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.

Comments

Valen Smith, the English teacher videos are missing!

I vaguely remembered that sometimes around 2009, engVid on YouTube was very popular. I especially liked a teacher by name Valen Smith's videos. She was not only beautiful but also very good at explaining the English usage. I also vaguely remembered to check her channel ValenESL around 2015. But, not sure what happened to her or engVid, all her videos are sadly gone. I have also noted that many people on Twitter were asking the same. Not sure what happened. Some people seem to have reuploaded her videos and YouTube continuously removing them with a note "This video contains content from LearnVid, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Strangely though, on Facebook, some people have managed to create a fake account using her old channel name ValenESL.

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...

Spotify's Greenroom Vs. Clubhouse - Missing Text Chat and Other Impacts

We have Clubhouse clones from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and now Spotify. Unlike others, Spotify seems to target directly into the Clubhouse audience/members. It is extremely obvious inside Clubhouse as you can find many spammy clubs and rooms created to attract the Clubhouse users. Greenroom Vs. Clubhouse I was stumbled upon one such room Clubhouse influencers are jumping off to Greenroom? - All things Hollywood . Few takeaways from the room are: Text chat is not available in Clubhouse, whereas it is available in Greenroom. This is the most talked-about USP. The recording feature is not available in Clubhouse and the same is available in Greenroom. Spotify has opened up a creator fund for Greenroom creators in the USA. However, I think, there are better indirect monetization options available for Clubhouse users. Stream's chat component & million-dollar opportunity? As I tweeted , Clubhouse can quickly bring the text chat feature by using Stream's chat component . If they...