broad band connection in Japan.
4. There is no cursor displayed in the user name, password and other input fields (sometimes)and you never know what are you doing currently (Zoho writer is fine). (I am using Firefox and I don't think it is a browser specific problem)
5. When I try to save the application, open a document, the browser simply freezes and sometimes I am not able to do anything other than simply gaze at the screen.
6. Not much support (almost no) for unicode or double byte characters like Japanese with Zoho spreadsheet. I am able to import a already created spreadsheet after a hard time and warning messages with ??????????????? display. I am able to open and see the contents. If I input any Japanese characters in the same sheet, it displays nice while entering but only to be later converted to ??????, whereas the Japanese characters I created thro' MS Office shows correctly.
7. If you enter the wrong password in several attempts (thrice ?), the system locks the password but how come you know that? keep entering some wrong password and stare at the browser window to read the instantly vanishing error message (too much AJAX?)
8. If I type something in a new sheet and press TAB, it moves to the next cell easily. But with a 136KB spreadsheet (of course with japanese contents), even if I enter a alphanumeric character and hit TAB, it takes a long time to move to the next cell.
9. I can type english alpha numeric characters with the focus on a cell. But to type Japanese characters, I have to click on a cell with the cursor positioned before typing anything.

What I expect from Zoho

1. Most products are developed primarily for the english speaking community and fail to realize the importance of unicode and double byte character support. I would like Zoho (spreadsheet) to make improvements in this area.
2. If there is a way to change the menus to a different language like Japanese or Tamil depending on the user preference, it will attract a much larger user space.

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Mon, 26 Jun 2006

sortz solves date problems with blosxom

I was bit annoyed when I learnt that blosxom takes the timestamp of the files to determine the date of posting. Whenever I made modifications to my post at a later date, the order of display and the date display also changes. I did some google and most people suggested me to touch the file and change the timestamp. That is a hassle and specially in my windows laptop, I need to download another tool to do this since windows doesn't have a touch like linux command to change the date. Besides, I just encourage anyone to change the timestamp each time when a file is modified.

I did a simple google and finally found sortz plugin through a link from the unofficial blosxom homepage.

1. I saved the contents into "sortz" without file name extension. I then mentioned the date format I prefer as below

my $format = 'YYYYMMDD';

2. I created a plugins directory under /u/suresh/blosxom directory in the server.

3. I then modified the blosxom.cgi file and added the plugin path as below and put it back in /u/suresh/.public_html/cgi-bin/

$plugin_dir = "/u/suresh/blosxom/plugins";

4. I created a new blogentry and saved the file as YYYYMMDDfilename.txt

5. Copy the blog into the corresponding directory (category) in blosxom

Done. Now when I pointed my browser to http://www.armory.com/~suresh/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi I could see the files reflecting the dates I mention in the file name extension.

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Mon, 13 Feb 2006

Winxp Activation Problem After Re-install

I thought of reinstalling WinXP on my HP Pavilion ze5200 cto notebook since it was a complete mess. I reinstalled everything, downloaded and installed the drivers from HP but I got stuck up when I tried to activate my WinXP installation. I don't really understand why I should activate whenever I reinstall this product though I paid money for this WinXP.

I entered the product key that is found at the bottom side of the computer and tried to activate. But it failed and complained that I am entering the wrong key. I tried 2, 3 times and really got fed up. Luckily I got my internet working and there was a telephone nearby. I checked for activation telephone support in Japan. Got the number, called and waited in a long queue before I got connected to a Japanese lady. She started asking hundreds of questions like the make of the computer, some auto generated ID and finally my product key. She then told me to enter a new 20digit key and I successfully activated my copy of win xp.

Imagine what will happen if I don't have internet to active my win xp and don't have a phone number nearby or my product key is lost. I will end up installing winxp once in every 30 days.

I googled and find out this simple solution as a work around.

If we install the same winxp on the same machine, before formatting/installing copy "c:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl" and keep it safe in a floppy disk or a cd-rom.

Once the software is installed copy back wpa.dbl to the same location and no need to activate the product again.

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