aditya's posterous

Using Mac's Mail.app.

On Snow Leopard, I hated the stock Mail app that shipped. But then, I also wasn't comfortable having my email on my local laptop hard drive. On Lion though, it seems they've worked on Mail quite a bit, and I think it's a pretty decent-looking app. But enough about Mail. This shouldn't have happened.

I just hate GMail's redesigned inbox. And this is not a spur-of-the-moment reactionary rant.

I find the auto-hide chat annoying as it appears when I hover-over and disappears otherwise. Also what's with the button labels on top of the messages replacing text with images? Why break a perfectly reasonable UI. (I liked GMail's earlier redesign, by the way.) The latest one has been unsettling.

I hope I get used to this, but seriously, why would they choose compact view as the default? I've switched to the 'cozy' view for now. Oh, and I don't like the way the conversation threads are formatted. It seems very social-networky (Google-wavy even?) for me. I don't want to see a profile pic of the sender—it's an email service for crying out loud! I really don't want to spend much time on it.

Oh well. . . let's see how my experiment with OS X Lion's Mail goes.

This is a rather strange article I found today (via). To wit:

. . . and that's why I won't be swapping my Nokia Lumia 800 for an iPhone any time soon.

Nope, Apple will have to do more than nick Android's notification system to >tempt me back to that dated interface. No widgets? Pssh. Delving into the menus >for simple tasks like killing the Wi-Fi? Whatevs. iTunes? See ya, most >definitively would not wanna be ya.

I felt the article was strange not because he was switching to Windows Phone. In fact, I believe Windows Phone's UI is gorgeous, and I honestly hope it gains significant share so we have 3 great platforms competing in the smartphone marketplace. But my problem was him knocking Apple for being a dated interface. It was essentially him rationalizing his switch to a platform by putting another platform down. Also as far as walled-gardens and restrictions go, both Microsoft and Apple are quite strict about what goes into their app stores and rightly so. It seems to me much of the tech press picks a favourite platform and rejects everything else.

Computer Science degree college kids, in particular. Couple of old classics by Joel Spolsky that I happened to read again recently. I won't say that I wish someone advised me like this when I was in school, but I'm pretty sure I would direct people seeking advice to these two articles. Worth their weight in gold.

1. Advice for computer science college students. Meant for fresh-out-of-high-school or freshman/sophomore kids unsure about the computer science major. The article is also accessible to non-computer science graduates, and some of it is even applicable to non-comp sci majors.
2. The Perils of JavaSchools This is great advice for someone already in the computer science major looking to make his degree useful.

Found this via Daring Fireball today:

Performance can no longer be measured with instruments, only with humans, which makes both engineering and reviews particularly tricky. Even Apple is not immune to awkwardness inherent in this shift, as the best critiques have noted. Specs have become meaningless. Usage is everything.

There seems to be a sudden feeling that specs have become irrelevant now and the 'experience' and 'ecosystem' is everything. I think a more accurate statement of the situation could be that specs have become less relevant now even among the tech-savvy folk, when it comes to portable devices (i.e., smartphones and tablets). The thinking goes like, "so what if you have a quad-core Android phone? How's your battery holding up?" Or, "I don't care if this tablet has the best specs, but this jitter while swiping across is terribly annoying."

Having worked in the semiconductor industry (i.e., CPUs to be specific) and having spoken to a few marketing folks, the consensus on consumers is that an overwhelming majority of them don't care about PC specs. And they've never cared about it ever. All they want to know when they walk into Best Buy is, can I play high quality videos? Or can I use the web browser for such and such tasks? (Or of course, "is this Intel Core iWatchamacallit that I saw on TV"—but that's a discussion for another day) It's us geeks and techies who would spend hours on Newegg or in Fry's balancing specs and budgets building our next PCs.

And it is these techies (many, if not all) who'd much rather buy a smart device that does the work they expect of it rather than fuss over specs. Of course, there are plenty others who prefer to buy a phone, hack it and overclock it to their heart's desire—and there will always be their like—but there is a growing number of tech savvy folks who will prioritize the 'overall experience' over specs.

Maybe it's just me, but I find email a lousy medium to compose blog posts. Especially webmail. I guess Outlook on the desktop isn't all that bad, but I'm not really a desktop-based-email-client person. Besides using Outlook at work, I am, oddly enough, not comfortable saving my personal email to my home laptop. (Yeah, go figure)

By that extension, I also find the experience of composing blogposts on blog CMS editors quite underwhelming. The WYSIWYG doesn't really give you as much control over formatting, and the HTML editor can be a pain because, let's face it, adding HTML tag formatting can be tedious. I wish blog CMSes supported something like Markdown because it strikes a fine balance, but that's for another day. Really, the main problem I think is the web browser itself. It's either too distracting, or even if it isn't your mind wanders enough to impulsively ctrl-T a new tab.

