Launching The Naked Frame

A little over a month ago, my friend Rouzbeh and I were talking about making nice prints of our pictures and doing a gallery showing. As we worked on filtering our pictures to create a collection that was small and represented our work best, we also wondered if we couldn't just create an online gallery where people could browse and purchase these prints.

As we looked around at the available solutions, we found that there wasn't anything that really excited us. We wanted a website that looked classy and didn't put us in with thousands of other artists with unlimited portfolios (i.e. we didn't want to get lost in a huge pool of pictures). We also wanted the website to focus on photographic art. You know where I'm going with this - we didn't find any that completely satisfied us, which led us to ask ourselves - could we build one?

That was around Christmas last year. Over this past month, the two of us (with an infinite amount of support from friends who chipped in with business advice, general feedback and encouragement) have built a website that attempts to create an online art marketplace where people can find and purchase limited-edition prints of photographs that are printed professionally. Along the way, we have also collected a few fellow photographers who have put up their collections and I hope to introduce them well in the official blog over time.

This is a baby-step and is intended to put our art out there while also helping us to learn what people really want. We hope to impress you with the collection of art we have, along with the quality of the prints we will give you. For now we are not offering anything other than prints on photographic paper, but in the future we will offer more high-end products such as prints mounted on masonite, prints on metal and possibly even framed prints. But as I said, baby steps.

So, head over to The Naked Frame, browse around and hopefully you'll find something you like. If not, that's okay, but don't forget to send us some feedback about what you liked or disliked and what you would like to see. (There's a nice little feedback button on the top of the website just for that!)

Labels: art, naked frame, photographs

HOWTO: Connect your blog to Facebook

Facebook doesn't make this obvious, but you can be active on Facebook without actually being there. For example, the notes I post on Facebook are actually post on my blog (http://www.ecogito.net/anil) which Facebook picks up and posts as 'Notes' on my profile. If you have a blog for the outside world, here's how you can connect it to your FB profile.

1. Click on the start menu on the bottom of your Facebook window. This is the button that has the facebook logo and the text 'Applications' on it. (See image).



2. On the menu that pops up, choose 'Notes'. (This is not the only way to go to Notes since you can also click on 'Notes' in your profile, but things work differently if you go down that route.) Now you should be on the 'My Friends' Notes' page. Click on the 'Import a blog' button on the right



3. Just enter the address of the RSS or Atom feed in this page, and you're done! For now, FB only allows you to import one blog into your notes, so if you want to add a different blog, you'll have to remove an existing one.

Why Avatar was a disappointment for me

Cameron's 'Avatar' is a great movie. It's absolutely beautiful to look at and people will be talking about it for a long time to come. However a great looking movie doesn't always mean an interesting one. (Just look at the last two Matrix movies or 300 or even Transformers) Here's what makes this movie a disappointment for me

1. For all the creativity shown in depicting the planet Pandora, it feels like all the creativity was spent on the beauty of the forests and the level of detail in the creatures, but not on the concept of what would make the planet different. Pandora seems to be just like earth, just prettier and completely interconnected. The trees look like earth trees (just more luminescent), the animals are just like earth animals, only with six legs and a lot more prehistoric. Almost as if Pandora is a Disney fantasy mated with Jurassic Park. Is that the best they could come up with in ten years?
2. The Na'vi are just Native Americans in a different world. Taller and blue skinned instead of dark skinned, but otherwise the same. Down to the jewellery and customs. I can understand why they would be humanoid for the story, but it's hard not to draw conclusions about this being a space-Pocohontas when you are constantly feeling that the Na'vi are just humans with blue stuff smeared on them. After a while, you stop noticing that they are taller than humans because there are few scenes where they actually stand with humans.
3. The natives have very unbelievable statistics. Where are the variations that you normally see everywhere? The women are identical, have the same boobs and the men are all exactly the same kind of lean. It's almost as if they made one model and then multiplied them for the animation.
4. Very cheesy dialogue and predictable plot. A predictable plot is not bad as long as the treatment is different. Unfortunately this is as cheesy as it gets.
5. Deux ex machina - when Jake Sully was praying to the tree, I almost felt like I was watching a 60's era hindi movie where the heroine would pray to some gods and there would be a miracle in the climax of the movie. And that's exactly what happened here.
6. The airships are all armored and bulletproof (made amply clear in the scene where an airship is shot at and nothing happens). They show arrows just bouncing off them, but when Jake Sully decides to fight back, he's able to punch holes in the glass using the same arrows. Really?
7. Very stereotyped and one-dimensional characters. The bad guys are almost comically bad - beyond what's believable. The good guys are almost stupidly good. Jake Sully gets accepted into the Na'vi clan within a few lines of the script with no good explanation why. (Yeah, there was a 'sign')
8. A lot of work was put in to make the Na'vi look believable with incredibly good detailing and skin textures. However, while the robots are huge and appear to move with the expected body weight, the Na'vi move in a cartoonish way as if they are feather-light. Reminded me of the bad physics in the first Hulk movie.

