Technology – Page 57

Learn Browsing – Part 3

I never thought a day would come when I would need to write a third part to this impromptu series, but arrive it did. I was reading Living Digital today (September 2008 issue), and came across this piece on things to do (read: waste time) online.

Again, it gave a link to wikipedia.com

My first reaction was “Ah, now I can do a follow-up saying that even guys can get it wrong”. Really. That WAS my first thought – to show that anyone can get things wrong. I flipped over to see who’d written the article and to my surprise (?)

…it was somebody called Richa Sharma

Obviously some chick. Now when topics like these come up, people always jump up and start preaching about political correctness. ‘Political correctness’, IMO, is pure bullcrap. It also brings up the question of stereotypes – and something I said about that earlier – stereotypes exist for a reason. Bongs have funny accents when speaking English. All Tamilians like Rajni. Girls don’t follow tech that much. Screw political correctness. This is real life. In real life, it just happens.

Coming back to this journo in Living Digital, it wasn’t a one-off error either. At another point in the article, she’s talking about online avatar sites. And she links to some sites specifically stating that you can create avatars at these places. And which is the first URL?

secondlife.reuters.com

That’s Reuters’ friggin news page on happenings in Second Life, not the link to original site which should’ve been given (see the context of the article). That simply shows shoddy research. I’m not a bigot, but incidents like these make subscribers feel chicks would be better of staying in Living Digital‘s review pages as eye-candy than writing stories.

Update: Check out this month’s PC Quest. It’s a publication from the same media house as Living Digital (Cybermedia). PC Quest conducts an annual survey of brand power of different IT brands / categories – something which is highly respected in the industry (apparently). They’ve a category for ‘Best Blogging Service’. The winner is Blogger.com, and the runner-up is Blogspot.com. Get a clue – they’re the same friggin’ service! Not a typo, because they’ve gone into a whole analysis of ‘brand persuasion’ and ‘brand pull’ between the two even when they’re the same bloody service. Makes you wonder about how much they even KNOW about what they’re writing. You could talk of TypePad.com (the second runner-up) and Vox.com (another service from TypePad’s parent company SixApart) as two different services and compare them; but not the above two. Which shows that PC Quest’s India’s Favourite IT Brands survey is TRASH.

Mentioning the fact that they always referred to brands as loosing their market share (instead of losing their market share) – and the fact that they called Wikipedia.com a search engine – are just extra nails in their coffin.

Two Too Useful Software For Windows

Two new software I installed. One is called KeyScrambler Personal. I’m always paranoid about keyloggers – that’s less of a threat in Linux (I still used chkrootkit) – but Windows gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. So I was quite happy to stumble upon this Firefox add-on which basically scrambles all your keyboard input at the kernel level; so that keyloggers, if any, get a bunch of garbage. Really, it doesn’t gobble up much memory, and an added line of protection – even if not fool-proof – goes a long way ensuring safety of your data.

The second one happens to be Workrave. I’ve loved GNOME’s lock-screen-after-such-and-such-period-of-time feature ever since it was launched. Basically, what it does is that after a specified period of time, it locks down your PC to allow you to take a rest. I, for instance, set it to make me take a 3 minute break every 30 minutes – both are values which the user himself can tweak according to his wish. It was good to stumble across a Windows version of this too. Actually, I’d heard to Workrave earlier too – but its earlier versions didn’t work since they weren’t able to lock the screen. The latest version works. I still haven’t got the funda behind having a sheep as its icon image. Of course, it also comes with skip / postpone break buttons. This is a software which everyone who uses computers should install – not only does it prevent repetitive stress injury (which can happen eventually), but it also prompts you to rest your eyes. Most people blink less when using a PC, and a dry eye isn’t good news (especially for people like me who wear spectacles). Did someone mention “I hit the skip button very often?”