Happy Holidays

Wish you all happy & prosperous New Year.Its time to write almost last entry for this year.

For quite a while was thinking to write about 2005 year diary. Hmm............not able to write with this dull and grey sky and no need to mention the cold at Paris but wait............ seems some ray of light is trying to reach my desk which I do not want to loose, hope that will keep my spirit high while writing this.

2005 started with the longest vacation I ever had so far in my career. It was six week India trip and an escape from cold Europe. It was not a vacation after all, as my younger brother was getting married.

Coming back to Paris we did traveled as-usual in the first half.We have been to Germany, Austria, Spain and Portugal.It was superb with excellent weather and good food.

Pamela did a great job which I was not able to accomplish from quite a long. She made sure my parents visit Paris. And yes...they did came in mid-August for 4 weeks. Organizing their first trip abroad was not perfect; starting with floods in Mumbai, not able to get cheap tickets & with delayed baggage service by airlines in Paris etc. But at the end hope they had good time in Paris.

We celebrated Pooja and Diwali this year at Maison de l'Inde. And yes, one more thing not to forget... in-spite of my disliking of France & French, I ended up joining French class.

Being crazy did major change to this web site. Anywayz, this holiday season is highlight with visit to Vedanta Society at Gretz. Need to see how I end up this year.

Once again best wishes and keep visiting.

Thank God its Friday

It has been a while I wrote any post. Well, after quite a long time I met with Tapas a good old friend from Bay Area. The meeting was short while having dinner at our place; got some updates on other friends in Bay Area.

Yesterday, was last French class before 2 week vacations so we went out for drinks after the class. I never had this kind of social events where you have to speak in French and you are not ashamed of your mistakes. It was good as all others did not started conversing in English though the french language was butchered like anything. It was fun; returned home late night :( . Well, need to finish lots of homeworks and revise the course now or chance of passing the exam is bleak

The big reason for writing today is about the comment I got - if I am selling my TIBX shoe laces or not? Well the whole idea of writing that post came to me when I read the news of Intel offering $10K for Dr.Moore’s paper published in Electronics Magazine 40 years ago.

Metro in Paris

Living in Paris and not travelling in Metro has lots of demerits. Like usual I am going to start with the traffic jams, one way roads, unavailability of parking, high parking tickets and very unusual sense of Parisian driving skills.

These only list if you have a car and travelling of your own. But what about those who are taking other mode of smart transports like Bus, Tram, Bicycle, Rollerblade or just walk to work or work from home? Well, looking at the list they look cool-nice with their own merits and demerits. For example, I used to go to work in summer by bike, it was the quickest mode to reach work with no major traffic. And I used to go-through Bois-de-Boulogne to have some exercise and fresh air.

But wait, I have not listed demerits yet for these mode of transport over Metro. You will have no clue about what is coming up or going on social front like which movie or big concert as metro walls list all those for you. You never know when there is “SALE” coming up from Galeries Lafayette to any electronics stores. Not only that you will also miss what is the latest trend in the fashion from shoes to eyeglasses.

This list can be long. In short, if you are not noticing the metro walls & people while walking those long passages between different metro lines you miss a lot ;)

create typewriter effect with ming php for flash (swf) movie

This is nice and simple code it creates the simple effect which you might have seen in lots of web sites. As it is PHP you can use the same from your own news reader to database.

