24 November 2005

Yahoo! Mail Search Bug?


I was searching my Yahoo! Mail(tm) yesterday and got a surprise as search results. Before that I want to get it in records that the search feature of yahoo mail sucks! It takes a lot of time to get back the results unlike the popular Gmail.

Back to Yahoo! Mail search results. I did a search for a string in my inbox for some messages in the last month. The results yahoo gave me looked foreign to me (see image above). On closer inspection none of the emails listed in the results belonged to me! Out of curiosity, I did another search and got the results I wanted. Attempts to recreate the original problem did not give me results from other users though. But the possibility of the mixup happening during search of yahoo mail indicates that they have a bug in their search system(atleast). I hope the performance is much better with their new email-client like interface they are developing.

17 November 2005

10 Degrees

A friend sent me this poem when told her about the first snow of the season.

10 Degrees

How beautiful the sun as it skims
across the air in the hush of ten degrees,
disc of palest yellow hope along a sky


of circumstance; how beautifully we watch it fall,
the random tern, forgotten mole,
the infant tree inside rough winter bark.


How beautiful this frost, female fingers
tracing down the glass, how beautiful
this world too cold to criticize itself;


how beautiful Earth's creatures are, happy
and forever safe from the only perfect tragedy,
which is of course to never have been born.

A big thank you to you.

Poem: "Ten Degrees" by Tom Chandler from Sad Jazz.© Table Rock Books
2003. Lincoln, Rhode Island. Reprinted with permission.

8 November 2005

down!

The webserver is down for maintenance. Should be up by 2300hrs ET 8 Nov.

Update: Server back up. Everything running fine and dandy!

6 November 2005

Saving the Environment - 1 Step at a Time

With the increasing use of plastic in our daily lives and it not being bio-degradable I had an idea in my mind which could result in reducing the amount of plastic we use.

Ever wondered how many bottles of bathroom cleaner you use in an year? How many bottles of perfume are sold with the spray attachment? Most of the simple devices for spraying some liquid can be redesigned to use less amount of plastic than they currently use. All these containers consist of is a tank and a spray mechanism. The spray mechanism has a tube below it which goes to the bottom of the tank. The tube is usually made of plastic and that is what we can do away with to save plastic.

Losing the tube would require almost nil or a little redesigning of the tank in order to be easily held by our hands. Removing the tube will render the apparatus unusable in its current position. To use it without the tube all that is required is to invert the container and use the pumping action to spray the liquid. Changing the shape of the place where one holds the container so that it is easy to hold would be the only required change in order to use this design. The principal on which the spray works still works would still be valid for most of the non-viscous liquids.

Neat, isn't it? I hope people would use this idea and help save the environment.