Ponderings of Mahesh Bhat

End of this blog!

2006-05-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

I think I should be taking the step and finally bring to everybodies notice that I would not be posting here anymore. There would be no more updates on 'Ponderings of Mahesh Bhat'.

Well, does that mean, there would be no more ponderings? You may ask.

Not really. I have merely shifted to a better blog host, and I would be (have been, as a matter of fact), posting regularly there.

The new blog: Splat @ WiseTome.com

So, just click on that link up there, and bookmark it.

Are we doing any good?

2006-03-13T02:16:00.000-08:00

It was when I got myself involved in a event to save the Olive Ridley Turtles (see my other blog post - Eggs of a turtle), I wondered if we are doing any good.
I mean, when we take out the eggs from where it is layed and take it to a hatchery and ensure that all of the hatchlings reach the sea, are we not greatly tipping the odds? Ofcourse, care is take to replicate the original nest so that the male-female ration of the batch of the eggs remains the same, but on the survival front, are we doing any good?

When we release so many turtles into the sea, what is the effect on the ecology? Trolling does effect all marine life and not just these turtles. So, is it of any use when we just go ahead and save one such species?

Oils again

2006-02-16T16:25:00.000-08:00

I had said earlier, that I would put up more of my oil works here, and so I had scanned my second work. It was meant to be a gift for someone, and hence, I had not posted it here. Now, since I have finished the work and already gifted it, I present to you my second oil, Wolf And Rabbit.

Here is another picture of the workplace. As you can see, the items are tools are quite minimal, as I am just starting out.
[Click on the images for enlarged view]

Sun Tech Days 2006

2006-02-09T00:52:00.000-08:00

Sun Tech Days 2006
A Worldwide Developer Conference
Link

The company I work for, sent me for this conference. I have only faint knowledge of Java, and no working experience on any of the Sun systems or related products. This may make you wonder why I was sent for the conference, but it seems to me that organizations can be mysteriously stupid.

Anyway, I land up at the Chennai Trade Centre with one of my collgeue (who is unlike me, and is quite well verse in developing Java applications) with a commute on my Bullet early morning on 7th of February. After a quick swipe of our badges' barcode (that were given to us few days earlier by our Learning and Development department) we had a good cup of coffee, and were off to listen to the welcome speech.

The welcome speech was good, but I cannot recollect who it was who gave it. Then, the Managing Director of Sun Microsystems India, Bhaskar Pramanik said something. As my usual self, I could only give him a dormant ear. What he agreed on was that he was not much of a developer and so he made way to Kiran Karnik and Laura Merling.

The two talked on 'East Meets West: Software and Innovation'. Kiran, the President of NASSCOM, briefed on how the diversity in California led to the establishment of Silicon Valley, that spewed a lot of innovation. And he noted on how similar India is in terms of the diversity.

And after a Sun Technical Keynote and some cool demos, we were off to different sessions. The first two days were broken down into three differnt tracks. We could jump from one track to another, attending sessions that kindled our interests.

Full Agenda: Link

For the morning session on 7-Feb, I attened two sessions from Track 1.

Java SE: Tiger, Mustang, Dolphin, and You!

Oracle Technical Session: 5 Ways to use Java with BPEL

After that, there was a good lunch that was provided. It was quite an effort though to have lunch, since there were about thousand plus delegates crowded in the huge hall. Then, there was a Sun Keynote by Laurie Tolson and Karen Tegan Padir. They made their entrace, with a Charlies Angles' kind of pose, and then resumed their talks on the briefings on Java SE and EE.

After that, I attended a session: Java SE on the Desktop: Extreme GUI Makeover.

Following that, I shifted to Track 2 and attended the following two sessions:

Web-tier Programming Codecamp I: Java Server Faces

Web-tier Programming Codecamp II: AJAX

The full day of technical sessions had taken a toll on me, and I was in no mood to attend the following Q&A sessions. Moreover, I did not know the Java technology well enough to pose interesting question to them. Conveniently, they had setup a good entertaining session in the open air. There was a good performance by Sivamani (on the drums), Vikku Vinayakaram (on the Ghattam) and Mandolin Rajesh (obviously, on the mandolin). My collegue and me had a good time, and we went back home, totally de-energized.

The next day, 8th, we came early, but not early enough, thanks to the Chennai traffic. We missed a session on coffe by a Brew Master. We attended the Oracle Keynote on SOA & The Agile Engerprise, and witnessed the hilarious Java Jacket Give-Away.