setBackground(0x00,0x00,0x00);// SM - This is very important as it set sets the speed of the movie// SM - Higher the number faster the typing will appear$movie->setRate(3);// SM - This one will depends upon you$movie->setDimension(600,40);$movie->setFrames(31);$movie->nextFrame();// Define your String here $str = 'Miing Typewriter Effect'; /* SM - As you note The space between character if not fixed SM - due to font width so you have to figure out your own SM - Now we split our string and make an array with the same */ $chars = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);// print_r($chars);$inc = 0 ;for($i=0;$isetFont($myFont); $myText->setColor(255,255,255); $myText->SetHeight(30); $myText->addString($chars[$i]); echo ("$chars[$i] \n") ; $firstText=$movie->add($myText); $firstText->moveTo($inc,30); $inc = $inc + 18; // SM - this is very critical as you need to add this extra frame to make this effect of some typewriter $movie->nextframe(); // SM - This helps to determine the width of the movie // SM - turn only if you need the same // echo "inc is $inc \n" ; } // SM - we do not want to loop this movie// $movie->add(new SWFAction("stop();")); // SM - Save the movie $movie->save("/tmp/banner.swf",9);?>

Create Banner with mirror effect by ImageMagick

A simple way to create a text image which will have mirror effects. The best part of this you do not have to use any fancy imging software and it takes only few seconds to create the same. The code a single line to make it easier for Windows

convert -size 460x130 xc:white -font forte -pointsize 72 -fill "#cccccc" -annotate 0x180+12+80 "Banner Mirror" -gaussian 0x2 -stroke black -strokewidth 1 -fill "#80904F" -stroke black -strokewidth 1 -annotate 0x0+12+55 "Banner Mirror" -draw "line 0,68 430,68" Banner-Mirror-Imagemagick.jpg

Reached 10K and folding

Folding @ Home is a Stanford University project of understating protein folding. It is distributed computing where small tasks are sent to Personal Computers (PC) across the world and it uses those CPU power to calculate. The results are sent back to the main computer. It is a very safe program and probably you will not notice any performance change for your computer.

There are similar projects for understanding Genome to AIDS which uses more or less similar technology of distributed computing. If you think you can contribute using your unused power of your PC other than warming the planet than please join any project of your choice.

The recent announcement from Sun about their low power consuming CPU is a new start from those Mega Hertz and Giga Hertz race. As most of the commonly used applications can not use any way as they are always backward compatible to reach all the market.

Orsay revisited

To my greatest surprise I found failure in implementing a perfect backup system for my digital images. Somehow I lost all the pictures from Orsay museum. May be I just deleted them(by mistake)!!! Yes I know the trouble of digital memories they are very easy to capture but most difficult to save. There are lists of problem that can happen to your golden past; starting with the media card to Hard Drive not to mention virus problems or accidental deletion of files

My current system is far from perfect I have one copy on my computer and other in external USB drive. That way I am insured from virus and hard-drive failure but may be I should make DVD(s) and keep it in a separate place. Working for IT is making me so paranoid with backups but I know few people who lost their digital pictures just thinking nothing wrong will happen to them.

Well enough of bragging, I think it was a small and good lesson and great reason to go back again to Orsay. Being there I just forgot all those anxiety of living in Paris small apartment and trouble it poses from carrier to saving for future or just picking up the language and be able to communicate properly in French. On humorous side if French economy does not recover and keeps declining then some dark day they can lease some of these masterpieces to new emerging economies of East to make some money.

This time there was temporary exhibition from Russia which was worth to explore the paintings from mid-19th century to 1917 ; most of the paintings and objects are from National Museum of Moscow and St. Petersburgs .

Diwali at Paris

"Are you safe out there?" This was typical question to which I have been answering to my friends and relatives after the riots at Paris suburbs. I myself was keeping updated with news only. "Thank God" it looks like getting better now. I would not like to make any comments and express my view on the same as it seems to be very complex matter.

We celebrated Diwali quite well this year. On evening of 2nd oct. it was at Vendanta Society of Paris(with puja).And on 5th it was at Maison de l'inde with fireworks and cultural activities. But this year the biggest celebration of Diwali was hosted by Mayor of Paris at “Hotel de Ville” for the first time. It was an event by invitation. Unfortunatley, I didnot have enough social contacts to be there.

