asnowfall

life of creativity

Cloud is a creative produce; sky, as long as it's alive, is going to purse this natural creative routine. We people need not have to fear the end creativity.

David Irving, prosecuted by Austrian court for denying Holocaust

Its unbelievable..
How can someone be prosecuted for his opinion?
Its suck bloody, fu*** law..

Does US should prosecute person who denies 9/11 ?

Its so shocking....
Austrians do not have any moral right to blame mulsims for protesting against Mohammud's cartoon.

poem "invincible winter tree"

invincible winter tree

you are so fine
indivisible by eyes
elude even the snow grains

you have an unique
signature, made of twigs
scribbled on gray space

your naked flame
dodges the cold air and
kept you warm enought to live

your web is incomprehensible
to my infinite mind and
untracable by trembling brush

poem by MS sufferer

I found this intense poem by accident.
beast

LAME

I was looking for an open source MP3 encoder library so that I can make my own MP3 files.
If anybody is interested in writing an s/w application for making they can use this LAME library.
http://lame.sourceforge.net/

If you are curios about MP3 patents too…
http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eeds/mpeg-patents-faq

Is .Net slower? a nice article

I wanted to know how managed C++ works in .Net environment. While doing this research I found some usefull articles.

Writing Faster Managed Code: Know What Things Cost

free speech: "holier" than "godS".

I think Danish paper did not do anything wrong by publishing Prophet Muhammad's cortoon. Some muslism followers might have felt hurt; but freedom of expression is the holiest thing.

I think all the western media including US, AUS should re-publish the cartoon just to uphold the freedom of speech.

In 80', I felt sad when Indian govt banned Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses". What more can one expect from a pseudo-democracy?

According to me media should have right to publish article saying
-"Jewish holocaust was a fiction"
-cartoon on Prophet Muhammad

Cartoon itself...

Grizzly man movie

It's a real story of a man who spent months with Grizzly bears.
During this time he shot 100s of hours video of Grizzle bear from a distance too close to be comfortable.
In these videos, you can see him shooting/commenting himself with the help of tripod.
He got killed/eaten by a bear and he is from LongIsland, NY.

Highlights of the movie are

1) Closeups of bears, scenes of bears fighting, etc..
2) Why he preferred bears for human society?
What made him to isolate himself from society for seasons and live in mountains?

logo for my site.

I have been working on my site and was forced to create a logo. Here is the concept behind logo.

'images-expressions'
It's well known that painting can 'talk'; agreed it can not change the day today reality. Photographs speak too, but they are not fluent, like a stammerer. On the other hand, painting has more flexible tongue. I tried to represent 'images-expressions' in the logo.

Logo

Making of logo...
I wanted my logo to have
1) Photography:- Mountain shown in the logo is a photograph/image.

2) Painting:- floating cloud is a painting. Lips seem to assert "I am a better communicator"

3) Human:- Again, floating cloud represents human with it's flesh color, nerves and lips.

4) Nature:- Mountain, trees....

Logo is a merge of a painting & photograph.

Telling stories

Recently I woke up to this meaningfull song; singer's voice makes it sound real too. I think song is saying the following....Our eyes/ears see observe events and there will be many gaps between these events. When we start intrepreting them, either the next day or 10 year later, we fill in these gaps with exciting assumptions. I think we do this to make our life more interesting..

Here is good example....
Take a case of man in unreciprocated love with "Y". Assume he is also a wishful thinker. There is chance that he may read in between the lines and misinterpret "Y"'s spoken and written words. Thus he may makeup a story and even write it in his dairy but the fact the remains that his love is unreciprocated.

Why "..less mundane..."?
This means he did all this misinterpretation for the sake of excitement. I think this is a both cynical and hopless view of his unreciprocated love.

I think best lines of this song are....
---------------------------------------
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane....