These might be little things, but when you are watching something that's billed as an epic, these little things can be big ruiners.

News Coverage - A comparison of major news websites

On November 8, there were three major news stories as shown by Google News. I'll use that as a baseline since Google News aggregates the opinion of a large number of newspapers and is probably a good indicator of what's considered newsworthy.


So, what we have is three major news items on this day - The Healthcare Bill passing the house floor, Hurricane Ida and related weather items, and the Fort Hood shooting. Let's see how the major news websites reported on these at approximately the same time. I'm also providing my own opinion and commentary, but feel free to ignore those.

The New York Times decided to give the Healthcare Bill prime space on its front page with no mention of Ida or Fort Hood above the fold.



The Washington Post gave coverage to both the bill and the shooting, but a major chunk of the front page real estate was taken up by ads and articles of debatable front-page-news-worthiness.


The Wall Street Journal gave coverage to the bill and shootings with very little sensationalism and good summaries of both topics.


Fox News was more like a supermarket checkout-stand magazine with sensationalist headlines and images.


CNN was weirdly surprising. Healthcare got a couple of lines in the 'Latest News' segment while the attention grabbing part of the page was a video-still that seemed to be there more for the entertainment value rather than news value. Depending on when you visited the page, you would have gotten either the Fort Hood video or a video on 'New mom inspired to lose 71 pounds'.


BBC (I chose the BBC 'Americas' section to be fair instead of the home page which is not America-centric) had one of the best layouts for news with good coverage for all three news items.



If I had to visit a single website other than Google News to get a good summary and news roundup, I guess I would have to visit either BBC or the WSJ.

Labels: news

HOWTO: How send email using Gmail or Google Apps from Rails

If you are developing a Rails application that needs to send email, you probably want to have support for sending emails without having sendmail or an smtp server installed on every development machine.

Everyone who has a Gmail account has access to their SMTP server for free, but there are some caveats:

1. Google only allows secure SMTP connections and Rails does not have support for this out-of-the-box.
2. Even if you solve problem #1, you do not want to embed your gmail password in your code.

Let's solve Issue #2 first: There are two immediate solutions

1. Create a throwaway gmail account just for your rails project.
2. Configure one of your domains for Google Apps, and create an email address purely for your Rails development (Google allows upto 200 email addresses in the free version). You can embed this username and password in your application and not worry about other folks having access to it.

Now about Issue #1:

There's a hack called 'smtp_tls' to enable secure SMTP access in Rails, but I've had trouble finding the original blog post that described this, even though that code is available in many different places. Here's an easy way to get it working.

1. Download 'smtp_tls' from here. (You can also google 'smtp_tls' to find it elsewhere) and copy it to your {RAILS_ROOT}/lib/

2. Edit {RAILS_ROOT}/config/environment.rb.
At the bottom of the file (after the very last line) add the following

require 'smtp_tls'

ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => "587",
:domain => "yourdomain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "username@yourdomain.com",
:password => "yourpassword"
}

Of course, replace yourdomain.com with the domain where Google Apps is running, and username and yourpassword with the username and password that you created on that domain. Note that the :userame has to be your complete email address for Google Apps. You do not have to change the settings for :address and :port since the smtp server address does not depend on the domain that you configured Google Apps for. The :port parameter can be either 587 or 465.

If you are using a regular Gmail account, use that account's settings for ::user_name and :password.

You can find more information about Google's SMTP settings on their help page, but you wouldn't need anything more than what's described above.
That's it! In your code, use ActionMailer like you would normally do.

Labels: rails, tutorial

Gringo...

From my friend Heather's recent trip to Chile.



Edit: Welcome Reddit Users!

Facebook Profile

Choosing your profile picture (from PhD Comics - extras included)




Original comic here.

Labels: comics, profile, social-networks

Ruby on Rails and mysql connection problems

If you are losing connection to mysql every so often on OSX (I'm using 10.5 Leopard), it's probably because you do not have the native C ruby-mysql bindings. If your error looks like this:

Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query:

then try the following. Verify that the bindings are really not present. In a terminal window, open up the interactive ruby shell and type the following commands:

irb
>> require 'mysql.bundle'
=> true
>> exit

If you do not get 'true', then you need the bindings. Back to your terminal window and type the following:

$ sudo -s
$ ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Try require 'mysql.bundle' again and this time you should get back true.

Sources: 1 and 2.

Labels: Leopard, mysql, rails, RoR, ruby

Grounds for your garden

Did you know that you can get coffee grounds for free from any Starbucks? Just walk in and ask for 'Grounds for your Garden' and you will receive a huge bag of used coffee grounds that you can use to dress up your soil. If you live in Arizona, you probably need some acidity in your soil anyway, so try it out!

Aim for Fame

From Banksy's guide to cutting stencils:

Any fame is a bi-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.