[HTML] The under-used <label> tag

I've seen so many web sites not using the label HTML tag. It's a very nifty usability tool whenever you're writing captions for form fields - especially checkboxes and radio buttons.

The problem with checkboxes and radio buttons is that they're small. You have to position your mouse pointer very accurately to be able to turn it on or off. With labels you can associate the form field with its accompanying caption. Clicking on the caption will turn the associated checkbox/radio button on or off. Give it a spin here:

Without the label tag

With the label tag

With text boxes clicking on the label will shift the cursor into the associated text box:

Enter your name (without label):

Enter your name (with label):

All you need to do is give the form field an id tag and associate the label with it:

<input type="checkbox" id="example2" /> <label for="example2"> With the label tag</label>

Impulse Purchase

I've seen people purchase clothes on an impulse. Shoes, deodorants, shades, food, whatever. But I don't think I've seen anyone purchase a domain name on impulse!

A few days ago I was following a truck on my bike and saw the ubiquitous "Horn OK Please" written on the back. And suddenly out of nowhere I thought of "horny" please. What a cool domain name to have! I came to the office, and purchases it for Rs 599 at Net4Domains.

What the fuck do I do with it now? Any ideas?

Saurabh Nanda. Proud (confused?) owner of www.hornyplease.com!

Composing blog posts in Textile Markup

Why can't I compose posts in Textile Markup? It's so damn simple and guarantees conversion to clean HTML. I hate using the rich text editor for composing posts. It's too complicated and I don't like the superfluous markup it generates. Plus I've also gotten addicted to Textile, thanks to the amount of time I spend on Basecamp.

I've submitted a feature request and also posted about it on the Blogger Help Group.

Clueless with Computers...

... that's how non-geeks feel. I'm extremely sure of that now.

I had been spending some time planning my parents' trip to Kerala. I had every event (flight, car travel, hotel stay, etc.) added neatly to my Evolution calendar. (Given the number of meetings I now have to attend - I've been using Evolution avidly for the past month or so - but that's a different story). Finally, I sent out notifications for each event to my parents.

I called up my Mom expecting the entire travel-plan communication process to be a breeze. What's the complication, I thought. You get a bunch of meeting invites; you click "Accept" for each one and boom! you have a proper travel calendar right in front of you.

She got the mails alright, she even clicked "Accept" on each one of them. But I had one hard of a time trying to get her to the calendar.

Me: Okay, now that you've accepted them, you can see the schedule in the calendar.
Mom: How do I get to the calendar?
Me: Okay, do you use Outlook? [That's what most offices use.]
Mom: Yes.
Me: So, the left pane, sorry column, sorry left side of the screen will have a button for calendar. Click on it.
Mom: It's not there.
Me: Can you see your mail folders?
Mom: Yes. But no calendar.
Me: Okay, I'll call you back in 5 min.

Then I rushed to a guy with Microsoft Windows on his machine. Fired up Outlook and noted the exact location of the Calendar button. It was pretty visible. But then I realized, probably it's been turned off on her machine. I asked the guy with M$ installed, he showed me how to configure your left pane to show/hide various buttons. I was like, yeah right. "Mom look at the left pane, there's a teeny-weeny arrow there which will lead to a menu, which will have an option called 'configure', which will have various checkboxes...." Not happening!

I spent the next 10 mins trying to figure out how to get to the calendar in Outlook without clicking on an onscreen button or going through the configuration process. It's bloody un-intuitive. It's "Go > Calendar" if you don't already know. The shortcut for it is Ctrl+2.

Back to the phone:

Me: Okay, press Ctrl+2.
Mom: [After 30 sec] I did, nothing happened.
Me: Are you in Outlook? [Damn!]
Mom: Yes.
Me: Do you have a Menu item called "Go"? You know, right at the top where file, edit, etc. are? Can you see a "Go" there?
Mom: No, there's no "Go" option!
Me: Are you sure you're using Outlook?
Mom: Yes.
Me: Are you sure it's not Netscape?
Mom: [getting irritated] yes!
Me: okay, are you using Outlook on your own desktop? Or do you sign in to Outlook using the Internet Explorer? [Ah, probably she was on one of the M$ web mail box thingies]
Mom: No. It's on my desktop. We have two different icons. One for Internet Explorer and the other for Outlook Express. [!!]

I wanted to pull my hair out! And as it turn out, Outlook Express, indeed does not have a calendar application.

I just gave up on the entire cool iCal stuff. Took a screenshot of my Evolution Calendar screen and mailed it to her.

[Ruby] A few points about Ruby threading...

... it's green threaded.

That means, the threading is simulated by the Ruby VM and they are not "true OS threads".

That means, if a thread in your Ruby program makes a call that the VM can't suspend, all threads running in that VM will block. In effect, your Ruby VM will "hang" until the rogue thread returns.

A few links about how threads in Ruby work:

• Thread and Processes from "the Pragmatic Programmers' Guide"


• Ruby Threads from "The RubySpec"

Basically, the recommended way to achieve concurrency, if each concurrent thread/process is doing even moderately complex I/O tasks, is to fork a new process. (The much-touted "shared nothing" architecture)

PS: And in case you're wondering, ActiveRecord *is* thread-safe. It's just that most apps don't use it because of the preferred way of achieving concurrency in Ruby (forking processes).

[Ruby] Madness with the 'require' command

I spent around 30 minutes trying to figure out why a particular Ruby file was being loaded twice, only to be struck in my face with this gotcha.

Basically, when you use require 'file' the method Ruby uses to determine whether the file has been loaded earlier is pretty stupid. It looks for the filename passed verbatim in it's internal data structure/hash/whatever. So, if you give require 'file' and require './file' the damn file will be loaded twice.

WTF?! Seriously!

Anyways, I thought this was undocumented behaviour but I found this in the RDoc entry for 'require' - should have looked there before.

Ruby tries to load the library named string, returning true if successful. If the filename does not resolve to an absolute path, it will be searched for in the directories listed in $:. If the file has the extension ``.rb’’, it is loaded as a source file; if the extension is ``.so’’, ``.o’’, or ``.dll’’, or whatever the default shared library extension is on the current platform, Ruby loads the shared library as a Ruby extension. Otherwise, Ruby tries adding ``.rb’’, ``.so’’, and so on to the name. The name of the loaded feature is added to the array in $". A feature will not be loaded if it‘s name already appears in $". However, the file name is not converted to an absolute path, so that ``require ‘a’;require ’./a‘’’ will load a.rb twice.