The Hindu Business Line : `Just enough to get by quickly, cleanly'

You are possibly not one of those who would like to `memorise long strings of computer commands while washing your hair'. Nor do you perhaps like to `randomly press keys in the hope of discovering hidden, undocumented features' of Vista, the latest Windows version from Microsoft. Instead, like most computer users, you want to know `just enough to get by quickly, cleanly, and with a minimum of pain so that you can move on to more pleasant things in life'.

If so, Andy Rathbone's Windows Vista for Dummies, from Wiley India (www.wileyindia.com) should be the right fit for you.

But first, you may ask, "Should I bother switching to Vista?" If your XP is running just fine, you probably won't need the new product, says the author.

You may yet like to consider the improved features that Vista offers. Such as, security (`Defender program constantly searches your PC for any spyware'), new Internet Explorer (with tabbed browsing, phishing filter, built-in search box and RSS feeds), and DVD burning (though `more than five years after DVD burners hit the market').

Watch out, Microsoft is sneaky, even while touting Windows as `your helpful computing companion, always keeping your best interests in mind'. Windows always keeps Microsoft's interests in mind, says Rathbone. "You'll find that out as soon as you call Microsoft for help on making Windows work right. Your first two questions are free if you up the long distance charges to Redmond, Washington. The third call (and all the rest) cost $35 a piece, but prices may change at any time."

Also, the company uses Windows as `a huge Microsoft advertising vehicle'; don't be surprised, therefore, if when you click a menu item that seems to offer something helpful, you are hijacked to a Web site `where you can purchase additional items from Microsoft or its business partners'.

The book comes with many useful tips and apt warnings. Here's a tip in a chapter on customising: "If you really want to extend your monitor's life (and save electricity), don't bother with screensavers. Instead, click Change Power Settings... and choose a Power Saver plan." Talking of warnings, this should be important. "The Recycle Bin only saves items deleted from your own computer's hard drive. That means it won't save anything deleted from a floppy, CD, memory card, MP3 player, or digital camera."

More crucially, "if you delete something from somebody else's computer over a network, it can't be retrieved." Rathbone frets that `for some awful reason, the Bin on the other person's computer doesn't save the item, either. So, "Be careful." Resourceful guide.

`Top of the IIT food chain'

The protagonist of the story opts for `computer science', considered `the top of the IIT food chain'.

`Nizamuddin Bridge was jammed the day they declared the IIT result, a truck had overturned. Cars were backed up almost till the Noida crossing... " On that jam-my note begins `Three Bistable Partitions', a chapter in Amitabha Bagchi's Above Average, from Harper Collins.

Arindam Chatterjee, the protagonist of the story, makes it to the top hundred. He opts for `computer science', considered `the top of the IIT food chain'...

Just four months into IIT, he learnt that two numbers, viz. CG (cumulative grade point average, on a scale of ten) and DR (departmental rank), defined who you are. "They were branded onto you like the owner's marks were branded onto the cattle that often wandered into the campus from the hostel gate." In his department (CS), a satti (seven point CG) was not taken seriously academically...

"It was in second year that, late one evening, I found myself in the Computer Centre. I wasn't one of those who spent weeks on end in the CompC, preferring instead to hammer out my assignments in a day or two, or simply copying them from someone else... "

Be that as it may, let us accompany Arindam... "Entering the white-panelled basement, I would run my eyes down the rows of computers: there were the third year people looking all grave and serious; there were the first years hunched over their terminals, still overawed by this impressively large and entirely air-conditioned space; and there were my own classmates with expressions of worry or fatigue or boredom on their faces."

Recounts Rindu: "Some would sit in pairs - relationships forged in this always cool room would last long after the room itself was no more than a memory. These were friendships being cemented in the heat of battle, a deathly struggle with intransigent code that refused to compile or, when it compiled, wouldn't run, or when it ran, would do everything but what you wanted it to do... "

Stroll around in the CompC and you'd find `people who were wheedling and cajoling others into parting with their painstakingly written programs'. And? "Once they had obtained a program and verified that it worked, they would sit for an hour or two changing variable names, moving sections of code around, changing its indentation, to make sure the professor would not be able to tell that it was all copied." Shady stuff, but `a craft,' it was - `this process of redigesting the code while ensuring it still ran'.

Ironically, "the most aesthetically minded practitioners of this craft would grumble as they worked." Kyon? "Is this any way to write a program?" they would lament. "No indentation at all, can't tell where you enter the loop and where you leave it. No documentation of any kind... And what kind of variable names are these, x, y, z? No information at all about what they represent. Total... nonsense. Next time I am going to write this program on my own."

On a different occasion, Arindam pulls up a chair to sit along with Neeraj. "I looked up at the screen.

It seemed he was writing small Prolog expressions, just putting it through its paces." Arindam asks Neeraj, "Do you remember how in last week's PL lecture the prof talked about how integers can be represented as functions? Do you think they can be represented as logical expressions as well?" Neeraj says, "Let's find out."

Narrates the author: "Later that semester Neeraj's reputation would explode out of the realm of student folklore into the world of faculty canteen chatter. He would come up with a proof for the notoriously difficult Reconstruction Conjecture."

It would be weeks before the faculty found a flaw in the argument: For, Neeraj's proof had brought together `logic and combinatorics in an impressively mature way, making it difficult for experts from either field to catch the error'.

The CompC session, though, was sheer excitement for Arindam.

"I sat with Neeraj in one corner, jumping through Prolog's hoops and making it jump through ours... When I had long forgotten the details of what we had done that night I remembered the pure joy of seeing mathematics and logic interlock and unfold on that old monochromatic screen in the Computer Centre... "

A book that brings back campus life alive to your table.

Tailpiece

"Early on, we discovered that compatibility was a problem between us... "

"Oh!"

"I'd send long emails, but she'd respond through mini SMS!"

dmurali@thehindu.co.in