Zac Brown Band rocks...

When I was doing UG, my super-senior friend Ronald introduced me to MLTR and I was totally taken away by the music then. About 15-years later, I'm feeling same ecstasy when listening to Zac Brown Band's Whatever It Is and Highway 20 Ride. The voice and music are amazingly cool.

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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...

Mrs. Sujatha, Marriage, and Misunderstandings

I recently watched an interview featuring Mrs. Sujatha on the Aval Vikatan YouTube channel, and I couldn’t help but write this post in response. In the video, she indirectly expresses regret about her relationship with the late writer Sujatha, implying that they lacked the kind of emotional bonding that today’s couples supposedly enjoy (?!). She also mentions that he would get angry at home, in contrast to his calm public persona. She suggests that they didn’t talk much—ironically, I vividly remember Sujatha’s own writing about the relationship between actress Shobha and Balu Mahendra, in which he quoted something his wife had said! Toward the end of the interview, she talks about the wealth and royalties he left behind, suggesting that material things don’t matter. ( It’s ironic—men spend their entire lives working to build wealth and security for their wives and families. ) What struck me even more was the comment section. Most of the viewers seemed critical of writer Sujatha, e...

Malayalis may not have valued Nedumudi Venu, but ChatGPT did

Back in the late 1980s (exactly in 1988, according to some searches)—there was a much-loved Malayalam serial called Mandan Kunju . Ever since then, our family developed a deep appreciation for Nedumudi Venu. His acting was often compared to that of Sivaji Ganesan, who was widely celebrated at the time. There were even debates about how Nedumudi was surpassing Sivaji with his unmatched natural style. Even in his 30s, Nedumudi would appear with grey hair, convincingly portraying elderly characters. About 35 years ago, I happened to watch a film in which Nedumudi Venu actually played the lead role—something quite rare in his career. I couldn’t remember the plot or the supporting cast, but what stayed with me vividly was the setting. The film had been shot in Munnar’s Madupetty Estate, with the estate school serving as one of the locations. I also remembered a Carnatic-influenced song filmed outdoors in the estate, which left a strong impression on me. For years, I tried to rediscover ...