I still have files on yahoo briefcase… very very valuable, but only to me… I am not talking about the contents of the file… yes, the files did cost me a lot, but I am not talking about that either. This is a different kind of value, which all of us appreciate. The value which is directly related to the object, the person and the time.. want examples ??? of course… Remember your old jeans? Remember your photos back from school days??  VALUABLE indeed ……

Sweet old memories I have in those uploaded bytes. The days of Gaming, Days of Age of Empires, Half-Life, Diablo II and Counter Strike… The days of my so called college, which I hardly ever bothered to attend… The days when the day used to dawn with the game and set with another… the memories of those addictive days crawl through my mind, unleashing torrents of energies, taking me into a trance, i see ….hoards of paladins raging through fields, rams attacking thick stone walls, Siege weapons hurling stones at distant enemy towers…. Somewhere deep beneath the town, we fight the legions of demons, just so we could reach to the portal which leads us to another realm…. GoGoGo… Strom the Front… Affirmative…….. Killing Spreee…. Double Kill…. Triple Kill……  …..GODLIKE!!!  Oh my GOD they’re so many names… WoW, DotA, Ragnarok, Warcraft III, Renegade, Commandos , CnC Generals, Red Alert II, GTA II, GTA Vice City, Quake III Arena, Day of Defeat, Unreal Tournament …  The awesomeness…..

I used to upload my savegame files over Yahoo Briefcase often… Just so that I could resume the game back home or in some other cyber cafe… I had plenty of Age of Empire custom maps, downloaded from several websites, stored in my briefcase, so that we wont need to find them again… Very addictive years they were… nothing else really mattered.. bunking college for days, spending those hours in cyber cafes playing multiplayer games with other kids, doing exactly the same with their colleges and their time was all that we used to do. Their real names never mattered, we hardly knew any real names of our fellow gamers… only nicknames like Nightmare, Casino, Shadow Warrior, Samrat, Pappupager, Cracker, A1, Chilli and so on… I still stick to my nickname “JaguarNac”…. I believe it’s something like gamer’s code that you do not ask a fellow gamer his real name until he exposes it by himself… or his parents come to the cafe yelling his name for bunking the college

Fun times indeed.

~JaguarNac~

http://psytoy.net/picasa-image-express/

with this plugin, you can customize how the thumbnails get linked up. Lightbox, Thickbox or just links to the picasa photos. You need flash player installed to use this plugin though.

Unlike the Picasa Lightbox 2 plugin, it’s harder to create galleries using this plugin…

~Nac

These are ducks from Lake Elizabeth, Fremont, CA, USA.
Voice Over : Chanda
Also starring : Nachiket and Ashish

On my first free weekend here, I visited Golden Gate Bridge and Crooked Street from San Francisco. Pictures now available at :

http://picasaweb.google.com/jaguarnac/SanFrancisco

more pictures from US :

http://picasaweb.google.com/jaguarnac/USPics

For your reference, there are a some really nice people in those photos.

1) Chanda Vaze : She’s my collegue who’s on this US tour with me.
2) Ashish Bapat & Anjali Bapat : These are real fun persons to be with. Our boss’s relatives, great hosts and guide for us here in US. They significantly smoothened our mental transition from India to US. Real good people

Last on the post, I believe I’m gonna put on some definite weight on my seketon during my stay here. It’s all cheese, butter, bread and fat-free food along with farm fresh vegetables and lot more food stuffing my tummy.

It’s different here. I’m enjoying the difference.

Have Fun

~JaguarNac~

The very variety in the different mindsets of designers and developers makes this combination a “special” case. Both types think that “the other work” is hard, tedious, unimaginable and most often, “not for us to do”.

In a general training course of a web designer, teachers or institutes follow a typical method. They usually begin with the designing tools like Photoshop or CorelDraw. Next step is to teach web designing. Basics of web page. It’s seen as designing a brochure. Students are given a topic or theme and taught the basics of placing links, images, contents etc. on the design using Photoshop or CorelDraw. A page is designed within a fixed size optimized for certain screen resolution. Web page elements (mostly links) are positioned . Later on, they teach to convert the “Image” to “Web Page” by slicing and exporting as web page, thus teaching to create a scary table based structure. During conversion, students are often “NOT” taught the basics of splitting the page into appropriate HTML elements. Soon after learning this “Page cutting” technique, students are taken to the WYSIWYG editor, in most of the cases, “Dreamweaver”. Editors are used to replace “The content” slice exported from Photoshop with actual content text and most of the remaining part of the page is kept as is… ALL IMAGES… sometimes, even replacing some image content with “Flash Animations”. Here, students are navigated through the basics of HTML and JavaScript. Though CSS is taught, it is mostly through the GUI driven interfaces provided by the WYSIWYG editors. These students however, get trained well in Designing tools and can produce good output for Print Media or Web based banners and flash ads.

Developer course on the other hand takes a complete development track. They’re taught the server side languages with a little bit introduction to the client side techniques such as AJAX. Modern server-side frameworks come with components that can effectively render the client-side AJAX stuff. Server-side developer does not need to know what exactly happens at the client side as these frameworks make the things as optimized as possible. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET give good idea of this. even on PHP, There’s a huge number of plugins, scripts and API’s available for developers that render the javascripted page on their behalf.

In short, Web Developers with decent JavaScript and CSS knowledge don’t come easy and need to be specifically trained or obtained through a tiresome search. However, the things that are expected from such candidate can easily be learned through online tutorials and trial and error study.

In a few coming days, I’ll try to post a basic guideline on how to go with web designing. Wish me luck!!

~JaguarNac