problems

Long Live Surfunion

For those of you wondering what happened to SurfUnion, here’s some bad news – the forum got affected in last week’s hacker attack with all its data destroyed. I called up Ron who had been its caretaker for many months and could sense the shock and awe over the phone, that dismayed look on his face. The plans to resurrect it are being put on hold for the time being.

Sadly, Surfunion died an unsung death. In its last days, there was little traffic and virtually nothing being generated which would have created some amount of interest amongst the community. Eventually it was left to survive on its own, with even its creators staying away from it. The greatest achievement of SU however would always be the network it created of local designers (Mumbai members had a strong presence on the forum) through MegaMeets.

Good Bye and Good Luck SurfUnion. I will miss you always!

That Sinking Feeling Again

Imagine having some kind of a button which could shut my system down for a given period. That would mean shutting my mind off all the bad things of the day and cleansing it forever. Going into some sort of a coma and waking up the next day absolutely unaware of the happenings of the previous day. If only my wishes would come true now I would have used that boon today because it was a BAD BAD day for me.

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Leave Mumbai Alone For Us

Life in Mumbai SlumsMumbaikars (natives of Mumbai city) are well aware of the hardships which they face everyday. To name some of the few – train travels, bad roads, polluted water supplies, growing slums, etc. Just recently I had an argument with a friend who has come down from Delhi to work with us and he was unapologetically critical about this city. The fact of the matter is that I know what plagues us and I know that the solution lies entirely in the hands of the administration which is not focusing on the city right now. I lost my temper and hit back with strong words on this.

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PayPal Sucks

PayPalAnd I mean it. Last night I logged into my PayPal account to check how much moolah I’ve got. Surprisingly I saw a “limited access” message boldly written on the home page. Upon some frantic searching from some places I found out that I needed to provide certain documents to verify myself. That’s fine but when I clicked on the link to resolve the issue it just wouldn’t give me the checklist of items that I needed to produce. It is quite suffocating to know that my money has been unnecessarily blocked and I can’t appeal against it or speak to them.

My troubles worsened when my case ID couldn’t be found in the database which meant that I do not know why my account has been de-regularised. Inspite of writing 3-4 mails via the contact form on the website, I got the same replies for all of them. It was probably an auto-responder. It sucks to think that Paypal which is handling finances globally should resort to such practices especially when it knows that the users will be located in different geographies and time zones. At this moment I have lost all hopes of getting back my money. The least that I can do is set up another account and hope for some business to come my way. If somebody has faced a similar situation and has a solution please contact me immediately.

Acrobat’s URL Parsing Option

The story began when I suddenly found that a URL was being parsed from the PDF document of a case study, which I had created. The original document was made using InDesign CS and I was pretty sure that I had not inserted a bookmark/hyperlink anywhere. The object in question was a URL and an email ID (corporate.engineering@tcs.com). Once opened in Acrobat Reader 7, the links used to become live. The second problem which I faced here was that although the URL was parsed properly, the email ID was faulty. So instead of corporate.engineering@tcs.com it parsed only engineering@tcs.com.

After searching high and low, I finally got some answers. Acrobat Reader (6 & 7) comes with an option of automatically parsing text as URLs (see Edit › Preferences › General). In the case of the email, it was discovered that it took the ‘.’ (in the corporate’.’ engineering@tcs.com) as a full stop (and therefore an end to the sentence) and parsed the later half of it as an email :) This was a pleasant revelation for me. I am relieved of a great worry.