Happy Diwali

Music phones

So what different things have you though your music phone (mobile) can do or look like.
The following page shows some of the very creative ways of designing music phones.
Music Phones
I know this will be very short post but can't resist to bring it to your notice.

My blogs' DNA Blueprint

Hey all blog and web freaks with a little bit of biological bend. Check this out. Well that's DNA blue print of my blog by WEB2DNA. My friend Atish brought it to light. You might also want to check out another application that shows your webpage as graph. The link is inline on web2dna webpage.
This is utterly new way of representing a page on web. And see how beautiful it brings out different information.

www.kumarahir.com

That's the name of my new domain.
So this Diwali I resolved to get myself a playground aka domain and webspace to play around with different applications and experiments and host my portfolio.

Tips for Bloggers

Those of you who want to add a little bit extra to your blog, be it hit counter or site map or statistics or a new show off image gallery there are many free 3rd party widgets available. But they come either with price or advertisements. But why pay them when Google allows you to do so in house. Hmmmmm.. so the question is where is it?

Well I was trying to search for the same answer and I landed up on TipsforNewBlogger blog which lists down different methods that are simple and inherent in Blogger that we can use to enhance the richness of our blog.

Happy blogging !

Booking a ticket

You must have guessed it right by now what this post is going to be about. But before starting I will just let you know the moral of the story first, so that you might not want to go through entire post and then repenting having known all these things.

"Use of IRCTC website for booking tickets of Indian Railways is only meant for people who are well organized and well planned. Those who plan their visits well in advance are the winners in this game. Last minute bookings will not help you get the desired tickets. You have to hop from one page to another atleast for few hours to attain Nirvana of booked ticket"

So far I have booked almost 50 tickets on this site. Most of them done at the end. But recent experiences prove the above statements. And during this journey I have kind of discovered few tips and tricks you can use to beat the system. However the final result rests in the hands of IRCTC. When each and every second of your time is precious (for last minute ticket bookers) following tips may help you get desired results. Also find my comments on each point inline in italics.

• Open 2 to 3 browser instances and try again and again to reach the login page in each one of them. Probability is very less, but you can try. The probability of getting the home screen in the very first try is inversely propotional to the festival/holiday/holiday in sequence
• Once you have opened the browsers switch off image loading/animation/sound/image dither/font cleartype options in the browsers. All these things take up too much of network bandwidth creating bottle neck for the original content/page. I don't know why IRCTC site has so many animations and images on their home page. Yes advertisement is the business model but it's not primary function/source of income for them. They should consider the users pain. How many users who do online booking refer to these advertisments and follow them for further information?
  
• Use Remember password feature of the browser and site, so that if you land on login page the login details are filled in and you don't have to waste your precious minutes. Just hit enter or click on login/submit button to login. Well well once you do this you have saved 15-30 seconds of your time filling in important two lines of credentials.
• So after login the biggest mistake that IRCTC website people have done is to land you on "Plan travel" page where in you have to find trains first, then fill in your personal details and then go for payment page. 3 pages in whole which takes up almost 10 to 15 minutes depending on your network and typing speed. So you have to fill in details again like source and destination station, class, date of journey etc. In this case use autofill feature of the browser. It's there in IE as well as Firefox. But this one is limited as it does not autofill few options. So we resort to 3rd party softwares. FormAutoFill is one such good freeware application. You can make profiles for different forms. So before you start booking take some time out when there is no rush, afternoon or evening (IST) and make this forms. Then when it's time to fill the online ticket booking forms just select the appropriate form from this software and it will fill in all the details in just one click. So you again save almost 2-5 minutes of your time on single page. And hit submit to go to next page. So if you are planning your travel it'll save 10-15 minutes and for quick book option it'll save 5 minutes of your time. More you save time more is the probability of your getting to the page.
• You must have extreme patience to get to the payment screen. Don't use autofill option for entering login credentials of netbanking unless the computer is used by you only. Never use it in cybercafe as it can be used to leak all your money from your account. Ok once you have made payment it's upto God only to lead you to congratulations screen of your booked ticket. There is still chance that your payment gateway or IRCTC server misbehaves and you are slapped with "Sorry- transaction failure" screen.

So these are few observations that I have done. Infact there are many but it'll take series of posts to discuss them. I have done an assignment on designing simple and usable screens for online ticket booking site during M.Des in usability classes.
Will scan the assignment notes and post it soon (i need to locate where those sheets are lying these days)

Well I forgot to add wonderful online resources that will ease half of the task of booking ticket i.e. checking availability of seats. Cleartrip, Zoomtra and Erail are the few websites that gives a new paradigm to checking availability. Zoomtra goes ahead a little bit and allows the user to search tickets based on price, departure time, arrival time and journey duration and that too in a noble way. Hmmmm, discussing these paradigms and their comparison will be taken up in another post.

