I had some minor hiccups while installing java on Ubuntu 8.04, here are the notes I stored as I went along-

On the Ubuntu Forums it was suggested that OpenJDK shud be used rather than Sun JDK.

After installing Eclipse it couldnt find the correct path to the Jvm or jre…

Used gksudo nautilus in app launcher(Alt + F2) and opened /etc/eclipse/javahome so that it could be opened as root and edited.
Added this line
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk

The next problem was while launching Eclipse, “An error occurred, check some log….” This is a common error and it was due to a corrupted directory used for the workspace. This directory was created by me in my earlier attempts to launch Eclipse.

Created a new dir and Eclipse ran!

If you ve been trying to use the setAttribute function to dynamically change the properties of an HTML element and wondering what to do when it fails on Internet Explorer 6 then here s something that most definitely works:

var oDiv =  document.getElementById(“div_name”);

Instead of typing
oDiv.setAttribute(“style”, “color:#666;”);
Simply access that property directly by Javascript
oDiv.style.cssText = “background-color:#666″;

This works on ie6 ie7 and ff. I havent checked in Netscape.
I found this solution here
http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/archives/2005/03/setAttribute_does_not_work_in_IE_when_used_with_th.html

It is the 5th comment on the page by Rob.(http://blog.throbs.net/)

I installed Thunderbird so that I could check my personal email, Hotmail and Yahoo! mails all together. To enable Hotmail and Yahoo, you MUST install the ‘webmail’ add-on for the ‘hotmail’ and ‘yahoo’ extensions to work. Here is the link to get these add-ons.

http://webmail.mozdev.org/installation.html

After that while configuring accounts you must select WebMail and then proceed to create the Hotmail or Yahoo accounts. While doing that you MUST write @hotmail.com OR @yahoo.com. Which means yourname@hotmail.com OR yourname@yahoo.com.

After doing that, Yahoo may get configured without any issues, but Hotmail, being a Microsoft property, needs a bit more cajoling. If Yahoo is Betty, then Hotmail is Veronica. Sad joke, lets get on with the solution. After Googling a bit, I found a post that suggested at looking at the LAST comment on this page

http://www.neilturner.me.uk/2005/Apr/09/thunderbird_webmail_extension.html#c5733

I looked at that and all it said was try and update the add-on by clicking the Update button found after accessing Tools>Addons. I did that but didnt work, but what I did notice was the ‘Options’ button that gets activated on selecting the Hotmail Addon. When you click this Options button, it gives you an option to choose between Hotmail or Hotmail Live!(New website) I selected Hotmail Live and that was it!

Now all the email accounts are right here and I dont have to wait for Hotmail, Yahoo or RediffMailPro to load up their stupid ads before I get to my messages.

Update: All kinds of mail can now be accessed simply using Gmail. Just go to Settings and specify your Hotmail, Yahoo or any other mail(including POP 3) and get all of it inside Gmail!

For a recent project(CLR), I was stuck because of some unassuming characters! They were very adamant and just wouldnt show up. Meet the ‘&’ character and the ‘+’ character. These guys wouldnt budge an inch from their invisible stand despite me saving the text file as ANSI or UTF-8 or Unicode. I was pulling text from a text file into a Flash textfield and these characters just couldnt tolerate it!

As usual I began the ‘googling it out’ routine and after many unsuccessfull attempts I stumbled upon this page: http://i-technica.com/whitestuff/urlencodechart.html where I found the dreaded solution! Use the htmlencode characters as follows:
& – %26
+ – %2b

Here’s a page where you can enter you content and get the required converted data in the appropriate format: http://www.dommermuth-1.com/protosite/experiments/encode/index.html

I installed Cakewalk 9! When the world is using SX and Sonar and Logic and all that jazz, I installed Cakewalk! No VST, no mastering plugins, no hardcore reverb…nothing! Still Cakewalk 9! About 6 years ago, when I was still a noob when it came to the computer and the internet, I used to have a walkman which could record. I had a keyboard that could allow me to record 2 tracks. I used to hanker for more tracks. I used to create a song using the 2 tracks and while playing them back, I used to play yet another track over it and record it on my walkman on a cassette. I made an entire album out of it and the only friend who heard it and appreciated it, suggested that I should call it ‘The Empty Boat’.

