I’m Jacob Thomas

Its been a long time since I have blogged. Infact, a very long one. I haven’t been a serious blogger. The only reason why I use one is to share with people something new, striking facts and my views and experiences about life. As expected, the philosophical posts get very low clicks. but the popular ones include design, code and maybe open accusations. So let me start off another season by the usual words.

I’m extremely sorry for inactiveness of this blog and will strive towards a better maintained personal log. Duh! I feel kinda weird after that line. Maybe this post will become the last one in the next 3-4 months. The suscribers to this blog must be of some really patient species branched from apes some 5-8 millions of years ago and from humans some one and a half years ago. You didn’t get it? My blog is nearing its second birthday. yay! hmm. What do I give my tolerant readers as a gift for bearing with me?  Maybe a free Wordpress theme. Maybe some screencast series. Blah! If you could have wasted precious mbs of bandwidth of stupid ‘geek’ pastimes like screencasts, then you surely would have seen a steamy youtube clip by then.(or maybe something that steams even more.)

So I will speak about about a few things I learned in the past few months while I was away from my blog. After Tejasvi, I found Vestec CMS didn’t have an edge in todays market if it were to based on just a bunch of functions and methods. MVC is the buzzword. So I may implement this either with a standard MVC platform like Cake PHP or Codeigniter or even try to model one myself. As for new changes, I added a new, improved interface to the admin section.

Moving away from code, I designed a few web interfaces for some companies and found out some bare truths. The most prominent among these is the fact that designs with more white in it are guaranteed to be a sell. According to my experience, a blue-white color scheme is the most liked scheme. A dark design is the riskiest thing you might want to do. Unless it is exceptional, clients are sure to have some second thoughts.

My N73 and its wide possibilities made me Google about S60 application development. After some persistent use of the ’submit’ button, I found out it that it needs some time and dedication. Maybe a bit extra than the usual. Some newer version of the platform is due to change the level of knowledge so it is better to go into mobile development until I get used to the terms and jargon of their codex.

Well then, I seem to be in pretty good form right now! Calculating this spirit, I think you guys can expect some more posts before the blog nerve gets blocked. Yes! Do expect some goodies from me soon.:-)

Ok so it is really hot out here and I think I will write about something cool.err..wait! Why not I write about some hot stars or some cool gadgets? Recently, I attempted a paper on Discrete Structures. It gives me sick thoughts but the futile effort enlightned me of some new concepts.

From the timeless centuries, people always differentiated cold and hot stuff as the extremes. My mission is to prove both are empirically the same. So let me present my latest in “Verbal Order Theorems”

HC Equivalence

“For every exclamation related to an object’s visual aspect, the extremes namely ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ are equivalent.”

Exercise 1:

What’s cool, What’s hot in the given set of colors?
{ a) black, b) pink, c) blue, d) red }
Solution

Pink! is usually associated with girls and they have fought for it ! Pink as hot? A part from that cursed period in history when pink was associated with boys! Aaarg! naah..with an exception of a pink bikini, I don’t think! Man! Red’s always hot! The inheritance maybe from a hot red chilli or a red haired Julian Moore. Black..aaah! The ultimate definition of coooooool stuff! A black Aston Martin DB9, A black Lamborghini Reventon to a F22 Raptor. Black versions rule! Blue is cool. References maybe from a clear blue sky, bluish-white global warmed glaciers or eccentric underwater action stunts from “Into the Blue” or “Deep Blue Sea”.

Excercise 2:
Give the structural validity of the statement “I am a cool guy and many girls think i am a hot”
The predicate subject is ‘guy’ i.e, myself. Here the basic assumption is “I am visually appealing to myself as well as the girls.

Let ‘Y be the guy’
Y:Y E {Humans;Male}

C:Cool
H:Hot
i.e.; C=H’

To Prove: (Y->C)+(Y->H) is always a tautology.

|C|H|C+H|
|0|1 |    1  |
|1|0 |    1  |
Here I have limited my test set to 2 order relation since C=H’
Hence Proved!

Exercise 3:
What is cool and hot in Transformers: The movie?
Transformers had some of the coolest graphical treat ever. Now thats the cool element! What’s hot in the film? Megan Fox! That would be quick and spontaneous. You tend to associate the sensuous elements with ‘hot’. Sensuous here refers to the theorectical substitute of “cool”.

