Bonjour Paris : Photograph

Pictures I took in Paris.


From Eiffel Tower

Inside Notre Dame

Street Near Notre Dame

The Eiffel Tower at Night

Antonio Canova's Psyche revived by Kiss of Love 

A  Kid drawing at The Louvre Museum 

On the streets of Paris near The Eiffel Tower

One of the shops on av. champs elysees

Colors : Photography

This picture taken at Wayanad from my cell phone camera K790i

These two pictures taken at Bordeaux from my Canon camera

Ghatikallu - Some pictures

I took this picture at Ghatikallu, an awesome place. For more details about the place visit their website . I am not a great photographer or something , but want to pursue it as a hobby :)

You can download original files from here (file size : 6.43 MB) and use them as wallpapers !!

Downside of Android

I am an Android Fan.

After a month of using my Xperia X10 I thought of writing this blog. If there is anything that has come near competing with Apple iPhone OS(now iOS) , it is Android. But the package comes with a serious downside, downside that hurt fans and on a long run hurt mobile manufacturers.

My Xperia X10 is a masterpiece.It is an amazing hardware limited by the software running on it. One may argue that android 1.6 is enough and not so bad to say it is a limiting factor, but i disagree. It is like saying it is ok to have a day old food, when others are having it fresh.

Anyway my point is not exactly that, my point is why Xperia X10 is running android 1.6 (Donut) when Nexus One is running android 2.2 (Froyo). I say if android releases new versions in the same frequency as now, it is going to do more bad than good to itself, it will be a suicide.

Since android is common for all phones , it is obvious that manufacturers compete on hardware. But the truth is they cannot compete on hardware as it is easily possible for all the manufacturers to have the similar hardware, so they try to add their own "signature" upon android to differ from their competitors(Sense UI from HTC, UX platform from SE etc.,) This takes time since every release there are lot of changes in the android. As manufactures cannot cope with androids fast releases they take time to add their UI platforms , they release them late, many times so late the next release of android has happened.

One solution could be to give the stock android without any manufacturer specific UI on it, but it is again a serious limiting factor. Imagine when you use a SE phone there is nothing on it to feel it as SE phone(camera, music, UI etc), so this option is not a practical one.

Other option is that Google has to delay the releases, which is better option for both Google and the phone manufacturers and therefore for the consumers.

I hope Google has learnt a lesson and starts thinking practical instead of being greedy of showing off its capabilities soon to the public, and allows phone manufacturers to imbibe into the phones their styles and signatures which proves profitable , a win-win situation.

My Favorite Picture Sketched

I love this pic, so i sketched it. Thi is the second time im sketching this coz i lost the first one. Im sad that it didnt come out so well as the first one (it is like that always - first is the best) Do comment!!

Use Pen drive as RAM (Vista/Windows 7)

Recently i came across an article that said that Pen Drive can be used to speed up windows vista.USB 2.0 and above, SD card, Compact Flash or any other massive portable flash drive can be used to speed up the working of vista using the ReadyBoost feature.

When a removable memory device such as a USB flash drive is first inserted into a port, vista checks if it is fast enough to work with the Superfetch mechanism that ReadyBoost uses. If so,we are asked if we want the drive to be used for improving system performance. We can then choose to allocate part of a USB drive's memory to speed up performance and use the remainder to store files.

The performance is drastically improved.In some cases a system whose memory is increased from 512MB to 1 GB through the external plugged device can see the speed improving from 11 sec to 2 sec. The performance is even better in the case of laptop systems as laptops have a relatively low 'rpm's than the desktop systems.It also saves the battery power of the laptops.

Sketch

Serial Port Access using RXTX in JAVA

This is the sample code to access serial port using RXTX in java,,,,
the packages can be downloded from rxtx.org and to be placed in the locations specified in that link,,,,,




import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.sql.Date;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Enumeration;

import gnu.io.CommPortIdentifier;
import gnu.io.SerialPort;

public class Port {

private CommPortIdentifier portId;
private SerialPort port;
private OutputStreamWriter out;
private InputStreamReader in;

public void open(String comportUsed) {
try {

Enumeration portList;
String defaultPort;

String osname = System.getProperty("os.name", "").toLowerCase();
if (osname.startsWith("windows")) {
// windows
defaultPort = "COM1";
} else if (osname.startsWith("linux")) {
// linux
defaultPort = "/dev/ttyS0";
} else if (osname.startsWith("mac")) {
// mac
defaultPort = "????";
} else {
System.out
.println("Sorry, your operating system is not supported");

}

portList = CommPortIdentifier.getPortIdentifiers();
while (portList.hasMoreElements()) {
portId = (CommPortIdentifier) portList.nextElement();
if (portId.getPortType() == CommPortIdentifier.PORT_SERIAL) {
if (portId.getName().equals(comportUsed)) {
System.out.println("Found port: " + comportUsed);
break;
}
}
}

this.port = (SerialPort) this.portId.open(comportUsed, 2000);
port.setSerialPortParams(19200, SerialPort.DATABITS_8,
SerialPort.STOPBITS_1, SerialPort.PARITY_NONE);
in = new InputStreamReader(port.getInputStream());
out = new OutputStreamWriter(port.getOutputStream());
System.err.println("Port Open:Success");

} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println("Port Open:Failed");
System.out.println("Port is already used from other application,");
System.out.println("Close that application and re-run this application");
}
}

private void write(String s) throws Exception {

out.write(s);
out.flush();
}

private void write(byte s) throws Exception {
out.write(s);
out.flush();
}

private void write(int s) throws Exception {
out.write(s);
out.flush();
}


private String read() throws Exception {
int n, i;
char c;
String answer = new String("");

for (i = 0; i <>
while (in.ready()) {
n = in.read();
if (n != -1) {
c = (char) n;
answer = answer + c;
Thread.sleep(1);
} else
break;
}
delay(1);
}


return answer;
}



private void delay(int a) {
try {
Thread.sleep(a);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}



public void close() throws Exception {
try {
port.close();
System.err.println("close port");
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println("Error: close port failed: " + e);
}
}


}