Go Green Save Earth

This is a small contribution from my side towards saving energy on this Earth Day. I understand that computer screens take lot less power to display darker pages than lighter ones. So i am changing my blog design to prominently contain darker shades. My apologies to all if you find this look and feel a little less appealing or pleasing. But isn’t it still a better deal  given that it will contribute towards a greater cause.

Did you know that Google has a darker variant of its site? You may like to use that next time you want a search engine. Go Green.

Indiaplaza.in : Tall claims, bitter realities

This is for all tech savvies who like to shop online, my personal experience with IndiaPlaza.in who claim themselves to be the “finest virtual supermarket” of India. I bought few gift items online to be delivered as Rakhi gift to my little sister. The order had items destined for different shipment locations. The items for Bangalore reached to me within a week. But items which were destined for smaller towns in Orissa went through a lot of turbulence and finally never really reached. Below is a recount of the sequence of events that unfolded in the process of getting my items delivered, before finally i give up on it and lost the entire money.

I placed the order on 23rd Aug 2007. The sequence of events since then,

1. There was no communication regarding the order for about two weeks. I sent a mail to customer care.
2. I do not have the exact mail chain of what happened in the initial one month. So i am not mentioning explicitely here. But if i remember correctly there were conflicting statements from different people in customer care about the status of order. In any case, they raised another order for the same item and sent me a mail of shipment on 20th Sep.
3. I waited for three weeks without any communication from them. So i sent another mail on 16 Oct asking the status.
4. I received a response next day. “Our sincere apologies for the delay and inconvenience caused. We have shipped the item Junior Tv Game of the order # 200920070030 through TNT courier. TNT does not have the service at your location and the item returned to its origin. We will ship the item through First Flight courier within 2 days. The same will reach to you within 3 days of reshipment.”
5. Six days passed without any communication. I sent a stinker this time on 21st Oct.
6. Got this response next day – “Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay and inconvenience caused. we would like to inform you that, The matter has been taken on priority and the same is being investigated. Kindly provide us time for a day to update you on the same. We request you to kindly treat this case in isolation and not as a true reflection of indiaplaza services to it’s valued Customers. Please feel free to revert for any information or clarifications.” They seem to be finally taking the matter in urgency. I have waited for two months anyways, so no harm in another few days.
7. A couple of days later (Oct 25) they sent another mail. “Your order # 200920070030 for the ?Junior Tv Game? is delayed in delivery as the address is incomplete. We request you to revert to us with a complete or alternate address, so that we shall reship the above order. We apologize for the delay and inconvenience caused.” Ha ha ha. I have been sending parcels to that address through different courier companies. It suddenly became incomplete for this people.
8. On Oct 26 i provided them an alternate address in a nearby bigger city.
9. I got the following response the same day – “We would like to inform you that the order for the item ‘Junior Tv Game’ placed under order #200920070030 will be reshipped to the given alternate address.We have already instructed our shipment department to ship the item to the alternate address given.Shipment details will be given once the order is reshipped.” See the matter-of-fact tone in the email. There is still no urgency from their part even though they earlier promised that the matter will be taken up with urgency.
10. I sent a reply to above mail on Oct 30 showing my frustration and asking for a refund.
11. Another two weeks gone without any response from them.
12. I sent a mail on Nov 14th asking the status.
13. I got a response on Nov 22 that the item has been returned undelivered even at the new address. Looks like i need to find one address where they WANT to deliver. Nonetheless, the email said that they will refund the order price and deduct the shipment amount paid by me. So i made up my mind to at least recover the money and forget about delivery of gift to my sister.
14. At this point enter their manager Lalita Jain (Customer Service), who sent me an apology mail (nov 16) about all the mess and promised to take a detail look into the problem and get back by Nov 19. She was the only person whose mails made me feel like a customer again, otherwise i was feeling like a prisnor fallen in a trap. I had my hopes raised again, but only for a short period.
15. I did not get any mail from her. I waited till Nov 22 before sending another mail to know the status.
16. She responded back on nov 22. “My apologies for the delay . We have canceled the order and the refund will reflect in your account in 5 business days.”.
17. I got a mail next day mentioning that some xxx amount will be credited to my credit card. The refund amount mentioned was way below my order amount.
18. I replied asking for clarification.
19. Two days letter i got a response. My order was paid using a gift certificate and balance using credit card. So the gift certificate money will be credited to me as gift certificate and the rest as refund to my credit card. This was opposite of what i was told by Lalita Jain. She mentioned about refunding the entire order money to my credit card.
20. I forwarded the mail to Lalita Jain. She replied on nov 26- “The below is an automated mail and since you had used a gift certificate to pay for the order, according to our refund policy the refund first goes into gift certificate. But in your case , the entire money will be refunded into your credit card.” First time it looked like they will go out of process in my case (they seem to accept troubling me) and do me a favor by paying entire money in cash/credit.
21. Another mail from her on nov 30 – “The refund was rejected by the bank as the transaction was old. We will issue a cheque to you by monday.”.
22. I did not want to get into another loop now. I requested her to deposite the money to my IndiaPlaza account. And she agreed to do so.
23. I kept checking my IndiaPlaza account since their was no confirmation from them regarding any credit. However, they did deposit some amount on Dec 06. It was again less that what i was supposed to get.
24. That was the last nail in the coffin. I decided to close the matter here itself and forget about the whole episode. So i sent this mail to Lalita Jain – “INR xxx/- is credited to my IndiaPLaza account, not INR yyy/-. Looks like there is a big disconnect between you and the team which supports the accounts. Unless i keep a constant watch, errors seem to keep happening. I pity the sorry state of affairs in an Indian Online shop. I am IT professional myself and have created many such websites for our international customers. But it feels bad when the sites are NOT supported by adequate/qualified backend staff and hence poeple do not rely on Indian sites. Its not that yyy rupees will make any difference to me. But i persisted with this loop to know exactly how an Indian online shopping site operates. I have a fare idea now and enough material for an article. You have been the only good thing in the entire episode. “
25. She responded – “I am sorry that your account was not credited with entire Rs.yyy. I will ensure that the difference of Rs.zzz is credited today itself. I have to agree with you that a good back end support team is required in a business like ours. This is our focus area and on a constant basis we keep improvising our processes and systems to improves or services.  I cannot assure you flawless execution but I can assure you at this point 110% redressal.. If you do happen to write an article on online shopping experience can I request you to send me the link or where it is published , so that I can read it too.”
26. I have checked my account multiple times since then and it still reflects the reduced refund amount, not the amount i am entitled for.