Exercise 4:
Dude, don’t tell me ‘Vertical Limit’ and ‘Volcano’ are empirically same. Ones’ dealing with cold avalanches..brr. and the other one has hot lava on the roads..
From the ‘Vertical Limit’ to the catostrophic ‘Volcano’, Hollywood has portrayed it to be something similar, Action!! But then it is cool action, cool graphics something associated with geek stuff!
Inferences: Everything around you is cool, You mind selects some as hot because of its inconsistence in singular allocation of concepts. Want that line in simpler words? Come on! Why should I? After all, I spend hours reading some stupid logic books. In most of them, they simple refuse to get to the point! Damn! I wonder whether that cost me my grades.

Conclusion:
I have included many ‘ad words’ into this blog post that was absolutely meaningless and absurd! The purpose of this post is to get more linkable words into my blog posts so that my advertisers are happy. But then theorem stays and is proved!

2007 was a year of reassertion for me. The year gave me new perspectives, new dimensions of thought and identification of some unique skills. Now when i look back, like every human being, i feel an element of regret saddening my heart. “I could have done better”. Be it my decisions or be it my outlook towards life, every single line i spoke could have been rephrased to a much more sinless speech. I feel.

Below are some of my inferences about the events that happened to me this year.

Opdyne: My ‘zero rupee’ Opdyne showed little or less signs of competitiveness in the vast and talented web designer’s world. The positives i got were the improvement factor. We have come way better than the day when we dressed up as designers ourselves. We had problems working together in a group. We had problems related to communication during constructive phases of projects. It were all sorted out so that we could welcome the new year with renewed energy , a new belief and some surprise plans.

Sometimes its best if you take the lead of your group and preach new ideologies. Sometimes its best if you stay back and receive suggestions for improvement.

New initiatives are demanding. It can consume a lot of time, energy and precious social time.

New initiatives, new domains of involvement… a new stage of recognition. Still there is something lacking in my deeds. What is it? The very human side of me is refusing to allow the very perfect me. Ironically our mind wants to strive for the perfect 10/10 when in reality the end result halts before that mark.

“To err is to human, to forgive is divine”. I will use this as an excuse to relieve me of all punishments. Oh wait! Asti warned me to stop writing ’senseless crap’ but in another world this maybe great work. Someone please tell him! Promising you more sensible blog posts in 2008. Bye.

This post is a bit on the philosophical edge of my unintelligent understanding. Still, What i am saying is absolutely true and is well supported by reason and personal experience.

Rule 1: You do not have to flatter your teammate’s work on the basis of any emotional, personal or intimate relationships. If you find any problem in the task done by the member of your team, do make the point clear with some suggestions.

Rule 2: Its “Give and Take!”. So when the advice from rule no 1 is FOR you, do listen with all your inbuilt qualities of patience and cool stretched to the maximum. Getting worried over the advices is a big mistake.

Rule 3: When you feel you have done your job, make sure you ask yourself “Is there any room for improvement?”.

Rule 4: Probably the most important rule of them all. Respect all your group members’ advices, suggestions and take all what you think is right. Your group is one which is defined by the similarity in ideas, mindset and skills. Your teammates won’t be asking for changes which make the entire work go look so bad.

Rule 5: A leader is an essential part of a group. He is the one who is supposedly managing every resources available to the group. But the selection of a team leader should be done with the qualities of selflessness and confidence fixed as essentials.

Rule 6: ‘Trust’.A personal bond between two persons can be termed as a ‘trusty’ relationship. The word has a whole new level of importance when it comes to a group. In a group of different people with different views of perspective, it natural to develop a tense, unproductive environment. So mutual trust in the work of other team members is a requisite.

Rule 7: When you are a member of a clan, making your own decision is invalid. Every decision is to made through a meeting with atleast a majority of the members present.

Rule 8: Be yourself. Imitations will be costly. One wrong step and the way your teammates think about you will change forever.

Rule 9: Never set yourself personal goals inside a circle of professionals. It can affect your contribution to the group and finally it results in your talents being speculated upon.

Rule 10: Work is not always interesting. But if you can discover how to work for fun with the purpose of learning it sure will be interesting.

Eating out with veggies can be a big problem.Two of our team members at Opdyne happens to vegetarians.Now let me analyze.Vegetarians and web development?
hmm..Not that veggies can’t do development but,Meat rules!!!.I mean where is ‘the meat’ in the stuff they develop.?

Of course! After a sumptous meal for the Opdyne Annual at Park Rajadhani. I was forced to tell the guys.”Yep!It was Bad!”.

Face it buddy! The food was really good. Hmm What else could i do? I have to work with them for some more years. I got to have a good relation with then until we split. (Split! Not in a million years!). From Plato to Gandhi , all of them advocated a good vegetarian diet.