I attended the following two sessions in Track 1:

Design of Cool Java ME Applications for Consumers & Enterprise Users

Java SE for Real-Time System: A Deep Dive

And again, after a quick lunch, and a boring Keynote on SAP, that I barely sat through without sleeping, I and my collegue attended the following sessions in Track 2:

NetBeans Extreme: Part I: Matisse and CVS

Unit Testing - love it or hate it, you should be doing it automatically - by Agitar Software

NetBeans Extreme: Part II: Profiling, and Plugins

By the end of the day, I was so much saturated by the NetBeans sessions, and ofcourse was overwhelmed by the technology, I called it a quits and said to my collegue that the next day, he would be attending the bonus track on Netbeans himself. Moreover, I had quite a bit of work in office and my team was finding it hard to coverup the absense of a resourse.

All in all, I was satisfied at the end of it. I did not gain much of know-how, but I sure did know what to look out for. I plan to write more on what I have learnt. I may not put it here in the blogs, but I may put links to them.

Oils

2006-01-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Those of you who have been regular readers of this blog may notice that I do am quite sporadic in updating my blogs. The reason, I sometimes wonder, must be because I am getting myself involved in too many subjects than I can keep track.

Click to see full size (nearly 1MB)

One of my recent diversions is oil painting. I had been doing paintings and pictures in other medium, but had not tried my hand in oils. My first attempt at oils came recently, and I accept it is quite messy. But as they say, failures are stepping stones to success. I learnt a lot doing this (incomplete) piece of work. This particular one has the subject as Thor[1], the Norse God of Lightning, wielding his war hammer, Mjollnir. I have a particular liking to Thor, as opposed to the Hindu God of Weather (Lightning) and War,
Indra[2]. To juxtapose Thor and Indra, would require a detail write up on its own, I leave it for now.

Painting has been an expression of many artists for quite a long time and works in oil paintings have contributed to the major share of the charm in the field of art. It would be hard to find one who has not even heard of the great work, Mona Lisa[3] by Leonardo da Vinci.

Oil painting provides a medium that is as versatile as difficult it is to produce. It gives a very flexible medium, where once the composition is proper, one need not worry about painting it wrong. One can always paint over it again, with the right hue and shade in the next layer. But it takes a lot of patience and skill to generate an oil painting. The annoying thing about the medium is that each layer takes a lot of time to dry up. Each layer must dry before another layer may be painted on it. Some pieces of art may take months to be created.

That said for now, I enjoy it. If you are interested in oil painting, check out the Wikipedia link: Oil painting

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra
[3] http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vinci/joconde

Creative Pandemonium - Ver 0.1?

2006-01-05T19:14:00.000-08:00

It has been almost a month since I posted anything here. Than means I have been busy. Well, the result is
Creative Pandemonium. This would be the normal layout of the website that I intend to roll out. It would be published based on the CMS being developed, but most of the CSS is now done. The CMS would output the content, the PHP coding would overlay it with the CSS, and present it to the visitor.

I think that is about it for now. For a duration of one month I thought there would be much to tell. But I think I substituted it by giving the above link.

Content Management System - Architecture

2005-12-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

It is of general design philosophy to go from vagueness to detail. Vagueness may seem as a shortcomming, but the insight the overall picture gives is worth it. Hence, to design the system that I wanted, I came up with a very basic picture of what I wanted.

As can be seen in the picture, it is basic, but that is the purpose of it. I plan to use server side scripting to get the content from the database, and the layout and design using CSS, and present it as webpage. For server side scripting, I plan to use PHP. I do not have PHP knowledge, but I plan to learn it incourse of this project. For that matter of fact, I do not know CSS that well either, and I plan to learn this too.

So, before even we think of coding anything, we need to know how the content and layout-design would be. The layout design should not be much of a problem, since that is the essense of using CSS. As of content, we do not need the content yet, but we should have a fair idea of how the content is stored. The content would be dynamic, and the only prior knowledge that is required is to know how it would be structured.

Content Management System - Intermission

2005-11-29T18:28:00.000-08:00

To CSS or not to?

During the design phase (will be posted here, when it is completed), I was going through many articles and resources. I was also looking out for how best to modularize the final layout. That is when I stumbled across CSS Zen Garden.

Here is the extract from the site:

The Road to Enlightenment
Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support.

Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser creators.

The css Zen Garden invites you to relax and meditate on the important lessons of the masters. Begin to see with clarity. Learn to use the (yet to be) time-honored techniques in new and invigorating fashion. Become one with the web.

