Capturing Rain
August 18, 2010
With the monsoons doing their usual thing and I having the luxury of a not-too-bad view of the rains, I had been itching to capture a shot of the rain in all its glory. Earlier this year I made a capture that brought out the rainy-ness in the scene but didn’t have any rain as such.
Online research about shooting the rains didn’t bring much enlightenment because there’s no “formula” for making rain shots.
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Simple PHP Timer
August 9, 2010
I was just trying to profile an HTML page for performance bottle-necks. I’m trying to follow a top-down approach, wherein I start from the entry script, and find the block of code that takes the biggest chunk of time before digging deeper into that chunk.
At this stage, it’s not feasible to drop in a full-blown profiling tool like xdebug because of the set-up overhead and amount of data it generates.
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Shooting in the Dark
August 3, 2010
Digital sensors have made a lot of progress on the light efficiency front. The Nikon D3s sensor, currently the most efficient sensor available, offers amazingly clean images at crazy high ISOs. Something that film shooters could only dream of. There is still some time, however, before a D3s calibre sensor makes it to consumer bodies. Meanwhile, it will help knowing the tips and tricks of shooting in the dark for the win.
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Take Two
July 31, 2010
This isn’t my first time writing a photography blog. I started one, almost 3 years ago and wrote a few posts regarding technique and gear. It was probably too early to start writing, though, and the blog fell off the edge when my hosting plan expired and I didn’t renew it. This time, it will hopefully stay.
Photography is, for me, a new way to experience things. It’s about delving deep into the visual characteristics of the environment around me — shapes, contours, colours, location, the light that I’m seeing by.
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PHP vs. Python for Web Apps
July 28, 2010
These days, more and more people ask the Python vs. PHP question when they start out with a web application from scratch. I’ve developed PHP applications for 5 years but for the last couple of years I’ve been doing Python. This post is meant to note some of my observations. If you don’t want to read the whole of it, my opinion — opinion — is to stick with PHP for dishing out your *ML.
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MySQLdb Leaks Memory
June 30, 2010
Whenever people search for a Python library for MySQL, they get directed to MySQL for Python. However, there are some nasties hidden in it. Searching for “mysql python memory leaks” results in a few links which suggest that using Unicode causes memory leaks with the library.
Today, however, I found another cause for MySQLdb memory leaks, while debugging a leaky Python daemon at work — database errors.
Use this script:
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{Browse ‘Hello World!’}
June 18, 2010
That snippet of Oz somehow felt like an appropriate title for the first post on my tech blog. Expect something new here once in a while. Happy hacking! 🙂
Why I Program in C++
March 12, 2004
IBM’s Pervasive Computing Lab is an intelligent home with most electronic gadgets networked together. All but two gadgets run Java applications on Linux. IBM chose Java because “it’s a good way to insulate developers from the idiosyncracies of specific operating system deployments.” Luxor is a XUL toolkit with “a (sic) ultra-light weight, multi-threaded web server, a portal engine and Apache Velocity as its template engine.” XUL is an XML vocabulary for assembling GUI.
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