'Lass' Vegas

'Lass' Vegas

Last week I was holidaying in most coveted nightlife destination in the world - Las Vegas. It's all about fun, frolic & masti in a wonderful place which is also known as sin city !

After spending marathon hours in Las Vegas finally I came into this conclusion: Las Vegas is nothing, without - Lass, Lighting & Looting.

Lass ? Seems ridiculous ? you got to agree :) Lass, as you know means gals. I bet if you don't get tuned to the core if you're in Vegas. The ultra babe crossed you either in Casino, night club or on the pavements of lovely Vegas strip gives you sure shot thunderstorms - be prepared for it if you're in Vegas! I've traversed from Bangkok to Bombay, London to Frankfurt, Singapore to Sunnyvale, but there's nothing like Las Vegas when it comes to beautiful gals. It seems all beauties have gathered in Vegas for one or the other reason !

Next one is Lighting. A structure which dunno how to use lighting is gone for toss here. I was bowled over by the interior & exterior lightings of The Venetian, Wynn, Bellagio etc.,

If you come all the way to Las Vegas you have to come to The Venetian hotel. It's amazing, these people have gone to a great extent to reproduce many of the landmarks of Venice in a truly realistic way. Of all the hotels I visited in Las Vegas The Venetian was the one that impressed me the most. It can't be hold in words one got to experience it. This has one of the most breath taking casinos in Vegas, and on my top 3 list for casinos. Its a must see. The Venetian has also some of the best shopping I found in Las Vegas. The cafes, the ambiance, the sky, everything has an Italian feel.

The spectacular example is 'the day sky' inside the hotel. Believe it - the sky looks like you're hanging around in Venice at 3 in the evening though it's 11 in the night. You will see an always blue sky with a few white clouds which was modeled on the early evening sky in Venice except of course it never rains here ! Every 15 minutes or so the "sky" turns from daytime to nigh time just like that! The clouds also look like they are moving when you walk down the streets inside - great illusions ! They even have the water channels, with gondolas and the gondoliers singing "Oh sole mio". It's cool to see an artificial canal running inside hotel which takes people for a short float. I wanted to try it, but they said you got to book at least 14 days before ! Oh man, the canal looks like a real blue water flowing inside Venice city ! I was thinking- If I get married & have onsite opportunity in US; Las Vegas Venice's Gondola ride is A must and its very romantic I'm Sure.

Looting ? What looting ? yes I am talking about casino's of Vegas. Either you get looted by casino's or you'll loot casinos if you're vested with the luck ;) But by default, it's always casino's who come prepared to empty your pocket ;) You never know how smoothly loose your money. As I said lucky gamblers makes money here. amongst zillions of casinos of Vegas. I lost a little & made a bit too. Kind of break even gambling ;) ! Since I was on budget tour de Vegas- ensured I've enough bucks to catch a cab back to Airport ;)

Finally, I've heard a lot about him, been mesmerized with his composing, I dreamt of shooting like his photos & finally I happened to see his fantastic wall level blowups at his Venetian gallery:

>> Peter Lik-shots

Scalable Design

Scalable Design

• Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and design professor, got it right when he said, “Design is never done.” Before you know it, there are new features to add, new markets to conquer, and new updates to your application’s content.
• “Screen frameworks, user interface structures, and components that enable your product design to gracefully accommodate new features, new markets, and dynamic content—that can shrink or grow—are the cornerstones of a scalable design.”
• “An effective screen framework for an application can provide a blueprint for deciding how to integrate new features.”
• “The structure you select to house the various components of an application is what determines how scalable your design actually is.”
• “Your applications will change over time. How much of an impact that has on your existing design depends, in part, on how well you’ve accounted for scalability.”

These are few excerpts taken from the effective article of Luke Wroblewski. It talks about the importance of scalability while building application which is essence & motto of any firm while going for product or application now a days. Scalability directly impacts future maintenance cost & flexibility in any application.

>> Further read on Scalable Design | By Luke Wroblewski
>> Link of the day: High Scalability

HP Pavilion DV6662SE 15.4"

HP Pavilion DV6662SE 15.4"

I was very much impressed with HP ad - "again computer is personal". I've read a lot about HP's Notebook Design Group & it was recognized by distinguished design institutions for innovative laptop designs. Being impressed with their effective specs, awards, accolades & bought new HP notebook. Thanks to my new cool friend Padma for assisting me to buy this wonderful notebook.

