Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:39:47 -0600 From: Some Guy <SGUY (AT) novell.com> Subject: Novell/SuSE/Ximian Technical Resource Kit I just wanted to let you know that the free Tech resource kit you have ordered has been shipped and you should be receiving it soon. Some Guy Novell Customer Communities
Excellent. Gentlemen, fire up your alien engines.
Jorge appears to be on a ranting binge recently. It would seem he has recently developed an allergy to those choices of other people that don’t mesh well with his own. For instance, in his most recent blog entry (referring to my previous entry on my adventures with the evil Yahoo! and its mail service), he denounces some of my choices (my MUA is Pine, my browser is Opera for graphical browsing and w3m for text browsing and I use JED in its CUA emulation mode to edit text on a console; I use SciTE for editing text and code when running X). I could just say “shove it” or “up yours” and move on, but I see he has some issues seeing my point of view, so I’ll see if I can correct that.
I try to help, I reallly do. He prefers pine to mutt, joe to vim, and Opera to every sane browser out there.
He seems to be quite myopic here. Evidently he cannot fathom how someone might want his user interface to use the same keybindings and exhibit the same behaviours as every single major desktop operation system has implemented since 1987. (Windows, Mac OS, KDE, even his precious GNOME all follow the CUA standard. As does JED [I don't use joe].) vim, On the other hand, despite its popularity, is a smelly piece of crap with a completely nonstandard and nonintuitive interface for anyone who has gotten used to the CUA way of doing things. There’s a saying, “You can’t polish a turd.” It applies to VI “iMproved” just as well. (And yes, Jorge, I can use vim quite proficiently. I choose not to use it.)
As far as Pine is concerned, its IMAP4 support blows Mutt’s out of the water. It also has halfway sane keybindings. And its aggregate command set is second to none — I can do operations on large amounts of email selected through keyword search very quickly and efficiently. Only a vi/vim lover can love mutt. (And no, its “Pine emulation macros” in no way approximate the sheer power and “togetherness” Pine offers me.)
Jorge it would seem is a fan of default configurations; Pine is not for him. Yes, you need to twiddle the prefs to turn on some features. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to do so (and Pine comes with an extensive help system if you can’t understand some of the choices).
As far as Opera is concerned, it’s built to be a dialup user’s browser. It provides me with a “Show Image” context menu option that’ll let me load an image in-place. (So, for that matter, does every single major browser out there except for Gecko-based browsers, where this has been an open bug for four years. Even Netscape 4 had this functionality — you double-clicked on the picture placeholder to load the image. That plain doesn’t work with Gecko. And no, it cannot be fixed with XUL; XUL does not have the ability to control this factor.) Evidently it’s been many many years since Jorge last used dialup. Perhaps if he were to use it for an extended period of time, he might see my point of view. And with 1280×960 pixels onscreen, I’m not bothered about banner ads, thank you.) Plus it has toolbar buttons to control finely what images to display and whether or not to load a stylesheet (this latter feature can be handy when reading text that has been sized or coloured poorly).
I’m tapped out gentlemen. My mission here has failed. Dude is choosing webmail on readability with links. There’s not much I can do here.
I like to read my personal e-mail without fearing what someone might have sent me may be monitored and misconstrued. Additionally, reading my webmail in w3m (not links; w3m is a far more capable browser that [unfortunately] follows the VI school of thought when it comes to commands) through a screen session in an ssh session makes the fact that I’m reading personal e-mail less conspicuous, so people are less likely to think I’m a slacker. Because of these criteria, Yahoo! Mail’s property of working in a non-JavaScript browser is invaluable to me. Evidently Jorge doesn’t mind if the SAIC admins read his private e-mail as he does so. Well, I do.
Everyone has their own needs; deal with it, Jorge.
I’ve offered imap-ssl. I don’t know where else to go … there is no hope.
Thanks, friend, but I like to read my email offline and there’s no way I’m going to restrict myself to the Linux platform just so I can use offlineimap.
Seriously. Pine. Dude uses pine. Who uses pine? Ok, bad question. Who uses pine by choice?
Lots of folks at Carnegie Mellon. Lots of folks at Ericsson IP Infrastructure, Inc. When they all had the choice of using mutt or Evolution or Mozilla Mail or Deity forbid, Netscape Mail.
Evidently Jorge doesn’t know how to use Pine or tap into its power. Too bad for him. Pine works extremely well for me, and my mail setup is decidedly nontrivial.
Don’t even get me started on Joe.
Don’t. I don’t use it, either. :p <3 JED.
Note: One day, when Firefox supports the one feature that is so important to him, he won’t use it. Just to spite me. Bastard.
