Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

As and when I get time, I will be exploring the various areas in Bangalore, though it may not be of interest to you all, I will be writing it down with the intention of keeping it as a log for self and you may also find something of some interest to you.

Today I went on really long walk lasting 1hr 30mins. I started from the area I live in Tyagarajnagar at 5:15 pm, navigated to Kathriggupe road (Vidyapeeta Circle) and went on this road (via Ashoknagar) till I reached the back side of BMS College. I then entered Hanumanthnagar and went on for some distance before I took a left turn and continued for some for time (I suppose I had taken another left turn) till I reached another road which was the 50ft road. The time was around 5:50 when I entered the 50ft road.

This road was a very long one, after continuing for sometime I entered the Srinagar area, and various blocks in it. I came across the PES Group Instituion college and RV Hospital on this road. One aspect of navigating on Bangalore roads is that right side of the road may be one block and left side may be a totally different block, which sometimes causes a lot of confusion. For example, when in Srinagar, one side was Nagendra Block, and the other was Raghavendra Block.

I kept on walking soon I entered another nagar, Girinagar to be precise, not knowing where the road leads I kept on walking. I saw a couple of buses pass by which had routes numbers which I was aware of, viz., 37 and another I dont quite recall now. At around 6:15, I reached the Girinagar BDA park, near to the Girinagar Branch of Corporation Bank. The road ahead looked deserted and the area name was like avanahalli or something similar, so not to tire myself more, I turned back.

I came back till PES College and then turned right, and continued, only then did I realise that I was walking on the road parallel to the SBM Colony and the Katriguppe main road, since I reached the SBM Colony road, near NIIT (Banashankari Branch). Since I knew this road I took a turn intending to reach the katriguppe main road which should be running parallel to SBM colony road based on my calculation. My calculation turned to be wrong, after walking a few hundered meter and not connecting to the other road I turned back and came back to SBM colony road in Srinivasnagar.

In Srinivasnagar, I saw Reliance Fresh store filled with people, I am not sure if the store has been formally inagurated or not, since work was still going on outside, they were putting the name stickers on the board outside the shop. But seeing the rush left me wondering what make the store different from other existing vegetable/fruit/grocery stores. Is it the craze of visiting a new store or what is it make people flock into the store? I finally reached back to the Vidyapeeta Circle and reached my room at 6:50 pm.

So today was really tiring, I must have walked around 7-9 Kms, I dont know. Anyways, walking is the best way to explore the roads, when one go in bus/vehicle the roads are difficult to know. So with this I end this boring and useless piece of scrap If you read it you must be wondering why! why! why did i read this!

Weekends are usually boring and sleepy, so what do you do for some fun, well you can play computer games for timepass. So from now on whenever I find a good game I will be doing a write up on some of the small and simple games which offer awesome playability. This week I will be writing about Classic Clickomania developed by Matthias Schussler.

Clickomania (Classic) has a very simple objective, as the author puts it:
“Your goal is to remove as many stones as possible by clicking on groups of stones with the same color. Sounds easy? I can tell you that it is harder than you might think… “

The game looks simple and you might ask what is so challenging in this game. Well it all comes down to the purpose you want to play it for, if you are playing for time-pass and fun then just go on clicking and try you luck and get best scores. But if you really want to clear all the blocks then you will have to be very clever calculating the impact of each removal, this is where it gets a bit tricky, complex and very challenging. This game can be played by all age groups, which is a big plus point.

The playability of the game is also good, one can set the rows and cols required in the playing field, the height of each stone, the no of stone patterns and various other configuration settings. Since the stone layout pattern is randomly generated, each game is different from the previous one, hence achieving good scores consistently is quite a difficult job and gives a boost to the playability of the game.

To test the game I played it five times, my worst score was 35 blocks and the best was 1 blocks. So that makes me a good player huh

Here are the plus points of the game:

• High playability (do not get bored of playing it even after playing it many times)
• Small download size (450+ KB)
• Minimal system requirements, hence will run on any PC.
• No installation is required, one just has to unzip it.
• Available for multiple platforms, right from mobile phones to Linux and Unix variants using java technology.
• Many configuration options provided.
• It’s a freeware!

The only minus point of the game which i found was that, I did not like the interface of the new version of the game, the old interface (classic) was much better and easier to use.

Links:
URL: http://www.clickomania.ch/click/ClassicClick.html
Size: 483 KBytes
System Requirements: Windows NT/2000/ XP/95/98/ME
License: Freeware

What do you feel about the game, did you like it? Let me know by leaving the comments below.

Hello readers, I will be taking a break of one month from blogging, during which I will most probably will not be posting. Please do expect posting to begin from Feb 18th onwards.

Thanks for visiting the blog, in the meantime you can visit the archives and read it. Thank you all for your cooperation.

With the advent of social networking site like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog and various others; it has become important to make a way so that people can quickly recognize you. One of doing so is using a photo or any image which you want.

Adding a photo is acceptable to most when it is put on sites which allow proper privacy settings. But what if you do not want to use your photo, but use some other image. Well here is a good site called ImageChef, a site which allows any one to create a custom image without any technical knowledge.

