My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

“Senator Barack Obama made the point on Monday that the United States needs an education system that enables children to compete with those from India and China”

 - Source: The Hindu.

I thought that this day would never come! So following the same line what might be coming up? Let me guess not-so-far-in-the-future headlines:

• Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and General Motors to form a consortium to create next generation cars as they are facing tough competition from Ambassador & Contessa in the passenger segment and luxury segment. Due to unmatched safety features and comfortness, these mobile sofas took the US markets by storm last year and made the shares of these companies nose dive
• Apple Inc. in a wide anticipated move, shut down its PC hardware division as its can’t win its competitors - HCL and Zenith Computers. Apple Inc’s CEO Steve Jobs said that this move will help Apple’s hardware division to concentrate on iPods and iPhones. He also claimed that within an year, Apple will overtake HRC and come back to number one position in personal MP3 players. Chennai based HRC is currently an undisputed leader in MP3 players with 80% of the market share and Apple a distinct second with 12%. Analysts claim that its better for Apple to shut down its entire hardware division and focus on Mac OS and its applications
• Bose Corporation proudly announced that it has signed a MoU with the Indian audio giant Ahuja. Under this agreement, Bose will use Ahuja’s superior technology in all of its sound systems. Ahuja will provide all the technology and Bose will handle the manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Following this announcement, the widespread rumours that Bose is going to fire their entire R&D department, has becoming more probable than ever
• Taking clues from the successful implementation of Indian Railway administration in Germany and Japan, the French railway minister and his officials were on a 2 month visit to India to learn the functionalities of Indian Railway. They will implement the same structure in France for a better cargo management; better passenger satisfaction and reduced costs. The Indian Railways minister Dr. Kanimozhi will help them in the study and implementation as well
• In reply to Wipro acquiring Yahoo! for Rs 200 Billion, the IT major Infosys is all set to acquire Google for Rs 300 billion in all cash and stock deal. As Infosys already has many of Google’s functionalties (Google Search - MSN Search, Gmail - Hotmail, etc) from its earlier acquisition of Microsoft last year, job cuts across the companies are envisaged
• The American parliament passed the bill on outsourcing its Government to India. Its a well known fact that for decades together, the American Government has failed to clear the debt on the nation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, appreciating Rupee, wrong foreign policies, unnecessary spending on military and war and much more problems can be solved by this. Neeraj Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India and the son of Rahul Gandhi, said that India is ready to help the reviving US economy by taking over as a President of US. Following this decision, the Nasdaq raised by more than 15% and the US dollar raised to 2 year high of Rs 52.

அப்பாவி ஆறுமுகம்: யப்பா ஒபாமா. எங்கள வெச்சு காமெடி கீமெடி எதும் பண்ணிடலையே?

written by Prakash G.R.

Cool one! Its not just Apple innovating

written by Prakash G.R.

Yesterday I got hold of my 350D and was experimenting it. Dinesh also bought a 350D. Along with the kit lens, he also bought a 50mm Macro lens and 75-300 mm lens, lens cleaner, tripod, a nice bag. With all the gear, he looks like a very professional photographer. As he says, now only thing left is to learn photography properly

First thing we experimented was to play with the different lenses. Fixed the camera on a Tripod and tried to shoot with different zoom levels:

50 mm(the standard view):

18mm:

25mm:

34mm:

75mm:

100mm:

200mm:

300 mm:

Note how the magnification occurs. We also tried some snaps in the beach after 7 PM. The first one is with a 10 second exposure and the other two are 30 second exposures. I didn’t know how to do the rear curtain sync in the second one, so Ravi’s image is little blurred.

Coming back, uploaded the photos to Mac and tried out little post production. Without powerful software like Photoshop/Gimp and just few corrections in iPhoto can bring out some amazing effects. Checkout the photo that was taken in Muttukadu boat house - before and after changes.

Now that there is no wait time for the completion of a roll & then developing, scanning to a CD etc, hope to post more photos

written by Prakash G.R.

If you are running Weblogic on Mac or some unsupported version of Linux, you might get OutOfMemoryError quite often (esp. if you are using the web console). To get rid of this, open the <domain root>/bin/setDomainEnv.sh file and add this line:

USER_MEM_ARGS=”-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m”

Its should be fine for the weblogic. If you have only 1GB RAM, your other apps will beg for more memory. So if you requently use weblogic and other apps simultaneously, better upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

Related:

Installing Weblogic on Mac

written by Prakash G.R.

With the invitation itself, it was well known that its going to be a special iPod event. The photos of iPod Nano leaked in the media, well before the event. Full screen iPod & a Wi-Fi enabled iPod were much expected. So what were the real surprises in yesterday’s event?

• The original iPod or simply “iPod” now gets a name - “iPod Classic”

• Who cares?

• Cool

• Wooops!

• On one side a (once) computer maker with passion in music & on the other side a coffee maker who creates music that wins Grammy awards. Interesting deal !

• A perfect match for Wi-Fi enabled iPod. What else to say?