I have left the matter here without any further persual. It took me 15 weeks, at least 30 emails and numerous phone calls to my sister during this entire unresolved saga. They credited a gift voucher to me which had very little time left for expiry. It stands expired now, which means that i did not get a single penny out of the order which was never delivered

My lessons from this episode are,

> There is a big disconnect between the different internal departments of the company. And you as a customer will not have enough time, energy and insight to keep all of them in loop and on same track. So always try to avoid to get into a situation where you would need their SERVICES(if at all you call it service). One of them being, DO NOT ship items to smaller towns.

> Their customer service is very very bad. You can see the mails above anyway. Also surprisingly i only got ONE call from them during this entire 15 weeks and it was to confirm that someone has responded to my eamils. No one from them took any initiative to talk to me about it, let alone verbal apologies. Run though the above sequence again. Twenty six steps and no results. Gosh….!!!

> They keep spamming your mailbox with new offers on their website even though you never asked them to do so.

Thats all. I have narreted my experince and bid a GoodBye to this website. God bless customers of this “FINEST virtual supermarket”.

Who provides good Petrol?

For a couple of months now i have been collecting data about all the gasoline / petrol vendors in Bangalore, so that i could make an informed decision on whom to choose next time my car needs fuel. The results i found were surprising.

The below data is about the mileage i got from each vendor on purchase of INR 1000/- worth of normal unleaded petrol. Going by the current petrol prices you get around 19.5x to 19.8x liters in that amount. Just see the variance even when its recorded on the same car, during the same period, by the same driver (and driving style), on almost the same route and under same tyre pressure.

Petrol Vendor	Mileage (km)
BP	230
HP	210
Indian Oil	265
IBP	not recorded
Shell	270

I am yet to collect data about a couple of them mentioned above. Will update the post later. Hope this will be useful to others.

The JSF/JSP EL mess

Its a known fact that SUN messed up very badly with the design of Expression Language. Its quite strange to imagine that they persisted with different syntaxes for EL within JSF and JSP even though both of them were getting finalized concurrently. I have been looking for reasonable justification for the same. Not that i have found any yet, but still i am putting down SUN’s efforts at it here. Its a copy from the JEE 5 tutorial. See if you get convinced.