So What is This About?
There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style
... read more at CSS Zen Garden

But, the extract serves no purpose. You need to visit the site to realize the beauty of the site. I usually restrain myself from making such remarks but I have to give it to this site.

Going through this site, really affected the personal CMS project I am undertaking. It made me revisit the option of using CSS. Thus I ask, to CSS or not to.

Content Management Systems

2005-11-28T21:28:00.000-08:00

I know. This sounds boring and would seem like something that would not come out of my mouth. But I came across this term when I had to face with reality of the amount of content that I want to put up on the web for all to see and how I would be able to manage it.

Most of what I put on the net is through this blog, the sister blogs (Universe of StarWars, Roleplayers' Rantings), the webcomic (Firman Tales), and the forum based roleplaying game (Chaos And Order). Now, as you can see, these are all good in they are taken in parts, or atleast fairly good. But, as most of them are related topics, intermingling with each other, I would also like to provide with a portal, that puts them all together. Something dynamic, so that I do not need to go about coding the HTML or whatever just to include more content. And all this lead to a logical conclusion, Content Management System (CMS).

Now that I got the jargon, it was hard for me to understand the underlying principles in this matter. Scourging the results page of Google, after some effort got me to some good pages that would explain me the fundamentals of CMS. One of the Article that really caught my attention was 'CMS and the Single Web Designer' by James Ellis.

He goes about explaining how a group of people, designer, editor and authors can create a good website, if provided with a proper CMS, that all would find good use of.

My approach now in this matter would be to a very simple CMS, where designer, editor and author would be myself and the audience would be the rest of the world. This would be a bit of over-simplification, but this done, details could be added later by successive designing over the older one, or by redesigning. The redesignin may seem as a lot of work, but the whole process, in my opinion gives a lot of scope for learning.

Web Comic

2005-11-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

I have to agree that I am crazy about comics. I cannot help it. I think, no matter what my age, I would always love comics.

My love for comics would actually explain the stack of them that lies in my room. My facination for comics, surpasses the print media and enters the cyberspace. It is called webcomics.

Sometime back, I somehow came by this term, and then, after few Google searches, I was hooked to them.

It is sometimes odd as to how, the various facinations fuse together. My indulgence in RPGs actually resulted in me creating a WebComic of my own. Check the particular article, 'Diversion', that I put up in my other blog, Roleplayer's Rantings. I put this article sometime back, and after that, I got time to work on another page of the comics. Here is a sneak peak:

See all the pages that are done until now at:

Here is the link to one of my favourite:

Inverloch is an amazingly drawn comic with great detail. The storyline is very indepth, and can keep one occupied. It makes one wait for the updates to come.

There are many others. One just needs to search.

More rain!

2005-10-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, more rain. No drain. And that results in floods.

I was just able to make it to the office. There was water all over the road. Trudged the engine of my baby bull, Black Beauty, and moved on to my office.

I had packed some dry clothes in my bag, and I got changed and sat at my desk. I was reporting to duty two hours late. I had just made calls to all my team mates that I just reached office, and found that they would not be able to make it, when the DCH(Delivery Center Head), called the handfull of people for the meeting.

Action plan was draw to inform the onsite as we would not be able to provide offshore support for long. Kind of disaster recovery. So, I am back here at my seat, juggling calls to all the onsite people and clients, and I am even able to make a call home. Home in the sense, my parents. You know how hysterical mothers can be watching the flooding scenes on the television and knowing their son is there. It just does not cross their mind that their son could be sitting eleven stories high in dry clothes, working.

I think that is it. I need to work.

Rain and drain

2005-10-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

I had quite an adventure today with my bike 'Black Beauty'. How does she look? Almost like the picture here, but with out the visor and the saddle bag.

It so happened that my friend had come over to Chennai, for this Visa related interview at the embassy. He had arrived late in the evening the the previous day.

The next day, he was done with his interview, and he called me up. It had been a long time since I had met him, so went to and picked him up, and came home. We spent some time together.

It had been raining mildly when we decided, I drop him back. He would hire a auto-rikshaw, after I dropped him as far as I could. Everything was fine, as we donned our rain coats, and cosily started from my place. But the rain god seemed to have other plans with us.

The place he had to go was quite some kilometers away, and as the weather worsened, the auto-rikshaw drivers refused to get hired. And so, I thought I would drop him off myself. It was easier said than done. If one lives in the city of Chennai, they would know what I am trying to say. When it rains, it seems like the city-planners of Chennai did not know the concept of drainage.

