bangalore to mekedatu and sangam
after referring to “outlook 52 weekend from bangalore” nearest which came to mind was mekedatu and sangam which are nearby and only 80 kms from our home. Also new bmic road from bannerghatta road to kanakpura road save 15 kms more.
started around 10 o clock. reached kanakpura through new bmic road. the kanakpura town is very small and looked like all the roads are one way. After driving for 5 min in town there was a road going left . We took that , kept going straight , there is one more left turn after 5-10 kms. Avoid that. 35 kms from kanakpura is sangam which is a meeting point for kaveri and arkavathi rivers. There is one restaurent at sangam. Crossed the river and there was are buses exclusively for going to mekedatu. If you want to ask directions dont hesitate as everyone knows that place after kanakpura.
Not what we expected. Felt that this was not right time to visit as everything was dry. It would look nicer with greenary in rainy season.
learning through books vs e-learning
The content was static .Now it is interactive. You can go through various routes to learn the things depending on situation. This is same as some novels asking readers to take decisions depending on which there can be varous endings to a story.
Reading books was making sure that you are learning from an expert which meant learning most of the thing. On internet anyone can publish an article very easily and most of the time it is not definitive and are only parts of the topic means it is learning as needed and the content is more personal.
There were less books published and we knew which one are good. If some publisher is publishing any book they might have made sure that it is not crap. On internet there is whole lot of information and there is no one to say about the quality of content. So do we need some more visible rating agency about the content.
Time spent was only on reading the book and buying it. Now most of the time is spent on searching for the information. Specialised portals might be answers.
And the one which in a small way defines the differences till now. Books had a price tag. And in todays world of web 2.0 everything is expected to be free..
how to reduce captivate file (swf) size
users of Adobe Captivate often complain about large size of the swf file captivate generates. It is only reflection of the content you have in you project. Without going into more detail and the reason behind it here are some quick things first time users can do to get low file size -
- Plan your recording area. 800 x 600 is good size for websites. If you capture at 1000 x 750 the size of images will be much more in your project.
- Go to “Slide Properties” and test with selecting value of Quality from “Standard, Optimized, JPEG, High Quality”. “Standard” will reduce the size. It also reduces the sharpness and clarity of images so test for the optimum combination you get. And dont forget to Do – Settings > Select “Apply only changed properties” in ”Which properties” section and “Apply to all” in “Which slides” section. “Close” the dialog and ”apply to all” and say OK to dialog. This steps changes the quality to “Standard” for all slides at once.
- If you have JPEG images in your project go to Project->preferences and change JPEG image quality to 75%.
- Go to Audio->Settings and reduce the “Encoding Bitrate” to as low as you can. Select Custom bitrate and slide to 32 or 24 kbps .Again listen the audio in published swf for the quality you want.
- Try not to use Full motion slides in the cases you dont need it like scrolling . Instead just click on the scroll bars to reach the area .Full motion is best suited to recording animations which cannot be done by any other way in Adobe Captivate.
With the above mentioned 5 things you can get much reduction in swf size generated by Adobe Captivate.
planet earth – the series
“A hundred years ago, there were one and a half billion people on Earth. Now, over six billion crowd our fragile planet. But even so, there are still places barely touched by humanity. This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before.”
– David Attenborough’s opening narration
the celebrated tv series is being broadcasted now a days on discovery channel. It was first of its kind to be filmed in high definition format. It took 4 years, 62 countries and 204 different locations to complete the series. And the hardships like one year for a snow leopard shot, two month trek in mongolia and many more . Read about it more here.
The result is stunning combination of visuals. The shots seems to be taken from so many angles that it is more effect than any movie. Shots like dog chasing their prey in a group. One is from the top of a helicopter, then there are so many camera that every movement is captured. And bizarre scenes like elephant swimming and the underwater camera , aerial camera and many on the land capturing it. Every thing looks so planned and you get view from all the angles. Added with David Attenborough narration and the soundtrack you are just amazed at the scale and variety of planet earth.
The firsts as released by bbc – here.
