ashishlive!

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.

Puzzle: Poisoned Wine You have 240 barrels of wine, one of which has been poisoned. After drinking the poisoned wine, one dies within 24 hours. You have 5 slaves whom you are willing to sacrifice in order to determine which barrel contains the poisoned wine. How do you achieve this in 48 hours? (Please try the puzzle before you skip to the solution mentioned at the bottom of this page.) Solution: We are gonna play with number bases this time. Hope you are familiar with them, or else you will not understand a bit after this sentence (Apologies. Thanks.). So, we have 5 slaves. Lets just forget about number of barrels and also assume that we have only 1 day. One day and five slaves, thats it. Can we determine how many barrels can we solve with our new constraints? Yes, we can. Lets see how: Five slaves and one chance. They must drink in a fashion that covers all the barrels and drink in a unique way i.e each barrel must be drank by a unique set of slaves, so that when some slaves die, ...