Then Computers happened and then something called Audio Architect happened. Unlimited tracks! I was spellbound and didnt know head or tail of using it. Then Cakewalk 7 happened. Still clueless! Rebirth followed but it had 4 tracks! I used to record many ‘four’ tracks from Rebirth and import it into Cakewalk as audio and then mixdown a track.

After some more time, I saw that a guy had a cable that connected from the musical keyboard to the computer and record MIDI in Cakewalk! I was going to kill myself for this technological advancement. I got this cable for 2000 bucks(roughly $40)! I was cheated as that cable was faulty and I thought it isnt working because I dont understand MIDI connectivity! Some more time went by and then Fruity Loops 3 happened. It was easier and created better sounding stuff. Then of course Reason and Cubase and then SX.

I bought the same MIDI cable again and this time for 300 bucks(roughly $6) and it connected with no problems. But every solution gives birth to a new problem. This one led to LATENCY. Some more years went by in fruitless thoughts of ‘how I am not supposed to be a musician’ and all the rest of it.

Day before yesterday I found the Cakewalk 9 CD and I installed it. Played it using my MIDI cable and WOAH…. no latency! Not even a bit! I quickly recorded some melody and exported it as a MIDI file and imported it in FL Studio 6. I pasted it on a Sytrus track and there was a masterpiece! Finally!

I ve decided I m going to create one CMS system and use it for every project. Same with the shopping cart and the products section of any site. There is a bit of a mental debate regarding MySQL and XML but one of them should be soon finalized. The sole reason for considering XML is ‘it is portable’ and I still need to learn how to transfer a MySQL database from one server to another.

The objective of creating one CMS or shopping cart system is, once that is done then I can concentrate solely on design which is something that has not been done consciously for years now.

Anyway, any good CMS solution should have at least some basic text formatting options when users add content. The solution that I had provided earlier was: Above every ‘textarea’ where the user would insert content, I had written very proudly ‘Feel free to use HTML tags in here!’ Now that was some solution!

I have noticed that useless solutions dont make a big issue, they simply get ignored and die out on their own. So I started hunting for tutorials to make rich text editors for CMS. Fortunately, I came across the following link: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/richtexteditor/index.htm. It gave me just what I wanted: A text editor that generates code for whatever formating the user does inside the textarea.

Though I still havent checked if the same code gets converted into formatted textarea while editing it!

One of the most recent minor problems while test writing code for a site (Desire) was avoiding cached content to be shown on refreshing the browser. When testing, a page is uploaded umpteen times with minor edits in the page. Till some days ago this was not a problem. Since the last few days, Firefox, the browser I use to view pages and to upload files using the add-on(FireFTP), started showing cached content each time I hit refresh or F5. I tried to find some ways to avoid this and primarily the PHP cache control scripts available online offered some solutions where they set the header to not show cache content. None of that worked and I started fiddling with the browser’s(Firefox) settings. Nothing happened. Then I finally opened IE and accessed the Tools > Internet Options

I clicked on Settings and change the radio button for ‘Check for newer versions of stored pages’ to ‘Every visit to the page‘

Thats it! Now every time the page loads, it loads with the last edited changes regardless of how small they were and how small was the page! The only hassle is, I will have to change this setting back to its default when I need to surf the net or check mails etc. But thats a small price to pay!

The new year has begun and there is already a lot of work to do. There are 3 print advertisements and a website for Aero, a shopping cum answers site for PM, a massive redesign of AI and the exhibition stall’s graphics for Acumen. All of it needs to be done within the next 8 to 10 days! My biggest problem is lousy time management. If I make a timetable, then it means I ll definitely not do anything according to in actuality. I have a very nasty habit of doing nothing till the last moment. Some call it working under pressure. But this habit stops me from creating some really great work. My clients like what I create but I m never satisfied with it beyond a few days. I think the reason for this is lousy time management skills. Being an artist or a programmer or a good singer or anything that you may be, is not enough!