Complete lyrics ~~~~ Telling stories-Tracy Chapman
--------------------------------------------------
There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn’t mean
You’re not just telling stories
There is fiction in the space between
You and me

There is fiction in the space between
You and reality
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane
There is fiction in the space between
You and me

There’s a science fiction in the space between
You and me
A fabrication of a grand scheme
Where I am the scary monster
I eat the city and as I leave the scene
In my spaceship I am laughing
In your remembrance of your bad dream
There’s no one but you standing

Leave the pity and the blame
For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between

There is fiction in the space between
You and everybody
Give us all what we need
Give us one more sad sordid story
But in the fiction of the space between
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
Sometimes a lie is the best thing

tell whom?

Effect of loosing something that you never had is worst because you can not even tell anybody..l

atheist - "Happy holidays" or "Merry christmas"

Yestarday me, Jack and David had this discussion during our lunch.

Topic: How should an atheist greet people for Dec 25?
-Happy holidays
-Merry christmas
-Season's greeting

Dictionary point of view

Happy holidays: In word 'holidays', 'holi' stands for 'holy'. So an atheist may have subtle difficulty when using this. Some christian believers may get offended when they hear Happy holidays instead of Merry christmas

Merry christmas: An atheist may have real difficulty when using this.

Season's greeting: Sounds perfectly fine...

Humane point of view
Greetings does not directly make things happen, but the greeting-reciepient's mind can certainly affect events.
So, while greeting, its good to use what the reciepient would like to hear.
So, I think, an atheist should use Merry christmas if it makes the recipient happy...

Adobe CS2 "Smart Sharpening"->"HighLights"

I had not realized effectiveness of "Smart Sharpening"->"HighLights", till I started viewing the image at 400%.

Here are samples to proove the effectiveness of "Smart Sharpening"->"HighLights"..:-)
This control is supposed control sharpening of highlights; I had not observed its effect because I would normally view at 100% but at 400% effect is very apperant.

"Smart Sharpening"->"HighLights" is 17%

"Smart Sharpening"->"HighLights" is 90%

This way I can reduce the over-shrpen effect

depth & distance

Realization of distance and depth happens only when we dare to stroll along edge of the cliff

Panoramic Photography - Projections

Imagine looking at the world map printed on paper.
You may ask, Why some have curved lines while some have straight lines?
May be, I too should have asked this question long back.

Today, as part of my research(loose usage of word..:-)) in to panoramic photography, I started reading about projections.
I found this very usefull information.

http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/CartDef/MapDef/mapDef.html

http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/CartDef/cartDef.gr.html

Panorama photography - AUTOPANO

After a gap of few months break I made a second attempt at panoramic photography.
My first stop was at PTAssembler site. The automation done to PTassembler, a panorama stitcher s/w, surpraised me; especially the addition of AUTOPANO.

AUTOPANO
--------
AUTOPANO is based on the research called "Recognising panoramas" done by two great people Matthew Brown and David Lowe

Here is nice a presentation on "Recognising panoramas"
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/425/slides/12-Panoramas.ppt

Also research paper http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/papers/cvpr05.pdf

..life is pleasant...

"Life is pleasant.
Death is peaceful.
It's the transition that's troublesome" -Isaac Asimov

This is one of the most convincing quote I have heard in recent times.

In my opinion....
Many people wish to be dead; even such people would have experienced pleasant moments at some time in their life. In those pleasant moments, world/life would have looked like a paradise to them.

Once dead, person is a senseless meat, so she/he can't experience the peace; but still the person thinks that death is peaceful. For a person in misery this makes perfect sense because by dying he/she can escape from dreaded tomorrow. So for such a person peace means just no-misery.

Means to reach death: accident, natural, suicide are certainly trouble-some.

My friend Jack's opinions....
Many people do not consider life to be pleasant at all; for them life is never ever pleasant. Another thing is, for the one who does not believe in life-after-death, peace after death is meaning less.

Anyway...it's great quote.