Design resource

This is a nice collection for getting enough to start the work and boost your brain

Interesting menus - Some Google work
http://www.google. co.uk/landing/ thingstodo/ #tip36

30 Beautiful Photoshop Illustration Tutorials
http://sixrevisions .com/graphics- design/30- beautiful- photoshop-
illustration- tutorials/

Phonographantasmasc ope - Must see!
http://in.youtube. com/watch? v=to99C-0cLGE

80 Graphic Design Links You Can't Live Without
http://outlawdesign blog.com/ 2008/80-graphic- design-links- you-cant-
live-without/

7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design
http://www.smashing magazine. com/2008/ 10/06/7-ingredie nts-of-good-
corporate-design/

Top Ten Things They Never Taught You at Design School
http://www.designob server.com/ archives/ entry.html? id=121

Graphic Exchange - portfolio
http://www.graphic-exchange.com/aabout.htm
got this from Dhairya

Google goggles

Ever been in situation when you had just hit send button of your email and repented of not doing so?? Well many of us have been victim of such conditions when we do that's not intended or that's not the right thing to do at that time.

So gmail team has come up with a new feature in their labs edition. It's Gmail Goggles.

What goggle does is to divert your attention to some other thing when you are going to take a critical decision so that you get enough time gap to rethink on it. It does this trick by giving you simple math problems of addition, multiplication etc. when you hit send button. Once you solve the problems correctly your message is send. And yes you still have time to revert or discard your message. You can set time when you want this feature available. Say Friday nights after parties you are most likely to be in unstable state of mind. So you enable this feature to work for Friday nights. And then whichever mail you compose and send on Friday nights will encounter goggles filter.
To enable this option go to Settings and then Lab option tab.

Happy goggling.

Composition of Life

Life is constituted of experiences.

They are of three types: physical, emotional and intellectual. The quality and
quantity of experiences determine the nature of life. If your experiences are
happy, your life is happy. If they are unhappy, it is unhappy. If dynamic, it is
dynamic. If dull, it is dull. Therefore, to bring about a chnage in your life
you need to change your experiences. An experience is a unit of life. It is made
up of you, the experiencing subject and the world, the experienced object. The
union of the subject and object, you and world brings about an experience. It is
like a chemical reaction between two chemicals. If you wish to enrich your life
you must deal with its constituents. Improve both, the world and you. Study the
naure of the world you contact. Develop it to the extent possible. Also study
the structure of your personality. Improve it as well. When the constituents are
bettered, the experiences arising out of their union must necessarily improve.
then the law applies - as the experieences so the life. Your life takes a turn
for the better.

And excerpt taken from "The Eternities - Vedanta Treatise" by A. Parthasarathy. I am reading this book these days. Very good for self realization.

Savouring Savior Sandwich

Note: there seems to be some problem with the template that I am trying to build for my blog, so the blog entry is not coming properly. It may be truncated at end in different browsers. Will be corrected soon.
There is only one person in a big 2 BHK flat doing nothing but surfing internet watching youtube videos, indian idol 4 videos and reading novel "Life of Pi". It's 1:30 PM and he is still looking for options to have lunch at. He had tried and tested almost all the nearby restaurants and they all seem to be old and tasteless to him. He is hungry. Well he has no hard cash in his pocket too and there are no ATMs nearby. What can be done? Well he is a designer. And Designers don't despair of any limitation or constraint. So was I. And then started the quest to get something yummy in my tummy.

Quickly went to nearby Food Bazaar. The items on list were bread, cheeze spread, tomato sauce, aloo sev and whatever I think was important. I managed to get all the required things to make a goodie sandwich and have treat of the day, rather week.

So here lies all the raw materials to make a yummy vegetable sandwich.

We have cucumber, white bread, capsicum, aloo nimbu sev from famous Haldiram namkeen, Everest chat masala for that extra chatkaaraa, Maggi Pichkoo tomato sauce, Milkmaid cheeze spread with Mexican chilli ting and yes an empty stomach to grab all this in.

Well I made different types of and flavors of sandwiches but I'll show the one I liked most.

It all starts with a bare bread.
This was a freshly baked white bread and as soft as cotton. So won't be any problem nibbling. Add a layer of cheeze spread to two slices of the bread.

Here's the cheeze spread. After applying cheeze I added a bit of emotion to it to make it more soothing to my heart. I wrote my and my beloveds initials K and F. And it was looking an awesome topping. Thought of doing some typography with tomato sauce someday. May be next time.

And now is the time to add some crunch and munch to the food. So here comes special Haldiram sev with nimboo paani. (chatkaaraa lag gayaa naa??)

And then it was the time for cucumber to get laid. Ummhhh (do I hear any mumbles??) I meant to lay cucumber pieces as stuff.

And now the final layer of ccccrunchy capsicum cut in very ornamental shape. After adding some more crunch with a sprinkle of Haldiram sev, the sandwich was finally ready to be eaten.

And what will be best way to eat this. With none other than Indian Idol 4.

Trying out Gtalk Labs edition

I got to know from my friend that Google is trying out hands on Gtalk in their labs. And it's available for download to test it out. So I just went ahead and downloaded this new kiddie with lot of enthusiasm, anxious to see what new has Google team done with Gtalk.


But after installing it and using I just can't bear it for more than few minutes. I uninstalled it. Listed below are some of the usability issues I found with it.

• they have put all chat windows into one. there is no liberty of moving (drag-drop) of different chat windows of different users
• sign out option is removed from chat window
• you need to right click on icon in task bar and then sign out
• limited settings options
• the title text color is grey which doesn't go well with blue tint of chat box
• when u are chatting with someone you can't say who's online
  closing the any chat window will bring up the last left chat window on top rather than the adjacent one