Why Palio Stile 1.6 Sport

The more you look at cars from higher segments, the more you start realising what a package this Palio Stile 1.6 Sport has been. Hydraulic steering (which even some high end cars are also missing), dead pedal, bucket seats with ample under-thigh support, thoughtful central locking, ample leg-room everywhere, live-wire engine with huge power on tap, high speed stability, gearbox and pedals totally isolated from drive-train vibrations, backwards folding rear-view mirrors, safe, strong build ... it's just an amazing package for the price. 


Ofcourse the interiors are dated, mileage is minimal and there can be niggling issues with maintainance and sourcing spare-parts, but once you drive a car like this you get spoilt. And then not-having-a-car probably becomes preferable to having-some-ordinary-one which has good mileage and low maintainance/issues, but is no match to a 1.6 palio when it comes to the fun-to-drive factor. So despite the petrol price hike, and pricey servicing bills, I still feel for this car.

Internet Explorer, Windows-7, Microsoft, Frustrations

This is why I hate Internet Explorer, and for that matter, almost all of Microsoft products.

2 instances of IE were running on my workstation, temporarily running Windows-7. One instance was running the website with my Ajax code changes, while the 2nd was automatically created as part of the testing (target=_blank). The 2nd instance had its own URL which it was trying to render since morning! I had tried to close it several times since morning, it stayed in busy state forever. I ignored it till evening, and then intending to cleanup unwanted stuff from the taskbar, I opened up Task Manager and tried to kill the process of the 2nd IE window. Even after trying to End Task twice, it wouldn't die. Finally after sometime, I got a message to the effect saying "Internet Explorer is not responding". And then it closed both the IE instances, 2nd one which was a zombie, and 1st one which I was using for testing my Ajax implementation for cross-browser compatibility!

These are the moments when I miss Linux most.  You don't have to think/wait/get-frustrated so much over a small issue, in Linux. Just kill-9 the process and get going if at all something hangs. There are no side-effects or no blanket-kills. You know what you are losing by running the kill-9 command, and you lose just that much, nothing more.

This happened with Internet Explorer  8 running on Windows-7; both of which are supposed to be sufficiently modern; built after MS received loads of flak over the last few years for substandard OSes and standards-defying browsers. Everything they make is still  loaded with kind of bugs which will put you off. And I haven't even mentioned CSS and zoom:1 and opacity and z-index and such myriads of issues that people face on IE after their HTML/JS/CSS runs impeccably well on Firefox/Chrome. I wish there was a world where people only bothered about webapp compatibility with browsers that were standards-compliant and just dumped IE for good.