A mind-Bloggingly terrible nuisance!

I have just emerged victorious - but rather broken and disappointed - from a 72-hour struggle with what has clearly been my first ever - and hopefully my last - encounter with a *L*O*U*S*Y* product from Google. Blogger. Blogspot. Whatever you call it. Thanks to Blogger, I took a trip down memory lane and went back to school. Kind of. I had to revise my HTML basics and literally "hand-write" my post from scratch trying in raw HTML in the "Edit HTML" tab of the editor.

For those of you who blog on Blogger/Blogspot (the same blogging site on which this blog is posted), you would have seen the "slick" new editor. Since I only posted brief messages till now, I thought it was rather neat. My wife had previously sought my help clean up some posts on her blog - the long and short of her problem was that the editor seemed to have a mind of its own and arbitrarily inserted whitespaces and new lines. I dismissively attributed the clunky behavior to the fact that she was copying+pasting from the Word document where she had originally composed her notes and recipes - after all, if you paste rich text in a "smart" editor, the formatting will also carry. Right? Turns out, I was only partly right.

Turns out that WebKit (Apple's layout engine on which Chrome is based) does some mighty weird things every time you edit anything - the algorithm it uses to "interpret" hard returns and formatting is "intriguing" at best. In a nutshell, it creates "" tags for empty lines and these tags add vertical whitespace. Especially when - at times; the logic of which remains a mystery - it also adds a line-height attribute (125% and 20px seem to be WebKit's favorite values). And God help you - assuming even He is willing to touch the resulting mess - if you switch between the "Edit HTML" and "Compose" options.

Granted, I was trying to create a rather lengthy "post" and I will agree that blogs may not be the ideal forum for such lengthy content, but that is no excuse for the mind-bloggingly terrible nuisance this new editor has turned out to be. 

(Sigh!) The bright side of this experience is that I tried out Wordpress (and will probably migrate there), burshed up on my HTML, learnt some new things in Eclipse while experimenting for a fix and got a lesson in perseverance.

Thank you, Google! GRRRR!

An old habit is re"Kindled"

I used to be an avid reader. It was not uncommon for me to finish an entire book in a day during my summer vacations as a school-going kid. Gradually, increased pressure of studies, email, the internet, work pressures, parenting and other excuses pushed this wonderful habit into oblivion.

A recent project I was working on, had me landing on the Amazon home page regularly. If you've seen their home page, you would know that the first thing that hits you is "Kindle". Repeated visits to that page started tempting me to buy a Kindle, but I kept putting it off because - I told myself - I no longer read like I used to. That's when it hit me. "I no longer read liked I used to?" That's right, I realized; I didn't. That introspection, combined with some work-related travel (with no in-flight WiFi) helped rekindle the habit.

In the last month, I have read 2 books - 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Middle East Conflict' and John Grisham's 'The Painted House'. I started reading 'The Associate' (another John Grisham novel), but thanks to a recent meeting with Subroto Bagchi, I have now picked up 'A Whole New Mind' as well.

I'm still tempted to buy the Kindle, but I'm still telling myself I don't need one.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying reading. The old fashioned way.

An old habit has been re"Kindled".

Thou shalt (NOT) cast the first stone

I live by old values, but am well-disposed to change and realize that value systems evolve and evolution of values is not necessarily a bad thing. Therefore, though I was taught in school that "only s/he who is without sin may cast the first stone" (John 8:7), I realize that constructive criticism is a key ingredient to continuous improvement and hence, I truly believe that one need not be above board before pointing out another's shortcomings. Indeed, I will decry a poor user interface for instance, even I cannot design a good UI for nuts and likewise, I will willingly accept meaningful criticism on the quality of my cooking from someone who can't even tell whether the stove is on or off.

But there's a fine line there. There's a fine line between providing constructive criticism and ascending the throne of Vikramaditya and absolving oneself of all shortcomings while haughtily finding fault with all & sundry. And my blood comes to an instant boil - so help me God - when people knowingly, regularly cross that line.

Therefore, someone pulling people up for coming to meetings without preparing for or without reading background emails on the agenda and subject matter is fine even if that person himself hasn't read all the background information. But pulling people up when that person himself hasn't read all the background information under the pretext that it is okay - for whatever reason - for him to come ill-prepared is unacceptable. Likewise, pointing out non-compliance of some process by someone who is himself not fully compliant is okay, as long as that someone is trying to be compliant. But pointing out someone else's non-compliance while trying to dodge, trivialize or worse, justify one's own non-compliance is (grrr!) not acceptable.

Grow up, fellas!