“Our planet is still full of wonders. As we explore them, so we gain not only understanding, but power. It’s not just the future of the whale that today lies in our hands: it’s the survival of the natural world in all parts of the living planet. We can now destroy or we can cherish. The choice is ours.”
– David Attenborough, in closing
size of video files
video files are series of still images played in sequence to give a sense of motion. Depending on size, quality and frame rate the video size can vary.
Size - Let us take 1400 as width and 1000 as height.
Quality - If images take 4 bytes memory space to store one point or pixel.
Frame rate – For illusion of a video we show 30 still images in one second.
Going by above data a 5 min video will take 1400(width) x 1000(height) x 4(bytes for one point) x 30(still images in a second) x 60(seconds in a min) x 5(minute) = 50400000000 bytes or 49218750 kilo bytes or 48065.2 mega bytes or 46.93 GB of space on your storage media !!!!This is a whole lot of space even in this age.
Consider how much space a 3 hour movie will take. And what does this means if it has to be transferred over a internet connection.
To solve this problem one uses something called CODEC which is acronym for COmpressor – DECompressor. We compress the video and then the player must understand the same logic for decompressing in order to play it. CODEC either compress the whole of individual images or use the fact that in most of the cases images in video depends on previous image. And if we can find out the difference in subsequent images and we superimpose the differences over the base image then whole video can be re created.
And this explain the realistic sizes of video files and the fact that we are able to see so much video on the web sites…
yet another feather in cap for captivate 2
Adobe captivate 2 wins e learning guilds member choice award in “Simulation tools – Market share” category. Press release here.
Other adobe products to win are -flash professional , authorware and director.
what is in an icon?
it is the first impression of the product. And lot much goes in designing an icon than it seems to our eyes. Some insights can be read here.
What happens when some familiar icons are intented to be changed? John Nack writes about the icon changes for upcoming Creative Suite 3 release of Adobe. It has same color scheme but different color and two letter from the product names as the icons. More popular product like Adobe Acrobat reader is out of the two letter category. Some likes it for its minimalistic and homogeneous approach. They say it is easy to differentiate out when you have hundreds of products from a company like adobe. And some hates it for not letting products retain their character.
indian ocean, junoon @ iim bangalore
Been to live concert by indian ocean and junoon at iim bangalore annual fest unmaad this saturday. Lucky ali and kailash kher were there on friday. Could not get time on friday so went for the next day show. The tickets were easily available at iim gate on saturday @ Rs 99 and 299. Everything from car parking to crowd management was being done by students.
Indian ocean does not seems to be very popular name outside students circle. But among student they has achieved a cult status. Might be due to very less exposure on television. I heard some of their songs two year back and also liked black friday numbers very much which were all done by them. The sounds are very different. The vocals is also very indian. For lyrics there is nothing which is flowing or has meaning like normal songs. I like them despite not finding the flow or some continuous meaning. They are mixture of dohas, shlokas, folk songs, interesting words. Overall they sound good, hummable and not like anything you have heard before. Currently only indian band whom I will buy to listen. I only hoped there was more vocal and words in their numbers.
Next came Junoon which was also good but nothing which differentiates them from others. They said they are in existence since 1988 .Some of their songs were good.
And the worst part was when the last joint number by Junoon and Indian ocean has to be cancelled as it was almost 11 pm which is the deadline for such performances in bangalore and the police was there to make sure that it is being followed. Sad and abrupt ending to good times we were having.
intelligent documents and pdf
Today Tom Malloy was in bangalore campus. He talked about two tribes in world – document and application. Currently they are two and separate. It is when “document” does what it is supposed to do that is store data and behave like an “application” they become “intelligent document“. They could have been named intelligent application also. And “intelligent document” and “rich internet applications” could be one and the same in coming years with boundaries diminishing. Future might belong to intelligent documents with low memory footprints. Who knows how history unfolds and Adobe has been witness to some of these turns.
And this week adobe submitted PDF 1.7 specifications to iso standard. And as the world sees it.
