I was refreshing my mind about API design and wanted to see if there were any good resources online apart from the book that I have. Came across the following 3 hour lecture on how to design APIs which pretty much covers one of the better books I have read on API design. The presenter is the co-author of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries which I found to be good and useful book.

Some useful tools can be found here…and here is the list to replace built-in tools in XP[via Lifehacker]

A 30 minute interestingvideo on how your eyes actually work viewing a webpage/site. Mostly aimed at web designers and SEO people. Still, I learned a lot…

Can be found here…

It really baffles me that the leader of a nation can deny facts in front of the rest of the world and everyone just laughs it off. As an example, when Iranian president visited Columbia university he made several denials that made the audience explode in laughter, yet none of these denials are joking matters. And yet another example of these denials that certainly cannot be blamed on his ignorance of lack of knowledge is the standard answer he gives on why the Baha’is of Iran are denied their basic human rights.

These are very deliberate denials. And Iran’s regime knows that no one will stand up to them on the question of minorities in Iran. Why? Because there are bigger issues that they get away with, so this one is a walk in the park, and that is why the president himself can outright lie and deny facts and get away with it.

Putting that aside, the question in mind today is what level of hatred, ignorance or whatever you want to call it does it take when you put so much energy into even destroying the Baha’is’ cemetery which is located somewhere very remote and desolate. And what have these Baha’is done that generates such a level hatred? They believe in oneness of mankind, oneness of religion, universal peace, elimination of poverty and many principles similar to these I just mentioned.

For those of you who have an unusual name for the country you live in, or your name is simply not international enough, I am sure you can relate to this little dilemma: You pick up the phone to make a reservation at a restaurant for dinner with your friends. It’s a simple task, you dial the number, say hello, ask for a table for x number of people at a certain hour and thats that. max 30 seconds needed. But in my case that never would be the case. After saying my name, they ask me to repeat it three times, then we go into spelling it…and since “d” and “b” and some other letters sound familiar, you now have to go into F as in frank/foxtrot, a as in apple/alpha…

so 5 minutes later I have successfully managed to reserve a table for dinner. Well a couple of years ago I decided no more of this, so my resturaunt/starbucks/general waiting line name became Bob Heart. Think that solved the problem? Oh yes! However, once every three months, when I order coffee at a coffee shop and they ask for a name to call when its ready, I get the question sometime: “You don’t look like a Bob. You sure your name is Bob?”..to which I respond, would you like to spell my real name instead?

Over two months into being a dad, I thought I would jolt down some of the experiences before new ones make the initial memories fade away (mostly due to lack of sleep). People ask how it feels, and regardless of how hard I attempt, I feel I am short of words to describe it.

The closest description I have come to, that most can relate to is going through, what I call, pink-clouds-period of falling in love: Nothing else matters, you walk around with smirk on your face, you don’t need food, sleep or drink. You are in a constant wonderful high and each time you hold your baby or see her face, your heart just melts away and you are washed over by a giant wave of joy. Every little movement or sound she makes is the cutest thing you have ever heard and as a bonus her occasional (reflex) smile puts you over those pink clouds.

Simultaneous to these feelings, there is a sense overwhelming feeling that you can’t help being reminded about constantly, mainly the great responsibility you have for this soul’s well being and development. The well being part being a walk in the park in comparison to the development part. I am far from having perfected my own flaws and character and yet here she is and it is a reality that can be overwhelming. And of course, I can’t get away with do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.

The start of this journey is a happy one as at least for me, fundamentally, it comes down to knowing the purpose of life before you start focusing on smaller puzzle pieces. It makes it a little easier to align the rest of your actions in accordance to this objective or at aspire and try to.

Once in a while you see something that really warms your heart:

This clip is from an audition of Britain Got Talent show (something similar to the “Idol” shows across the globe)…Watch and I would be shocked if you don’t find it interesting to say the least…

Title says it all and here is a review…

Saw this small segment on the Baha’i Faith earlier tonight on NBC…

Faith in America: Diversity and division

graball.com is useful for those of you who are not satisfied with sticking to one search engine, or simply want to compare search results across the big players.

It also has toolbar you can install.

This documentary was shown on South African TV recently it seems…

I learned about HDRI technique a while back, but did not really bother to experiment with it as I didn’t have a DSLR camera (you can do it with a point and shoot camera too, but I figured I would just wait and get a DSLR). Anyways, I thought I would give it a try now that I have a DSLR and looked around and found two different tutorials (the authors disagree with each others ways strongly).

I know some of the friends HDR work on Flickr and you can get very nice results.

- Ryan McGinnis’s Tutorial
- Peter Carr’s Tutorial

Will post results of my experiments once I get around to it.

I’m sure anyone who has to share photos to a wider circle on a semi-regular basis realizes that emailing them is not the best option. So in my circle, I know most people use one of the three ways of sharing, namely: 1) Flickr, 2)Picasaweb or 3)Kodakgallery. I have gone back and forth a lot and been very torn between these three for several reasons, here is why:

Kodakgallery (used to be oFoto.com) - While allowing unlimited space and traffic free of charge and very easy to drag and drop pictures and create albums, it is fairly limited and doesn’t allow much for tagging and frankly doesn’t have a cool sideshow feature. And you can only see the pics in one size only. In terms of uploading, you can either drag the pics you want from your file system in original size (takes long time) or resize them to being smaller and then drag and drop (also not the fastest or most efficient way in today’s web world).

Picasaweb - Wonderful site which is really an extension of the Picasa photo organizer application (free from Google). So its very easy to select a bunch of pics from within Picasa desktop, and then create an album and have it uploaded to your picasaweb site (in original or reduced sizes). You can choose to share your albums with the public or exclusively with a small circle of family/friends (which is also supported by the two other services). So no complaints here except that you only have 1 gig of free space and if you want more space, you have to pay a yearly fee depending on how much extra space you want (e.g. 6 gig = $20/year). One feature that I really do like is the fact that; say someone has sent you a picasaweb album link and I want to download all these pictures and includes them among all my other neatly organized pictures within Picasa desktop tool. No problem, just hit download and it will get downloaded and organized with the rest of your photos.

Flickr - Probably the most popular choice by a lot of people. Comes in two flavors: free accounts (i.e. you have unlimited space, but limited amount of traffic upload/month) or pro (i.e. $24-25ish/year without any limits on space or traffic and mind you a lot of my friends have this). Again wonderful site with a lot of good features. Also provides a few different way to upload pictures, yet none of them I found to be as easy, powerful and straight forward as Picasa’s solution.

So what do I do? Well, why choose one over the other when I can have all three? Here is what I did. I have a free account on all three services (but have pretty much stopped using Kodak since I find working with the other two more smooth), which means limited monthly traffic on Flickr and limited space on Picasaweb. And since I wanted to be able to export to both flickr and picasaweb equally easy, I found this solution for getting pictures uploaded to Flickr from within Picasa desktop tool (one tip, make sure you have Java installed on your machine before installing the rest).

So now, for more artistic pictures that I want online for a long while ahead, I upload them to Flickr and the everyday life pictures from different events that family and friends want to see I upload to Picasaweb. This way, my flickr account continues to have a manageable monthly traffic (i.e stay within my limits), while I can enjoy the no space limit on it. And on my picasaweb account, over time I can delete very old albums on it to make space for new ones if need be.

Then go to skydrive.live.com. Seems like the beta is finally open to public.