• For those early adopters, who are complaining: (i) Nokia’s timely wit (ii) I paid ~ $500 for an 20 GB B&W screen iPod which had 6 hrs of battery life. Should I complain now? No. Remember one thing with the electronic gadgets. As soon as they leave the designers table and enter the manufacturing line, they are outdated. The next generation cool device is already in the Designer’s table. You can keep on waiting to get cheaper, better products. That will never end.

• Although steve didn’t say anything about that, Apple website is displaying an image (at this time of writing) with a Bluetooth icon. See it the top-right corner of iPod in landscape position?

In essence, Apple armed itself perfectly for the holiday season. This year, even more number of socks are going to have iPod. Bad news for Zune. A price cut just before this event is not going to help it. Good news for everyone else.

PS: I’m eying on the iPod Touch. Might get one soon

written by Prakash G.R.

James Gosling has posted a video of Project Green - the one that gave birth to Java. Considering the technology was developed one and half decades back, its really amazing to see what the little hand held device can accomplish. Full touch screen, speakers (yeah, but ugly sound theme), infrared and yes smooth scrolling in the touch screen interface. Is this where iPhone copied it from?

Watch the video and decide yourself. I think if Sun had patented it, it could have sued Apple!

written by Prakash G.R.

BEA is one of the biggest Java vendors; Macs run Java & many Java developers use Mac. But still Weblogic is not supported on Mac. So I have to follow the unofficial informations to install it. Here are the steps:

BEA’s download site lists the officially supported OS. Mac won’t be there in the list. If you select IBM AIX/ HP Itanium, you will see that the downloaded file is server<version>_generic.jar. These jars can be used to install Weblogic on any machine with a JRE.

The generic installer is “intelligent” enough to find that you don’t have any space in your disk to install and will give you this error dialog:

To avoid this you have to tell the installer that you are running on a Unix machine: java -Dos.name=unix -jar server100_generic.jar

The installation will go smoothly without any troubles. When you are done with the installation, the wizard you show you an option to run the QuickStart uncheck and press Finish. (If you are happy with the Example Server and want to start it, you may want to show the Quick Start)

Run the <bea home>/wlserver_10.0/common/bin/config.sh to create your own domain and go to the domain directory and run startWeblogic.sh. Its all the usual stuff. Nothing specific to Mac.

The only trouble is you will get the login screen for console and the login will take for ever with more than 90% CPU usage Don’t worry, I’ll give a solution soon

Related Posts:

Weblogic on Ubuntu

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve never looked at the trash folder in my MacBook Pro. Today I opened it and found so many items. I said “Empty Trash”. It calculated the number of items and displayed this dialog box:

I should say the sound effect after the cleaning was nice

written by Prakash G.R.

Mac + iSight camera + Photo Booth Software + my daughter = Priceless Expressions

This time, I sat with her and kept on pressing the Shoot button at 10 seconds intervals. That was a long list of photos and few selected photos here.

In case you have missed: Part 1 and Part 2

Related links:
Priceless Expressions - 2
Priceless Expressions - 1

written by Prakash G.R.

Disclaimer: Even on my MacBook I use Firefox rather than Safari because of the wonderful plugins that I need.

I’m using Safari on Windows since the day its announced (and switched back to Firefox today). There are some nice things about Safari (like Find) but I don’t like the product as a whole. Here are top 5 reasons why Safari is not going to succeed:

5) Safari installs unwanted apps: The installer of Safari tries to install other unwanted software. (No. I definitely don’t want Bonjour)

4) Safari doesn’t import your settings from IE/Firefox: When I install Firefox, I remember Firefox giving me options to import my settings from IE. So that I don’t have to loose any bookmarks. Safari doesn’t do that. So I’ve to recreate all the bookmarks

3) Safari is NOT a fast browser: I don’t know about the benchmark results. But the applications I use like Gmail, Google Reader takes more time to load than Firefox/IE. Googling around I found the real reason. More over, its neither a sleek browser. Even for the modest number of websites, the memory usage shoots up.

2) Safari is not a native Windows application: At least it doesn’t looks/behaves like one. For example, its Edit > Preferences not Tools > Options, you can resize only from bottom right corner, …

1) Safari’s font rendering is pathetic: Perhaps besides the other reasons like Security/websites compatibility, if there is a single big reason a user is going to dump Safari on Windows, it could the font rendering. There are reasons why Apple selected this rendering. Honestly I don’t give a shit about that. To me it should be easily readable in my screen and its not so.

I was wondering why the hell did Apple enters a game which it can’t win? The reason is simple. Steve decided to close iPhone to third party applications and the only way to write apps is Web 2.0 and Safari is the only browser in iPhone. No Firefox/IE/Opera. So why should a developer write web apps for a browser that has a single digit market share? The only way to increase the market share is to let Safari go out of Mac and explore the windows arena. Is it going to work? Who knows? It might!!! Look at what people said when iPod was released.

Related Links:
Safari for Windows announced
Gmail extension for Firefox
Top 10 Firefox extensions I use

written by Prakash G.R.