There is a large set of images to choose from, nicely divided into appropriate categories. So what do you have to do to get a custom image. Nothing much just go to the site, pick an image you like, you will get a text box in which you can enter the text you want to appear on the image, click on preview and you will get the image with the text you entered. Also there is an new section on creating images for instant messengers.

Here is a small preview of some of the images which I tested on, not the best but workable:

Did you ever want to create a neat, good looking website? But did not have any ideas on the design or did’t know how to start, then here is the site for you. FreeLayout.com is a site which offers free website templates to website designers who are inexperienced, or just need some inspiration for their designs. Know what the layouts are 100% free for use (some of the templates may require the user to link back in some form).

The plus point of this site is that the templates are derived from the sites users and web designers from around the world who have contributed to the template world by posting their designs online. And more users are submitting their design daily. One more glorious example of how much people believe in sharing and making the best things in life free!

Coming to the navigation, the templates can be browsed through by sorting them based on parameters such as date added, rating, no of votes, and download count. The Categories available to choose from are Website Templates, Flash Templates, WordPress Themes, Textpattern Templates, MySpace Layouts/Backgrounds/Generators, and various tutorials and articles.

The site also has a huge collection of Online Tools and Generators, there are Flash Generators, Graphic Generators, DHTML/CSS Generators, and Javascript Generators. Lots to explore in there.

So this a good site especially for inexperienced web developers and for newbies. Even if you are not interested in it now, some or the other day you will be, So do bookmark this site. Also build your website or if you already have a site, don’t forget to let me know of them by mentioning your page url in the comments below.

Orkut has in the last 24 hours added some new features and this list features one of the most requested feature that many have been waiting for, that of being able to delete multiple scrap’s at one go.

Here are a list of new features that I was able to notice today:

• Option to select multiple scrap’s at a time and deleting them.
• Option of being able to view either 10/20/30 scraps at a time.
• A new Reply button for each scrap means that you can reply to scraps from your scrap book itself. This was a a feature which was until now enjoyed by firefox users with the Orkut ScrapEasy extension.
• Now one can choose to get friend requests from everyone or only from people that speak the languages that one has set in the profile.
• In the messages sent to communities, i now find an option to ‘Ignore this person’, which means you can block messages from reaching you when the ignored person posts to the community.
• Here is something which i have not tried but may be of help if more coverage of India is done in Google Earth, visit http://www.orkut.com/Map.aspx when you are logged in to Orkut.

Though these may not represent all the changes that may have been performed, I am still wondering why Orkut does not have any mention of these in the ‘news’ of the site. Strange!.

Recently I was seeing a new craze in our college internet center, that of most people using orkut.com, the social networking site. So me being the person I am, i took a plunge into this to check out what it is all about.

The first thing I noticed is that Orkut is in affiliation with Google, and it accepts the google account id to login. I remembered that one of my friends had quite some time back sent an orkut invite or something like that and i had joined it. And had added him as a friend. But never used it since. So with that in my mind, I used my gmail id and logged in and hoped that this time around I would atleast last around till i completely try it out.

First I went through the list of friends of the friend i had mentioned above. I found quite a few of the degree friends in that list with whom i had lost contact. Proceeded further and added them to the list and so the hunt began to find more of the people I knew. In the process i discovered that Orkut keeps track of the relationship’s very nicely, for example when i clicked on one of the people through my friend’s ‘friends list’, and wanted to add it, it nicely showed how the person is relates to me(Something like: Nithin ->Friend 1 -> Friend 1’s friend -> Friend 2. It is a nice feature and makes life much easier. I am just wondering how the algorithm in the background works.

Then there are other features like scrap’s, testimonials, etc. It also has an option to message the friends or a ‘group’ of friends or just a person right from the site itself. Just now after a new friend was added I noticed that even Birthday reminders are shown.

I was adding more and more friends, so the next step was organizing them. So there was an option to create groups, which i happily did and create some groups and added my friends to the relevant group. Also there is communities, which I am yet to try, though i have joined a few.

It’s nearly two days since I entered Orkut, and I my friends list has 20 odd friends, some of whom I have not met for over 2 years now. Overall it is a great networking tool, the only thing that worries me is that how long will people continue using it and will take interest to keep the details updated, since that’s what will matter over time. For the time being, let me go slow on this, since I have already more than exceeded my broadband internet limit, so maybe try out more next month.

If you know me, and are not on my Orkut friends list, please let me know by posting a comment below, and I will add you in.

Checkout this some interesting useful less known webSites about Linux:

Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands with brief information, from O’Reilly.

http://linuxdevcenter.com/linux/cmd

A Great collection Technicial database about different distribution of Linux, from RedHat, Fefora, SuSE, and FreeBSD Documentation.

http://elibrary.fultus.com/technical/index.jsp

Linux Art and Design Resources

http://linuxartist.org

Google Search specific to Linux Technology

http://google.com/linux

Source of Linux related Security issues

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/

Linux Based Games and Codes

http://linuxgames.com

A active Linux Community to answer our questions

http://linuxquestions.org/

Collection of Linux based links for various platforms

http://linuxlinks.com/

Taken from: http://i5bala.blogspot.com/