Fun with yahoo! answers – Whats the probability of passing my exam

I was searching for some exam related keyword in google and came across a yahoo! answer post. Check out this screenshot. This entry is deleted probably by yahoo! answer moderator or the user himself. But Google cache still shows the content for The probability I’m going to pass my exam today?

Here is the full transcript.

Question:
The probability I’m going to pass my exam today?
I was going to pull an all-nighter but I haven’t slept in 2 days because I had an exam on Thursday and Friday. So I fell asleep on my desk last night. Now instead of having reviewed for 7 hours. I was freaking asleep. OH MY GOD. I’m going Die.

Answer 1:
and your on here…. shouldn’t you be studying???

Answer 2:
it’s better than falling asleep during the exam have fun!
peace

Jokes apart I hope that kid will pass the exam .

Rocket Singh – from a startup employee perspective

Rocket Singh is a simple story with some good thoughts. pluggd.in already talked about it. Being worked with few startup’s this is my take on rocket singh theory from an employee perspective.

1. If you are a startup or a service company never mislead customers and employees with over promising ’stealth mode’ product and deliver absolute useless product that no one cares.

2. Never ever under estimate anyone. Even your chai wala to your irritating product manager. You will never know when he become your boss.

3. Never promise anything to your employees and customers if you can’t deliver.

4. Never give a chance to your employees and customers to shake the trust in you. Most importantly never lie when you hire them.

5. Value your relationships between individuals over profits.

6. Never leave your employees and customers in trouble when your business goes through a tough time. If you talk to them and remain transparent they will understand. Share the revenue numbers with your team. Even if its bad news. Let them know whats going on.

7. Having the right team is important to make it big.

8. Everyone deserve respect. Everyone comes with some value. If you are a true leader you will get to know that in the interview itself.

9. Take ownership when something bad happens. A true leader will not think of the word layoff the moment he hear about “cut spending” from vc.

Watch the movie if you haven’t. Do let me know what you think about it.

group bargaining site for India – Grabbon.com

I love to get discounts on a SPA or Dinner. And I love any site that comes up with good deals to grab. Here is a new site grabbon.com that features an exclusive deal on their site at a discounted price everyday . For each deal, there has to be a minimum number of participants required. User can pay a small token amount to book their deal . The token amount is redeemable as part of your deal. The token amount will be charged from your credit card only if the minimum number of deal request are met for that deal. If you win the deal, grabbon will email you the coupon for the deal.

I liked the idea behind grabbon . It could be great if they can sms me the coupon code when I cut a deal. Checking out the deals from my mobile or by sending an sms to check for any deals could make this business a great success.

On the international market Chicago based groupon is already getting large attention and funding. Mydala is another indian startup in the same vertical.

Cat 2009 – summary of analysis, score percentile calculator and updates

CAT 2009 Update from IIMA.
Update on ongoing Computerized CAT 2009
IIMA, November 30, 2009: The decision to conduct computerized CAT was taken unanimously by all IIMs. The contract for delivery of computerized CAT was awarded to Prometric, a world leader in computerized test delivery. IIMs were responsible for generating questions for the tests and Prometric was responsible for conducting the test. The delivery could not be executed flawlessly because of virus attack on several test sites. Prometric is working to address the issues arising from the attacks.
IIMs would categorically like to assure candidates who could not take the test that they would get another opportunity to take the test. This assurance has been given by Prometric. The details will be worked out by Prometric shortly and announced.

Resources

CAT 2009 takers share their problems @ Rediff – CAT 2009 was a nightmare he’d like to forget

percentile calculator for CAT 2009 from career launcher can be found here

CAT 2009 FAQ from IIM A website can be found here with updates.

Testfunda guys put up their analysis for CAT 2009 here

IMS CAT updates can be found here and more updates here

Minglebox CAT 2009 daily analysis can be found here

TCYOnline CAT 2009 analysis can be found here

If you find any other interesting links please leave it as a comment. I will update this post with your links.

*UPDATE 1*
Day 4 analysis and experience from pagalguy can be found here

*UPDATE 2*
CAT 2009 Day 2 analysis can be found here.

*UPDATE 3*
CAT 2009 answer keys will be released only after December 7th.

Yahoo! Meme use jquery as their library – serious!

hehe being me I have to check the view source of any website I come across. And I just noticed Yahoo! meme homepage loads jquery and use that as the basic js library. Whatever happened to YUI 3.1 Beta ? If you guys don’t use it how do you expect us to recommend YUI 3.1 for our new projects.

create a digg facebook like frame to display external content

You might have noticed the stylish iframes used by digg or facebook that display external content. There are plenty of argument about how bad is the iframe for the web , I believe its okay to use iframe if you wanted to share some interesting content for your visitors and keep them inside your site. Here is the simplest, optimised html and css to create a digg like frame to show external content inside your website. Enjoy.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
body {
	overflow: hidden;
}

body, iframe {
	margin: 0 auto;
	padding: 0;
}

#frameHeader {
	background: #ccc;
	height: 30px; /* change this to increase the bar height */
	left: 0;
	top: 0;
	position: absolute;
	width: 100%;
	z-index: 999;
}

#content {
	padding: 5px;
}

iframe {
	margin-top: 30px;  /* change this to increase the bar height */
	width: 100%;
	height: 101%; /* just to make sure that iframe takes the full content, you can reset this to 100%  */
}

</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="frameHeader">
	YOUR SPACE TO ADD STUFFS
</div>
<iframe src="http://www.ajaxination.com"></iframe>
</body>
</html>

*Update* – 30/Aug/2009
I am glad to know that folks at broadbandproviders.co.uk implimented this code in their broadband news section.

