The Butterfly Story Retold

The Original:

    Once upon a time in a land far far away, an old man found the cocoon of a butterfly. Feeling lonely he decided to take the cocoon home to watch its transformation to a beautiful butterfly. One day a small opening appeared in the cocoon. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further. Clearly it was having trouble coming out of the cocoon

    So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took as pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged out easily…but it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

    What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God´s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

    The Moral: If Life had no obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been and we could never fly.

The Tester’s Version:

    Once upon a time in a land far far away (no, not that far away. come back) an old man* found some WinRunner scripts lying around. Feeling bored he decided to modify them, fix bugs in them and beautify the code.

    One day, satisfied with his work, he started the final run of the automation. He sat down and watched it click, type and navigate around the application in it’s own beautiful way. All of a sudden it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further. Clearly it was having trouble recognizing an OK button in the application.

    So the man decided to help the script move forward and clicked on the OK button. He continued to watch because he expected that any moment the script would continue. Nothing happened. It had just stopped. The script was still looking for the OK button, which wasn’t there anymore ‘cos the old man had already clicked on it. In fact, the entire automation that had been running perfectly fine for several hours had to be totally restarted.

    What the man in his kindness and haste (impatience and stupidity, actually) did not realize is that the Gods of Mercury don’t quite like to be interrupted.

    The moral: When Winrunner scripts are running, just leave the damn thing alone!

* Age and gender changed to protect the privacy of the guilty ;-)

P.S. I know that was a lame post but then, at times, I get a little too philosophical…in a weird sort of way :D

 

Paying bills online? No thanks!

    The airtel.in site - that looks impeccably professional at first sight - can seriously get on your nerves sometimes. Ok, I understand for a person with a flash memory (meaning, I forget everything in a flash), changing passwords every month is not a security option but a dumb idea. But just because I changed my airtel.in password sometime back and forgot the new password doesn’t mean Airtel can subject me to a mental torment, right? I need to pay my mobile bill, which is already a week overdue and the site is doing everything possible to stop me from paying it. Now, don’t ask me why I didn’t walk into an Airtel office to pay it. That’s a physical torment!

    So, for the record, here’s what happened. I went to the airtel.in site and entered my username (which, thankfully being my mobile number, is easy to remember) and password. It opened a pop-up asking me to enter my username/password again…yes, again! Now, this is not because I entered the wrong password the first time. It just happens to be Airtel’s standard login procedure - enter your username/password twice to prove that you aren’t lazy. So, I took up the challenge of proving that I’m not lazy and entered my username/password again…only to get a blank white screen staring blankly at me. Now, that’s not a very polite way of saying I failed the challenge right? I closed the window and logged in again. Now, it said, “Please open a new browser for new session“. Security reasons huh? Feeling glad that someone is taking my security seriously, I opened a new browser window and logged in again. It said again, “Please open a new browser for new session” and I said, “what the hell!”. It was a new browser window, after all. It took me a moment to understand that when they say ‘open a new browser’, they mean, ‘close all your existing browser windows and open a brand new browser window’. Now, don’t you think that’s a bit too haughty of Airtel? to make me close all my important browser windows - orkut, gmail, yahoomail and a couple of blogs (from where I was trying to steal ideas) - just to relogin to their site? Thankfully, they didn’t ask me to reinstall my browser or much worse, reinstall Windows or much much worse, buy a new PC each time I have to login to their site. Probably their security team is thinking of that right now.

    Anyway, I did what I was told - closed all my browser windows, opened a fresh browser and logged in again. To appreciate all my efforts, this time the blank screen was replaced by a rather polite ‘Authentication failed‘ screen. I closed the pop-up and logged in again. “Please open a new browser for new session“. Shucks! I forgot that!

    After repeating the above cycle for ‘n’ number of times (where n is a multiple of infinity), I finally got my password right. I heaved a sigh of relief (that almost startled the person sleeping..er sitting next to me) and proceeded to pay my bill. Did I succeed? No! This time it was “Payment not processed. Please try again later“. With a string of expletives - which, had I said louder would’ve gotten me out of my job without even a severance package - I was about to give up. However, the fact that I got so close to paying my bill encouraged me for a few more cycles. The result of my “try, try and try until you are tired” determination: the same blank screen that stared blankly at me during my first attempt. Back to screen one…er square one. I gave up there! I still haven’t paid my bill and hence, my mobile connection could get disconnected any moment (I can see my friends heaving a sigh of relief here…wonder why?).

    The infamous ‘Communication Error’ on the irctc.co.in had, long back, made me realise that having a PC and an Internet connection doesn’t make life any easier. Airtel only reaffirms that now. I can now see why my dad grinned when I told him I’ve started paying bills online. So much for me trying to appear internet-sauvy to him! :(

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I need help!

    I really do! I happened to read a mail from my ’sent items’ today, one I had sent to a friend some days back and I was mighty shocked at what I saw. The four-line mail had about a dozen smilies grinning, laughing, staring, winking and even yelling at me. That’s when the truth hit me: I’ve become a smiley-addict!

