Body Browser By Google

Google has developed educational demo of human body. Interesting.

bodybrowser

Harry Potter Vs Lord Krishna

Despite so many of my friends insisting on reading/watching Harry Potter movies, I never got any interest for that.

Finally, today I got a chance to hear the overall story of Harry Potter series and quite surprised to see lot of similarities with the story of Lord Krishna's childhood.

I could draw parallel lines on
 - Born in someplace and raised by others
 - One who is chosen to destroy the evil
 - Childhood glories

What else?  Almost for all major turns and twists, there is a similarity.

Did anyone feel the same?

PS: After some hard googling, I found following blog to strengthen my thoughts.

Harry and Krishna

Usability - What every product owner must know!

When it comes to usability of your product, its usually be carried out by subjective opinions of developers, designers and product managers. How highly skilled they are, some of fundamental facts are often missed during those product design discussions.

I recently got a chance to read a book "Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability By Steve Krug". The author reveals lot of so obvious common sense lessons. Few points to ponder yourself. 

• Don’t Make Me Think!
• When it comes to software, people often do not want think too much to accomplish something. For anyone its quite embarrassing to admit as dumb, they wont be interested visit your product next time. The page should be as much self-explanatory as possible [like traffic signs]   
• Your goal should be for each page to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it.
• We don’t read pages. We scan them.
• Reduce as much words as possible. 
• We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfy.
• The is no single BEST way to accomplish a thing on web. We try to find how to get things done and stick with that even though that's not a best approach. 
• We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.
• We take lot of guess work. click here and if it does not work, click somewhere else. 
• Users Like mindless choices 
• Create clear visual hierarchy 
• Easy as organized as library. 
• Use Conventions and commonly used vocabulary wherever applicable 
• Use Job instead of employment etc. 
• Breakup pages to clearly defined areas 
• As per the domain. For example, how a cook would arrange the kitchen selves. 
• Make it obvious what is clickable 
• Link or button
• Keep the noise down to dull roar.
• No mess around. Simple
• Omit Needless words 
• Example, Google search button. By looking at it, everyone knows what to do. 
• Happy Talk must die 
• No need for introductions, mission, goal statement, welcome message etc 
• Instructions must die 
• Gone are the days to have help menu, mouse overs etc 
• Page Navigation should be modelled like navigating a mall
• Easy to reach home [Home page] in a click from wherever you are. 
• Design breadcrumbs to explicitly tell user how far he is gone from home page 
• What Home page should consist?
• Site Identity and mission - what is it and why i should be here.
• Site Hierarchy - what i can do here. 
• Search - Single most important thing in home page 
• Teases - promos, upcoming events etc 
• Timely content - any special news NOW 
• Deals  - if any 
• Short-cuts 
• Registration - 
• Show me what I am looking for?
• Show me where to start ?
• Establish credibility and trust 
• Most web design team arguments about usability are waste of time. Instead conduct usability test with targeted audience and get the objective results 

BrowserID - Single Sign On

Yet another initiative to simplify, centralize, regulate single sign on multiple web sites

This time, its from Mozilla. Lets hope one day we dont need to remember so many user ids and passwords without compromising identity.

 BrowseID

Internet Business Model

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Internet

business models are like buses: If you miss one, all you have to do is wait a little

while and another one will come along. I’m no expert when it comes to making

money on the Web, and even if I were, whatever I had to say would probably be

passé by the time you read 

                                                                        Excerpts from Don't Make Me Think.

ConcurrentTesting - Advanced Testing for Multi-Threaded Applications

IBM has created a tool for testing, debugging, and coverage-measuring of concurrent programs.

Concurrent Testing

Free source code repositories!

• bitbucket.org
• launchpad
• koders
• github

Search indian laws, court judgments, tribunal judgments and law journals

Kanoon

Dec 31, 1969 Glitch!

Smart phone users might have noticed with variety of applications defaulting the date to Dec 31,1969 with current time quite often. I even noticed this on Facebook update date time.

This might not happen quite often on well tested applications but lot on sparsely tested mobile applications.

If you ever wonder why this may happen, we all know on computer, the system time counted from Jan 1, 1970.

Most of the programming languages have a interface to setup the time with number of milliseconds away from this start date [Jan 1, 1970]. if its a positive number it will be greater than the Jan 1,1970 if its a negative number it will be before that date. If its 0 [or more appropriately, less than 1 day = 24*60*60*1000] it falls to Dec 31,1969.

The number datatype mostly defaults to 0 on most of these programming languages. [Example, Java requires number of milliseconds to be setup with long data type which defaults to 0L].

So when anyone uses this mechanism to update the date and any conditions fails to set the date time, it turns out to be default value 0L and thus the underlying system sets as Dec 31,1969.

How to avoid it?

• More Testing
• Understand the default values of data types on your programming languages and its impact. 
• Efficient Error handling 
• Finally, if you are using this way to set the current time, handle it properly. To set the current time, you cannot set 0L, you should either calculate the time or use other sophisticated API to set the current date time

Free text to speech to check your American and British accent

naturalreaders

Start your little business today!

Interesting..

Memcached with Java in Windows

Recently I got a chance to review design of using memcached in our J2EE application. To start with I tried the cache my windows 7 development environment.

Albeit, the cache mechanism has its own limitations, certainly its one of the simplest key-value in memory cache that can scale for large applications. Facebook uses this cache on around 900 dedicated servers to scale up its needs.

The memcached comes with application exe for windows and its very easy to install, start and stop the services.

One can also use telnet to access the server and its cache content.

Java

More info on installation: Memcached for Windows
Integration with Java : Java Integration
Memcached Java Client : spymemcached


I will try to post my sample code soon.

Great domain registration!

NameCheap

Advanced Javascript Tips

Interesting article about lot of unknowns in JavaScript.

Wonder the power of JS!

தமிழ் இணைய புத்தகங்கள்

தமிழ் இணைய புத்தகங்கள்

Why Google search does not handle empty spaces in search input?

I just noticed after decade of using Google, that its general search input does not care about empty space input

Google Search for Empty spaces

In a enterprise world lot of emphasis was given for input data sanitation and I guess so many Web developers would have fixed these kinda of issues.

I just wonder about so called "standards" in web development.

Is Google missed QA or doing intentionally?

Other Quality Engineers are fuming about these kinda of issues should think about it?