My new blog

Created a new blog on my website. The first post is about a small thing which developers like me overlook in their programs:

http://ashishware.com/myblog/?p=6

My 'Image Resize Utility'

I have been searching for a tool that can resize images, add border and put a watermark on those. Most of my favourite tools, dont have this functionality the way I wanted. So I decide to write my own. It's a tiny C# console program that can process images in a batch. I use it to add border and copyright notice to images from my digital camera. The tool has fair bit of configurability. It can be downloaded here:

http://ashishware.com/ImgResize.shtml

Spore: Create your own creatures !

Computer games these days are getting larger than life. The recent example is 'Spore' , a game which allows you to create different create and nurture your own creatures and nurture them through various phases of evolution. The whole concept in my opinion is wonderful. More can be read about the game here : http://www.spore.com/what/platforms#PC



Thought this game is yet to be released, it has a great feature that is already making it a hit. The 'Spore Creature Creator'. Just downloaded the trial version and started playing with it. And I have to say that this is 'one of the best' software, I have ever used.
Within minutes of downloading the software, I was able to create really funny new creatures and upload their videos on youtube !



The spore creator is a 'standalone' software which is available for around $10. This is a real steal, for the entertainment it provides. The creator is easy to use software which has three sections : create, paint and play. The day when our world would be ruled by game characters is not far !





Here are couple of videos I created:

Enabled commenting on my site !

The long missing feature is finally here. Added commenting functionality to my website. Now users can post comment for different articles on my website.

Working on a system to show comments entered by users, below their corresponding articles. This might take some time !

Still, I hope it becomes easier to readers of my site to communicate with me !

Silverlight Applications on Linux using Moonlight !

Today, I decided to try out the Moonlight plug-in for Firefox on Linux. It can be downloaded from this site : http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/.

It looks like there is no support for video and audio at this stage. I tested my silverlight applications on it. All my apps work with both Silverlight 1.x and 2.x, and are written using javascript. I was surprised with the results. All of them worked flawlessly on Linux. Below are the screenshots:


My 'Animated 3D Bar Graph Application':
http://ashishware.com/XAMLGraph3DDemo.shtml




Animated line graph application:
http://ashishware.com/SlvrGraphDemo.shtml



Photo Viewer
http://ashishware.com/Silverlight_example.shtml


Well done ..guys at http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight !

My app on Silverlight Gallery !

Patience paid off ! Traffic to the page increased and I 'thought' someone had published link to my work somewhere. To my great surprise and excitement, I found my 'Silverlight based 3D AJAX bar Graph' example at the official Silverlight 1.0 gallery. Here is the screenshot of how it looks:


Still don't believe me ! See for yourself :
http://silverlight.net/Community/gallerydetail.aspx?cat=3&sort=1

Thank you Microsoft !

2D Animation for Web Benchmark

Came across this great site for comparing recent 2D graphic/animation technologies for the internet today. The site has nice 'colliding balls' example done with different technologies (DHTML, Java Swing, FLEX, WPF...).

Visit the site : http://bubblemark.com/

I love working with Silverlight and javascript. I was looking for performace comparision between Silveright+Javascript and Sliverlight+CLR. Though the Silverlight + javascript , example is lot slower (around 50 fps on my machine) than the CLR one, I think it has lot potential. However when performance is required, nothing beats Sliverlight+CLR, it seems !

Cool AJAX bar graph using Silverlight !

I had been working on this since past two weeks and finally uploaded to my website. Created this using XAML and javascript. There is an article on my site explaining in detail, how to customize and use it in your own application. It relies on JSON feed to refresh itself, so it's not tied down to any specific platform.

Most interesting part was to create an online tool that will let people create template XAML for this graph.

I love to work with Silverlight, javascript and AJAX. Everytime I use them together, turns out to be an awesome combination.

Check out the live demo of this graph in action here:
http://ashishware.com/XAMLGraph3DDemo.shtml

Looks like a 'rainbow' ! Doesn't it ?

Wobbly NOP = Ultimate Compiz Fusion LiveCD

Puppy linux is a wonderful linux distro. I had covered it in my article ' Running Linux on Windows Like Normal Programs'. Compiz Fusion is next generation windows manager provides some spectacular GUI effects. Wobbly NOP is what we get when they both meet.

Firstly, I would like to thank the guys behind this distro. I believe they have created the 'ultimate Compiz Fusion demo disk' . The distro is around 130 MB and runs off a live CD. This means no installation or anything required. Simply boot from the CD and run Linux. Remove the CD and reboot to start your normal OS.

If you are new to Linux, then you must try out this CD. Also, I would recommend this CD to anyone who still thinks Linux is lagging behind when it comes to GUI.

Download the ISO from this site: http://coblitz.codeen.org/puppylinux.ca/puppyfiles/wNOP/wNOP-v0.2.iso

More download options (remmember to scroll down to 'Wobbly NOP' section)
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/DownloadNOP

Some of my Wobbly NOP screenshots:

Congratulations ISRO !

Congratulations to all our scientist for this achievement. The guys at ISRO are doing an awesome job. They have been working silently and very hard for the country. The irony is not many people in India understand or value their achievements as much as they should.

It would be nice to see :

1. Names of key contributors published.
2. Some awards being announced.
3. A small movie or documentary to be made on this. So that students can develop liking for science.

Congratulations once again ! Wish you all the best for GSLV Mk-III and Chandrayaan 1

ViewState Decoder Add-On for Firefox

My first Add-on for FireFox. Never realized that creating add-ons could be so much of fun. This add-on could be useful for programmers and testers who want to keep watch on viewstate. It is designed to give sneak peek of the viewstate and not really deserialize it.

You can download it here : http://ashishware.com/ViewStatePeeker.shtml

Dojo Toolkit on Nokia n800

I tried running few examples of the Dojo Toolkit on my Nokia n800's default browser. Most things worked well except for the 'Fisheye' widget, which kept on giving error. Drag and drop example worked flawlessly on the device.

Tcl\Tk on Nokia n800

Ever since I have owned a n800 I was impatient to try some coding for it. I tried to setup Ubuntu on VM and install the Maemo SDK , but I was greeted with hundreds of errors.

Then I tried the VMWare images of Maemo SDK, but again faced problems. Had trouble changing targets and using ESBox. Also to add to the frustration the desktop manager (which I believe is Xfce) behaves weirdly, especially after restarts.

So, I was looking for some option that was easier to setup and fast. Then I came across Tcl/Tk for Maemo. Tcl is a fairly old scripting language and Tk is GUI toolkit that comes with Tcl. One can create nice GUIs with very few lines of code. Give below is a sample script and the output:

font create myfont -family Helvetica -size 20
image create photo myimg -file "img.gif" -format gif
label .i -image myimg -background white -borderwidth 3
label .l -text "Hello Maemo" -font myfont
pack .i .l -padx 10 -pady 10

Once can do some pretty serious scripting with Tcl too ! Here is another screen shot of widgets demo script that comes with standard Tcl\Tk distribution running on my n800:















But for some reasons when I click on any of the hyperlinks , I get error ! Also I was unable to install Gnocl package on my N800 (OS 2008) . Even then I think I have quite a bit to explore with this scripting language and this amazing gadget !

My Nokia n800

Last month I got myself a Nokia n800 Internet Tablet. The first thing I end up telling people about it is, it is not a 'mobile phone'. Apart from that it can do almost anything that you may expect from a PDA/Smartphone/PMP. For around USD 250 its one of the best gadgets I have ever purchased. Also, it runs on open source Linux based operating system (Maemo). Here are some images: