Monday, March 13, 2006
Are we doing any good?
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?
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?
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Oils again
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]
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Sun Tech Days 2006
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Oils
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
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
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Creative Pandemonium - Ver 0.1?
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Content Management System - Architecture
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Content Management System - Intermission
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.
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.
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