Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Contd from here (I am sorry but I am really drowning in work right now ) Ok after lunch it was time for another round of sessions. This time there were supposed to be some parallel session. This meant you win some, you loose some. But its fine with barcamps. To make sure people are awake, alive and kicking, Anil, COO, Aditi Technologies, dumped his usual upper level management fundas and let loose a volley of Shayaris, with a twist. I sorry I dont recall any(Ya its been a long time too ) Next in line was Aashish Solanki a.k.a. Net Bramha with an interesting topic, Art and Science of Web Design. It was more of discussion. Some interesting points were Differentiate between structure and skin. Something which is good for you might not be good for others. Getting their requirements is important. An interesting comment from Aashish was "IE is the Labour Pain of Web Development". Why well, most of you time goes in checking if the page is render...

It was time again DCamp or Design Camp Bangalore.  Amit Pande, Sarit, Muthu , Anil Gupta among others worked hard to get this event going. I must tell you that I had an awesome time there. The presentations there were truly awesome. Let give a short summary of the things as they happened at the DCamp, though Vinodhn already has kind of everything on twitter . So heres how the event unfolded for me. I happily landed and Mekhri Circle expecting Aditi's office to be close by. So I begin walking from there towards Cauvery Circle. Cool I was looking for directions and I see someone looking at me from an auto. Oh ok I recognize this guy, hmmm....ok he is Gilberto from Thoughworks. Fine he is going to DCamp but is lost and does not know where is it happening. Ok fine I said, let walk to towards the Aditi Office and let so we walk. A few meters down the road, there is Muthu and Sudhindra at the gate of Aditi. So next thing we do is register and head for the terrace where the event was ha...

Well there has been a lot hoola hoo over the recent releases of Firefox and Opera. But here are certain things that still suck and would like them to be removed. 1. Better plugins and make them such that they dont hang that tab or window. 2. Download accelerator be integrated in the download manager of the browser itself. Hardly makes sense keeping them dumb. 3. Super fast start is not possible for various technical reasons but a preloader program would definitely be kind of must have. 4. Get more screen real estate to the page and make rest of the things like toolbar, menubar and optionally even status bar visible on a need basis like the playbar in video players in full screen mode. 5. Subscribing to an RSS feed to Google Reader or iGoogle is  a dumb two step process now. Google Reader or iGoogle be made two different options. 6. Tabs must have a 3D effect or something really cool. Switching like pages is so yesterday. 7. Make download dialog unobtrusive. Make it so...

Well this was one thing that I had thought a lot about. In college when I was totally unaware of the alpha blending technology. So I wondered how the ppl would have had got hold of it. I had this weird idea of having a pixel taken from background and using that to make us believe that its semi-transparent. When I learned about Alpha Blending I thought my idea was really childish. I should have thought beyond. Then came the question of how to make the splash screen transparent. Well as many of u might be knowing, splash screens are bmp images by default. You cannot have any special effect using them. But then I had an idea, how about taking a snapshot of the current screen and then generating a splash bmp giving a nice semi-transparency. This was one among the many ideas that bumped by head at some point of time.  Coming back to today. We all must have used the Windows Live Writer or other applications. If u havnt then give them a try. This application has a nice splash screen wh...

With so many things happening for the engineers Bar Camp, OCC and now D Camp . Sure we are going to see the next MS or Google from India very soon. D Camp or design camp was held a Yahoo office in EGL. First presentation was by Muthu from Sun Microsystems. He started with demo on how to use CSS and Javascript. Next how to use it to get ' Your Kind' of a look for your webpage. Then we had the demo for YUI Javascript Library. And the usual corporate bashing was kicked off but Muthu cleverly moved the controversy out by saying that YUI is his favourite thats all and the ultimate call to use is on the developer themselves. Joe Arnold from Yahoo! was next to make a presentation with an unusual title " Learning to Fly ". Rather actually it was a great one. Interesting way to explain how to design, using the Wright brothers experience on how to build invent a plane. Some interesting thought on what it takes to build or rather invent a good product. You need ...