Part -2

create individual pages for each image dirty way with php
[code]
<?php
//$image_files=[] ;
$type = "jpg";
$abspath_folder = "/home/santm/public_html/PamelasCreation/images" ;
if ( is_dir ( $abspath_folder ) ) {
if ( $handle = opendir( $abspath_folder ) ) {
while (false !== ( $file = readdir($handle ) ) ) {
if ( $file != '.' && $file != '..' && $file != 'CVS' && $file != 'index.html' ) {
//santm echo "FILE is $file \n" ;
$the_array[] = $file;
}
}
}
}
closedir( $handle );
// end of reading the directory
// santm print_r ( $the_array );
// making sure the array only has our jpg image starting with a number
foreach ( $the_array as $img ) {
if ( !is_dir( $abspath_folder .'/'. $img ) ) {
if ( eregi( $type, $img ) && eregi ( "^[0-9]", $img)) {
$the_image[] = $img;
}
}
}
// the main part
if ( !$the_image ) {
echo "no image \n";
}
else {
$i = count ( $the_image);
echo "count $i\n";
// sort the array
rsort ($the_image) ;
//print_r ($the_image ) ;
for ($k = 0 ; $k < $i ; $k++) {
$bb = $k+1 ;
echo "santm $the_image[$k] \n" ;
$full_name = explode (".",$the_image[$k]);
$short_name = $full_name[0];
$foo_img = images .'/'. $short_name;
if ( $k != 0 ) {
$pre_name = explode (".",$the_image[$k - 1]);
$pre_short_name = $pre_name[0];
}
if ($bb != $i ){
$next_name = explode (".",$the_image[$k + 1]);
$next_short_name = $next_name[0];
}
echo " short $short_name \n";
//
// doing dirty way with system call for placing the header
//
$head_out = shell_exec ('cat /home/santm/head.pam.inc');
$write_handle = fopen ("/home/santm/public_html/PamelasCreation/$short_name.html","w+");
fwrite ($write_handle,$head_out);

fwrite ($write_handle," $bb of $i\n");
fwrite ($write_handle," <div class=
\"big_photo\">\n");
fwrite ($write_handle,"\n");
if ( $pre_short_name ) {
fwrite ($write_handle,"<
img src=\"images/previous.gif\" alt=\"next\" border=\"0\">\n");
}

if ((!$pre_short_name) || (!$next_short_name)) {

fwrite ($write_handle,"<a href=\"index.html\" width=\"90
/%\">\n");
}
else {
fwrite ($write_handle,"<img src=
\"images/home.gif\" alt=\"home\" border=\"0\">\n");
}

if ( $next_short_name ) {
fwrite ($write_handle,"
\n");
}
fwrite ($write_handle,"\n");
fwrite ($write_handle,"\n");
fclose ($write_handle) ;
}
}


?>
[/code]

photo album : imagemagick (part -1)

Quick and dirty way of creating photo album with imagemagick, creating images with black border as it looks good for all

#!/bin/cshset files = `echo [0-9]*.jpg`echo $filesforeach file ( $files )set w = `identify -format  "%w" $file`set h = `identify -format  "%h" $file`if ($w > $h) then  convert $file -thumbnail 500X -bordercolor black -border 1 /tmp/foo100/$fileelse  convert $file -thumbnail X500 -bordercolor black -border 1 /tmp/foo100/$fileendifend

Place de la Concorde

After a long time I was able to capture the fountain of Place de la Concorde in a very beautiful sunny morning. It is so amazing that we still take pictures of Paris like tourist on their first day. When we left home it was cloudy and we were questioning ourselves why we are carrying the camera with us. But luckily it was worth to do so. Then from there we took a small promenade at the garden of Elysee.

While walking in 5th arrondissement we saw preparation for a big renovation is going on at Madame Curie University (Jussieu) as they used asbestos as insulator, But with high risk of cancer now government is trying to get rid of the same. It has unique architectural plan which resembles as a molecular matrix where each column is numbered. Looking at the same you can like it or hate it there can not be any middle opinion about the same.