Retaliation debate

Retaliation debate

Two Israeli soldiers get kidnapped from Northern Israel, Israel holds Lebanon responsible. Lebanon claims it has no control over the southern parts of the country and Hezbollah. Israel attacks the whole of Lebanon and takes out Hezbollah leadership and infrastructure.200 innocents get killed in Mumbai. Our Prime Minister after four days says that this was an act done by groups ‘across the border’. Says Mumbai is strong and we are united. Does nothing. Are we going to do anything? Every day our soldiers and civilians are blown up in Jammu and Kashmir. We still do nothing.

Pakistan occupied Kashmir continues to harbour terrorists training camps. Terrorists cross into the country from there. We have the evidence to prove it apart from the increasing toll of dead and injured civilians. Can’t we do anything against these terrorists?

Pakistan claims that it has no control over these groups and the very same groups are out to kill their President. What are we waiting for? Let’s do them a favour and do what Israel is doing and weed them out!

@ 'The Great Indian Mutiny'

Bend it like digicam

Bend it like digicam

As a neo digital enthusiast I prefer digital cameras to take photos. Occasionally I opt digital retouching if the snaps are underexposed or degraded of white balance, sharpening, contrast, saturation, image effect, digital zoom. So it's quite common to receive remarks from my friends 'Whether I use digital camera to capture the photos, as they seem clear & contrast ? '.Though it's a simple curiosity query, It made me to feel that it's a generalized opinion on digital photo taking. Their query includes everything; digital photos can be manipulated or enhanced v/s analog photography & the originality is not the mantra of digital snaps. This is the bane & boon of digital photography perse.

Photos are perceived as the freezed-moments of the particular time frame. People try to visualize the timing, place, emotions & feelings behind the snap even all these are not inside the frame. That’s the beauty of photography. Digital photography is challenging that very essence of conventional thought of the analog snapping.

Yester years when photo-clicking media was constrained to analog cameras, photo was almost depends on the quality of lenses, photo taking abilities, technicalities of the camera. But more or less the break-even-point was ‘the moment’ the photo is captured.

Most photographers may retouch ("post-process") the digital output with Photoshop or imaging s/w to adjust levels and sharpen the image a bit. This post processing work normally done on jpeg’s after a photo is taken. For sure reasons this doesn’t make any real contribution to photo taking skills because it’s a retouch or in simple words 'fabrication'.

Here's the new approach of post-processing. How about enhancing the photo taking options in pre-processing rather than enhancing the picture itself? There comes the format called ‘RAW’. Photoshop CS2 supports editing RAW files. It makes 'post-process' of digital output more sensible.

The RAW file format is the uncompressed data file captured by a digital camera's electronic sensor. When your camera saves an image in RAW format, settings like white balance, sharpening, contrast and saturation are not applied to the image but are saved instead in a separate header. Because RAW files remain virtually untouched by in-camera processing, they are essentially the digital equivalent to exposed but undeveloped film. This makes RAW an increasingly popular format with amateur and professional digital photographers, because it affords greater flexibility and control during the editing process-if you know how to work with RAW files _ Via Oreilly

Inter - view

Inter - view

Weekends are meant to relax, refresh & relish being out of workstations and hectic meeting schedules, progress-meetings and lot. But my weekends went for a toss when our lovely recruitment people requested rather gorilla pulled (like: guerrilla warfare) ;) me to be a part of hiring & recruitment process this weekend. It's kind of nice experience to see people in hot-seat where I was there many times. I felt like Mr.Bachan( though short of height) while framing candidate into trickiest technical questions. I admire his style of enouncing: lock kar diya jaaye ?. Was not able to implement his style as it was a serious process conducting serious interviews. So no space for humor or being unofficial !

Fun apart, the process was smooth & packed with a serious learning curve in it. I know many company's have a live interview panel which conducts interview everyday, every working hour whether there may be requirement or not. It may be to add right candidate to database in need of urgent hour. But ours was a ad-hoc basis of immediate requirement.

I think now it has become a 'nomenclature' for a s/w employee to conduct interviews at least once in the span of his tenure ! Days may come, where the prerequisite will be: 'Person should be able to conduct interviews !' Rather than a self-patting statment one thing which drives a human resource team to pull-in employee to this recruitment process is cost reduction & adaptive skillset scalability contrary to external hiring consultants.

It's not the first time that I'm conducting interviews for the company's I've worked for. For me it's not a mandatory job but a occasional experience which helps to leverage my understanding of people's behavioral pattern, body language, actions or expressions, nonverbal movements and social interactions, industry standards & best practices around, the adapting trends, pit-falls of this process.

In the dark room of design interaction

In the dark room of design interaction

To create the real impression of a 'working prototype'(to capture the workable structure and relevance of information on a screen or page) I heavily depend on Visio. To my mind itz a jack of all trades and a master of none :) bcoz I see a real problem of interactivity with Visio. Often I had to show up my screens interactively either via live-conferencing or live on my networked desktop.Which is a lacking feature in visio.

So I was searching for some kind of tool which could provide me with the rich possibility of creating interactive wireframes intuitively. I tested couple of softwares available in stencils design space. some how fell in love with Axure RP Pro due to its capability, as it lets me do all kind of DHTM-related-tricks to simulate AJAX kind of stuff. But still, at the end of a day each tool has its own uniqueness in delivering perfect solution. Not but the least there're vector graphic tools & markup editors to do the magic which're less considered for this kinda work.

I also tested ConceptDraw & SmartDraw but somehow the combination of stpBA+Visio 03 Stenicils seems to be a perfect blend of wireframe creation & GUI storyboarding. I like visio's ability to create wireframes easily but miss the possibility of adding interactive funcionality to it (i.e lack of sequence of user interactions). To resolve this issue there's a nice way of handling deliverable in a order in which the wireframes appear in a website or application in sequence(which helps to keep the user engaged & informed about the flow). Its' called swipr, a toolset allows Information Architects to create an integrated and interactive deliverable from standard Visio files. Which is yet to be released as a free toolset.

Btw, I encountered a interesting trick which makes a life of prototyper more comfortable. It's about hand-drawing prototypes on a tablet computer or on pen tablet.

What causes the dark circles under your eyes?

What causes the dark circles under your eyes?

As you tack on the years, the skin covering your eyelids thins out, which may cause the blood vessels to become more apparent, giving your lower eyelids a darker appearance. It's also possible that thin eyelids can be inherited. Dark eyelids can also be caused from swelling in your lower eyelids. When you're lying down, gravity causes fluid to collect in your lower eyelids, which may create shadows below your eyes.

In most cases the condition is a result of aging or inheritance, and does not indicate illness or toxicity in the body. Therer'e two simple Ayurvedic remedies that can help eliminate the hollow look.

*Gently massage saffron or almond oil on the dark area before going to bed.
* Dip cotton pads in fig juice, rosewater, or cold milk. Lie down with your feet raised higher than your head,then place the wet pads on your closed eyes.Stay that way for 10 minutes.
[yahoo-answers]

The first version of Photoshop

The first version of Photoshop

Photoshop's developers, Thomas and John Knoll began development on Photoshop in 1987. Version 1 was released by Adobe in 1990. The program was intended from the start as a tool for manipulating images that were digitized by a scanner, which was a rare and expensive device in those days.

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