How many of us have built a windmill???

“I saw the picture of the windmill in the library book. So when I saw it, I say ‘Aah this picture in this book, I think I can also build’ “, says William Kamkwamba. A truly inspiring story, I wish I could have done something cool like that. I saw his interview on the Daily Show, its very interesting, and I liked the “where was this google all this time” comment. Also watch his ted talk, where he tells the short story of how he built his windmill.

Learning Photography – 1

Ever since I bought my new camera Canon Rebel XS, I have learnt more and more about photography. But its all in bits and pieces, you learn a bit about exposure, then you find an article about f-stops and you never complete what you started. Learning or reading on the internet is like that, there’s always something new to read and something else to distract you. So I thought I would put down my learning down as notes, in one place. Maybe one day somebody will just put them together to make a handy learning-photography-for-the-beginner kind of book(I can dream can’t I?). So join me as I explore the world of photography.

First, lets understand what the purpose of photography is. As a software engineer, I have been taught to always build the software based on the customer’s needs. In the case of photography, there are two kinds of customer base -

1. Those who use a photograph as a substitute for a real object. In this case the idea is to imitate real life as closely as possible. The photograph has to depict the entire scene when it was taken as accurately as possible.
2. Those who see a photograph as a way of expression. In this case, the photographer might use various effects and the viewer of the photograph views it as art rather than depiction of a real life object.

I feel that all photographs fall in either of the above categories or somewhere in between the two. Now, to use a photography as an art medium, I believe one must first understand how to use it for depicting real life accurately. So lets start from there. Keep waiting for Learning Photography – 2, were I will start with the technicalities.

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Why Firefox needs a Revamp

After using Opera 10 RC, I feel like I have to write about Firefox, my favourite browser till date. It’s not perfect in fact it has enough quirks to make someone hate it.

• Memory footprint – It easily takes 200MB in any configuration and if you run videos(especially Youtube flash videos) the footprint goes up to 400 – 500MB – which is criminal. Firefox needs to learn a thing or two from the way Opera and Google Chrome function – both of them have brilliant memory management. With all the features that Firefox development team is looking into, the one thing it definitely needs to revisit is its memory management. Process isolation between tabs(sandboxing in Chrome) can be a starting point for this but as I am not familiar with the codebase maybe this is not exactly true.

• The reason I love Firefox is its extensions. The ones I use regularly are Google Toolbar, Adblock Plus, SmarterFox, ShowIP, Tab Mix Plus, WOT and Download Statusbar among others(there will be a separate post for this). Now, Firefox has been supporting extensions since 0.9. But even now I don’t see a task manager kind of utility for Firefox which picks up the culprits among these extensions which cause problems with the general functioning of the browser – like memory leaks and too much CPU utilization. I would love to code this as this will be helping the users as well as developers of the browsers and extensions.

• Startup Time – Firefox has a reaaaalllly long cold startup time and even a hot startup is not comparable to the fastest one – Chrome. Firefox has some solutions to this (check this) but I am still hoping that they’ll improve this.

• Speed – Overall browser is fast but once the memory footprint becomes huge, the browser becomes non responsive. The only solution is to restart. From the point of view of an application which is meant to be used the whole day by people on a computer this is an unacceptable situation. Once again, solving the memory footprint problem should solve this, but I am only guessing.

In an era where browsers are taking up the functions of OS I don’t want firefox to loose the battle because of these reasons. Even though the development plan for Firefox doesn’t involve some of these I hope the development team will take it up and consider including these features in the future releases. For those of you running firefox, this link has tips on how to prevent Firefox from hogging memory (although I don’t know how anything that mentions restart as a solution is a good one )

P.S: Update – LifeHacker has an article on Five Feature They Want to See in Firefox. Seems like our wants match

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A Date with Opera 10 RC

Opera 10 RC has come out and am I enjoying browsing in it or what!!

• Installation is smooth and completes in seconds.

• All the features aside the one thing I love about this browser is its memory footprint. Right now, with 6 tabs open its just showing 146MB footprint on my xp pc. I have observed that even if I keep it for hours together, it never hogs memory. I have seen opera with 2 tabs after almost 2 hours of running with a 20MB footprint(my stomach doubled on seeing this, because if it were firefox it would have been 200-300MB by now).

• It is fast – don’t you love it when an application just starts on your click and the rendering of webpages is fast too. It is not as fast as Google Chrome though – that one is snappy – but it comes quite close. I also like the fact that it runs flash videos without hogging memory – another quirk I have with firefox.

• The UI is beautiful – simple buttons, simple theme and smooth on eyes. I don’t usually personalize the UI’s of my applications so I am not sure how people who do this find the UI.

• The content blocker – this is an inbuilt feature (Firefox does this using the Adblock extension). Opera 9 introduced the content blocker which lets you filter the content in a page – this can be used to block ads. In a fresh installation nothing is blocked but overtime as you start blocking(you can set the filters intelligently – almost all the ads over the web are provided by the same group of sites) you’ll find the pages you visit are free of ads. You don’t have the advantage of filter list of Firefox’s Adblock extension here though, but I am glad that Opera considers this a feature to be included in the browser.

• Extensions – I am not missing my firefox extensions a lot here. The only thing I do miss (and I miss it a lot) is the Google Toolbar – the suggest-as-you-type google search box and the highlighter when in the page(this is very useful quick find tool) but other than that it’s all fine – my day went the same way ( I guess I don’t use a lot of extensions that I have installed – meaning I have to clean my firefox installation) Somehow I was not able to run the google toolbar widget for opera. It launches but I am not able to view the toolbar anywhere on my screen(need to check this later on).

• One thing I had a bit of a problem with was scrolling in Opera using the Synaptics touchpad. It was not possible to use Virtual Scrolling in the browser. Seems like I had a driver problem(This solved the same problem I had with Google Chrome). However, the installation of the latest Synaptics driver causes Windows XP Update to prompt for the installation of IBM Trackpoint. Don’t fall for this as this is not necessary and installing trackpoint caused the mouse to stop working all together and once that was rectified the scrolling didn’t work once again.

• I am not comfortable with the fact that I am using(and secretly falling in love with) a closed source browser in place of an open source one, but I guess that’s just starting blues.

All in all using this browser has been a rewarding experience. (Right now the browser has been open for almost 3 hours, still it is showing only a 105MB footprint – although it reached a high of 196MB in the interim, it corrected itself). Comment away to glory!!

A new start!!

A fresh attempt at blogging.. Here’s to a new beginning!!