For me, text editors are the way to go for distraction-free writing of blogposts. Even desktop blog editors aren't too bad. In my old windows PC I've liked Windows Live Writer. Sadly there isn't one for the Mac. I have heard a lot of great things about MarsEdit, but I am a bit too cheap to fork out $30 odd to purchase it. So it's good old TextEdit, and a PHP script for me, which works just as great.

For commenting however, I think Posterous' email-everything-to-your-blog system works. I find it quite convenient respond to comments on my blog posts by email. I think this is probably because comments are typically short, refers to one person, and can be treated like replying to someone via email.

Of course, the real enemy of blogging is oneself (and facebook, and twitter), so there...

This is for those of you who are in the green card process (especially from countries like India and China) Actually, it even applies to you if you plan to apply for a green card in future through your employer.

Background

Till now the United States issued 140,000 visas in the employer-sponsored category. Each country has a 7% share out of this allotment. But if the 7% for a given country is not filled, it won't rollover to those countries whose list of applicants easily exceeds the 7% quota several times over.Edit: it won't rollover until the last quarter of the year by which time there's significant pipeline of applicants built up causing further delays. As a result, those high-volume countries have long waiting lists. (For example: people from India, who've applied for it in 2002 are still waiting for their green card, while those from, say, Belgium, who've applied for it in 2006 might have already got their green cards.)

Okay, so what does this H.R. 3012 do?

It does away with these country-specific limits, making it a more fair system of first-come-first-serve. Based on recent research, according to the existing system, Indians might have to wait as long as 70 years in the EB-3 category of employment-sponsored green card category. This amendment brings it down to a more reasonable 4-5 years. For the EB-2 category, it could bring down the wait from 6-7 years down to 2-3 years. And it makes it fair for everyone.

So what are the chances of this ever passing in Congress?

This amendment actually has a fairly reasonable chance of passing. Mainly because it doesn't increase the number of green cards issued by the US on an annual basis. Also there is an added provision of increasing the family-based immigration quota from the current 7% to 15%, which has Democrat support. By and large, it has quite a bit of bi-partisan support, and it's upto us to explain our point of view to those representatives who are still undecided.

What can I do to help?

A few things actually. And almost all of these things won't take much of your time and yet make a lot of difference. This page tells you exactly what you need to do, but if you want the short of it, read on:

• Email Lawmakers: There is a template in immigration voice. You don't have to write out a letter. Just enter your zip code, sign your name, and hit submit in this link and you're done. Your letter will go to your Representative.

• Email local news reporters: Media coverage would be preferable. Again this can be done just like the above. Just click on this link

• Call the House Judiciary Committee members: Actually this is the most important action item. A phone call is a lot more important for officials because they consider even one call from a constituency a representative sample size of a larger populace. More calls translate to more numbers of people who are supportive of this legislation. One phone call carries a lot of weight. It might sound intimidating, but if you actually make one call you'll realize how easy it is to talk to the officials. Also you don't have to worry about what and how to talk to them. Even that is laid out for you here Scroll down to action item 4.

There are other things you can do, such as donating money for the great efforts some of the Immigration Voice representatives are doing but the above three are the most important things you can do. The hearing was supposed to have happened on Friday, but they couldn't get to it because of some other bills. The committee is in recess the whole of next week which gives you more time to talk to the Representatives and voice your support.

Remember, if this doesn't happen this year, the chances of it happening next year gets a lot more bleak thanks to elections. Often people in the legal immigration queue are accused of complaining about the state of legal immigration without actually putting their money or effort where their mouth is. This is an opportunity to right that. So, go for it.

I hadn't heard of such a thing as Markdown until I happened to see it mentioned in Joe Hewitt's blog post. And I didn't know the guy who created this is none other than John Gruber. It's basically a script (with some basic syntax rules) that helps convert your plain text post into HTML. Pretty neat when you prefer writing stuff on a plain text editor but find adding HTML formatting too cumbersome. There is even a PHP implementation of this perl script, which gives me an idea.

Yes, this was composed using Markdown

Breaking Bad aired its season 4 finale Sunday night and while it blew a lot of people away, I merely liked it a lot. However it ended is immaterial though because this season kicked the show up another notch. And this season will be famous for what, I'm sure, will go down as an iconic line in TV history. [Spoiler alert rules apply to the video if you haven't watched this season. Also, if you haven't watched Breaking Bad maybe you should]