Actually, given that now my hardware is fast enough to run Gecko, which is now fast enough to be usable, and the fact that it’s more standards-compliant (and supported better) than any other browser on the Linux platform, I will, if Bug 47475 is fixed. There’s no sign of it being fixed this decade either.
Maybe Jorge should realise he is nowhere near the centre of my world. :p And perhaps realise that my needs differ greatly from his, so things like “OMG cool tech!” and “OMG open sores!” aren’t more important than the functionality that satisfies my needs. Thank you very much for your concern, Jorge. Now go rm -rf / someone else’s box. :p
So my primary e-mail account is a Yahoo! Mail account (primarily because of the e-mail accounts I currently have, Yahoo!’s is the most reliable one with a Linux-based screen-scraper available; I do have a GMail account (thanks much, Ayush), but the only screen-scraper available for it at present is written for Windows). Ten days ago, Yahoo! started to convert people’s accounts over to 100MB quotas and this was somewhat gradually done, though by now I think about everyone has the new quota.
Except me.
I see the new interface but I still have ye olde 6MB quota. I think I might have logged into Yahoo! Mail using a non-JavaScript browser once. I briefly saw a message mentioning 100MB upon login one time, then was promptly redirected to their JavaScript warning page. Once I logged in using their “old” interface, my quota still showed up as 6MB. Since then, even logging in with a JavaScript-enabled browser retains my 6MB quota, though it does show me the new interface.
ARGH.
Am I missing something? Is there some trick I need to know to coerce Yahoo! Mail’s upgrading scripts/whatever to upgrade my account?
Hmph. Yahoo!, just wait until someone writes a Linux screen-scraper for GMail.
Update: I switched the Region in my Account Info to English – United Kingdom. Voilà — instant upgrade. Damn you, Yahoo!, for being discriminatory.
Update 2: I switched it to English – India and it dropped to 6.0MB again. @_@ gg, Yahoo!. No wonder people are leaving for GMail in droves. I guess it goes back to English – <some country in developed world>.
Update 3: Evidently Yahoo! thinks Indians are scum. Once you switch to English – India, the option to change region disappears. Fortunately, I had the region-change page in the browser history, so I looked up the URL. Change the Edit Profile URL (http://edit.yahoo.com/set_profile?.child=&.scrumb=…) just slightly: http://edit.yahoo.com/set_intl?.child=&.scrumb=… and you get the region change page, even if your region is set to India. I changed the region back to English – United Kingdom and my 100MB quota is back.
I’m coming very close to cussing for the first time in my blog. Yahoo! is drawing this hate out of me by its despicable actions.
A lot has happened since I last blogged. Since then, I’ve left a nice, comfortable but nonprogressive place (Dubai) for a dirty, smelly, backward place (Bangalore) that has one advantage: an IT boom feeding off the woes of the IT industry elsewhere in the world.
Despite what you may have heard of the place (“up and coming”, “happening”, “high-tech powerhouse”), all that technology is what they create. They use good technology in the workplace. However, there is disturbingly little penetration of technology into the average household (even IT workers’ households). There’s so little demand for things like proper broadband, air conditioning, gas heating, digital cable, refrigeration, vacuum cleaners, DVD players, even things like chainsaws, that when you try to purchase one of these things, they’re far more expensive than the international market, and the common excuse is, “you’re lucky this is even available here.” It’s hard to find a decent place to purchase a laptop, and it’s going to be very overpriced compared to the rest of the world. It’s about as hard to find accessories for it such as a spare battery, because not enough people buy them. Considering that the average IT person earns about INR 300,000 a year here (US$6600 a year, with heavy taxation — about 30%), it’s that much harder to pay for what would be perhaps half a month’s salary for someone in the US.
I think the attitude sucks, too. People skimp wherever they can, usually unnecessarily so. They simply have no concept of quality of service or goods. Frequently they are callous in their behaviour. They tend to prefer to adhere to the letter rather than the spirit of the law. And they favour things like academic performance far too much when evaluating a person for a job — they asked me for my marksheets from grades 10 and 12! Also, people will try to avoid doing work as far as possible, even if it means losing a lucrative customer.
The whole place is dirty. Before you get off the plane, the smell of detritus rotting and urine fills your nostrils. Since the previous Indian government banned cow slaughter, there are dirty cows all over the streets, and finding cowpats on the ground (frequently after you’ve stepped in them) is a commonplace occurrence.
IT companies expect their (poorly-paid) employees to work ten, eleven, twelve hours a day without overtime pay. People are happy with it (because they have work at all). Suffice it to say, I’m going to break with the trend and work just the 40 hours a week (A week! A week! Not a day! You can tell I was tired . . .) I’m required to as far as I can meet deadlines. Let’s see what they do, especially since (a) I’m quite productive and (b) they need people badly.
