Disqus - Friends of sajith

Re: The State Of The Indian Entertainment Industry

deepakg — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:45:23 -0000

I am doing what I'd thought I'd never do - enable comments on my blog again! Let's see how it goes!

Re: Good Bye 2007

deepakg — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:21:04 -0000

Thanks!

Re: The State Of The Indian Entertainment Industry

deepakg — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:02:00 -0000

That sounds good. I'll keep my eyes open whenever I am at the Chennai Airport next.

I really wish Amazon's MP3 store comes to India soon. There is no investment they need to make in infrastructure/warehousing so the entry barrier should be really low. Of course there may still be complications around foreign investment regulations, but nothing like Starbucks or Walmart have had to face.

Re: Auto Strike In Bangalore

deepakg — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:16:01 -0000

I agree folks. I was a little lost over the last one year. While I am not giving up or giving up on the SLR, I am definitely writing a lot more than what I did over the past few months.

Re: Panning Around At MG Road

deepakg — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:24:02 -0000

Thanks Anon.

The shutter speed for the first one was 1/13, aperture f/5.6, ISO 200 and focal length 20 mm (Sigma 10-20 mm on a Canon EOS 350 D).

The second one was shot at 1/25, aperture f/4.5, ISO 200 and focal length 14 mm (camera and lens same as the first one).

Re: A Brief Visit To Pondicherry

deepakg — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:16:23 -0000

Thanks Jam. I doubt I'll be going anytime soon, but whenever I visit I'll blog about it with pictures!

Re: A Brief Visit To Pondicherry

deepakg — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:37:56 -0000

Thanks Swapna!

Re: Halebidu

deepakg — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:48:36 -0000

Sajith:

"Um, isn't it Halebidu?

I like these. My B&W devas and apsaras were completely messed up!"

Thanks for correcting me. Have fixed the spelling. Sadly, the disqus commenting system relies on permalinks for showing the relevant comments and my permalinks depend on the post's title. So changing the spelling in the title has caused your comment to go away :(.

In my case the final product is B&W but the originals were not. I started with color and toned them into B&W in Photoshop. In fact the last one involved combining two different exposures to ensure that the sky was not blown out.

Re: Pondicherry - More Pictures

deepakg — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:39:47 -0000

I am afraid my knowledge of French (or rather the lack of it) does not permit me to give you a first hand account of the language's usage in Pondicherry. Those who know better, say that it is more French than French in use in France today. Which is to be expected - you cling on to some things more fiercely when you are away from home and language often tends to be on top of the list.

Oh yes, I continue to love travelling - sometimes just for the sake of it :)

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:03:55 -0000

Thanks Sis!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:57:43 -0000

Thanks Tarun!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:53:54 -0000

Thanks Vinod! We are definitely keeping in touch :)

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:54:08 -0000

Thanks Ramesh!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:01:22 -0000

Thanks Richard!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:06:22 -0000

Thanks for the pointer Jani. I'll take it for a spin today!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:45:05 -0000

Thanks Suraj!

Re: Server.XmlEncode?

deepakg — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:48:27 -0000

Hi Adam,

I think you are confusing the issue here - the error you got indicates that the permission issue is on the server where your web application is hosted, not on the user's local machine.

Any file IO on user's local machine will be handled by the input type=file control, and as long as the user has access to a file on his machine, he should be able to upload it.

Now to be really sure that I understand your problem correctly, you'd have to paste some code here.. :)

Cheers,
Deepak

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:42:23 -0000

Thanks Kumar!

Re: Boundin' And Motion Blur

deepakg — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:20:53 -0000

The first shot was a matter of chance. I managed to take it when the owl jumped out and stayed stationary in mid-air for 1/24th of a second :). Every screenshot after that had a motion-blur. I'd love to open the whole movie up in some video editor and examine each frame!

Regular movies, with a lot of action/movement will have motion-blur in each frame. Unless of course you somehow get hold of a high frame-rate movie (casio's new line-up is supposed to allow you to do 1200 fps, and even that might not be enough for shooting a humming bird and extracting pristine still frames ;-)).

But for places in the movie where things are more or less still, I manage to get decent screenshots. I use VLC Player's Video >> Snapshot option.

I got it as a bonus with Incredibles too. They've recently come out with a DVD of their shorts: http://www.amazon.com/Pixar...

BTW another thing to notice is how they add a depth of field. Notice the grass in the bottom right corner of screenshots above comes out blurred because it is closer than the main subject in focus.

Re: Boundin' And Motion Blur

deepakg — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:25:24 -0000

p.s. I found a bug that was causing the comment to show up on the permalink you followed from the RSS feed but not if you follow the permalink from the home page. Just fixed that and copied your comment over.

Re: Finder Date Columns

deepakg — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:46:33 -0000

I miss a lot of things. Let me see if I can recall some of those:

Besides a Windows power user I am also a heavy keyboard user. The key bindings hard-wired into your head after 8-10 years of continuous use are the hardest to change. Mac does things differently with respect to keyboard shortcuts for a lot of common things. You can teach yourself new shortcuts, but sometimes you'll find your fingers acting without your inputs :)

I miss Visual Studio! Like I tell people - Mac OS might be my new OS, Win32 is still my runtime. I use VMWare fusion to run a copy of XP on which I run VS, SQL 2005 and all the other goodness.

And thats about all I miss. A lot of things work much better on Mac - my boot-up time (including time it takes to launch my first app) is under 45 seconds. Shutdowns happen in under 30 seconds. Bluetooth just works. Its been 5 months and I haven't seen a perceptible slow down that would cause me to "rebuild" my machine - and this is despite the fact that I've played with about as much mucky beta products as I did on Windows. I also find the predominantly grey UI - especially if you switch to the Graphite theme - much more conducive to graphics oriented work than the default M&M candy XP theme (the black Zune theme was a welcome change, but had its own usability issues) or look_ma_I_can_do_frosted_glass_transparency_in_title-bar Aero theme of Vista. The UI animations are subtle, delightful and often useful. The OS bugs me a whole lot lesser than Windows, I rarely miss the systray bubble (they even put in a cutesy "pop" sound to go with it!) saying something to the effect of: "look ma I installed a new software update!". I don't know why, but I am generally much calmer/happier on a Mac :)

I recently finished read an interesting book on design: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Emo... and I find Macs incorporate a lot things mentioned in there.

I think this should be a topic of another blog post itself :)

Re: Finder Date Columns

deepakg — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:49:20 -0000

I must add one more thing. Support for Indian languages is no where close to what Windows does today - especially the beautiful rendering of Indic fonts on Windows Vista. There is no support for Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu or Malayalam. Hindi, Gujarati, Gurumukhi and Tamil are supported. I think the support for languages is totally random (as in doesn't really take into account market size) - for instance Tibetan and Vietnamese are supported well - with multiple IMEs for each!

Re: Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

deepakg — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:01:42 -0000

Thanks! This picture was taken at Lal Bagh on a cloudy evening. The iron-work is present on the roof of the glass-house. You can see crows roosting there at dusk. I flipped the picture horizontally and did some color alteration in Photoshop... I can post the original if you are interested :)

Re: Buildings In Bangkok

deepakg — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:23:13 -0000

Hope I didn't offend you Williams! My Apologies if I did. I am sure Bangkok must be a great place to live - and it is certainly not as crowded as some of the cities here in India :)

Like I said - I didn't get much time to go around as I was cooped up in the hotel all the time, I am merely recalling the impressions from a 16th storey (or thereabouts) hotel room.

Re: Nandi Hills

deepakg — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:15:36 -0000

:) Thanks Jani. Believe it or not, I was thinking of the Ximian logo as well!