Problem:  ”Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.”
Solution: “Almost replaced left inside main tire.”

Problem:  ”Test flight OK, except autoland very rough.”
Solution: “Autoland not installed on this aircraft.”

Problem #1:  ”#2 Propeller seeping prop fluid.”
Solution #1: “#2 Propeller seepage normal.”
Problem #2:  ”#1, #3, and #4 propellers lack normal seepage.”

Problem:    ”The autopilot doesn’t.”
Signed off: “IT DOES NOW.”

Problem:  ”Something loose in cockpit.”
Solution: “Something tightened in cockpit.”

Problem:  ”Evidence of hydraulic leak on right main landing gear.”
Solution: “Evidence removed.”

Problem:  ”DME volume unbelievably loud.”
Solution: “Volume set to more believable level.”

Problem:  ”Dead bugs on windshield.”
Solution: “Live bugs on order.”

Problem:  ”Autopilot in altitude hold mode produces a 200 fpm descent.”
Solution: “Cannot reproduce problem on ground.”

Problem:  ”IFF inoperative.”
Solution: “IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.”

Problem:  ”Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.”
Solution: “That’s what they’re there for.”

Problem:  ”Number three engine missing.”
Solution: “Engine found on right wing after brief search.”

From R.H.F.R – Been around lots times, really old, but still … I like it!

Please fix the following:

1) Working Skype client on all networks! Or if that’s just too distasteful, some kind of secure, group capable video chat in BBM. Secure is key!
Android’s got it. Symbian’s go it. WinMo 8 will surely integrate tightly with Skype. iOS has it. Why doesn’t BBOS?

2) Enable creation of WiFi Hotspots.

3) Decode VCF cards from Nokia users, recd. by SMS

4) Allow sending contact details via VCF to people who don’t have BB’s / BBM.

5) Enable editing of email when forwarding.

6) Dual Core 1.2GHz+ processor
I love the Bold (original) keyboard, hence no storm/torch for me. Good to see the 9900 has kept the good’ol Bold keyboard. If only the 9900 had a nice dual core so there’d be less of the hourglass….

I’ll sacrifice some battery life. But give me an option. Allow me to turn off one core. Or reduce core frequency on the fly. Kinda like Asus’s Overclocking tools, only  being used for power savings…

Please?

I had a major argument with my girlfriend, Helen. I was in the wrong,
but not enough to back down without an argument.

So after storming away, and cooling off, I had a think. I was clearly
in the wrong and felt pretty guilty, with all the trauma it had caused.
So to make it up to Helen, I said I’d buy her a gift.

"Any thing at all, my love", I said, overcome with remorse.

"Oh, I don’t know", replied Helen,"You really shouldn’t do this you
know. But, if you are, just get me something really expensive, that I
don’t need."

The following day I booked her in for chemotherapy.

After installing the hotfix, you can enter unicode characters using “charmap.exe”. In Windows, press the WIN and R keys, type charmap and press enter.

Whether you use the official (Microsoft supplied) hotfix or download a font like Foradian, people who you send your document to, may not have the requisite fonts. Word, Excel, PDF allow you to embed your own fonts, but there’s not much you can do for websites (sure you can do a lot of CSS work and embed your own fonts, but it won’t work with a lot of browsers out there). When sharing docs with people, you can also use the older U+20A8 symbol (₨).

Inserting the older symbol is not much different, and you can use charmap.

Another side-effect of installing the hot-fix is that Excel’s “currency format” dropdown now has a Rupee format available:

Also see: “Three Ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows”

To use Indian formatting for numbers (i.e. Lakh, Crore instead of Millions) see this article: “Indian Currency format in Excel”

(heard this joke on tv last night:)

When I told my family I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up, they
all laughed at me.
Well I showed them.  Nobodys laughing now.

–
Jim Zeek Pyramid Technology
–

rec.humor.funny.reruns is a moderated newsgroup.  If you are seeing postings in the group other than the repostings from netfunny.com then your site’s
software is misconfigured.  Write your site’s admin (usenet@yoursite) and ask
them to make sure RHF and RHF.reruns are configured as “moderated.”

A political activist named Dave was just arriving in Hell, and was told
he had a choice to make.  He could go to Capitalist Hell or to
Communist Hell.

