Tech rants and elations: Safari 4

The new Safari 4 is here. Beta. I wonder if apple have done that before. It seems to have been given a different UI compared to the developer beta.

What I love:

Speed - It works really fast on most sites with web 2.0 attached to it. Its much faster than firefox 3.0.x, I am amazed.

Cover flow - I like cover flow. Useful to see your history and your bookmarks.

What I hate:

Looks - There are people I know that use safari to make their PC look and feel like Macs. They seem to be a bit pissed that the Mac look and feel has disappeared and the PC users get the Win Vista look and feel. I liked the Mac look and feel, and now it's gone :(. Some might want to suggest here that I should buy a Mac. Nope, no money in the budget for that.

Google search bar - Its a bit better now that search suggestions from google and your history are included. But there are certain cases where you will end up with a case where you will have to manually get rid of the search suggestions. I have yet to characterize this issue. :)

Cover flow - Everything in apple seems to have cover flow.

Building a nation

The screams of the street vendors selling greens heralded the morning for Kumar, a budding software professional. Most of them sold spinach but other healthy leafy vegetables were also available on prior-order. It was 6 AM and soon it would be time to get up. He hated sleeping without sheets. He slept with a thin bed sheet even in the hottest weather. He always struggled to get up.
It was a device that he had invented himself or that's how he liked to lay claim to it. The alarm clock he had was creepy, corroded and steel plated, a "grandfather" alarm clock. He had placed it in a precarious position on the lone dusty table. The clock rose hell. He moaned, and so did some of the still asleep neighbours. The poor time piece vibrated viciously like a sick man puking his guts out and unable to control his collapsing knees. The clock fell to its daily silence onto the chair, landing on the stopper. It dragged a weak rope tied from the ceiling along with it. The suicidal clock rarely had the ambition to go all the way, may be hit the floor and shatter into intricate mechanical splinters, but it did enough to bring the rope in to crucial contact with the blades of the blackened ceiling fan. The fan quickly whipped up the rope like a hungry Italian attacking a bowl of spaghetti. The loose end of the rope was tied to Kumar's sheet of serenity.
The baroque contraption was designed to piss him off and wake him up. It did the first part well with the reliability of a German automobile. His bizarre plans never helped him wake up. His mother's nasal high pitched screams always succeeded. He was more pissed now. He had seconds before the fan, that was now spinning the sheet like a male actor spinning a bra in most "respectable" porn movies, stopped rotating amidst a tangle of ropes. He always got to the switch on time to prevent any nasty fumes. Grumpy and even more pissed, he headed off to the bathroom.
It never took a monumental event to piss Kumar off these days. He realised that he was now a man who led a life in a sea of irritation with occasional breaths of peace rather than merely succumbing to minor irritation a few hours a day; just as it all had begun.
Dressed in regulation formals, he waited for the bus. The bus arrived on time. Sri Lakshmi Transport was contracted for punctuality rather than comfort. Head rests did not exist. The bus began its journey under the slowly forming haze. As a dutiful vehicle of India, the bus threw up an exhaust formulated by relic engines and the best adulterated diesel the government could allow without loosing the next election.

The region competed with Cherrapunji and regions of Colombia for the highest rainfall in the world. It was virgin territory before the rape. Kumara hung on to the rattling rails running along the ceiling of the bus. His clothing looked sooty. The bus arrived at the end of the infamous line. The company that ran the buses had paid the seller a paltry sum and the RTO officer a slightly greater sum. Kumara proceeded to the winch. He was awake now but could not see clearly. He convinced himself it was a mix of the air and trailing drowsiness. The descent began. The winch with its pulleys, weights and locks amazed him. With a blank stare he saw the the greasy ropes slide through a perpetually black pulley.
At the bottom, the light was steady, expressionless and artificial. Kumara had trained to make mechanical toys. He made excellent copies of the mysterious toys that his uncle procured from far out places but somehow he was never encouraged to create anything new. Misfortunes and governments were common place and he had been forced to work where his talents were useless. He needed no great skills. In fact he needed none. Just good health.

Kumar began the day with a sneeze. Not a good sign. His thoughts spiraled into panic: his throat would itch, he would begin to cough, he would need to see a doctor, pay him, this could slow down his work, he would have to work longer to compensate ... double whammy. He was thrown back into reality when his screen saver popped up. On it posed Just Right Soft's latest CEO. The screen saver was designed by a prestigious consultant company that had beaten Just Right Soft in its own business model of offering value added services. It was designed to bring a sense of camaraderie. Kumar shook the mouse violently and Mr CEO Santa left Kumar's screen to gift another less fortunate soul his potential job threatening moment.
The job was routine. He received a set of tasks from his line manager and then proceeded to make appropriate changes to a huge mass of software. He sometimes wondered how much disk space all this software would take. This ethereal software he was melding with could be occupying enough disks in the server room to have a strong enough gravitational force of its own. That could explain why he felt gentle tugging on the little finger of his right hand. He filled enough "change request complete" forms to finalize his minimalistic change. He proceeded to the next one. He had 10 more hours to go.