Vegetarians are believed to have 40% less chance of getting forms of cancers compared to meat-eating machines.Another good point is the have comparatively less blood pressure due to high fibre content and lower viscosity of the blood. That means more qualities of patience , stress and a smiling “No!” . Then that should prove that they can work long hours in a stretch without grumbling or any sort of discomfort.(I must demand for less working hours!!!). Those hapless professionals on a non-veg diet tend to live shorter than their veg counterparts.OMG!

To all my fellow non-veg developers out there, eat less meat and live on low fat, high fibre food!!!

Wait!The lunch break siren!!What do they have?.Ahhhhhhh!!

Nice looking biriyani with a reddish yellow tint with minced meat sprinkled all over garnished with green coriander leaves with tomatoes and 2 eggs floating in the richness of rice and butter(MOM!How could you!I just preached ……)

[Sound of someone washing his hands]

This post may be directed towards a community with high intellectual values but poor socialization or maybe to a person with the same problems transcended in enormous proportions! A man is basically a whole junk of whopping crap if he can’t understand what it feels like to work with teammates. Yeah!Thats right I’m talking about a the problem of undefined protocols and a group that’s struggling to make an identity.

Let me rewind to months back when the whole concept of Opdyne was given birth too..

jac_acme: Daey i am gonna start a site
jac_acme: u in?
intelinsidepranthanoutside: yep
intelinsidepranthanoutside: name?
intelinsidepranthanoutside: wats it abt?
jac_acme: dunno
jac_acme: i am just seeing it as a learning experience

That was it . The real genesis.. behind the screen.. behind this wonderful minimalistic blog and all the young weird of the world ideas. The brainchild, Opdyne was a concept that could have led its way into oblivion. But some really good spirit pumped it all the way to a success. Not that its a smashing or dandy in appearance,but it was our concept come true. I really love it. After years of studying all theory and doing nothing productive, that was a moment of absolute happiness and a sense of victory engulfed us. Its really sad why this venture comes to a dead end. I never considered my team members as my teammates. Moreover it was like a group of friends coming together and doing some work for fun. After all the motto of opdyne was,”Work for fun and learning”. True!. It was a motto so far fetched that i had to fill in my real experiences with fantasies to complete it.

A great man, once remarked.

“Anyway, do whatever it is that you must. When you have finally understood what I’ve said (since you so obviously haven’t, judging by your quotes) we’ll sort this out. Go and think.”

Little does he know what the person he is accusing hasn’t anything other than the prestigious post of being a member of Opdyne. And this is my statement.I will say it loud and clear.

“I love Opdyne.”

The very first time i saw a website(probably yahoo), i didn’t want to read the content in it…rather i searched for “making a website”. Yes! That search didn’t make any sense to a 6th grader back then but i definitely knew one day i would know it for sure.

Years have passed by, Here I’m celebrating what’s best know equivalent my life right now.

Opdyne.

During my days at Loyola, i used to hear stories about our seniors doing amazing things in the’ webosphere’. During my long, boring vacation after my entrance exams (which i messed quite bad!), i was searching for a good, productive way to spend time.Reading some blogs was a main cause for the initiative to start Opdyne. As always had a liking to do something creative all that time because some weird, uncanny instinct makes the work quite fun for me!

I started slowly… reading small tutorials in Photoshop (the glass orb was a good start!) . I realized that i had something to survive in the the hostile world for a newbie. After that i did watch arun (already established artist) at work. The way he produced wonderful computer generated imagery with a handful of harmless clicks and curves really got me inspired to be glued to the PC for the next two months.

“…emerged from the cocoon, was a beautiful butterfly fluttering in the wind with gracility and charm. Quite sensitive were its receptors to the outside world, spreading its beneficence to every single object in its surroundings.”

OMG! Sorry but that was a sudden emote due to all ‘excessive grammar classes’ i had with DP(once in a year). Well, anyway i got into full swing after that…. jumping around frantically like a monkey from the ‘branch of code’ to the nearby ‘design tree’. It was fun. I really enjoyed learning many new and exciting things at Opdyne. I may sound like i am going to stop tomorrow but have “miles to go before i sleep”.

I am a windows application programmer…i don’t know whether i can boast about it anymore? The first few years of my programming life were concentrated around visual basic and windows application development. Back then i didn’t have an internet connection(, probably one of the bigger reasons why i evolved away from being one). I created a few applications based on some loose codes from planetsourcecode.com. I really enjoyed it! Every bit of code. I was very inquisitive of the how the softwares were made and that led me into a very simple but exciting world of VB. (I was 14 back then.)