Naturally, Dave wanted to compare the two, so he wandered over to
Capitalist Hell.  There outside the door was Rockerfeller, looking
bored.  “What’s it like in there?”  asked Dave.  “Well,” he replied ,
“In Capitalist Hell, they flay you alive, boil you in oil, chain you to
a rock and let a vulture tear your liver out, and cut you up into small
pieces with sharp knives.”

“That’s terrible!!”  gasped Dave.  “I’m going to check out Communist
Hell!”  He went over to Communist Hell, where he discovered a huge line
of people waiting to get in; the line circled around the lobby seven
times before receding off into the horizon.  Dave pushed his way
through to the head of the line, where he found Karl Marx busily
signing people in.  Dave asked Karl what Communist Hell was like.
“In Communist Hell,” said Marx impatiently, “they flay you alive, boil
you in oil, chain you to a rock and let vultures tear out your liver,
and cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”

“But …  but that’s the same as Capitalist Hell!”  protested Dave.
“True,” sighed Marx, “but sometimes we don’t have oil, sometimes we
don’t have knives …”
–
Henry Cate III
–
From the RHF archives as selected by Brad Templeton, Maddi Hausmann and
Jim Griffith.  This newsgroup posts former jokes from the newsgroup
rec.humor.funny.   Visit http://www.netfunny.com/rhf to browse the RHF pages and archives on the web.
Join and contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today.

From the RHF archives as selected by Brad Templeton, Maddi Hausmann and
Jim Griffith.  This newsgroup posts former jokes from the newsgroup
rec.humor.funny.   Visit http://www.netfunny.com/rhf to browse the RHF pages and archives on the web.
This newsgroup does not accept submissions.  See rec.humor.funny for that.

BTW: If you wanna serve web-apps to India, put ‘em in your London data centers. London is closer than NYK (and the food is better so your sysadmins will be happier people). Ping times to LA probably are similar since packets go via SGP -> TKY -> LA … but nothing beats the BOM -> UAE -> LDN speeds. Flag Telecom beats Teleglobe hands down. Go RCOM!

File Storage: Windows Live (SkyDrive), Google Docs, Roll your own (Amazon S3 and equivalents including Google Storage for Developers beta), Box.net etc

I never really got around to creating a box.net account though I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. Could be they really are good or could be that that they have a very good social media management team. Somehow, I’m not terribly excited. I use a lot of disk. I need terabytes and I don’t think box.net is trying to service customers like me.

I don’t really like any of the alternatives at the moment. Sometimes I think JungleDisk + S3 will do the trick, but then again, S3 means that it is not really possible to copy deltas. You have to copy the whole file across even if you change just one miserable byte. There is some kind of commercial service at rsync.net that would probably work, but then, they’re charging more than 50 cents/GB/mo. So that won’t work either.

I think I have the perfect storage solution – and there’s an empty space here — but it’s going to be a lot of work to develop. If you are a VC looking for new ideas, contact me!

I currently use Roll my own, with a Sharepoint based WebDAV shared “drive”, backed by a Kimsufi.co.uk server. Can’t get cheaper than kimsufi though you do have to buy in chunks of 1Tb. Easy-peasy to install Proxmox or VMWare though, so you can install your choice of Windows + “app server”. I suppose I could try OpenFiler, but then again I think it’d really be useful only for people with high bandwidth, low latency links. I have “medium” bandwidth – 2Mbps/high latency. I suppose over time I will get higher bandwidth, but unless I find a cheap’ish datacenter in India, there isn’t any way to get around the latency issues.

Backup: I also pay for a Mozy.com account. Mozy rocks for Windows clients. Mostly, till you decide to restore and find it is slower than molasses. Really. Slow. SugarSync rocks too (or so I’ve heard)… I’ve heard a lot of “small medium” businesses are moving to Mozy/Druvaa. I don’t like Vembu’s offering but they seem to have some traction too.

Music Management: iTunes, Windows Media Player, WinAmp ….

iTunes is getting bloated. Wish there was iTunes light. Still works nice (though very slow) has a decent COM API and is supported by millions of third party apps. And you don’t have to jailbreak/fsck around with your iToys … though you do hate Apple every time you use it. Like for example, when syncing photos to my iPad, why the fsck do I have to delete existing photos when syncing to a new computer? I own my photos. They’re not MP3s <which also I own:)>. I hates you Apple. Still there’s safety in numbers. Millions of iPads being sold. Sure to be plenty of third-party development. Linux drivers. You know…

However, a really complete Windows solution needs:

ffmpeg, Media Player Classic – HomeCinema, xvid, Quicktime Alternative, Real Alternative and Songbird (or other open source, iTunes) to really work well. There’s just nothing in the purely commercial space that meets my needs.

