ahlawat.net

I just got off the phone with the apple care folks. I cannot believe how ignorant and absolutely useless it really is, specially given the fact that apple charges $350 for a three year support. I wanted to set some user environment variables and was surprised to see there was no GUI in the mac to configure them. 

I have recently moved to the mac and was surprised not to find the conventional .bashrc file in the user home directory either. I mucked around the internet for a while and spent some time on the apple support website. So I decided to give apple care a shot. Gave them a call and was surprised to get through to a customer support representative within a couple of minutes. I told the guy that I wanted to add some user environment variables and he had no idea what environment variables were. I explained to him what they were and that I needed them to do some java development.

He forwarded me a customer support specialist who informed me that they dont support “configuration via the terminal”. I was making a case that this is one of the most elementry configuration changes you can make to system - when the phone got cut. They had my phone number so I waited for five minutes to see if I would get a call back - no one called. 

So I called up again after spending time with a customer support agent I was again forwarded to a customer support specialist. She too had no idea about environment variables and was surprised why someone would use the terminal. She put me on hold for five minutes and told me that they “did not support” such modifications, and that if I wanted to do development I was on my own. By this time I was sure I was not going to get any help from the team that claims to support people moving to a mac from other operating systems. 

I looked up the internet one more time and figured out that creating a ~/.profile file would do the trick. Bash picks it up before launching the shell. I have since then happily installed groovy, grails and ant and am happy with my mac experience. However I am a little surprised at just how bad a “paid” service can be. $350 for three years to help people navigate around the pre installed GUI is not worth it. Thank God I did not buy it - I recommend you don’t either.

Its qutie amazing that a country as populated as India could not produce a single individual Olypmic gold medal till the 11th of August 2008.

The Olympic record of India is dismal to say the least. The previous best performer was Lt. Col. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore who won a silver at Athens in 2004.

On August 11, 2008, Abhinav Bindra won the gold medal in the men’s 10m air rifle shooting event. In doing so, he won the first ever individual gold medal for post independence India, and the first medal in any event for India at the Beijing Games. A very proud moment for any country.

The system has to blamed for this - the India Olympic Association is underfunded and frankly does not do it’s job well. In addition to a lack on infrastructure the association is crippled with politics and frictional bureaucracy. Lack of interest in any sport other than cricket has made matters even worse. I really hope this inspiring story serves as a catalyst and propels the popularity of other sports in a country that badly need to do better.

Congratulations Abhinav - you have done India proud.