Happy Birthday hotmail!

So it’s the 10th birthday of my hotmail account, which was my first email account. That also marks the 10th anniversary of my access to the internet. I still love hotmail, in spite of having a gmail account. Hotmail was the first web based free email, developed by Sabeer Bhatia in 1996, who then sold it to Microsoft. The initial space given per email account was 2 MB (yea, that’s right). Today it is 5 GB.

I still maintain that hotmail is superior to gmail in many aspects. Here’s why:

1. The spam policy is pretty clear. Whatever is not known to the address book goes straight to the junk folder. Sure, you have to keep checking the junk folder for mails from new senders. But you certainly won’t have annoying mails from wayn and Hi5 going to your inbox, and large attachments from your friends going to your spam. Gmail is supposed to learn from the “reported spam”, but unfortunately, it hasn’t learnt so far.

2. The inbox contains ONLY incoming messages and sent items contain only sent messages. Nothing sent by you or replies from other people. Every item contains only one message.

3. Hotmail does not save annoyingly long orkut headers as “names” in the address book.

I do wish Hotmail would learn some things from gmail:

1. Allow you to download all attachments at once, rather than download each one at a time.

2. Allow use of colours and filters to make your inbox organized.

Beware- It's my birthday

I’m usually not a fatalistic person, but somehow, reality has got the better of me.

It’s my birthday in a few hours, and I can’t help remembering what happened on my last two birthdays.

20^th may 2007- An uncle of mine suddenly got a heart attack for the first time. He then had to stay in the ICU for a few days and then an angioplasty. Luckily he’s completely recovered from it now.

20^th may 2008- Two close family friends passed away, from cancer and old age respectively. Though both deaths were due to health reasons and not ill fate, they both happened on the same day, my birthday.

For those who don’t know it, a trend of disastrous birthdays runs in my family. My mom’s birthday is 11^th July (train blast day). Others have birthdays on 7^th December (Pearl Harbour day), 11^th September (you-know-what day), 26^th January (earthquake day).

In a few hours, it’s gonna be 20^th May 2009. So everyone reading this, watch out and take really good care of yourselves. At least for the next 24 hours.

Acknowledgements

So I’m finally done with my project report and the “black book”. We’ve been forced to thank a bunch of people for their support, encouragement and all that. Now that the official acknowledgements are done, I’d like to thank a few people who actually made it possible to do the project.

1. Larry and Sergei: I can’t thank you enough. Google has brought the world to our fingertips. Searching was never this easy. I could have never learnt and used python if it weren’t for you.

2. Jimmy Wales: Documentation would have been of 10 pages if wiki didn’t exist. And thanks to all the editors and contributors out there.

3. Guido Van Rossum: Thankssssssssss. You’re awesome. Connecting applications was a piece of cake.

4. Statsoft: You gave us respite from the troublesome task of coding mining algorithms. Not just in the project, but also in the mining lab work.

5. Torrents, utorrent: Thanks to you, getting cracked software is child’s play. Thanks also for making the latest movies n tv shows available immediately. It’s saved me many movie tickets. I should dedicate an entire post to you.

6. Songs.pk: One good thing that Pakistan did for India. They stock Indian music. Which we listened to all the time while coding. (Actually, we listened to music and did a bit of coding in between.)

7. Subway, Mama Mia, Tewari Brothers: For the great cheap food that gave us the strength and motivation to work.

8. Mundu: For the great masala-chai. Although I didn’t have it myself, the expressions on others’ faces looked like it was good. Or so I believe. Also for the mascot idea.

9. Gelato: I love you guys! Double scoops of orange cheesecake ice cream had never been so affordable. What a great way to celebrate the beginning of the project success. BTW, you do owe me commission for publicizing your offer to the whole of Mumbai.

And now here’s the first release of our unofficial mascot for the software we created. To understand why it is used, you need to read the entire black book. A soft copy will be provided on request and proof of sufficient interest. Applications may be sent to zskerkar@hotmail.com