TRP mafia and Anna Hazare -- best critic from Settaikkaran

Lately, friend of mine texted me to read Arundhati Roy's I'd rather not be Anna article published in The Hindu newspaper. Previously I too blogged on the topic and it once received huge traffic.

I always boast myself that Tamil has huge number of authors who can get to depth. Though there are lots of critical views on Anna Hazare issue, the best critic I have read is from Settaikkaran blog "உண்ணா" ஹஜாரேயும் ஊழல் எதிர்ப்பு நாடகமும்

As long as we have such in-depth articles in Tamil, we may not get victimized by TRP mafia of north India.

Comments

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...

Beyond Groupon Now -- Street marketing platform in GroupDeal

Our team has developed GroupDeal, group buying software platform that powers many Groupon competitor sites. Being ours is the first and popular groupon clone in the market, our team introduced many new features. Like I already pointed out , we added self service merchant login in the first version itself and Groupon introduced the same feature--much later as Groupon 2.0. By August 2011, our team introduced another killer feature termed as "GroupDeal Live". It is more than Groupon's Groupon Now: It has street marketing ability. With it, merchants can create deals for the (sudden) crowd. By looking at merchant control panel, they can find the users around their shops and branches. The users are classified into Normal/Web Users and iPhone Users--and so, merchants can identify the new crowd. They can then create deals to attract the online crowd. The platform will be of huge help during any procession or sudden crowd in any branches. I hope, Groupon will adop...