TimesOnline declares Sonia Gandhi as the President of India!

India's Sonia Gandhi may have renounced the post of Prime Minister of India a few years ago thus commiting the mother of all sacrifices... This deed definately increased her popularity. And as usual accolades were soon to follow. One of the recent recognitions that has come to her way was being declared as one of the top ten most powerful women in the world. And.. what has lead her to this rank? she is not the prime minister nor does she look after any crucial ministry... So how do we justify her place in the top ten?

This was probably the question that haunted the TimesOnline website. So how did they solve it? Well, simple they declared her the President of India!!! Yes, she is a president but that of the national party named India National Congress... but not many people may have heard of the local Indian party's name. So TimesOnline decided.. lets declare Sonia Gandhi President if India.. that'll make it more interesting ;)

Following is the link where I observed the hilarious typo on TimesOnline web page - http://timesonline.typepad.com/

Bastard child conceived in an orgy

I am a software engineer and have decent experience in software development now. I have been part of different projects and all of them had a common thread running through them. The common thing was 'End of Project'.

This is the time when everyone wants to get out of the project. Everyone is bugged... tired of seeing the same people day after day... tired of doing the same kind of work day after day...

This is the time when people start to shrug off their responsibilities and try to confine themselves to their respective 'Domain'. Every one wants to get out of the project and get into something new where they will experience the same 'End oF Project' syndrome again.

This reminds me of lines I had read in Steve Jobs biography. It said about the calamitous Apple III, "The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during an orgy, and [later] everybody had this bad headache and there's this bastard child, and everyone says, 'It's not mine.'"

I can say with a total certainity... thats the story of every software projects!

Generic AJAX Object

Posting a code that you can use in your page to implement AJAX. Its is not a full fleged javascript object yet, but I feel its good enough to start.

function ajaxcore(){
 var req;  //  the request object
 var cbfn; // name of the callback function

 this.initRequest = function(){
  if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
   req = new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
  else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
   req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
  else {
   throw new Error("XMLHttpRequest not supported");
  }
 }

// Call this method for processing your request.
// arguments:
//  cbFunName - name of callback function that you will handle
//  url - servlet URL
// todo..
// provide additional argument that would be a 
// form object which would be parsed
//   and then given to the server for processing.
 this.doCompletion = function(url,cbFunName) {
  if ("undefined" == cbFunName){
   alert ("Inappropriate Callback function specified. Aborting server 
    call without further action.");
   return;
  }
  cbfn = cbFunName   function () { };

  try{
   this.initRequest();
  }
  catch (e){
   alert ("Unable to create XML request object.")
  }

  if (req != null){
   req.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (null != req ){
     if (req.readyState == 4){
      cbfn (req.responseText,req.responseXML,req.readyState,req);
     }else {
      cbfn (null,null,req.readyState,req);
     }

    }
    else{
     //todo...
    }
   }
   req.open("GET", url, true);
   req.send(null);
  }
  else{
   alert ("You are probably using a primitive browser.");
  }
 }
}// Main End