ashishlive!

Android is awesome. We found love in a hopeless place. It's the unix of mobile phones. But it is so fricking annoying when: It vibrates on shutdown Why? Why does it have to vibrate on shutdown?? My phone battery definitely dies everyday because battery-life sucks and I suck more since I am too lazy to keep my phone charged. Now, when battery gives up, phone shuts down silently and in the end it vibrates. I pull the phone out of my pocket to see what the vibration was about, click the Power Button and it starts booting up, just to shutdown again! You may call it a dark pattern/(insert a mumbo-jumbo here), I call it wtf. wtf.

A lot has been said and done about Work-Life Balance lately, and in the past as well. I will keep this short, I have no patience and time to go on blabbering for pages and pages of philosophical crap. To begin with, I have had day jobs just like you, definitely not perfect, and where work can be so demanding at times that you feel like hating it all. But, I have been appropriately satisfied with my life definitely (if not so much with my work). I think its partly also because I don't give a damn about my work after a point of time, but never-mind. Admit it, you hate your work routine. It's ruining your life. You don't find time for yourselves, or your friends, family, your favorite sport or to learn new ninja skills. But at same time, understand that your company won't help this sort out for you. It's really your problem and you need to kick some ass to fix it. Take charge, and nail it. Here are a few things I apply sub-consciously: Find the passion in ...

Before I begin, C++ is awesome. It's exactly the right kind of balance between low and high level languages. When you need C++, you need C++. But it comes with it's own sets of problems. The Standard Template Library (STL) shipped with C++ is quite great, but at the same time it's excruciating verbose and is very counter intuitive. For instance, std::sort sorts C++ the elements in a container in place. Sounds good enough. Now you would expect to sort like this:   vector<int> a;   a.push_back(1);   a.push_back(2);   std::sort(a); But, NO. std::sort would only sort over a range of elements over a container, so you must write:   std::sort(a.begin(), a.end()); This really irritates me. std::sort(a) would have been brilliant, easy to use, and intuitive. I tried to pull up a simple overload and worked like a charm:   template   void sort(T& t)   {       return std::sort(t.begin(), t.end());...

Everyone wants to wake up early, and make good use of those extra early morning hours. But we fail all the time, even if we succeed, its one-off times. I thought its a good opportunity to seize and fix this problem with the existing alarm clocks. I started exploring the existing solutions out there and found there are quite many interesting stuff: A whole breed of biologically sync'd clocks who wake you up when you are least in sleep Hard to snooze alarm clocks which ask you to solve a difficult puzzle to snooze an annoying alarm tone Motivational messages to wake you up I gave all the existing products a lot of thought and why they don't quite work. Here is my conclusion: People don't really understand the real purpose of alarm clocks .   Here's the deal: Alarm clocks are not meant to wake you up. Yes, you read it right. Alarm clocks really are the mission-control, last resort plan to wake you up at the deadline time. You are supposed to get up on...

I am no usability expert, nor a PhD in HCI. I am just another tech savvy, maybe a more concerned one. This post is a rant against two most popular and religiously used applications: Youtube and Outlook. I am so frustrated of the usability bugs in these applications, that i am writing this post hoping to get some relief and a fix from these bugs soon. Youtube: Smart Resolution Present your user with minimal number of options and make decisions for them wherever possible. This seems like a magic usability-voodoo that works most of the times, but sadly not for Youtube. It goes something like this for Youtube: I click on a video, and it opens up nice with a 360px resolution (atleast with my browser and connection). I am watching this 1 hour video which has almost buffered completely and i decide to go full screen. Whoa! Youtube decides for you that the video resolution must be changed to 480px or more for a better video experience. I loose all my buffered video, and at times when my intern...

So i was mailing somebody at facebook @facebook.com and got the following autoreply mail from Facebook: Sub: Please use @fb.com for Facebook Corporate email Dear Sender: Facebook has changed its corporate email address domain from @ facebook.com to @ fb.com . Your message has been delivered to the intended recipient, but please update your contact details with @ fb.com for future correspondence. You will not receive this message again if you utilize @ fb.com . We will not be forwarding any email sent to @ facebook.com corporate email addresses past January 5th, 2011. Regards, Facebook I was hoping to get @facebook.com much earlier, like by Christmas or something. Sad.