Kumara's robotic movements was now entirely coordinated by his spinal cord. The connections between his few remaining grey cells and the rest of his body would soon go into atrophy. The repetitive movement of this arms and the 12 hour work day left him little time to think, for himself or for those who were less fortunate than him: those that could not afford the rice that would be eaten with sooty hands. With tensionless fear, he gazed at the distant lamp.

Paris - The city of love

Putta Nadubeedi, B.A., had read too many captivating romance books. It served a deep, joyous and an embarrassing passion during turmoil of his adolescent days in parts of not-so-rural India. Quite quixotically brainwashed about the emotion of love (as love simply had the power to do so), he was overwhelmed by the constant mention of Paris -- the City of Love. He had read of many grand palaces. He had day dreamed of giggling women and ubiquitous perfume. The very sound of soft french, spoken with puckered lips by the gorgeous french women was to die for, he thought. Zee accente was too much thu handaelll. Women had such power over him, he thought. Oui! Paris, he had to see it. There had to be something in the city that pushed everyone to hug and kiss in every corner, on every street. A barrage of computer courses that had drummed up his "domain expertise" never really made him any more logical. And so, he dreamt on: between every "build" ... he nurtured dreams of walking by the Seine and sipping something French in a cafe. Oui!

Egale Bande was quite hurriedly named, or so she preferred to claim. She could not really mention the drunken stupor with which her father had walked to the registration office. She was born 4 weeks premature. She concealed her embarrassment quite well by hanging out, and indeed "teaming-up", with north Indians. They could not be bothered to find out what her south Indian name really meant. Her prowess in using Visio to illustrate "code-documentation" meant that she had to be respected. For their sanity, she had to be named something pronounceable but unmistakeably grand. Acronyms are elegant and anglicised, her worshipping colleagues thought. They proceeded to call her Eagle.

It was not lightning, love at first sight or other such reel-fantasies. It was simply an "on-site" thing. Sent away to labour for the emerging giants in a sexually more forthcoming Republique, the two found themselves in the same accommodation within kissing distance of Paris. An aromatic sambar later they were together; no questions asked and anglicised first names exchanged.

It dawned on Putta that he could kiss in the streets of Paris. It struck Eagle that she was in France. She could do what she wanted and the French would love her for she was exotic. They headed to Paris. They zipped to Rue de Rivoli. They walked the pavements with new found strength. Eagle swung round waist height poles that demarcated the pavement and the abused french cars on the street. She ran a quick thought through her mind: they should have a fence and not "dysfunctional poles for midget pole-dancers" on the pavement. She convinced herself that this was Paris: "Art for art's sake". Quickly over a narrow side lane, they jumped, without a care for the traffic lights, in true french style. As he crossed the lane, there was one thing on Nadubeedi's mind: hugs, kisses in every corner of Paris. Blinded by these romantic thoughts, he strode straight into one beloved piece of French art on the street: the midget pole. He was not greeted by a pole dancer, not even a midget one. The pole was designed, perhaps, to inflict maximum pain in a man's weakest part with absolute precision. Eagle saw him cringe with agony, but he held on to prevent further embarrassment. Not wanting to be embarrassed herself by her first walk on Rue de Rivoli, she grabbed him and yanked him to the corner. Nadubeedi in the corner of the lane held by the hug of Ms. Bande. Eagle held him hard and kissed him on his lips. She felt that she had to suck the air out of his ballooning cheeks before his head blew up. A hug and kiss in every corner, on every street. Women wield great power here and their inventions dotted, or rather, stuck out as spikes, on the pavements of Paris, thought poor Putta.
Hugs, kisses, expectation, romance and pain. Truly the City of Love. Oui!

Dedicated to an inspirer. Dedicate to a city.

More Knight gallantry

Bought "Don Quixote" by cervantes. I have been wanting to read that for sometime. I love out of copyright books as they tend to be exceptionally cheap; I am sure the publisher would want to extend copyright by 200 years after the death of the author. At £2, I regret that I did not buy three; One for myself, one to throw at Peter Jackson and the last one to throw at Tolkein and all the "knight" gallantry writers to come. :)