Funny things happen if you add a second disk with a live Linux install to to your existing Red Hat install – the system gets confused with double LABEL=\ and starts hissing, spitting and boots into the wrong Linux install among other things 😉

The solution to this (thanks to ) is to edit the grub.conf and replace LABEL=\ with the real device name like \dev\hda1 and also do the same in the fstab file.

Petty people petty politics
Less said about it the better…

Pretty people pretty photos

Had an impromptu photo session with a friend of ours – Two photos have come up displayable BUT I don’t have permission to… … now now don’t let your imagination run awry they are both close-ups and not….

Pointers

Pointers – I vaguely remember my CSc friends saying that Pointers in C were a pain, today I finally got to reading about them (really) am still wondering why, I presume ignorance on my part and expect one of the pointers to stab me in the back when I am not looking… But once again the architecture of PHP and Zend makes life easier

Been reading the source of the PHP’s EXIF extension. Could comprehend about 30% of the unfamiliar parts.

Extending PHP

Yippeee!! Today I compiled and ran my first (and totally useless) PHP extension, It is a stand alone .so file which implements a function called spit(), It just spits back whatever string you pass to it as a parameter. It took me all of 20 min to do it… Now I am kicking myself for not starting at it 2 years ago. It took Rasmus to convince me sheeesh

Well better late than never, now wishing that I have just bit of time free to pursue this as well.

Hmmm… Lets see apart form commercial work what am I doing? Reading, photography, UT2003 with Aasim, enhancing Coppermine, must find some more time

230 pictures taken at LB/2003

Click here to see the 230 pictures which I took at the LB/2003 Some pictures there have a counter part in other peoples camera like this and this in Jeremy’s album here and here 🙂

There may be more of such out there – if any of you have got them please post URL

BTW I used the following to convert 211MB to 19MB in one fell swoop before I uploaded

jhead -cmd “mogrify -quality 85 -resize 800 -format jpg &i” *.jpg

Back from Bangalore…

I am sure everyone has read all about LB/2003 and how wonderful it was here, here, here, here, here and here so nothing more to write about it except my own personal teeny weeny ego trips and treasured moments which I gleaned form the conference.

The most elating moment was when just before the first PHP talk by Rasmus rushed in and announced that the event had been slashdotted and I got to announce it to the near full 750 seater hall…

Talking to Rasmus over dinner at Atul’s place about writing extensions to PHP was most encouraging and enlightening, considering that I don’t know C or C++ hopefully I will have my name in credits of one of the PHP extensions soon.

Then there was this extremely hilarious incident about unzipped pants (not mine 😉

The trip would have been perfect had Aasim not suffered that food poisoning which kept him down for nearly all days… BUT then he took that very bravely as well…

So whatever some of the critics might say the event was a great success for me

Yes there are pictures about 440MB worth of them, will take some time before they are resized and put up…

Off to Linux Bangalore / 2003

Slides done and sent
Clients informed for the last time
Packing done – thankfully Swati travels light(er)
Tickets Confirmed

We are already to board the train

100% Natural

No Make-up
No Filters
No Artificial lights
No Posing
No Post processing (nitpick – resized!)
Just a 100% natural candid portrait.

LB/2003 is now just round the corner, stress levels are high, patience running low and things are working perfectly fine as planned 😀

Check out the first schedule of talks. We leave for Bangalore on Sunday, Aasim is excited to travel by train instead of the boring “all you do is – wait” plane…

Surya Kiran – There is still hope…

Finally a somewhat displayable picture which would not have been possible at all using my older camera!!

Surya Kiran the aerobatic team of Indian Air force performed over the city airport as a part of finale for the National Air Race. These shots, an example of extreme zoom, were taken from our roof top. Airport is about 10 Kms away, so these jets were not flying exactly overhead 😀

The 800×600 is achieved by cropping the Hi Res 5MP pictures. The pixelation of sky is artifact of compression needed for the web…

These shots would not be possible with my older Casio8000SX because it is very slow to get ready would have missed the shots before it came on, 1MP does not leave any room for cropping

There are a couple of more of Aasim which I took when he was blowing soap bubbles thinking no one was looking – will post them as soon I get time to resize and upload

In other things we have just returned from a day out with Aasim and are again going out to get some clothes for him – some guys gave all the fun.

My Experiments with…

Finally grabbed enough time to read through the complete manual of my new camera.

Till now I have managed to take usual pictures (read mostly auto settings) with success BUT have not been very successful with macros (results have very poor DoF) low light (results with poor focus and lots of noise).

Tried a bit of fiddling but not much change in results almost feeling that my older cam was better – but I know for fact that this is not true and it is just my inexperience with the options that is the problem… NEED 24 more hours in every day!!!