Good Bye Blogger, Hello Wordpress...

Note: This blog has been moved to http://blog.yuvisense.net

At last, I have finished shifting my blog from Blogger to my own domain which is running Wordpress.

You can find the new blog at http://blog.yuvisense.net and if you have subscribed to the RSS feed the feed URL(whoa thanks!), then just refresh it to http://blog.yuvisense.net/feed. I know it's a PITA when you have to go around updating RSS feed URLs, but, hey that's much better than changing that URL from your memory, right?

Shifting all the posts with comments from Blogger has mostly been a painless process, since Wordpress offers a built-in importer which simplifies a lot of things. But, this domain was registered almost 2 months ago(thanks to my cousin Sudar), but I'm goin live only today, for reasons that are so philosophical that I'll keep them to another post. But suffice to say, the fact that I tried to categorize my posts twice and made 3 redesigns speaks a point...

Wordpress has been really excellent so far and has satisfied all my requirements. You get tons of themes and plug-ins. And the credit goes to the community. Right now I am playing with lot of themes and may be even this theme may change in a few days.

So guys welcome to the new version of my blog and do let me know your comments and suggestions. More content coming up soon. And, the categorization has not yet been completed...

P.S: I made this post by copying this post of my cousin Sudar's blog verbatim and making modifications. Talk about content theft:D

One [more] reason being a at school sucks...

Steve Pavlina on Ten Reasons you should never get a job. Awesome Article. Something in the ninth reason caught my eye, and I was instinctively able to rewrite it:

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee student. The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will. A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations. This leads the new employee student to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible. Thus, the employee student will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question. Stir in some office student politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave. As part of their obedience training, employees students must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees students thinking for themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.

God forbid you should put a plant sticker on your desk bag when it’s against the company school policy. Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant sticker on her desk bag! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only policy they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you love. Have fun."

Truer words of Wisdom never spoken!

I am a Journalist in High School!

I've been a journalist for almost 6 months now. A Journalist for my School Magazine, The Marian Star. I'm the One and Only Designer, One of the Editors, and an ocassional photographer(without a cam:D).

And, it's been an awesome experience. I learnt lots of things, from Serif and Sans-Serif fonts to writing Reports and Headlines. And the peer-review process and bare-bones editing were fun and challenging as well. Inshort, joining the Marian Star (which happened by accident) is probably the best thing for me since sliced bread, since I got to do a whole lot of stuff, some of which you'll be seeing in the days to come...

But, If I've been a Journalist for 5 months, then why haven't I blogged about it before? Well, main reason being, I wanted to show some work for being there, so I had to wait till I had something significant, something interview-worthy. And now, since I have not one but two of those, I guess I can break the news...

As of now, we've published 7 Interviews, 6 with teachers from our school(including the Principal) and one with the General Manager of Lotte India, and we've some good ones in the works. We've also covered every major and minor event in our school, and littered the place with reports and surveys.

So today, I am publishing those 7 interviews. PDF format. Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence.

At School

Our Principal, Fr. Paulraj

Our Assitant Headmistress, Ms. Selvi

Our Hawks House Master & Mr. Best-Teacher-ever, Mr. Nicholas

Our Owls House Master & Mr. Computer, Mr. Darius

Our Swifts House Master & Mr. Motivation, Mr. Arul Rajan

Our Eagles(my) House Master & Mr. Newly Married, Mr. Dominic

Outside

The General Manager of Lotte India, Mr. In Do Hwang

PDF versions for now, but I'm working on HTML versions of them as well...

And what do you think of the designs? With 20/20 hindsight, they all look crappy to me, since they were done when I was a noob and used (horror music) Microsoft Publisher. While there's nothing wrong with that, and it certainly introduced me to designing on paper, I've overgrown it and my next interviews use the f'awesome Adobe InDesign.

So, feel the Design is Crappy? Flame me:D

Creating Thumbnails in a Single line of Code

I've posted this before, but it was a bit too convulated(just showin my age:D). So, here's another try, a single logical line statement that will generate Thumbnail of any image:

Dim I as Image

I = Image.FromFile("F:\Dash.jpg").GetThumbnailImage(tWidth, tHeight, Nothing, IntPtr.Zero)

That will give you an Image object with dimensions tWidth and tHeight. The Nothing and IntPtr.Zero are there for reasons which I have no idea about. You can do anything with it, such as save it to another file:

I.Save("F:\TNail.png",System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)

This will save the thumbnail as "TNail.png" in the PNG Format. The .NET Framework supports almost all of the popular formats(GIF, PNG, BMP, JPEG, etc) So, hack away!

And, if you wanna do this in ASP.NET web pages, here's a pretty good article on how to.