What does software and menstruation have in common?

At least two Ubuntu packages. I present to you cycle and mencal for tracking menstrual cycles. Immense entertainment ensues to think about the functional testing.

Man from testing team: Honey, did you have your period today?
Test subject: Get lost you insensitive clod!
Man from testing team: (Filling out bug report form) Prediction early by few days. Kindly fix ASAP.

Cycle

calendar program for women
Cycle is a calendar for women. Given a cycle length or statistics for
several periods, it can calculate the days until menstruation, the days
of "safe" sex, the fertile period, and the days to ovulations, and
define the d.o.b. of a child. It allows the user to write notes and
helps to supervise the administration of hormonal contraceptive tablets.

Possibilities of the program:
  - Calculate days of menstruation, based on the length of the cycle or
    on statistics of previous periods.
  - Calculate days of "safe" sex, fertile period and day to ovulations.
  - Definition of D.O.B. (Date Of Birth) of a child
  - Allows to write notes.
  - Helps to supervise reception of hormonal contraceptive tablets.
  - Multiple users allowed. Data is protected by a password for every
    user.

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does
neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. It is
just an electronic means of keeping track of some of your medical data
and extract some statistical conclusions from them. You cannot consider
this program as a substitute for your gynecologist in any way.

 Homepage: http://cycle.sourceforge.net/

Mencal

A menstruation calendar
Mencal is a menstruation calendar written in Perl.

It is a simple variation of the well-known Unix command cal. The main
difference is that you can have some periodically repeating days highlighted
in color. This can be used to track menstruation (or other) cycles
conveniently.

Author: C. McCohy 
Homepage: http://mencal.kyberdigi.cz/english.html

I've read so many arguments and debates on why we don't have women in technology, especially software. And I never really figure out the real reason for it. But now I can say, at least we're trying!

Mother of all CAPTCHAs

Came across this Slashdot story about a "true random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission." QRBG provides high-quality true random numbers through a web service for which you have to sign up.

I laughed my guts out at the CAPTCHA:



Nice. Makes sure you're a human AND of a certain type.

For all those who're racking their brains out yaar, sine ka differentiation kya hota tha (I did that too :-)), here are some hints:

• (d/dx) sin(x) = cos(x)


• (d/dx) cos(x) = -sin(x)


• sin(n*pi)=0 for all integer values of n


• cos(m*pi/2)=0 for all odd (integer) values of m

Is stealing users a good strategy?

Zapak seems to have caught my fancy. I'm sure everyone would've seen the irritating (and offensive) "As fast as 1-2-3" ad campaign by Zapak. Close on the heels of that, I notice another web campaign from Zapak:



The first frame of the animated GIF has a purple Spidey holding up a placard that reads, "jumping_jack@tediffmail.com" (emphasis mine, apparent spelling mistake - theirs).



The second frame has the same purple Spidey holding up a placard with "spider.man@zapak.com" written on it. Why the dot, I wonder. Wasn't it about "reclaiming your name"? It's Spiderman, not Spider-dot-man!

I just don't get it. Zapak started off as an online gaming company with excellent advertising and marketing campaigns. I remember telling everyone about the "Get to the next level" campaign I saw in Adlabs loos. Or the "Your race begins here" campaign on escalators. Then it went off to focus on girls in gaming.

And then all of a sudden - free email? Which gets delivered instantaneously? Which is as easy as "login, compose, send"? I mean, wow! No one though of that before!

And then it wants people to reclaim their names on a website called Zapak.com? What would anyone like to give out on a CV - nanda_saurabh@gmail.com OR saurabh.nanda@zapak.com? And how long can you go along with this strategy? It's self defeating. You can have only one amit.agarwal@zapak.com or amit.singh@zapak.com. Your USP goes out of the window as soon as you have enough number of people signing up.

If you can't innovate at least don't try to steal Rediffmail's users. They have a phrase for this - "splitting the pie" or "dividing the pie"...

(Oh, btw, they've also launched a YouTube clone now - Zapak.tv)