RutSum

You Know It’s A Government Website When..

This post was guest blogged by Sneezy Melon of The Goofy Express.

1) Different browsers mean different displays.

2) None of the displays match the way it was supposed to be.

3) Internet Explorer 5.5 is “recommended”.

4) Same set of username and password results differently on different occasions.

5) Flash is used more than HTML.

6) Internet finally makes your head all dizzy.

I recently happened to come across one such website. It was designed for the Employee Information System of the Delhi Governent. Not-so-surprisingly, the title tags said otherwise. The stupidity didn’t begin here, actually. The password for login (a 3-letter string) was the same as the username. Both were printed on thousands of notices which were circulated across all the employee offices in Delhi. Yet, a “highly-secure database” was insisted upon. I don’t see how that works.

As expected, the website worked neither on Opera Kestrel (9.50 Beta 2), Opera 9.27, Mozilla Firefox 3 (Beta 4,5), Mozilla Firefox 2, Apple Safari or Konqueror. The only hope left was the world’s best browser of all time. Yes, I’m talking about your, mine and Microsoft’s favorite (*drum roll*) Internet Explorer! Now working on Intenet Explorer and that too on Windows would have been no better than sleeping with two ugly witches.

So, some Googling and a few minutes later, I had downloaded the IES4linux project and was already running it. I decided to start with the latest stable version and step down one-by-one (which I was pretty sure I would have to). Sadly, the beta feature (in ies4linux) didn’t work as the Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Setup file was “corrupted”. 6.0 got installed easily. 6.0 gave up easily. 5.5 was no better. And 5.0 did not get install altogether. Again, the file was “corrupted”.

Finally, 48 hours, lots of head-banging and around a fifty thousand curses later, I’m still stuck. And I know I may remain stuck till eternity, unless I die about 20 years from now due to food-poisoning. Let’s hope the dog pees in my porridge!

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