In fact I had made a list of things required for someone to become tremendously successful in a particular field. Here I mean a field directly related to some form of creativity like acting, film making, music, computer artistry, performing arts etc. The following things are a must and you WILL find at least 75% of these attributes in anybody who’s made it BIG in a creative field:

• Talent. (Most of us have this)
• Willingness to put in excruciating hard work. (Few of us have this)
• Perserverance (Most people dont even know the meaning of this in the true sense)
• Time Management Skills (Few of us have this)
• An effortless, steady resource of funds (Very few of us have this. With this you can seriously experiment with your art without hassles to create something unique. But many a times, pseudo-artists with financial resources start falsely identifying themselves as true artists, thus creating nuissance for us)
• Lady Luck (This can be the proverbial women behind a successful man or simply luck)
• Decent family background and upbringing.
• A foolish or ‘real’ belief in the self. (You must believe in yourself, at least foolishly, this helps the third point in this list)
• Some amount of cunningness. (Surprised? This is the most important element to make it really really big! You may have noticed that some people are really deserving but they have reached nowhere, the reason for this is the lack of this last point. It is a serious contradiction to art but it is true. All super achievers have some amount of cunningness in them)

I am sure there are some points that can be added here. But more or less these 9 points are required to come in the public eye as a successful person. Not all are necessarily required. 50% of this is good enough to keep you decently happy, the bills are paid and you have a life. Less than that is called struggle and more than that is called gifted! Also the degree to which you have the above points will make a difference. If you are decently talented but are not so keen on hardwork then please count both of those as ‘one’ point.

So how many points are you? If its not a very pleasing number then you know what areas you need to work on!

This week started with getting my data organized which included sorting the piles of CDs and distributing tasks and data on the 2 machines. I worked on a print ad for a friend’s new music album and a backdrop for an exhibition stall for a new client, who are into distance education I think.

Anyway I continued work on the IF CMS by enabling the ‘edit product’ section and submitted a design option for F. I havent got response on that as yet. IF is my first ecommerce site and unfortunately this week has not seen much work done on it.Yesterday I had to go to the office to get my PAN card, open an account which had delayed becuase I couldnt make the same signatures in 3 different location of the same form last time and the PM box needed some changes. I also changed the phone number on AK’s site and disabled a link on AR’s site.

Somehow I cannot give my 100% to a work which is either non paying or non real. Non real means, some people want to get work done for half baked ideas or something that is an imitation or something that is not really their cup of tea.

This is the last week of the year!

My new machine is finally here. Now I have 2 machines to work on! One dedicated for graphics and the other for programming(web), music, bluetooth and internet. I alway wanted to separate the graphics from all the other functions on the computer.

Anyway this new machne is a Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz which is basically 40% faster and more efficient than regular machines. My other machine is a P4 3 GHz HT which is 30% faster than not HT P4 machines. Anyway I posted a question on Yahoo Answers regarding which is better and here is what I got:

• Core 2 Duo, especially for graphics. The P4 may be faster but raw GHz speed doesn’t always make the difference. I’d put my money on Core 2. It’s like 64 bit computing, a 32 bit processor might be faster in GHz speed but a 64bit CPU at a lower clock rate can get more done in a single strike. It’s like an athletic runner’s heart beat vs. a non athletic person’s heart beat. The non athletic runner’s heart will beat faster but the athlete’s heart pumps more blood per stroke or beat making him faster, (more blood gets to the muscles per shot making him/her run faster and longer.)
• Depends on what you want to do – the P4 has more raw horsepower – but overall the Core 2 Duo will function much faster, particularly in something like graphics rendering.
  If you want a real serious comparison, go to www.tomshardware.com
  The do detailed comparisons of CPUs as well as Motherboards, Graphics and just about everything else there is that’s PC related.
• if P4 is HT enabled…. both are somewhat simillar…. but in terms of processor heat… Core 2 Duo wins…. well depending upon the graphics oriented work that you do i feel you will need more processor usage… so P4 may annoy you if the processor fan keeps running most of the time…. but again P4 will be cheaper.
  Choose judiciously… if bucks are not a problem go for Core 2 Duo with even higher frequency.
• yes….in everything except single threading encoding jobs
  i would recommend amd for graphics though…..much better price for performance

