Voted at last

The other day, I had the opportunity to vote for the first time. There are first times for everyone for many different things in life. In most of the cases people tend to get excited about doing things for the first time. I’m no exception. I was very excited about voting for the first time. I got up early, got ready and went to the polling station in our locality at 8.00 AM in the morning, thinking that there wouldn’t be anyone at that time. But when I reached the polling station I realized that everyone in our locality had exactly the same thought in their minds. It was completely full and there was a long queue in which I had to wait. I thought I had to wait at least an hour or so for my turn. And it turned out to be what I thought. I stood in the queue for an hour and it was 9.00 AM by the time I came out. I got so bored standing in the queue. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of taking some photos using my cellphone and I did so.

Project Experience

Now that my Project External is finished, I’m a free bird (well, at least for a while because I’ve my final exams starting in a few days). Project work was very hectic. Generally the coding part is done first and then the documentation part. But in my case it was entirely different. We completed the documentation part first and then we completed the coding part. Sounds strange? But that was what had exactly happened. We had no time for the coding part and the deadline for submitting the documentation of our project to the University was getting deadlier (I meant that the deadline was getting close :D. Forgive my poor S.O.H). So we had to get our documentation ready and get the printing done. The only way we could do that was to imagine how the interface of the “undeveloped” new module would look like and prepare its dummy screens. And that was what we did.

Our project was actually being developed using ASP .NET with C# and MS Access as our database. But, we developed the new screens using HTML and took screenshots of them to use in the documentation part of our project. We even implemented JavaScript alerts in these fake screens. The same JavaScript would execute each time for a new screenshot, only with the alert text changed. All the new screens were thus created and the documentation part was successfully completed. We immediately gave our soft copy for printing and got the books bound. Once all this was done, we continued with the coding part. We actually wanted to skip certain aspects of the project, but couldn’t. That was because we had already put those screenshots in the project documentation. As a result, we had to work like dogs to complete the coding part.

I worked till 3.30 AM in the morning of the day on which our final external seminar was scheduled. By then the project was complete with very minor changes left behind. I had given my pen-drive to my friend, Sravan, who in turn gave it to another friend of his. Thanks to him, I didn’t have a pen-drive to take my code to the college. So, I sent Amar, another friend of mine, an SMS asking him his pen-drive. This was the exact content of that SMS: “Dude, I need ur pen-drive. Plz get it 2 me 2mro early in da mrng…jus in case if m asleep, dn wake me up. Ok.” I worked till 3.45 AM and dozed off. I thought that Amar would wake me up early when he comes to my place to hand me over the pen-drive. With this confidence I went to bed happily. Suddenly I woke up and saw that the time was 6.25 AM. I had to develop some minor parts in the code and so I started doing that till 7.20 AM. My bus reaches my stop by 8.00 AM and I had to be there by 7.55 AM. I got ready and I asked my dad whether Amar had come. He said that he had come and given the pen-drive. Without wasting a single minute I copied my project code into it and rushed to my stop and boarded my bus. Amar too was there in the bus. I asked him why he didn’t wake me up when he had come to my place to give me his pen-drive. He said that I was the one who asked him not to wake me if I were asleep. He even showed me the message I sent him. He read the message as: “Dude, I need ur pen-drive. Plz get it 2 me 2mro early in da mrng…jus in case if m asleep, ‘DONT’ wake me up. Ok.” He thought by “dn” I meant “dont”. Knowing that, I started laughing out loud because by “dn”, I actually meant “then”.

All this ended in a while and the journey to my college relieved me a bit. Everything went fine. I reached my college, met my team-mates and went straight to the seminar lab to show the latest module to my team-mates. I copied the contents of the pen-drive onto my college PC and started executing the code. To my utter shock, the code didn’t behave the way it did on my home PC. A lot of changes that I made to the code went missing. After a little amount of panic I realized that I had accidentally copied the wrong code onto the pen-drive. HOLY SHIT!!! This was the only thing that was running through my mind at that time. I felt like kicking my own ass. There was nothing I could do nor could my team-mates. We, in a jiffy, made some minor changes to hide the flaws in the code.

We really hoped that the external examiner would not find out those flaws. The ultimate time had come. It was our turn to present the project to the external examiner. Our seminar started and lasted for 45 minutes and everything went smooth. The external examiner didn’t notice the flaws. In turn, he liked our project and praised us. Once the seminar ended, we all felt relieved and I was very excited about it. Overall it was a memorable experience and I had learnt my lesson.

Things I learnt:

  • Never delay project work.
  • Never send ambiguous messages.

