What's powering this site?

Code

• MVC - Struts framework
  
• Code - Java/JSP
  
• Database - MySQL
  
• Persistence layer - home grown
  
• Logging - log4j
  
• Blog - www.blogger.com
  

Photos

• 35mm slides and negatives shot on my good old Canon EOS 500N
  
• Scanned on Nikon CoolScan IV film scanner
  
• Levels adjusted in PhotoShop
  
• Some Washington photos cropped for "lens hood at the edge" mistake; it was so sunny did not notice it in the view finder
  
• No other adjustments; on display here is my photography skills (still learning), not PhotoShop skills (at which I suck anyway)!
  

On my way to become a Zealot!

I'm a Zeal member. A small step towards becoming a Zealot.

Right now, I can add sites. If you'd like to add one, email nizam@mohideen.com the URL and a brief description.

Find other sites near me

Added my site to GeoURL. Now you can find sites near me.

Colorado man shoots Dell laptop

Enraged man shoots laptop. Must have been really pissed off!

Dude, why did I ever choose Dell!?

It's been a frustrating experience dealing with Dell's "award winning" customer support. They have a myriad of problems and I won't have to list any of them here because that's old news which is available if you search Google for "dell customer support sucks".

Their product itself is pretty decent. You may probably have an acceptable buying experience if they sent you the proper item within the promised timeframe and it all worked when you got it and continues to work... God forbid, if anything breaks in this fragile sequence and you have to email customer support and they respond that they "truly regret any inconvenience or frustration" I may have gone through, and that I should call 1-800-917-3355 where they will address my issues "in a more efficient manner". That's when your problem starts.

Well, not exactly. You actually start getting annoyed right after you place the order and realize you've forgotten basic addition! Applying 2nd Business Day shipping method to a product that Ships Same Day does not mean that you'll get it on the 2nd business day or the 3rd! Oops, they forgot to tell you there is a step where it is shipped from facility a to facility b and all the math you learnt in school only applies from facility b onwards. You say that's misleading? I say it's lying!!

I wonder how they manage to retain customers and make money? Is Dell keeping the lead because all the other PC makers are worse off than them in terms of cost effectiveness, quality or support?

Verisign loses round one!

Sure enough, Verisign has decided to 'suspend' it's 'useful' service. Mercury News - VeriSign to suspend Site Finder service

Some acts are so stupid you can outright predict that it is doomed to fail. This is yet another one of them. Verisign may have read the legal fine print and decided there's nothing that stops them from doing this. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

And what's with the "we are trying to make the user's internet experience better" defense? Verisign is given the authority to maintain the registry and provide DNS services. Not to improve the user experience for people using HTTP protocol over web browsers. What about the other hundreds of protocols?

Read my related post Stupid ideas ultimately get burnt!

Yahoo! News - Annoying new feature breaks page scrollability

Yahoo! News seems to have broken page scrollability with the introduction of a recent design change.

Yahoo! News pages now set UI focus to the Search box whenever a page loads. This change seems to have happened sometime in the past 2 days. What this does is, it breaks the ability to scroll the page using the keyboard navigation keys or the scroll button in the mouse. I now have to click once outside the text box before my navigation keys will work.

Don't know if this was intended or happened by accident. If it was intentionally designed, it's just a bad idea as far as usability is concerned.

Setting focus to a text box is advisable only for pages where the text box is the most important element on the page and the user almost always will type something into the box. Like for instance, the Search box on the Google home page, or the Username box of a login page.