• Yes, because it’s really two processors, so it’s way faster than a Pentium 4. And it’s more efficient. The only bad thing is that it’s more expensive.

So thats a little lowdown on the topic from ‘people’ and not some experts most of whom are biased ‘for’ or ‘against’ something!

As a rule I never kill ants!

Acutally as a rule I dont kill anything at all. This is not very well appreciated as it increases the insects in the house. Anyway, since the last few days, the black ants living in our house have been importing in a different breed of worker ants. You may be aware that ants are exceptionally organized and disciplined beings. They are known to annex armies of ants(of another kind) to do their work. Every now and then, they bring in a new set of workers. The latest are really small red ants which do not bite! These are not the regular red ants. These are very small red ants who are very slow. Whenever I see an ant in a zone where it might die, I quickly blow it away. Surprisingly the new small red worker ants need to be blown 3 to 4 times! They hold their ground with amazing ease, as if they had sticky feet!

My father once said, “You may think that this is your house, but the insects think that it is their house!”

I had gone again to the office to work on the PM box artwork and its completed now. Later I saw a great movie with my wife, Kabul Express. It was a very very good movie! I generally dont like watching any of the new Bollywood movies.

This week started with first 3 days of the watering hole routine and then Thursday onwards I worked on the IF project with its CMS and last night I created the thumbnails page to dynamically resize images from a database. I m saying this as if I have created a non existing function in the language that deals with this problem. But for a non programmer this is an achievement!

I have gotten into PHP and am very happy about it. I really love the way one can make thumbnails on the fly. Its really surprising that ASP didn’t have that. I m sure there is a whole lot to PHP than just making thumbnails. I have managed to get 25 books on PHP! I think that should be enough to start learning PHP. My approach to learning anything has always been, keep trying the damn thing till its done. No deadlines, no goals, just to keep it going. There is one more crucial thing to the success of this method. Whatever that I am learning must have some commercial importance. For example I cannot just yet start taking 3D very seriously as there is no commercially viable project that can happen in the near or far future at this moment. The same applies to music.

OK, the PHP image gallery. There wasnt much problem as there is the GD Library and innumerable tutorials online for achieving the thumbnailing procedure. The one which turned out the most useful for me was by Michael Bailey and here is a nice pdf of it:
www.codewalkers.com/tutorialpdfs/tutorial42.pdf

If you are an absolute newcomer to PHP or any kind of programming like me, then you might stumble upon the confusion due to the header tag and where does the link for the thumbnailed image actually come? From the above tutorial, make one php file with the script for the thumbnail without any other tags, save it and close it. Then in another page using the HTML <IMG> tag and assign this thumbnail.php to the SRC attribute of the IMG tage like this
<img border=’0′ src=’thumbnail.php?”.$row['pimg'].”‘ alt=’Click to enlarge this product!’>

The PHP query string value is retrieved from MySQL and an example would be ‘the_image.jpg’. It is basically the full version of the image we want to make a thumbnail of. thumbnail.php does all the necessary processing and returns an appropriate thumbnail.