    When I first set my eyes on ’smilies’ in one of my text books - under topic ‘Emoticons’ - they didn’t impress me so much. It didn’t make sense to me why anyone would want to use those little ascii-faces to convey emotions? weren’t words enough, I wondered (my! how naive I was then!)

    Even when yahoo messenger introduced me to it’s graphical smilies, I wasn’t all that impressed. I started using them because they were there, tossing them around carelessly…and then slowly, they started appearing at every punctuation of my sentences. The animated ones only made it worse…they were just too cute to resist. By the time the email clients came up with smilies, they had already become a habit. I’m now dreaming about the day they would replace my facial expressions too (you see, my face muscles don’t always cooperate with me like smilies do).

    I know there aren’t any rehabilitation centers yet for smiley addiction but I’m really hoping some kind soul would start one soon … or I might soon land up forgetting my alphabets. Meanwhile, if you’d like to offer your condolences to me, a poor victim of the smiley craze, feel free to drop a bunch of smilies in the comments section.

    P.S. If you are wondering why there aren’t any of those much-talked-about smilies in this post, well, actually they were there…I spent about a day in deleting them and cleaning up the mess so as to appear sober to u :) ..oops! that one just slipped in!

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    This is probably the silliest dialog I’ve ever come across. Like popping it out of the blue when I’m in the middle of something isn’t irritating enough, it gives me two stupid options to choose from, ‘restart now’ or ‘restart later’, when the one I want is ‘leave me alone’. If you’re looking at the dialog for the first time, you’d probably assume ‘restart later’ is going to let you off the hook but no, it would haunt you, every 10 minutes, until you submit to the Gods of Windows and reboot.

    Now what happens if you just drag the annoying window (which, mind you, doesn’t have a close button) to a corner of the screen and continue with your work? It just restarts your system, pretending you do not even exist. The same would happen if you aren’t near your computer when the dialog comes up. It just reboots, giving no damn consideration to whatever you were doing, leaving you with absolutely no clue of why your screen is at the innocent looking login prompt when you return. Now, unless you are a geek who’d look into the system log for clues, wouldn’t you suspect your neighbor for the reboot? I, for sure, would!

    Now, for some reason, my computer always chooses to bring this prompt up when I’m not at my desk (more often, when I haven’t saved my work…Finagle’s law, probably) and my work’s already gone by the time I return. I finally decided enough is enough and googled for a way out. Here’s the not-too-obvious solution to get rid of this dialog without having to turn off the automatic updates:

Now, to get rid of it:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

You can configure how often it will nag you (I re-configured it for 720 minutes, which means I’ll be asked twice on a work day), or completely disable it.

I’m yet to check if the trick works but I’m hoping it would ‘cos the next time I see this nagging dialog on my screen…well, I’d just reboot (what more can I do?).

    While on the topic, looks like Windows Vista has a ‘new’ feature that allows you to update your system without requiring a restart (in other words, it doesn’t have this annoying dialog). Now, I don’t know whether am supposed to applaude Microsoft’s marketing strategy or smirk at it. Call a mere bug fix a feature and use that to sell your product! If I ever happen to run a company, I’d love to have one of those MS marketing guys sell my product. That way I can , once and for all, stop worrying about quality!

*** Update ***

To disable the automatic restart completely, you can also enable the ‘No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations’ option under Start -> Run -> gpedit.msc -> Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update. In this case, it’ll not even prompt you the first time with the auto-restart dialog. Thanks Jeltje for pointing it out.

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“Welcome to Google Talk!

xyz is online right now (online friends have a green dot). Type below and press the Enter key to send an instant message.”

    Couldn’t Google just welcome me without making me feel like an idiot who doesn’t know how to send an instant message? Am glad they didn’t go on to explain what an instant message is (an instant message is something similar to instant coffee, only tastes a bit different) and how to press ‘enter’ on my keyboard…they probably have that in their help pages.

    The auto-message in YM informing me, every now and then, that my friends are still using an older version of the messenger sounds a lot better than this one. Atleast it makes me feel more sophisticated and technologically advanced than my naive friends ‘cos I was capable of updating my YM successfully, all by myself, without crashing my computer and calling technical support to ask if pressing ‘enter’ will reboot my machine or send an instant message!

    I thought Microsoft was the only one following the strategy, “we think for you cos we, by default, assume you can’t do it yourself”. Looks like Google has started thinking on the same lines now. I wonder if, according to the major software players, being user-friendly is to assume all users are idiots. I think user-friendly is just making things easier for the user and stopping these nagging messages would be the first step towards it.

    And you guys at Google, if you’re listening, give me the damn “invisible” option in gtalk before you come up with such interesting welcome messages. I don’t feel one bit welcomed in gtalk without that one! (and you, Google tutors, please understand, to us lay-people, being “invisible” is different from “blocking” someone…I don’t want to use the latter as a workaround for the former)

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