Geshan's Blog

Years back when we used to watch a good advert in India television channels, some weeks later the same advertisement would appear on a Nepali channel only change it would be voiced over in Nepal. And now after so many years the trend is there and why is it still there. We are killing our own advertisement industry.

There are some good adverts like the Jagadamaba Cement Advert (below) and Nepal Samachar Patra (below) but the voice over ads of Fanta, Fair and Handsome and a lot others makes me feel what do the Advertisement and media companies do here??



Translate the jingle and use some words you are done, no copy writing, no copy editing, no jingle composition, no model selection, no shooting. Just some video editing with voice over and the deal is sealed.




But again when I see voice over ads I think we can do better but we are not given a chance to portray our creativity. I hope we don't have to watch adverts like below in future:

I really hope this scenario changes and it changes soon. Let's vote for Nepali adverts by and for the Nepali people.

Wordpress has been a blogging tool and a blog hosting service admired by a lot of users for its power and friendliness. Amongst many great websites powered by Wordpress, I found WPDesigner.com which is a web hosting review site and a Wordpress blog with posts on theming aspect of arguably the most popular blogging engine.

The homepage lists top 10 web hosting providers where again Blue Host tops the list as in other web host review websites. The site has a clean and elegant design, with good use of dark background and light foreground/font colors. The typography and usability aspect are also good and the funny mustache man adds the comic zing to the website.
The web hosting resources block on the right has great articles on web hosting and things to look for in a web host. Personally I liked the "how to choose a web host" post which talks about factors to consider when choosing a web host.

The reviews are based on price, server up-time, reliability, ease-of-Use, control panel and customer support or after sales support provided by the web hosts. As per me, the top 10 list is quite satisfying and I have also used some of the hosts in the top 10. Therefore I know the reasons why those web hosting companies are there in the top 10 list. The ratings of cost, feature, bandwidth, reliability given in the review is also justifiable. The review written is short but descriptive enough to cover the topic.
The other component of this website is the blog, all posts focus around great Wordpress themes, tips and tutorial to develop Wordpress themes etc. The blogs are well laid out and use of headings makes it easier to read the blogs. The posts are also written well short and up to the point. If there was some more description in some of the posts it would have been better.

All in all, it is a good blog. The web hosting review section is the best part of the website and the blog posts are also praiseworthy. I hope to see admirable websites like these in future.

8th August 2009, Kathmandu, Yela Maya Kendra, Patan Dhoka witnessed a big flock of Kathmanduites from different walks of life to create share and advance ideas. Dominated by presence of youngsters the sessions registered at http://barcampktm.wikispot.org/BCKTM09_Sessions was under way when I reached there around 11:30 AM.

Jumping on a session invitingly titled "Collaboration amongst Nepalese IT companies/entrepreneurs for creating a strong IT industry in Nepal" was grabbing attention. The session presented by Bibhusan Bista (@bbista) was really good. The history laid out and the ideas presented was commendable.


While tweeting for the session (not from my twitter account), I was amazed by the views voiced by the participants. They were really frustrated with the Government policies, lack of implementation and loads of other things. I really think this session and idea of getting together to better IT industry in Nepal should be taken to next level.

Then after lunch, Rabindra Gurung's session on "BCC - Behavioural Change Communication in Nepal" was also very good. @rabinshres did put light on how it is being used and with the stats and touchy pictures he made his message clear. The discussions after the session was also very good and fruitful. But in all this we missed the "Twitter Analysis" session :).

Then after some time in the "Innovate a trance within-FOO-THE-FLUTE" session by Sunil Pariyar we just could hear some Flute being played which was amazing. Last session I tried to attend :) was "संस्कृत(Sanskrit) restoring the lost glory" but before the end I lost interest ;).

Anyway, it was productive and enlightening few hours. After all this if you are still confused what is barcamp then check the video below:


And yes the video below was on the bid day, well compiled and gives you a hint what happened at BarCamp Kathmandu 2009 :) :

I guess we will see more events like this promoting open culture, yes Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2009 being organized by FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Nepal is also approaching near.

