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Photo got published in Puthiyathalaimurai magazine

The photo once I collected from late Sujatha Rangarajan , which is a class/college photo of Sujatha and Abdul Kalam was featured in the center page of Puthiyathalaimurai magazine

Humble Award - RJ Yazh Sudhakar

Yazh Sudhakar , of Suryan FM is the best radio jockey for Tamil. His modulation and pronunciation are brilliant. His voice is really superb amongst other crappy "fast forward voices". Links: யாà®´் சுதாகர் கவிதைகள்

Humbe Award - RJ Joshua

Recently, I don't listen to RJ Joshua of AIR FM, Chennai (I'm not even sure if the program still exists). As the way he conducts the program especially for his positive words, he's the best RJ I have ever tuned to. I wish him to be more famous.

Humble Award - Dr. A.N. Sreevatsan

Dr. A.N. Sreevatsan , ENT specialist located in Adyar, Chennai is one of the gems available in medicines. No assistants in his consulting room and he'd take at least 15mins for every patients. So far I have referred many and all are happy with his approach. Every wannabe doctor should visit him personally to understand his approach. I wish him to be more famous than now. Update (2010-11-21) : Added link to Google Map Keywords : Sreevatsan, Srivatsan, ENT, Adyar, Chennai, Hospital, Doctor

Humble Awards

When I was studying 10th standard, I had a bet with my friend Nalin that A.R.Rahman will become very famous (He was telling me that no one can beat Ilaiyaraaja ) Since then I thought about appreciating the people that I think are the best and finally here is the effort. Some people are yet to become famous--but I strongly believe and wish that they'll become famous sooner! Gaana Rahman - Gaana singer Dr. A.N. Sreevatsan , ENT specialist OptiPerl , Windows based IDE RJ Joshua , Radio Jockey of AIR FM, Chennai RJ Yazh Sudhakar , Radio Jockey of Suryan FM, Chennai Discovery Channel's Tamil Interpreters , for the superb Tamil voices & modulations Savukku, WikiLeaks of India , for the brave news coverage on hidden politics of India, especially Tamil Nadu state

Humble Award - Gaana Rahman

Gaana Rahman (I also think, his name is Rahmankhan or so) was a participant of "Gaana Kyuil Pattu" program on Kalaignar TV . The judges didn't select him mentioning that he didn't maintain his pitch. But, I like(d) voice very much and even sent a recommendation email to Mr.James Vasanthan . Hopefully he'll become famous sooner.

Ohm Kumar, a motivational leader

I always stress the need for typing and technical skill for our team. But, I turned out to be less successful in motivating the team to improve those skills. Ohm Kumar, who lately took up the challenge of motivating the team, turned many teammates technically certified. I'm yet to learn such motivating skill from him:-(

Photo got published in Kumudam magazine

I'm extremely surprised to find that the photo I took in Dakshina Chitra and later uploaded to Wikipedia got published in Kumudam magazine (dated July 1, 2009).

How to interview a candidate?

How to interview a candidate/programmer -- Version 0.0.1 Note : It's based on my process of short-listing candidates/programmers and experiences so far in selecting and building my great team. I'll expand it whenever I get time and will amend versions. Not many of you were wise in the way the world judges wisdom. Not many of you had great influence. Not many of you came from important families. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. - St. Paul Core facts Interviewing is a serious effort and interviewing has great career prospects. Take it as a serious profession. Interviewer/interviewee – no one is genius. You cannot find a person who knows everything. You're not a foreteller and so you cannot identify people by appearance. That's the need for the interview. No interview question is right or wrong. You need to take good decision based on many factors—not just

jQuery.favicon - jQuery plugin for adding favicons next to the links

It's easy to add little favicons next to all or external links using CSS's background properties: a[href ^="http://jquery.com"] { background: url(http://jquery.com/favicon.ico) center right no-repeat; padding-right: 16px; } But, to automate that for all links in a page, I wrote a nifty jQuery plugin-- favicon (posted to jQuery group). Side note I don't know of anyway to parse the domain name of a link using JavaScript and so thought of using RFC compliant regexp and had to write a PHP helper to import regexp in JavaScript: <?php // Generate JavaScript regexp for matching URL for getting host part // set user agent; otherwise getting 403 ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11'); echo str_replace(array( "\n", // remove newline '/', // escape / to \/ '?:' // remove--we really need mach ) , array( '', '\/'

Sad demise of Suresh Kumar

When my spirit was high in pain, I wrote "If there is a God, he must be a sadist!" and also added that in my Usenet sig-block. God proved to be cruel again, by taking Suresh Kumar, a great hacker, a good human being, an inspiring Team Leader who worked with me on February 25, 2009. Suresh joined my team in October 2008 and have shown his leadership skills immediately around November 2008 and started building his own team. His knowledge and involvement in CSSilize.com, an online PSD to XHTML conversion website that we're developing was a great asset. It's a great shock that a low BP or any unknown disease can kill him at the very young age. We have had a discussion on February 24th but a bad news came the next day--all to prove absolute vanity in life--and to prove "We live to die; we die to live" May his soul rest in peace.

Detect identical & black frame in video with ffmpeg?

Thumbnail creation is a very needed feature for any social networking site. Obviously, ffmpeg is the ideal solution for generating thumbnail. Problem-1: Detecting identical thumbnails Fortunately, we have a good solution-- libpuzzle . It would be ideal to have a filter in ffmpeg for that. Problem-2: Detecting black/dark frames I'm still keenly looking for a solution tied up with ffmpeg. When Google turned no help, Heleena (my wife) solved it by calculating average luminance value of the frame and ignoring the frames based on certain preset threshold value--which worked better at that time.

Converting PSD with PHP/ImageMagick

After seeing feature rich options in Imagick PECL extension at Mikko Koppanen 's (the author) website and also impressed with ImageMagick 's features, I have decided to use it for the PSD to XHTML conversion website that I'm architecting and managing. Since, the team wants programming help for converting PSD images, I have tried it (documentation is sparse on PSD handling) Converting PSD to PNG/JPEG/etc Note that, flattenImages() is needed for layered/multi-page PSD file. <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->flattenImages(); $im->setImageFormat('png'); $im->writeImage('test.png'); ?> Extracting PSD layers One by one <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->setImageFormat('png'); for ($i = 0, $num_layers = $im->getNumberImages(); $i < $num_layers; ++$i) { $im->setImageIndex($i); $im->writeImage('layer' . $i . '.png'); } ?> Note that, there is a better version below In