Siddharth's Blog

Jogged 5 kilometers for the first time today. Now, the question is.... what will be my state in the evening?? ;) In any case, I feel good that I could manage it.

Tried Picassa with Hello yesterday finally. It worked like a charm :)

my pic. 

Back in Bangalore
Reached yesterday night after a hectic and lovely 3 day trip to Ahmedabad. Its nice to be back....

General ramblings
Things are going okay for the last couple of days. Nothing particularly new or interesting to write about at the moment. So this post is more like a list of ramblings.... come to think of it, everything in my blog is more like a list of ramblings in the life of 'yet-another-software-programmer'. Ocasssionaly I do write about work or software or echo other people's point of views (which I agree with). But for the most part, I like to talk and talk.... and talk about casual stuff.

Picasa
The topic for the day is the now free Google Picassa software. I had been looking at Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 demo for some time recently and I had liked the convinience that it offered. So much so that I had called up at least 2 Adobe retailers in the city to find out what a licenced copy would cost me. Sadly, I never got any proper response and the thing persisted like that because the demo version was okay for the mean time since most of my requirements are to do with organizing the photographs into albums and viewing/searching them.

But now coming to Picasa, the following sums up my opinion:

• I was quite impressed on the usability front when I gave it a whirl recently. I distinctly remember getting a Jasc Software demo download for similar purpose, but I found the GUI was simply not good enough. I uninstalled it after the first hour or so that I used it. For me to use a photo organization software, it has to have a good interface. Picasa scores heavily on that front. Its elegant and simple. Sort of like most GNOME apps that I like. Its easy to do most stuff and is presented very neatly. The menus are not heaily nested and 'organized' in that sense.
• Another big plus is the fact that I can post images to this blog online from the app. Although I haven't tried my hand at that yet, I'm sure I will soon. Going by what I've heard from my friends it should be a nice no-hitch experience.
• I read it serves as a means to transfer photographs between friends using the app. That would be a nice thing too. I'd rather not send huge pics through mail or reduce their size by uploading to a photo album site. I would really love to send images in the actual size to my friends. So I look forward to that too.
  

The downsides that I found during my trial run were:

• there is no zoom option.
• there's little image manipulation that one can do from within Picasa. The enhancement and the red eye reduction work well.... but still, it would have been good to have a few manual controls instead of only one-click operations.
• the software litters Picasa.ini files all over the hard disk (I would like to know the necessity for those files sometime, maybe I'm missing something here).
• there is no option to change a photograph's creation date timestamp. This usually gets in my way of navigating on the timeline. If I take a scanned pic and enhance it in GIMP or some app like that, then when I come back to Picasa I end up having the pic showing up as recent instead of old. Or even if I get pics in mail from a friend, they end up having a wrong timestamp. Adobe allows you to correct this.... I wish Picasa did too. I need to do some RTFM to see if there is any workaround for this issue.
• there is no Linux port for this application too. Maybe I can use it with Wine. But I'll have to try that some time at leisure. I dislike booting into Windows for specific apps. If only I could find something equivalent or better on Linux. But that requires some more search.
  

All in all, Picasa is more than just flashy software. It serves most (if not all) of my photo management requirements and is free to use, so I can definitely recommend it to a friend. Adobe may still have an edge over Picasa at present, but at least the competition has increased for it. I can only hope for better things to come :)

Personal stuff
Its mid-week and time is flying. Went to Golden Palms resort on Monday evening. Was a nice trip. Felt good to talk to Mama after a long time. The place does look grand. Too bad, I don't have any pics to upload. Looking forward to spend this weekend at Ahmedabad if that trip goes as planned.

Work and misc
* Could not agree more to this post from Callum McKenzie. I've been in a project which used C and where memory allocation/de-allocation was a mess because we were afraid of customers who would 'go to bed thinking gotos are bad' (in the words of my lead). I wish there were more people like this guy.
* Yay! I notice Blogger sports a new look again. I like the keyboard shortcuts and stuff.... though I thought the previous look for composing messages was good too.

Philosophy.
Never studied it, but have one none the less ;)
To see which thinker would you agree with, you can try this page.
My first 5 results were:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Jeremy Bentham (89%)
3. John Stuart Mill (79%)
4. Aristotle (76%)
5. Epicureans (62%)

Note: The highest score, 100, represents the closest philosophical
match to your reponses. This is not to say that you and the
philosopher are in total agreement. However this is a philosophy
that you may want to study further.

Almost here.
So many things....
* the long awaited weekend is almost here.
* the passport renewal is almost here.
* the expected refund for the real-estate hunt that went awry is almost here.
* the visit to the travel agent is almost here.
* the completion of my house shifting exercise is almost here.
If only I could remove the 'almost' and get on with it ;)

Memories.
As I collected my stuff from my present residence and moved towards my next, I realize I have a load of stuff which (strictly-speaking) does not make much sense to keep, but which I think I'll be nostalgic about if I let it go. I wonder, does this happen to everyone? :)

Weekend approaching....
Continuing from where I left off last time:
The real estate hunt proved too much to take. After hours spent in talking to the builder, financers, family, friends and the lawyer we finally hit on a stumbling block that forced me to let go of the same. I'm exhausted.... but still not sure if I should take a break from the whole thing for a little while or to press further and carry on to the next builder, and the next, and the next.... what was that bit about perseverance again? ;)

Had a nice trip to Delhi (apart from the not-so-nice experience in the morning). Spoke to Sandy after a long time. Missed Nirula's burger though.... Maybe next time? ;)

Later in the day:
Got drenched again. But for a change, I don't mind it so much. Point is I got my work done for which I had to venture out.

Upgrade to Thunderbird working very fine for me. Tempted to switch back from Evolution. But I shall wait for Evo 2 before making any decisions.