Another issue I faced was, how to create a grid. I had a layout of 2 columns and many rows to display a bunch of images pulled from the database. This is what I did. I had a loop running to collect all the image paths of the selected category of images. This loop obviously incremented a counter called $num to see how many images we have pulled. At every loop point I simply divided the counter variable by 2 and saw if it returned ‘zero’ as the remainder by using the modulo function. If it did then it meant that it needed to be in the second column in the grid. If it didnt then it needed to come in the first column. Here is the script to demonstrate this:

$result = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM if_products WHERE pcategory=’”.$cat.”‘”);
echo “<table border=’0′ cellpadding=’10′ cellspacing=’10′>”;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$num=$num+1;
if($num%2==0){
echo “<td valign=’top’ width=’50%’>”;

echo “<table class=’product_display’>”;
echo “<tr><td>”;
echo “<a href=’if_product_details.php?id=”.$row['id'].”‘><img border=’0′ src=’if_thumbnail.php?”.$row['pimg'].”‘ alt=’Click to enlarge this product!’></a>”;
echo “</td></tr>”;
echo “</table>”;

echo “</td></tr>”;

}else{
echo “<tr><td valign=’top’ width=’50%’>”;
echo “<table class=’product_display’>”;
echo “<tr><td>”;
echo “</td></tr>”;
echo “</table>”;

echo “</td>”;
}
}
if($num%2 != 0){
echo “</td></tr>”;
}
echo “</table>”;

Apart from that I created the new year ad option for A and the concept is approved, just the artwork had some serious layout issues. Its best to look at a whole lot of good layouts before starting any artwork. Also the problem is to suddenly shift from web dev to hi res print artwork. The entire process changes. Firstly the machine reacts slower due to hi res and then there is no code to achieve something faster.

I have ordered for a new machine and it will be here alongside in a week or so. Its cost me 39 k which comes from my wife’s office as a perk! All machines I ve ever bought have come from my wife.

The new machine is a core 2 duo 2.13 ghz machine with a gigabyte of ram and a 256mb graphics card. Its sufficient for my kinda work. Create artwork, splice it and bind it with the database content with resuable code.

I am on a roll considering work life. I ve never had it better. I work from home, do good work and get paid very well. At least thats how it looks like at the moment. I ve reason to believe that something that comes too fast can go away faster. But this hasnt come fast but yes it has come pretty easy. I ve not really done anything to get this.

This week I created 2 templates entirely in Photoshop for websites(IF & FF). They will have huge online catalogs with a shopping cart for IF. The templates got approved while I was typing this with a minor edit in IF.

I also created a mailer for the AR’s Relationships movie screening at Fun Republic this weekend. I finished the PM box yesterday but then it needed some changes. I went today and did them yet they were not quite good enough. Now I have it on CD and I have been told what to put on it.

Yesterday I spoke to A about the new year’s ad to be created by this weekend.

Some guy from a subsidiary of Kotak has been calling up regarding fixing up a meeting to discuss the possibility of work for their ads. I really have no intentions of travelling all the way to town just to discuss work! Today I finally requested him to give me the brief for one ad on mail, I work on it and if they like my style then we continue working, else, Happy New Year!

An old friend called to tell me that there is an enquiry for a stall design for a lingerie company. I m least interested and totally busy to even think about stall designs. So I gave him some cock regarding the same and got on with my watering hole routine. I ve come to the conclusion that no one is really a friend of mine and I am not really a friend to anyone either. If I do good to someone, I do it because I want to, not because he is a friend. Thats selfishness!

Work wise this week was more or less wasted due to the hospitalization of my grandmother in law, the trip to Ro and of course because of my wife’s last week of mandatory vacation. I spent a night in Girgao in a chawl room after being present in the hospital for the whole day. I also managed to find a watering hole nearby which was the prime reason for my volunteering to stay back for the night. I had done that once when my dad was hospitalized too.

Ro was not like always primarily because we were not alone. A few hours with outsiders is OK with me, but anything beyond that is misery! The Ro trip cost us almost 8 k and everytime I notice a particular amount of money gone to waste, I think about something that I could ve bought instead with that money. The most common thing to fall in this less than 10 k bracket is a Midi Fastlane to reduce latency. Ironically I was gifted one and I left it in a rick as I was too drunk to take care of my belongings while getting off. The revelation next morning was absolutely disheartening and I realized for the umpteenth time that ‘I can never be a musician’.