After about five or so weeks of looking for a job, I landed one that I would consider decent by Indian standards. I’m now at Manhattan Associates as a Software Analyst, writing C++/CORBA code for their connector architecture and currently involved in porting duties. The pay is nothing like what I made at Ericsson, of course (compare $11,000 a year with $67,000 + bonus). It’s enough to live comfortably, where “comfortably” means “forget about gadgets, pal.”
I’ve seen some of the housing IT people live in, if it can be called that. Frequently it’s a 8ft x 10ft room with an attached shower room with two beds shared by two people. There is no space for a writing desk or a computer table or any such thing, Just the bed is provided. Even people earning more than I am often opt for such hopeless housing.
Homes here are usually not designed by an architect. Most of them are quite inconvenient to live in, frequently with hopeless ventilation and lighting. I’ve seen only one apartment so far that I really liked, and that was far away (with poor transportation options).
Driving here is like Tetris — you only look ahead of you and try to fill in gaps. If someone finds that you’re about to hit them, they honk their horn, and you’re supposed to rectify yourself. The result is that noise and air pollution are both through the roof,
One thing is true: people try to help, whether or not they can. This is taken to an extreme — ask for directions; if the person knows, he will walk with you until you see the destination. If the person doesn’t know, he’ll misguide you with a poor guess (just so he doesn’t look ignorant).
People at government offices exemplify all that is wrong with Indian society today. They’re tardy, they avoid work, they will refuse to do anything until they’ve received a bribe, they’ll attempt to find a technicality, any technicality, not to process your request, they’ll try to flaunt their power over you and liable to unceremoniously have you kicked out of the office if they feel that their fragile prestige is not being honoured, and they’re generally braggarts. In short: avoid dealings with the government, wherever possible.
People here try to grab money shamelessly. This might mean lowballing you (a common technique not just limited to used-car and insurance salesmen). It might also mean misleading you about their product from the start, and then giving you a simper when you object. They’ll also say things like “yes, item X is in stock, come now”, then 25 miles later, “we’re sorry, the shipment won’t arrive for a week.”
It’s a whole other world, beyond the imagination of most people in the developed and better-developing world, and you bet I’m going to try as hard as possible to get myself out of here as soon as possible.
In other news, I’ve been diagnosed as a diabetic (Type 2). This was about two weeks ago. My father (a doctor) noticed I’d had the classical symptoms of diabetes (rapid weight loss, a lot of thirst, a lot of voiding), so he had some blood tests done on me. On two consecutive days, my fasting blood glucose level was 298 mg/dl and 365 mg/dl respectively. (Normal range is 70-104 mg/dl; 104-126 mg/dl is impaired glucose tolerance; and 126 mg/dl and above is diabetes.) We went to the hospital where my sister is interning, the Christian Medical College Hospital, Vellore, TN, where my blood sugar levels at fasting and peak levels were measured in the 300-450 range, which is very high. Additional tests suggested I’d been diabetic with high blood sugar for at least two months, and a new occurrence (ketosis) indicated that my pancreas had shut down due to the high sugar levels poisoning it and unbalancing my body chemistry. I was promptly admitted to the hospital for five days and given regular injections of insulin.
Fortunately I’ve been weaned off the insulin now and am on metformin (2 grams a day) and Amaryl (2 mg a day), and that’s controlling the blood sugar fairly well. I also burn about 400-450 kcal a day on an exercise bicycle and am on a 1600 kcal reducing diet. I’ve started losing weight already; I should be within normal range in a couple of months.
This weekend I’m visiting my sister, handing off a new laptop that she feels is necessary for her to be able to apply to various UK universities. It’s a Compaq Presario 2591AT, with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4-M, 640MB of DDR266, a Radeon IGP 340M, a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive (that I promptly switched to RPC-1 using Lite-on’s utility), 30GB hard disk, 15″ XGA TFT, USB 2.0, FireWire, Bluetooth, etc. It’s better than my box. 
I bought it without an OS installed, and it came with Mandrake CDs. I’ve put Windows on it for her sake.
Here’s hoping things work out soon. I’m giving serious thought to pursuing a Master’s program in Sweden or Australia or some such place. At least it’ll get me out of here and add to my credibility. By the time I get admission, it’ll be this time next year, and I’ll have had an additional year of experience, this time in enterprise framework development. Maybe I’ll be employable enough by the end of my Master’s degree in order to be able to settle in a developed country. Time will tell.
Whew, that’s quite an entry. Time for me to have dinner, take my meds and sleep. I have a long day ahead of me.
