Daily Archives: December 17, 2008

Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Another website, another day

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I just read a piece about 5000 DDA flats being allotted through lottery and recalled a snippet of conversation that I had yesterday.

It turns out that the DDA website is close to being a piece of useless web_real_estate. The current problems include

  • every time there is a draw of lots for allotment, the website cannot handle high traffic and inevitably goes down
  • since the server cannot handle load it is difficult to fathom whether the application form has been scrutinized. It turns out that IIS throws up some message about being unable to handle the load
  • the website actually does not do anything more than what can be done via a simple set of CGI scripts that query a database

Can the powers_that_be take note of this ?

Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

bn_IN moves out of beta for Firefox

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Just read off Seth’s blog that for Firefox 3.0.5, bn_IN has moved out of beta. Thanks to Runa for making that happen. The mandatory download link

Incidentally, the same post from Seth provides pointers to what would be required to be done to move a locale out from beta. That’s a good list to have handy and a page that requires to be bookmarked.

Catchall Scribbles, My Reading Habits, Personal

The curious incident of the online bookstore

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Sometime during the month of August this year, I planned to buy the two books – God Created The Integers and On The Shoulders of Giants. Since the local brick-n-mortar version of the Landmark bookstore did not have the latter, I took a chance and ordered it off the online store.

When the book finally arrived it was a mess. The package was torn, the book dog-eared and it was wet.

I took the above two pictures with the phone camera and put them up on flickr.

Curiously enough, on the 15th of Dec 2008, a person claiming to be heading the said bookstore/portal called up and asked for the pictures to be taken down. I requested him to write to me with the same statements that he made over phone. I await that e-mail.

I don’t really have much to say except that they just lost my business. And, I remain amazed at the notion of customer service/satisfaction that these folks have.