The music bit has taken a backseat but it is right there. In the ‘backseat’ and the distance between the backseat and the front seat is never too much.

In the morning I continued work on the CLR CMS by fine tuning the update of text files through ASP. Using the RegExp Object I am able to provide only <br> replacements to vbcrlf from a <textarea> and vice versa. The text file is used in a Flash website which has text fields set to render as HTML.

Later in the afternoon I started AK’s book cover which needed some minor tweaks. Later it turned out we had to revert to the original artwork I had created which unfortunately I had not saved anymore after further edits. In the last few days I have learnt 2 very old lessons all over again.

• Never delete any project files untill the project is completed and backed up
• Always create new versions of the work file when doing major changes

Later in the evening I got home early as tomorrow we are going out to Ro for the weekend. My eyes are really over worked and they need some serious rest. In the last 15 to 20 days the CLR project and the Doyl’y project were completed. Only the fag end of the CMS for CLR is left. It detained majorly because of the image upload section. ASP doesnt have a file upload object like PHP does. So I simply sent the form data from an ASP page to a PHP page to upload the file and returned the user back to the ASP page. There were some problems, notably the width and height of the image uploaded had to be specific. It took some time and by midnight, I had a decent solution. I was not a PHP programmer at all. But it was pretty straighforward. You can get a very simple file upload script here. After this little workaround I completely switched to PHP from ASP!

• The form in the ASP page sends data to a PHP page through a basic HTML form with action set to “name_of_the_page.php”. This can be done by offering to upload image which takes the user to the PHP page, uploads it from there and returns back to the ASP page.
• The data that goes to PHP contains the file to be uploaded along with its required width, height and destination in hidden fields.
• The PHP page uploads the image to a temporary location with a fixed name (“tmp_images/tmp_jpg”).
• Then it checks the size of this uploaded image (not the temp image that even PHP created)
• It validates this information with the width and height details that came in with the from as hidden fields.
• If it is ok then the script copies the image from the tmp location and pastes it into the permanent location(“images/the_image.jpg”).
• Then PHP redirects back to the ASP page where the new image is loaded from its location.

Crazy solution but I felt good that it worked. It’s 2 AM in the night and I have an alarm for 6:30 AM! The car will come at 7 and we leave immediately. I hope it turns out a relaxing weekend. I have been on a detox diet for the last 7 days which I will break from and continue from Monday!

I ve finally managed to pull data from MS Access database into an ASP page and then into Flash! It wasnt difficult at all. I never tried it earlier because of many reasons that can grip a creative person. The biggest of them all is ‘laziness’!

Anyway, coming back to my MS Access to ASP to Flash trip, it was very simple. Flash needs a string in the following format:

var1=value1&var2=value2&var3=value3… etc.

Some website had posted this format with an extra ‘&’ character in the beginning which makes it:

&var1=value1&var2=value2&var3=value3…

The preceeding & is WRONG! Why do people post tutorials with unchecked examples? Anyway, the the next problem was: I was pulling an array of a list of things from the database. While writing the ASP script, I made a for loop that calculated from 0 to ubound(the_array) and then response.write (“var1=” &recordset(“name of the database field”)& “&”)

The obvious problem is, this script lands with an extra ‘&’ at the end of the string:

var1=value1&var2=value2&var3=value3&

This creates a problem for ASP and Flash! The ending ‘&’ is absolutely unnecessary. So I simply made a variable called ‘total’ and incremented the value of ubound(the_array) and stored it in total and added to the script:
response.write(“total=”&total)

Now the script outputted:
var1=value1&var2=value2&var3=value3&total=3

Then in Flash, using the LoadVars object, I grabbed the total value and added the preceding variables’ values to a combobox using:

var my_lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
my_lv.load(“the url of the asp page”);
my_lv.onLoad=function(success){
if(success){
for(i=0;i_root.myComboBox.addItem({data:my_lv["var"+i], label:my_lv["var"+i]});
}
}
}

Thats it!