Once i got older (and when i got an internet connection) , i did sense a migration into a much more wider, more reachable platform..the web itself. I was truly inspired by lots of wonderful websites from various design showcases including webcreme, cssremix, cssmania etc. Soon i was exercising my artistic talents and was frantically trying to learn the skills of many accomplished designers. (I used to go ‘wowwwwww.’ seeing some of the websites created by avalonstar.) My entry into professional web development was marked by the founding of Opdyne; a group of young developers, designers, and programmers.

Opdyne has now evolved into a professional firm offering many design solutions with decent quality.(We won’t blab about exquisite designs now as we are still learning.) Now that i look back i find it very difficult to understand whether i would have become an accomplished developer. A few applications like a hapless media player(Neu + Media Player), a CD/DVD indexing software(Thikset) are not enough to make one an expert in that field. Another of my ventures in application development was a CD presentation maker for an event including features like video encryption, authentication module , a fully featured media player , a scriptable interface with advanced skinning options(XTOOP CD).

Just because i am spending all my energy in web development these days doesn’t mean i am done with my old passion. I hope i will be able to complete , many of what i still want to achieve in that field.Presently there are lots of things to finish in Opdyne with release of LF and many other projects slated on immediate dates. Later!

At one glance , an innocuous word, ‘inspiration’ may seem to be related to the great paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci produced due the influence of Verrocchio, his teacher. Inspiration is usually associated with art and design.

In olden days, inspiration was thought to of a divine nature. The people believed it to be a gift of god. As time traveled across centuries of development, renaissance and revolution this inspiration found new meanings. Nowadays it is concerned with education,personality, paintings (abstract art too) and websites . Inspiration has found new galleries to showcase themselves in different mediums. They are umpteen inspirational personalities, masterpieces, materials and products available now(which makes me think that there is hardly anything divine in it anymore.)

I would like to center this post around ‘web inspiration’ a rather new term which has many possibilities of advancements and ramifications in different directions (and the way it gets corrupted by rippers and plagiarists). Before we get into this topic let me show you one of my works. A simple cover i did for my college magazine and the art that inspired me to do it(the one on the left is mine).

Well as you can see the better one is the original found from here .

First Question!.Is my art a rip of the other? The fact that I’m calling the other one ‘an original’ is itself an assertion of the fact that i borrowed a lot of ideas from ‘the time‘ by Nazan Dedeoglu. Borrowed? uh oh! I don’t know Nazan. Borrowing without his consent is stealing right? Assuming the above case to be true i rephrase my statement. I stole his art!. But then in my defense i have a sweet word which is manipulated by every known ripper artist in the world(i’m not one,in any way).

Inspiration .

Boy!Haven’t we always wondered what the difference between the words Inspiration and a Rip means.

Many websites have been on the lookout for Web rip off! On such site is pirated-sites.com.(check out their more believable Flickr account with screen shots) Obviously the hapless culprits tried to model upon the the original site,(starting from pure inspiration), slowly accumulating a lot of the parent website features and finally transforming into a truly fascinating rip of the former. Most of the websites under attack are from people in the same circle of involvement, say Web design studios. The best part is the style how the original creators write about their ripper counterparts! They go commenting from ’shameless f**king @#$%@’ to ‘nice try buddy,better luck next time. While most of the counterfeits are dismissed off with a ‘disgraceful act’ tag, the clicks to the uri keep increasing dramatically, (increasing the link popularity dumbo!). The ripped sites are usually replaced with more impressive original creations in very short time.

Inspiration usually is accepted if it is about using the styles of the original artist in a different way with his/her flavor mixed in it to produce an completely different art.Whoosh!Thats all i can squeeze out of me. Besides it all depends on what the original artist thinks about his alleged rip off art.

FOOTNOTES:

1)My art was not used in any profitable venture or my college magazine( ,they rejected it because it was too complex a concept of time!) or was not sold to any enterprising group. Besides i still think it is an inspired art. Oops there we go again!…

I wrote this song during my last days at Loyola.What it is about?Boohoo!!I miss school..

It’s all over now
Reasons are all gone
Silence crept in,Rythm faded away
Clapping of hands came to a still
Heart of the young men were swelling with grief

Why ,Why did the light succumb to darkness
Silence just prevailed over the tempo
Tunes so soothing turned to neverending din
Dry leaves were falling down from the maple trees(Its all..)

We are bidding goodbye..to a wonderful world
And i saw the sparkle in the eyes of the world
Why ,Why did the music stop then
When the tap of the music faded into silence(Its all..)

Dry leaves were falling faster
Sweet memories ,we had in the past
were now wept down to shiny drops
Time was in its slowest role (Its all..)

Different roads we have to tread
I’m No more brave to look back once
Years’ together with all the fun
i’m saying goodbye to a world so dear
(Its all..)