JSP supports a simple equest/response life cycle, during which a page is executed and the HTML markup is rendered immediately. Therefore, the simple, read-only expression language offered by JSP 2.0 was well suited to the needs of JSP applications.
JavaServer Faces technology, on the other hand, features a multi-phase life cycle designed to support its sophisticated UI component model, which allows for converting and validating component data, propagating component data to objects, and handling component events. To facilitate these functions, JavaServer Faces technology introduced its own expression language that included the following functionality:

• Deferred evaluation of expressions
• The ability to set data as well as get data
• The ability to invoke methods.

These two expression languages have been unified for a couple reasons.

1. One reason is so that page authors can mix JSP content with JavaServer Faces tags without worrying about conflicts caused by the different life cycles these technologies support.
2. Another reason is so that other JSP-based technologies could make use of the additional features similarly to the way JavaServer Faces UNIFIED EXPRESSION LANGUAGE technology uses them. In fact, although the standard JSP tags and static content continue to use only those features present in JSP 2.0, authors of JSP custom tags can create tags that take advantage of the new set of features in the unified expression language.

To summarize, the new, unified expression language allows page authors to use simple expressions to perform the following tasks:

• Dynamically read application data stored in JavaBeans components, various data structures, and implicit objects.
• Dynamically write data—such as user input into forms—to JavaBeans components.
• Invoke arbitrary static and public methods
• Dynamically perform arithmetic operations.

The unified EL also allows custom tag developers to specify which of the following kinds of expressions that a custom tag attribute will accept:

• Immediate evaluation expressions or deferred evaluation expressions. An immediate evaluation expression is evaluated immediately by the JSP engine. A deferred evaluation expression can be evaluated later by the underlying technology using the expression language.
• Value expression or method expression. A value expression references data, whereas a method expression invokes a method.
• Rvalue expression or Lvalue expression. An rvalue expression can only read a value, whereas an lvalue expression can both read and write that value to an external object.

Finally, the unified EL also provides a pluggable API for resolving expressions so that application developers can implement their own resolvers that can handle expressions not already supported by the unified EL.

Do you accept this argument?

Lage Raho Munna Bhai

well well well…its a movie you dont wanna miss. I just returned from the theatre, its 0200 hrs in the night and my eyes are literally falling off. But i cant control myself. I want to write about it. I want to let people know about the movie, right now. My impression is – its a great movie and has all ingredients to be a super hit. If you watch movies for entertainment, relaxation or for learning then take it from me, you will not be disappointed.

For those who want to watch the movie, pls don’t read further. The section below talks about the movie, reveals all the secrets and have full potential to spoil your entertainment value. Paragraphs below are only for my friends who like to discuss movies but hardly have time to go and watch it. So read on pals….

Initial half an hour into the movie and i was disappointed. There was a huge expectation, mainly because of the success of its earlier version – Munna Bhai MBBS. I was expecting an out n out comedy but with different dialogues and delivery style. It seemed same initially and added to my worry. However, i soon realized it is a comedy movie indeed but with a different approach. By that time the movie had already built a story and i was getting involved. From then on time flew away and the show was over in no time.

There are quite a few surprise factors. Almost all the characters in first flick are present in this one too. Bomman Irani didn’t get enough dialogues to show his skills this time. If you are a comedy freak, glue your ears to the ‘circuit’ speaks. The message is clear this time too – Help others to help yourself. However, the message comes direct from the father of the nation. yes, Mahatma Gandhi. No, he didn’t show up for few seconds to deliver a lecture. He is present through out the movie. And still you don’t feel being lectured. that’s the beauty.

If you like imotional stuff, be sure to carry a kerchief. If you like comedy stuff, again be sure to carry a kerchief. You like multi starrers? wow…dont worry – you would get to see Aby baby and Diya Mirza too. You are a Radio Jockey(RJ)? then you must watch it. I never thought Vidya Balan can look beautiful. I had an impression that she is overhyped though i have not seen any of her movies yet. But now i feel otherwise. She has got very expressive eyes and a beautiful smile. Good acting skills as add-on makes it a deadly combination.

In a earlier blog my friend Madhu was sceptic about the movies prospects for different reasons. But i dont think that applies to this movie.

Overall, my verdict – must watch even though you don’t regularly watch movies. After the movie you will realize why i asked you to go for it. signing off!!!