Thiyagaraj Krishna

From a email forward

• Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul.
• Most motorcycle problems are caused by the nut that connects the handlebars to the saddle.
• Life may begin at 40, but it doesn’t get real interesting until about 110 mph!
• You start the game of life with a full pot o’ luck and an empty pot o’ experience… The object is to fill the pot of experience before you empty the pot of luck. If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
• Midnight bugs taste best.
• Saddlebags can never hold everything you want, but they CAN hold everything you need.
• Never try to race an old geezer, he may have one more gear than you.
• It takes more love to share the saddle than it does to share the bed.
• The only good view of a thunderstorm is in your rearview mirror.
• Never be afraid to slow down.
• Don’t ride so late into the night that you sleep through the sunrise.
• Sometimes it takes a whole tankful of fuel before you can think straight.
• Never hesitate to ride past the last street light at the edge of town.
• Never do less than forty miles before breakfast.
• If you don’t ride in the rain, you don’t ride.
• A bike on the road is worth two in the shed.
• Young riders pick a destination and go… Old riders pick a direction and go.
• A good mechanic will let you watch without charging you for it.
• Sometimes the fastest way to get there is to stop for the night.
• Always back your bike into the curb, and sit where you can see it.
• Whatever it is, it’s better in the wind.
• Two-lane blacktop isn’t a highway – it’s an attitude.
• Winter is Nature’s way of telling you to polish.
• Good coffee should be indistinguishable from 50 weight motor oil.
• The best alarm clock is sunshine on chrome.
• The twisties – not the superslabs -separate the riders from the squids.
• A friend is someone who’ll get out of bed at 2 am to drive his pickup to the middle of nowhere to get you when you’re broken down.
• Catching a yellow jacket in your shirt @ 70 mph can double your vocabulary.
• There’s something ugly about a NEW bike on a trailer.
• Don’t lead the pack if you don’t know where you’re going.
• Practice wrenching on your own bike.
• Everyone crashes. Some get back on. Some don’t. Some can’t.
• Don’t argue with an 18-wheeler.
• Never be ashamed to unlearn an old habit.
• If you can’t get it going with bungee cords and electrician’s tape, it’s serious.
• If you ride like there’s no tomorrow, there won’t be.
• Gray-haired riders don’t get that way from pure luck.
• There are drunk riders. There are old riders. There are NO old, drunk riders.
• The best modifications cannot be seen from the outside.
• Always replace the cheapest parts first.
• You can forget what you do for a living when your knees are in the breeze.
• Only a Biker knows why a dog sticks its head out of a car window.
• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Peek-a-boo, originally uploaded by thiyaga.

I was on a trip to Allepey recently and was overawed by the beauty of the backwaters. A definite spot that you have to visit if you are in the vicinity. We went on a boat for about a day and then went to Vazhachal and Athirapalli falls. I had the opportunity to capture some good shots and I will be posting them to flickr whenever I get some free time. Life is a blur nowadays with a lot of time being put at work.

About to start with the fifth semester at college!

Forte Grande, originally uploaded by thiyaga.

I recently had the privilege of attending a conference where the keynote was delivered by Sir Nicholas Donofrio.. He is the Vice President – Innovation and Technology and is retiring after spending 44 years at IBM.. It was an inspiring speech and he told of change and why change should be always omnipresent and why we should be pushing forward in everything we do. He summed it up in this quote from his dad to him – “If nothing changes, nothing changes”.

Light, originally uploaded by thiyaga.

I have started posting to Flickr nowadays… After not spending any time at all over the past two years on blogging, I seem to be taking the easy way out.. Posting pics to my blog directly from flickr..

Determination, originally uploaded by thiyaga.

If there is a will, there is a way. So dont ever let go of your belief. Believe in yourself and you would come out against all odds, Victorious!

(Just to make your day surreal – Makes you think “What’s wrong with this guy?” he he he.. )

Locked, originally uploaded by thiyaga.

Posting after a long time, guess photo posts are easier for me

Close on the heels of writing about the Super Mario JavaScript implementation, I came across a Java implementation of Super Mario which to me seemed like the actual one that had a cult following when it was launched and still remains a cult for many years after that.

I am not completely sure if this game was a port of the actual assembler code or low level code that they may have used during those days, It sure looks the same!

Play the game!

I was just reading this post on Arcade games and nostalgia on Coding Horror when I just came across this amazing implementation of the classic Super Mario game in JavaScript at nihilogic!! Everthing about the game is in JavaScript including the sound version which is supposedly base64 encoded! And to top it all, it is written in only 14KB of code! An amazing feat indeed.

Everything about the game is in JavaScript with no images or audio files used as quoted above. I tried my hand in it and the game was pretty decent enough, but the point here is not the game, but the fact that you can do so much using just a little JavaScript!

Check out the post here and the games with audio, without audio, with audio(2x size) and without audio(2x size).

But when it comes to Standards, Sorry Mario, but our Princess is in another castle!

I just came across Adobe Lab’s AJAX offering, titled Spry. Creating dynamic applications seems to be a breeze for non-programmers and time-saving for regular programmers. This is a completely client-side set of libraries with no dependency on any other downloadable or server side component.

A good set of demos are provided alongwith code samples that show how easy it would be to deploy Rich Internet Applications that can be rapidly developed by mashing up components from Spry to come up with your final RIA. Quite a few visual effects top up the icing on the cake. Spry also has pre-built widgets which you can customize out of the box. Quite a lot of other widgets that aid in form validation are also provided making it easier to validate form input too.

Just to refresh my memory, I checked out OpenLaszlo, another open source framework for RIAs, the last time I saw it, it seemed to be relying overly on Flash, but on my latest visit, found that there was rendering in DHTML too from version 4 onwards. Though I am not a critic of Macromedia Flash, er Adobe Flash, there are many things that can be achieved without going for plugins like Flash, which ultimately lies with the way the designer designs the system choosing whether or not to implement plugins for simple functionality.

Check out Spry here.