Social Information Overload Management: Nutshellmail, Gist, Ping.fm, Pidgin, Twhirl, UberTwitter and the “many” many RSS readers and aggregators out there …

Google Reader (which replaces StumbleUpon for me) + NutshellMail + Ping.Fm + Gmail + Rapportive + Pidgin is my choice du jour. I think Google has all the pieces now and could oneday soon, create an app that works with IMAP/RSS/ATOM/NNTP/TWITTER/FACEBOOK and like the magic ring “binds them all”. Wave isn’t it.

Not even sure there is competition in this category. A lot of people love Gist. I don’t.

I think a Pidgin client with twitter + facebook + lnkd.in + other apps would rock. Perhaps one written in C# though. C# on Mono (ie !Windows.Forms) if you swing that way.

Photo Management: Picasa/Flickr/Windows Live Gallery/iPhoto…

This is one category with a clear winner. At least for me. Picasa it is.

It’s a combination Windows App + WebApp unlike the other contenders. This does mean that only the first “sniff” is free (ie you only get so much free disk space, after which you have to pay).

Flickr is probably the most popular in this category (sez wakoopa) but I like Picasa because it’s also got a real Windows app that is beautiful, fast, smooth and integrates brilliantly well with Windows. Picasa is available for Linux too. Not sure about Macs, assume it is available.

In terms of usage charges, Picasa is probably amongst the lowest cost. Something like 10 cents/GB/month. USD 20 gets you 80GB for a year.

Development : Eclipse? Visual Studio? MonoDevelop? SharpDevelop? Argh.

Nothing is a clear Winner. VS2K8 rocked. VS2K10 sux (well its really good, but really slow. You need a machine that can run Crysis at 50 fps).

I think the language of the future is Javascript. Everything will be JS + PHP. Even local apps. C# 4.0 with “dynamic typing” is close, but no cigar. C++ is for masochists and banksters who like to complicate everything…(and in turn have developed an incurable passion for obfuscated everything – balance sheets, term sheets, derivatives, employment contracts, etc)

I’ve been using LINQPad more and more these days because it loads so much faster than VS2K10.

Office / Productivity: MS Office, Open Office, Google Docs, Zoho?

OpenOffice is not a patch on MS Office. Google Docs is still in the “getting there” stage. And it’s not really free anymore. You kinda have to pay cuz this feature or that is only available to “premium” and “educational” users. And that makes it worse than a pirated <— err borrowed –> copy of Office. So I think Office wins and will keep winning for the near future. I’ve had “free” copies of Office (courtesy MSDN subscriptions from employers, universities and the like) most of my life, but even so I’m beginning to wonder if it is worth even the near “zero” cost.

I think the Office Web-Apps are a disaster. Even with a decent JS engine the OneNote WebApp is slooooow. The Word WebApp is hobbled to the point that it can’t even create tables. And the need for Sharepoint + a Windows Server to run it on just makes the whole setup “hopelessly” expensive. Powerpoint renders well but who cares? Slideshare renders well enough for me.

Perhaps, perhaps, there will be an offline Google Docs effort? Something like Picasa? A combination web-app + windows app? Hope lives eternal and all that.

Onenote/Evernote/Somehting else?

Something else. Evernote is good, but I want more. I want the OneNote experience with the ability to embed activex/COM and JS. I want to embed Excel. And Word. And other docs. And really embed, where they become part of the DOM. For example, if I have a table on a OneNote page …. Why can’t I stick an Excel function in it? Why can’t the table (secretly) be a Excel sheet? Then I could use some of the kewl Excel-Addins to do kewl stuff.

Tomboy may get there someday. If I was to place bets…..I’d say tomboy, but for now OneNote. Unless there’s a sudden crush of developers TomBoy is going to take ages …. 