XHTML strict mode and table height

I wanted to vertically align something central to the screen. To avoid all the unwanted positioning and looping using DIV tags I decided to try it with a table. My Doctype was XHTML strict mode.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>your page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
	<table width="100%" border="0" style="height: 100%;">
	<tr>
		<td>HELLO</td>
	</tr>
	</table>
</body>
</html>

It turned out that, in XHTML strict mode, you can’t really have 100% table height like the transitional.
Take a look at the allowed attributes for table and valid attributes for td on the XHTML website[http://www.xhtml.com] . Height is not a valid attribute. I would like to know the reason behind removal of height from the table attribute compared to the ‘bad practices’ from HTML 4 standard mode.

Standards are good, provided it meet their purpose. People like me who take extra pain to validate their html every day, we respect standards. But in this case it definitely a broken standard for me.

And oh, the DIV lovers will come and tell me I can do a vertical align to the center of screen ‘easily’ using DIV tag. Yeah right! Again is there a standard way of doing vertical align using a single div tag? I would love to see that

Anyway this is how I made it work finally. So here is the code to align a div block center to the screen both horizontal and vertical. And yeah, this one works on FF and even on IE6;) [see my IE 6.0 support pledge]

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>your page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<style type="text/css">
body{
	margin: 0 auto;
}

#verticalWrapper {
	display: block;
	height: 1px;
	left: 0px;
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	text-align: center;
	width: 100%;
}

#verticalContainer {
	height: 140px;
	left: 50%;
	margin-left: -76px;
	position: absolute;
	top: -10px;
	width: 150px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
	<div id="verticalWrapper">
		<div id="verticalContainer">
			CENTER
		</div>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

stop crying, we have to support IE 6.0

I am tired of seeing numerous post about not supporting IE 6.0 anymore.

If you look at the sentiments from the web developer community most of them are tired of writing hacks for IE 6.0 specific. For a change I dont consider IE 6.0 as enemy of the web developer. I think its the bad development practice of developer that create issues.

For example, when you know IE 6.0 have issues like box model you still tend to avoid doctype or excessive usage of padding on your div tags. How many of us actually take the pain to validate our css and HTML for each single page we develop on a daily basis.

Why IE 6.0 is still valid and important?
If you install a fresh windows xp even today, by default the browser version is IE 6.0. Even today, there are plenty of customers who are on windows xp and stick with whatever gets shipped in the package. IE 6.0 user base is fading but still its a very large user base to ignore completely.

My Two cents
Stop crying. Seriously. If your page is having cross browser issues, 70% of the time your HTML/CSS is not cross browser friendly.
Upgrade yourself to FF 3.5 or new chrome but don’t expect your users to do that. Upgrade your knowledge and try to develop solid css and html to fight against cross browser issue.

Resources
I should show you some way to get there also right?
6 Steps to Create a Cross-Browser Friendly Web Page

Writing Cross Browser Friendly CSS (Mozilla vs. IE)

new way to discover broadband providers in uk

If you live in the United Kingdom and wanted to find out all the broadband providers in your area, check out broadbandproviders.co.uk – a comprehensive guide to all things broadband in the UK. By entering your postcode, you can check broadband availability in your area, compare broadband providers , and purchase the most suitable package according to your need. The site have some interesting broadband news feeds from in and around UK websites.

Startup Lesson: The Washerman, Dog and Donkey

I normally dont post stuffs like this . But this one was too good to miss. Enjoy.

Good story with old version…

There was once a washer man who had a donkey and a dog.

One night when the whole world was sleeping, a thief broke into the house, the washer man was fast asleep but the donkey and the dog were awake.

The dog decided not to bark since the master did not take good care of him and wanted to teach him a lesson.

The donkey got worried and said to the dog that if he doesn’t bark, the donkey will have to do something himself. The dog did not change his mind and the donkey started braying loudly.

Hearing the donkey bray, the thief ran away, the master woke up and started beating the donkey for braying in the middle of the night for no reason.

Moral of the story ” One must not engage in duties other than his own”
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Now take a new look at the same story…

The washer man was a well educated man from a premier management institute.

He had the fundas of looking at the bigger picture and thinking out of the box. He was convinced that there must be some reason for the donkey to bray in the night.

He walked outside a little and did some fact finding, applied a bottom up approach, figured out from the ground realities that there was a thief who broke in and the donkey only wanted to alert him about it.

Looking at the donkey’s extra initiative and going beyond the call of the duty, he rewarded him with lot of hay and other perks and became his favorite pet.

The dog’s life didn’t change much, except that now the donkey was more motivated in doing the dogs duties as well. In the annual appraisal the dog managed a ” meets requirement” Soon the dog realized that the donkey is taking care of his duties and he can enjoy his life sleeping and lazing around.

The donkey was rated as “star performer”. The donkey had to live up to his already high performance standards. Soon he was over burdened with work and always under pressure and now is looking for a job rotation…

If you have worked in a startup or corporate environment, I am sure you have guessed the characters of the new story.