Talk less, Type more

The one who brought me to this world – the one who has shaped me and tried to make me a better person – the one who nourished my body and soul – the one who has inspired many – the one who exemplifies courage, sacrifice, patience, humility, intelligence and many more – the one who suffered many a physical and emotional pain without any complaints – is no more.

My mom’s life story is such an inspiration to me and to many in our family and extended families. How much ever I write here about my mom, I will not be able to make any justice. I haven’t even decided if I should begin writing about my mom.

The past few weeks have been such a roller-coaster ride for all of us. For a few days we thought my mom would get better, for a few other days we had hopes fading and again we saw mom getting better and so on. Ultimately, my mom passed away – hopefully peacefully – in sleep.

The past few weeks it was an emotional roller-coaster journey for me. I have started to re-evaluate my choices, my decisions and the direction I should take moving forward. Not that I have figured it all out, but I now know what is important in life – or so I think.

Visting India has always been a philosophical journey and an eye-opener for me. But this visit – which I thought would be just visiting my mother who was sick – turned into something else.

I saw a person, who even in the most unimaginable physical anguish, never utter a harsh word to anyone – even to god. I saw a person, who mustered all the strength she can, while still having these immense physical pains, to cheer us up. I saw a person breathing her last breath. I saw a person lying so still, yet we thought would wake up at any moment. I saw a person turning to ash.

And I collected whatever is left of the person in a small urn. That small urn is what is left of a person – who has brought me to this world; nourished, shaped, inspired me and many others.

Even though mom, you are no longer with us in person, you will always live in our hearts.

http://kotipalli.com/sarala.asp

Everybody has their favorite desktop internet browser. I have not one but four; but since they are not all created equal, my favorite-ness of them also vary.

I have begun to use Internet Explorer almost exclusively on Windows 7 – but I test the websites I develop on all the other browsers – Internet Explorer 7 (Windows XP), Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 (of course on Windows Vista and Windows 7), Google Chrome (Windows, Macintosh and Linux), Firefox (Windows, Macintosh and Linux) and Safari (Windows and Macintosh). That is a big test matrix.

My reasons:

Firefox is too slow to launch. It might be doing some optimizations before loading, but initial impressions count in this case.

Google Chrome launches fast. It feels snippy and fast, but over time the performance degradation creeps up. In my tests I have found that even opening 3 tabs shows about 7-8 chrome.exe processes and each eating up upwards of 50KB per instance on average! This is completely unacceptable. The 3 tabs have Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar – so it is not like I am being unfair here.

Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are not bad and I have to fall back on these sometimes when a few websites misbehave in Google Chrome.

I read somewhere that the internet browsers are nothing but mini-operating systems that you need to code to. That is telling it very politely.

The differences between the various browsers, and the ‘standards’ they espouse are well “standards to that browser” and with the introduction and adaption of HTML5 the waters get even more murkier.

I don’t want to begin enumerating the differences here because I will not be able to do any justice. There are sites dedicated to these. Some of them are:

• the various Acid tests at http://www.acidtests.org/,
• http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ for CSS,
• http://quirksmode.org/ for CSS, DOM, events and JavaScript compatibility testing

For more just search in your favorite browser, “browser standards compliance comparison” or “compatibility test browser” or “browser css test”

It is just mind boggling.

One solution is to use a library like jQuery or Prototype or even Raphael because they abstract away these browser quirks and differences. Again, there are tons of these libraries. Just search “javascript libraries” or “javascript libraries comparison” you will be amazed.

However, there is no magic bullet. Any code is not perfect and these JavaScript libraries are no different. You tend to use and stick with one or may be two. Or you might peruse these libraries and create your own unique library!

I started using Prototype and switched to jQuery because it was more intuitive to use. I blame Prototype for confusing and misdirecting me about an important JavaScript concept called ‘prototype’. Naming a library after a ‘property’ is a very bad choice and the creators – nah actually those people who named it Prototype are to blame. I will never use Prototype again, even though I might refer to it once in a while to see how things are done.

For the past year, I got bit by this bug about writing JavaScript in C# and compiling it to JavaScript. I tried Script# – a horrible and a ‘waste of time’ framework. It expects you to learn writing JavaScript in a whole different way. It is out as a choice.

I then bought SharpKit – but very soon I realized that I have to pull in lot of gunk but still kept on using it for lack of a better choice.

For another project of mine, I was hand-coding JavaScript (i.e., not using any Javascript libraries) and I learnt a lot about JavaScript and I can’t think about going back to using SharpKit. The maximum I will use is jQuery because it abstracts away the differences between the browsers – but I will stick to hand-writing JavaScript hence forth.

You know what you are writing, you know what you are getting yourself into – of course, you get bit by a very weird error once in a while when you miss a punctuation, but with source control (or just plain saving older versions of your js files) you can always revert and start over.