Nadar rocks!

If you ask a single question and get 10-different indirect answers, then the person might be a westerner.
If you get 5-different indirect answers, then the person might be from Indian corporate mafia.

If you happen to read any sane corporate interviews, it might be either from Shiv Nadar or Shivkumar (of Nokia). The reason must be that both are Tamilians. (On a personal note, I strongly believe that only Tamilians and Tamil TV channels have "to the point" discussions/communication).

Having said, I keep following Shiv Nadar's interviews and news (Wikipedia says that he's alumnus of The American College!)... and recently found that he started Shiv Nadar University ... Great story.

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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 $im->setImageIndex($i); $im->writeImage('layer' . $i . '.png'); } ?> Note that, there is a better version below In a single call with writeIm...

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

Rajiv Gandhi assassination, conspiracy theories in English

This is part of my Save Perarivalan series. In Tamil, we have lots of news articles available on the conspiracy theories surrounding Rajiv Gandhi assassination, investigation, Subramanian Swamy's alleged involvement, Chandraswami's alleged involvement, P. Chidambaram's alleged involvement, Jain Commission report, other countries' alleged involvement, etc. But in English, we have very few articles available on the topic: The Deadly Duo Crucial evidence linking Chandraswami to the Rajiv case went missing from Rao's PMO. Outlook investigates. Outlook Magazine, dated November 24, 1997 The Scoop Is Ours THE Jain Commission's interim report on Rajiv Gandhi's assassination has created a furore in political circles and hogged the headlines in all major national dailies. Outlook Magazine, dated November 24, 1997 Dusty Trail TWELVE extensions in six years and no sign of the final report yet. Outlook Magazine, dated November 24, 1997 "Some Files Weren...