Style, fit & finish coupled with nice specs made me to go for special edition-HP Pavilion 6662se. I might be loosing edge because of 1.5 ghz & no dedicated graphic card, but that's not a big worry because I would rarely hit 50%-100% CPU usage. I've a dedicated gaming desktop pc, which is also meant for overclocking needs. This cute laptop is built for entertainment & has ample 2GB memory & 250GB hard disk space for rest of the geeky life. Beauty of this white colored notebook is, it comes with additional 12-cell Lithium-Ion battery, which is essential for its energy hungry needs.

I was seriously considering apple mac book, it's a kind of vanity to own & work with. But there are lot of shortcomings specially when it comes to compatibility & I am neck deep involved with compatibility world of windows. Now I understand why people sue Bill for creating 'monopolistic' market ;) Anyway, I am loving this new laptop of mine which comes preloaded with new windows vista. But some how I miss simplicity & complexity of windows xp ;). Probably it's becoz my office laptops were ranging from simple hp to toshiba techra to lenovo T60's which came with preloaded xp.

Technical Details of DV6662 -

• Entertainment-centric notebook PC with widescreen 15.4-inch LCD and stylish high-gloss finish with wave imprint, integrated webcam
• 1.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor, 250 GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM (4 GB max), LightScribe dual-layer DVD drive
• Quad-mode Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n); 10/100 Ethernet; Intel GMA X3100 graphics (up to 384 MB of available memory)
• Connectivity: 3 USB, 1 FireWire, 1 VGA, 1 S-Video, expansion port 3 connector, ExpressCard 54/34, 5-in-1 memory card reader
• Pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium (with Media Center capabilities)

Link of the day:
Windows Vista tweaking

Trust your eyes

Trust your eyes

Look at it, gaze it...slowly glance it from corner to corner, what do you see?

You guess, almond's are waving slowly ? Wondering is it some kind soft animation ? It's not, because it's a static image ! It's termed as "Anomalous motion illusions", a illusion techique. Read this funny comment from one of the reddit reader about this illustration- "Now that would make good wallpaper. In a bar." ;)

By the way, how this illusion works? One of the reddit member-cypherx observes it like this:

• The motion of the image coincides with the motion of my eyes. If I fix my eyes on a single spot (which is very uncomfortable) the image is still
• The motion always occurs around but never exactly where I am focused.
• The leftmost diagonal column moves downward, the one to its right moves up. The left diagonal has black on top, white on bottom, whereas the right diagonal is reversed.

It's an interesting, thought provoking, detailed illusion design by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. Looks very simple but it's an complicated art - which challenges eye perception & brain apprehension. There are so many interesting illusions listed in his web site. From the Akiyoshi's page, a short pdf on what he calls the optimized Fraser-Wilcox illusion and what the pdf calls the peripheral drift illusion.

Link of the day from Flickr Photos:
Ooops how did he do that lense effect ? - Seb Przd's Photos

Silicon valley Verson.01

Silicon valley Verson.01

I'm currently in Sunnyvale, California to work with my parent company on one of the interesting project which might re-write the game in the financial domain in coming days. It's my first visit to west coast or popularly called as -bay area. In precise- I'm roaming inside so-called silicon valley of America.

I've seen many American companies having an offshore development or support center in Bangalore. But it's altogether a different experience traversing between the green lawns of giant Head quarters of these new-economy companies which have offices in Bangalore.

Other day I & my colleague went on a drive around MountainView & sunny vale downtown. While driving between the campus of Google Head quarters, I asked him- "Why there are no security guards & compounds for the main building ?" Guess what ? he laughed out loud asking me what made me to think like that ? ;). Honestly, I could not imagine a world's most talked, valued & accessed company is between tall trees & such a lovely open nature having no compound walls !

Sun, Mcafee, Oracle, yahoo, intuit & many more got recorded into my camera memory. It was immense pleasure driving on the roads of Mountainview looking at these head quarters having one leg in namma-Bengalooru. I'm sure I've recalled Bangalore many times for so many good reasons except traffic :) . I've heard a lot about lane discipline, freeway driving, traffic rules observation in US. Now I'm actually looking at it sitting on the seats of posh cars & I say to myself- 'when my city will have less traffic like this ?'

App in One Month ?

App in One Month ?

Here's a team of enthusiasts geared up for a change in project management build & delivery timeline. They're aimed to finish a app in a month's time. I'm sure this depends on the volume & size of the project in terms of weight & intensity. They call themselves -'one month app team'. Few techno-consulting co's out there must be hissing...

Interesting paragraph from their blog:

Our friends over in the Digg world are enjoying saying that the app we are building could be done in a time span ranging from one day to a couple of weeks. While this could be true, the point of this blog and application is not to get it done in the quickest amount of time possible. The point is to put an appropriate time constraint on building a quality app and to document our process during this time.

>> Read them