There was water level on the road, more than knee-high, threatening to ruin my Black Beauty's engines when we were half way through. I realized this and happened to cut into a cross road that seemed to have a bit higher ground level. Then, we were lost in a maze of water filled roads and sub-urban flats by the seaside. It took quite a effort to drive in the dark and tormenting rains, and finally we reached the beach side road and headed north.

It was the end of adventure for my friend, when we found a auto-rikshaw driver, who agreed to get him to his hotel. But then, for me it was another gruelling hour. I took a different route, hoping that the situation of roads would be better. They were indeed better, but the problem was that, many other people thought the same. The result was wading with my bike with trafic jams at a turtle's pace, in knee-high water.

Returning home, my stomach started growling at me, indicating I had delayed in answering its calls. So, I went to a eating place, a usual haunt of mine during dinner time. After dinner, I went home, took a hot water bath. I had to report to work, as I was in night shift.

[I know, I know. This post does not come under 'ponderings'. But let me tell you some thing. Earth is not a perfect sphere.]

A heads-up

2005-10-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

It seems like I am doing quite well here. I have been able to atleast initiate on the commitments I made in my previous post.

The first of the two blogs I promised to start has been put up, and can be found at 'Universe of Star Wars'. And I think I should be able to start with the other blog on roleplaying soon. Keep looking at the side pane here.

It is another issue, as to how I would be able to keep up updating them. I do not even know how I would be able to keep updating this blog on the first hand.

What can be said? There is a dimension called time in this time-space?

More on obsession

2005-10-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

Dwelling on the word 'obsession' I thought I would better look up a dictionary, so that I do not mess things up. It came close to what I had assumed it to be. The stripped down version of what I got out of the dictionary (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - Indian Edition) is as follows:

obsess v fill the mind of (sb) continually
obsession n 1 state of being obsessed 2 thing or person that obsesses; fixed idea that fills the mind

Come to think of it, I am very close to develop an obsession on the word 'obsess'.

More on my other obsessions, I do have obsession on roleplaying games. I wonder sometimes, if I would soon be engulfed by these obsessions and breach the walls of craziness into the realm of insanity.

Insanity, is more in terms of chaotic behaviour. So, I have come to a resolve that I would soon practice my obsessiveness in a orderly behaviour. Expression of these would greatly reduce the build-up of them with in me.

And so, expect two more blogs along with 'Ponderings of Mahesh Bhat'. Not yet thought of a fitting title but the subjects it would be on, I have already decided.

Roleplaying
Star Wars

Well, committing like this has its own advantages and disadvantages. It has that nagging nature, so that I do it for real and not let it rot in my mind like many of the other thoughts. But on the other hand, the humiliation it would bring, I cannot imagine, if I do not get the two above mentioned blogs materialized.

Regarding obsessions

2005-10-06T04:12:00.000-07:00

I wonder sometimes, as to what goes on in the organic mind of people, who have these obsessions. I mean, I am not trying to seperate myself from the people I am referring to. I too have obsessions. More over, as some one said (I cannot quite place, who said it), "The experiment and the experimenter are inseperable."

Coming back to my pondering on obsession, people go to lengths to get satisfied with whatever they are after. There are many instances when the obsession people have, ruin them and at times, become the cause of thier destruction. I sometimes think, how could it be that the evolution that plays by the rule of "Survival of the fittest" came to such a turn, where the entities inflict self-damage with great zeal.

Luckily, I do not have any such obsession, or I atleast think so. I do have quite a few, though. The latest one is my craze to collect all the novels that has been published in the StarWars universe. I recently shelled out about a little more than thousand bucks on a clearace sale, gabbing all the StarWars I could lay my hands on. It is a different story as to how I managed to get the bulk to my house.

It was quite a pleasure for me to watch the begining of my collection. It did not bother me least that it costed me quite a bit of my earnings, and also it just crossed my mind momentarily that I would be now spending quite a few nights without a blink of sleep. I also hope write-up my views on the books I am done with. I may even start a blog on the StarWars novels.

What all we do, for our obsessions?

Here goes another attempt at blogging!

2005-10-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

I tried it before, but never got the hang of it. May be, I was too busy with other things. May be, I was too chaotic. Now, though, life seems to be a bit organized, though there is turmoil. Ofcourse, there is turmoil everywhere, even under the seemingly calm waters of a serene looking ocean.

Thus, I decided to blog.
Another run, another try.
Never say die.