Dipesh Khakhkhar’s Blog

Australian Open is the first major tournament of the year and it will be most exciting finale. We will be grateful to see the clash of the Titans -Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. These two players will be facing each on hard court for the first time.

Nadal is tired after his one of the longest game (longest in Australian Open history, it lasted for 5 hours and 14 minutes) vs Fernando Verdasco yesterday. Federer had a comparatively easy semifinal encounter against Any Roddick, he won the match in straight 3 sets.

If we go by statistics, Nadal has an edge over Federer -

		Federer	Nadal
Total	18	6	12
Sets	62	25	37
Finals	14	4	10
Major	7	2	5

I am all up for this grand finale and I am supporting Federer and my wife is supporting Nadal, lets see who wins the battle!

Dipesh Khakhkhar Sports, Tennis Australian Open, Federer vs Nadal, Hard Court, Statistics

Mike Arrington posted a very humble message to his readers “Some Things Need To Change”

Ani’t he absolutely correct? This is the same person who is the maker/breaker of some many web 2.0 companies. His startup TechCrunch has give a whole new dimension to blogging about startups, venture funding, what’s hot in tech industry, providing PR to some stealth startup etc.

Does he deserve this from some stranger in some foreign country? This shows how much down a person can go if he/she don’t get what they want/tried/desired. Oh give me a break before you do such a thing to anyone. There is some major defect in the mindset of these kind of people and shame on them to act like a frustrated moron.

YES!! we definitely want a change here – where blogger/company like TechCrunch can write freely and bloggers (employees working in such company) can live freely without any kind of fear for their life and should not be humiliated.

Dipesh Khakhkhar Software, Web 2.0 Bloggers, entrepreneur, freely, PR, Spat Mike Arrington, Techcrunch, Web 2.0

“Unavailable” should be the last thing which I would like to see on some web page of a established company’s website.

There are many companies like

which develops tax software in United States and this being the start of the tax season I don’t expect their service to go down.

Today I was looking at online turbo tax (I am perfectly okay doing tax online vs doing it on my desktop. What the heck, whole (almost) life is online !!!!) and got a very disturbing “unavailable” response.  Here is the image

This is the time everyone is evaluating/subscribing/downloading your software and in this economy losing customers will be painful. But one person will definitely agree with me i.e. Timothy Geithner  and will say “better be unavailable then messing my tax returns (like the way it happened with Timothy Geithner but who cares he is a Treasury Secretary now)

But seriously this is again a good lesson for companies who wants to sell their product fast. It would be better to have automated testing framework set up testing their web applications. Hire more QA people and test and retest before releasing the final product. You can’t take chance with critical application like this.

Update 1: It seems turbotax is broken again and many of it’s customers are having hard time. I am presuming that the fix which Bob mentioned below didn’t work for them.

Update 2: I have emailed to Bob Meighan (VP – Turbo Tax) at Intuit to see when this saga will be over.  As soon as I get a reply I will post it here.

Update 3: I have received this email from Bob and he told me that service is up and running…

from    Meighan, Bob <Bob_Meighan@intuit.com>
to    Dipesh Khakhkhar <dipeshkhakhkhar@gmail.com>
date    Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 10:07 PM
subject    RE: Turbo tax errors – turbo tax online temporarily unavailable
mailed-by    intuit.com
signed-by    intuit.com

Reply

Dipesh…We’re still investigating root cause, but the service is up and running.

Dipesh Khakhkhar Software Automated Testing, Online web application, QA, Software, Taxact, Taxcut, Testing, Timothy Geithner, Turbo tax erros