SetFocus()

When I login to the multiple websites, I'm impatient. Impatient of the jazzy flash to load, for the Ads to be fetched. As soon as I see the Username and Password fields get rendered, I start typing and hit Enter. Many of you would have encountered this problem. When one starts typing the password, the client sets the focus in the Username text box. Result, I end up typing the password in clear text. More over, it gets cached by the browser.

So yeah,
1) Is there a way to avoid this late focus? Can't the code be written to set the focus as soon as the component is created!
2) Is it a problem with the code or the browser?
3) How about making Username text box also masked with "*" character. When one can type long passwords with special characters correctly, (s)he can very well type the Username correctly.
4) Why does this late focus happens? Technically!!

P.S. I've got three UI developers in my home. :-)

Update: psankar commented a cool tip,
one thing that you can do after this has happened is, you can do a shift+del, to delete that entry alone from autocompletion list.
Many people dont know this and end up clearing full history.

Easter Egg - 90 days advance booking IRCTC

Today (July 24th) I was deep asleep after watching few episodes of prison break and around 9am (apparently close to midnight) I got a call from my friend.

Friend: Vijesh, Did you book the tickets?
Me: What.... What ticket?
Friend: Ticket for Diwali (in train) opened today.
(...gives me a mild shock and sit up)
Me: No, I guess its not today. I'm keeping track, few more days to go.
Friend: No, it opened today and sleeper is already in waiting list (WL) so we booked in AC. Hope its fine with you.
Me: Yeah ok.

Dragging myself to a system near by to check my Google calender reminder and IRCTC online reservation for Oct 24th. Well something was wrong. It was not really 90 days for tickets to open for booking. Since I lost my love towards Coimbatore Express after the night stay at the train station. I always ignored that train and tried with Kanyakumari express (6526). Still it says given date is out of range for booking. Then gave it a try in Coimbatore Express(1013). This query seems to work fine and says tickets are in WL, Ah! that's strange. With some trails I inferred that Coimbatore Express starts 2 days earlier from Lokmanya Thilak. So apparently the booking software allowed to book for all stations that the train traveled on that date itself. So Bangalore that comes on the third day opens two days before they actually do.

How many would know this? Still, have mailed Customer Care! Let me see how they respond. Ideally only those stations that are exactly 90 days before the train reaches should show up for booking. Guess the engineer was lazy to have this boundary condition in place. I would call it an pseudo Easter Egg.

Beta testing Gmail

After some interesting discussion over blogger I shifted focus to Gmail. To my knowledge one of the longest Beta product is Gmail. One strong feature I like is labels, which is far more superior than historic folder. Today surprisingly noticed a unexpected behavior in the labels, I call it a bug.

The steps are simple to reproduce:
1) select any mail conversation in your Inbox thats labeled, Open it.
2) Expand the conversation and delete the first message of it. (Yes Gmail allows to delete a single message from a conversation)
3) Return back to Inbox.
4) Now look at the conversation, Err! the label is deleted. :)

You need to relabel the conversation. The engineer has optimized the logic of associating the label with the first mail of the conversation. So when thats gone, the label vanishes. Instead, it should associated with a conversation or all mails in the conversation. Or add a condition

if(message.isFirst() && labeled == true && conversation.isNextAvail())
conversation.getNext Message().label = message.label;
del(message);

You can follow any progress on this from here.