Geshan's Blog

In the past years Nepal has been hit very hard by the impacts of climate change. Being a land locked country and with places ranging from almost the sea level to the highest place on the planet, the country has great biodiversity and breathtaking landscapes. But rising pollution levels in the cities and low awareness about impacts of climate change has taken its toll mainly on the people who live in and near by cities.

A prominent problem Nepali is facing is global warming, due to which the glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. The whole himalayan range and the region is in danger due to the fast melt down of the ice in the region. The region is facing rise in temperature and it is adversely affecting the lifestyle.

YoungInnovaitons Private Limited is a company consisting of talented people. Among them Prashant Shrestha our own XHTML/CSS guru can work his hands greatly on the camera mainly the single lens reflex (SLR). He recently tried his hands on High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. See below and image that depicts the beauty of HDR.

Wikipedia defines HDR as "In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight." And the images below gives you the feel what its all about.

Hope you like the pictures taken by the man himself - Prashant Shrestha. check out his flickr page at http://flickr.com/photos/prashant_sh.

Drupal is arguably the best Content Management System (CMS) available for free, it may not be as popular as Joomla mainly because of a steep learning curve but it is a solid system with lots of features out of the box. More features can be added on in the forms of modules and look and feel can be changed in the form of themes in Drupal.

Drupal has multiplied its users, audience and developers in the past years. In every Drupal Con we hear Dries Buytaert telling that he hand not anticipated the exponential growth and how everything has come to place with all the community members. Google Trends also shows Drupal is rising drastically:

With Drupal 7 code freeze already happened and we waiting for the best Drupal release ever Drupal has gained popularity than ever. Below are some of the statistics I got from Google Insights: The chart shows Drupal's search popularity in Google in past 90 days.

Statistics below indicate that Open Atrium is very popular, and drush the command line interface for Drupal is also in the popularity race.

Drupal is a very widely used and popular even among big enterprises. If you are searching for a Content Management System (CMS) Drupal might be the best solution

Nowadays TV is infested with reality shows, people are singing, dancing, traveling thousands of kilometers to even marrying on TV. Some for money some for fame and some for I don't know what. But why are producers at NDTV Imagine going mad dragging innocent infants and babies who can't even speak in their new reality TV show “Pati Patni Aur Woh”.(The link has videos, behind the scenes and a forum as well)

I strongly object the concept of the show where I can't determine who are the bigger fools the parents who agree to give their baby to be mishandled by celebrities or the celebrities who think they can take care of other's baby who can't even talk.

Pati patni or woh, is a disgusting show on TV where real parents of the baby give manuals about the baby that has the likes, dislikes of the baby and even how to take care of the baby. I am still confused what do the real parents of babies think of their babies, I guess they think their baby is just a doll who comes with a manual on how to operate and they give the manual to the mad celebrities with whom the baby stays 24 hours. How can a baby who needs to be breast fed live with insane celebrities who have never raised a baby in their life?

The babies were crying like mad, couldn't even eat or drink, were even gasping for air and the babies were treated like dolls. On top of it a celebrity calls the baby is like a baby of a monkey who just keeps quite in her hands and starts crying as soon as the baby is separated from her. Why did she come to do a show without calculating the repercussions.

I was again amazed to see how a mother could see her baby crying on the monitor and cry herself helpless. In the first place why did she let her small baby get in the hands of those celebrities. I thought Bindass Dadagiri was inhumane but this is truly pathetic. Al least the people there are adults who can be said things but here the dependent babies can't even contest on what is happening on them.

Insane, inhumane and cruel, the celebrities don't even have time to fight with themselves to sort who's going to do what. I am not a child right activist but what are the child right activists who even objected on children acting on shows are allowing such a heinous show to run and air on TV. I want to make a really humble request “Keep the small babies who can't even speak out of the dirty drama of reality TV”.

Without doubts this was the most atrocious show ever, If this blog post can make a difference I hope the show goes off air and we don't get to see the nonsense on TV. The best thing if this show goes off air will be the babies will get to live with their parents and not go through the torture from the hands of those celebrities. When I Googled it,there has been other criticism about this show, I will really want it to go off air ASAP. You can watch the show on your own risk.

Surfing through some website, I found a good flash gallery that was displaying images. I thought it was a good gallery and then came to find out the images are ported from Flickr. So I just wanted to find out how was it made, to my delight it was work of Pictobrowser.com.

The PictoBuilder that lets you customize the flash slideshow kind picture gallery is also very easy to use. Just put your screen name, select sets or tags or groups and off you go to create your gallery. Its very easy to get a gallery in under a minute :).

Simple to understand and easy settings make PictoBrower a very good application to try out. Here is the gallery I created.



I have got some suggestions and improvements for PictoBrowser. Here are some:

1. Enable choosing the cover picture, the one that displays at first
   
2. Enable reordering the pictures for better presentation.
3. No. of seconds to display a picture in the slideshow
4. If possible some subtle effects in photo transition in the slideshow
5. Integration with other photo hosting websites like Photo Bucket etc and  Facebook or other social networking websites.
   

The flash interface to create the gallery is good. PictoBrowser is the kind of applicaiton I was searching for.

All in all, a very simple yet elegant flash image gallery for your Flickr and Picasa pictures. One you should try out and put it on your website.