Internet Explorer 8, a review

Now that the latest version of one of the most bashed-up (Yet, the most popular) Microsoft products is out, the bashers can’t wait to get their hands on this new baby. But believe me, I tested it and I can confidently say that they will have a tough time bashing up IE8. Coming to the review, Microsoft seems to have developed IE8 as an answer to all those web developers who hate IE for its noncompliance towards the W3C standards. Now let me start off with the some of the most important features that are “visible” to the average user.

Feature 1: The Speed Microsoft has drastically increased the speed of IE8 since its previous version 7. If you have used IE7, you will definitely notice a drastic change in the speed of IE8. This is probably the first thing that an average user would notice apart from the interface. The rendering times of some heavy sites like Wikipedia, Orkut, Microsoft etc seems to have reduced. IE8 seems to be in a fair contention with Opera 9, Firefox 3 and Chrome 2 in case of Speed.

Feature 2: New “New Tab”
The new “New Tab” (Type “about:Tabs” in the address bar of IE8 to access it) when opened has some useful options. Some of them are: Reopen Closed Tabs:
At last, one of the features that I always wanted in IE, reopening closed tabs. IE8 has this feature embedded in it. One can use this feature by simply opening a blank new tab and then clicking on the “Reopen Closed Tabs” link available to the top left corner of the tabbed page. This shows a drop-down list of all the tabs that have been closed in the current session.

InPrivate Browsing: This is an all new feature implemented in IE8. This feature allows the users to open a new “InPrivate” window where the users can browse websites, at the same time having a control over the browsing history, cookies and other data. This mode helps web developers and those interested in watching p0rn! 😉

Accelerator: This option has features such as showing text available on the clipboard, Blogging, Mapping, Searching etc. This can also be accessed by selecting some text and then clicking on the small square icon that appears.

Feature 3:Developer Tools IE8’s answer to Firefox’s plugins “Firebug” and “Web Developer Tools”. This is a very useful feature for the web developers. I found it worthy.

Feature 4: Colored Tabs or Group Tabs Another nice feature added to IE8 is the “Colored Tabs” feature. This feature is a lot useful when you open a lot of pages in tabs and you don’t understand which link was opened from which page. Thanks to this new feature, IE8 groups links opened in tabs from one page in one color. Similarly tabs of each group are grouped with a single color showing that the tabs belong to that group.

Feature 5: Close All or Current Tab When a person browsing multiple tabs accidentally clicks on the close button of the IE window to close the current tab, the previous version of IE would just prompt the user that there are multiple tabs open and whether the user would like to continue by closing all of them or cancel the operation. This is not the case in IE8. IE8 provides a neat dialog asking the user whether to close the current tab or all the tabs.

Feature 6: Compatibility View This is a beautiful feature added to IE8 to make it work better with the websites that have been designed for the previous versions of IE (which were not standards compliant at all). The tooltip in the following image explains the purpose better.

Feature 7: **Caret Browsing ** This feature allows the users to access the webpage textual content using keyboard by inserting a cursor in the webpage which can be moved by using the arrow keys on the keyboard.

Feature 8: Crash Recovery One of the most important new features of IE8 is crash recovery. IE8 has the capability to restore the previous session when the crash occurred.

Feature 9: Delete Browsing History on Exit This feature is similar to the ones that are available in Firefox and Opera. The name says it all. The option is available in Tools >> Internet Options >> Browsing History (Group)

Now that I have discussed all the major new features of IE8, let me throw some light on the way the memory is being consumed by IE8. IE8 divides itself into several instances in order to divide the load on the browser to maintain stability. The following image shows how IE8 divides itself into 5 processes when 5 tabs are open. This is not a direct proportion. I tested it with 12 tabs and IE8 had 6 processes running. So, this is just to maintain stability and the number of processes that are created is not in direct proportion to the number of opened tabs.

Finally, I would like to conclude this review by saying that IE8 is no more noncompliant with the W3C standards. This is definitely a recommended download for all. The support for more number of plugins to IE8 has made it even more flexible.

Rating:

  • Features: 3/5
  • Performance: 3/5
  • Interface: 4/5
  • Stability: 3/5

Overall: 3/5

Numero Uno

Hello! My first blog post.
At last I have successfully set up my blog after a lot of hard work. I had to tweak the template a lot to get the blog look like what I wanted it to look like. Thanks to WampServer, I could test it almost thoroughly. If you have anything to say about any post, then don’t hesitate to leave a comment. There are some minor changes that I need to make to the blog. So, I need to work a bit more on the blog. Right now I’m not gifted with such an amount of time. Maybe I will find time in the near future. Anyways come back if you like my blog.