Evernote… just not sure… it’s good’ish. Works on Blackberry’s, IPads and what have you’s. But, there’s something about the editor. It’s good’ish not great. I like the OneNote integration with Windows Text Services and Windows Automation. I love the depth of “Ink” Support. I heart the magic “autocorrections” and the reasonable heuristic based guess about what I’m trying to do. I mean I like that pressing TAB will do the right thing most of the times (like indent a para or bulleted list, or create a new table…). It kinda reminds me of the commandline.

Just wish OneNote used more of Word’s editing, embedding and programmability.

Windows / Suse / Ubuntu / Mac OS ?

Windows for now. Suse is a close second. Give it another 5 years. And short MSFT in the meantime if you have SIPP that you don’t intend to touch till you retire (et plus since any profits you make will be denominated in USD, you’ll need to swap your USD for INR every now and then)

Reliance/Vodafone/Airtel/MTNL/Tata/Other?

If you’re in Mumbai and use a Berry and are willing to live with CDMA –> Reliance. Just no competition here.

If you’re anywhere else in India –> Vodafone (which strangely isn’t dying. I’ve been predicting its collapse for years now. Like they say the markets can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent. I wonder where they’re funding the enormous losses they’re surely making in India, in Africa etc? I haven’t looked at a Voda balancesheet recently, but surely someone must’ve noticed the “massaging”? Even in their home-turf, in the UK, I’d bet on ’3′.)

migueldeicaza Social media experts for hire: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="social+media+expert"+site:twitter.com 
Fri 05/21 12:22 AM

Wrote this post thinking about Google Docs. Turns out Google is copying Amazon and has come out with its own “Google Storage for Developers”. Basically identical to Amazon, just that it costs $0.17 per GB per month instead of the $.20 per GB per month that Amazon charges. Data transfer in and out costs a heck of a lot of money, especially to-from APAC ($0.30 / GB)!

Which means running your own storage server (in a well built and well managed data-center) is probably the best bet. A decent server with decent storage say, 2Terabytes of disk (1TB x2) costs about $100 per month which is … $0.1 GB/month with RAID level 1 – Mirroring or $0.5 per GB/month with RAID level 0 – striping. In all practicality there will be no further data-transfer charges.

‘Course you have run your own linux distro, but you can choose whatever super cool filesystem you want. If you use Kimsufi.co.uk you can run Proxmox VE (or VMWare or Hyper-V) + a pre-packaged appliance like Openfiler.

[EDIT: Original Post continues]

Google is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than Amazon S3 for cloud storage!

• Google: Max 1GB, Crappy interface for large files, tools ecosystem not as rich as S3.
  
  • 80 Gb for $20 p.a (see: https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage?hl=en)

• Amazon S3: Max 5Gb per file. Decent tools. Have to pay for good usermode filesystems. EBS allows you to easily store/mount true-crypt encrypted volumes.
  
• 80 Gb for $192 p.a (full redundancy)
• 80 Gb for $96 p.a (reduced redundancy storage)

And Google has no data-transfer charges … which can be very, very substantial! Amazon is free for inbound data till June 2k10 …

I think I’m going to start transitioning my content from S3 to Google. Going to try and store my everyday desktop as a VM image – let’s see how that goes.

BTW: Noticed that Reliance has substantially lower latency than Tata when it comes to international bandwidth. Round-trip times under a 100ms for servers in Paris/London. Which means remote desktop may actually be usable. I remember a senior (and brilliant, though understated) colleague, saying that anything under 200ms is ok for UI tasks … (this is when I was developing embedded devices and we were trying to work out how fast we needed the processor to be …). Methinks Tata goes via SGP => TKY => NYK to reach LDN (they acquired Tyco). Reliance on the other hand owns FLAG and can go via the Middle East. When I’m next on a Tata line, I’ll check out ping times to NYK. Should be about the same either way to NYK (~250ms), but LDN should be 400ms via Tata if I’m right.

I think Amazon has servers in SGP. I think Google is more of HKG play – which will add some 50ms to round-trip times.

People (including my own parents!) pay for stuff like QuickHeal when there are perfectly good free alternatives such as Microsoft Security Essentials and AVG out there. Mainly because QuickHeal advertises a lot. Wish they’d asked me (maybe).

Anyways:

You can download “Microsoft Security Essentials” from here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

And AVG Free (Personal use only) from here:
http://free.avg.com/ww-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free

Both are excellent. You should have one of the two installed at all times! Both have been installed on millions of machines and are relatively stable, known to be solid (not crashy) and won’t slow your computer down too much.