Drupal 7 is said to have a code freeze this September and as far as I heard Dries has no plans to release Drupal 7 until all the critical issues are resolved. Till today's date there are 332 critical issues to be resolved.
But none the less I am waiting for the killer release. Having look at the new shiny dashboard and the drag and drop goodness and all the hustle and bustle about file API and fields in core I really want to try out D7 ASAP. Recently I found a presentation about the features I'm embedding below:



But the features in the change log are as follows:

Drupal 7.0, xxxx-xx-xx (development version)
----------------------
- Database:
* Fully rewritten database layer utilizing PHP 5's PDO abstraction layer.
* Added query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT queries.
* Support for master/slave replication, transactions, multi-insert queries,
delayed inserts, and other features.
* Added support for the SQLite database engine.

- Security:
* Protected cron.php -- cron will only run if the proper key is provided.
* Implemented much stronger password hashes that are also compatible with the
Portable PHP password hashing framework.
* Implemented a pluggable password hashing API supporting alternative
hashing and authentication schemes.

- Usability:
* Improved installer requirements check.
* Improved support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.
* Implemented drag-and-drop positioning for input format listings.
* Implemented drag-and-drop positioning for language listing.
* Implemented drag-and-drop positioning for poll options.
* Provided descriptions and human-readable names for user permissions.
* Removed comment controls for users.
* Removed display order settings for comment module. Comment display
order can now be customised using the Views module.
* Added additional features to the default install profile, and implemented
a "slimmed down" install profile designed for developers.
* Image toolkits are now provided by modules (rather than requiring a manual
file copy to the includes directory).
* Added an edit tab to taxonomy term pages.
* Redesigned password strength validator.
* Redesigned the add content type screen.
* Highlight duplicate URL aliases.
* Renamed "input formats" to "text formats".
* Added configurable ability for users to cancel their own accounts.

- Performance:
* Improved performance on uncached page views by loading multiple core
objects in a single database query.
- Documentation:
* Hook API documentation now included in Drupal core.
- News aggregator:
* Added OPML import functionality for RSS feeds.
* Optionally, RSS feeds may be configured to not automatically generate feed blocks.
- Search:
* Added support for language-aware searches.
- Aggregator:
* Introduced architecture that allows pluggable parsers and processors for
syndicating RSS and Atom feeds.

- Testing:
* Added test framework and tests.
- Improved time zone support:
* Drupal now uses PHP's time zone database when rendering dates in local
time. Site-wide and user-configured time zone offsets have been converted
to time zone names, e.g. Africa/Abidjan.
* In some cases the upgrade and install scripts do not choose the preferred
site default time zone. The automatically-selected time zone can be
corrected at admin/settings/date-time.
* If your site is being upgraded from Drupal 6 and you do not have the
contributed date or event modules installed, user time zone settings will
fallback to the system time zone and will have to be reconfigured by each user.

- Removed ping module:
* Contributed modules with similar functionality are available.

- Refactored the "access rules" component of user module:
* The user module now provides a simple interface for blocking single
IP addresses. The previous functionality in the user module for restricting
certain e-mail addresses and usernames is now available as a contributed module.
Further, IP address range blocking is no longer supported and should be
implemented at the operating system level.

- Removed throttle module:
* Alternative methods for improving performance are available in other core and
contributed modules.

- Added code registry:
* Using the registry, modules declare their includable files via their .info file,
allowing Drupal to lazy-load code as needed, resulting in significant performance
and memory improvements.

- Theme system:
* Converted the 'bluemarine' theme to a tableless layout.

- File handling:
* Files are now first class Drupal objects with file_load(), file_save(),
and file_validate() functions and corresponding hooks.
* The file_move(), file_copy() and file_delete() functions now operate on
file objects and invoke file hooks so that modules are notified and can
respond to changes.
* For the occasions when only basic file manipulation are needed--such as
uploading a site logo--that don't require the overhead of databases and
hooks, the current unmanaged copy, move and delete operations have been
preserved but renamed to file_unmanaged_*().

- Added aliased multi-site support:
* Added support for mapping domain names to sites directories.
- Added RDF support:
* Modules can declare RDF namespaces which are serialized in the tag
for RDFa support.

And, those are exciting new features as always a new Drupal release has lots of things to offer.

Let's wait for the Day Drupal 7 is finally released.