Thursday, February 21, 2008

Indian Fashion, Human Mannequins

Quote from the Wiki:
# A jointed model of the human body used by artists, especially to demonstrate the arrangement of drapery. Also called lay figure.
# A life-size, articulated doll mainly used to display clothing.

There seem to be a lot of India clothes tailors in Bangkok. These guys share a common trait and that is to stand *outside* the store like retards.

It is annoying as hell to see these characters standing around, doing nothing, staring the whole damn day.

I was quick to grab this photo. My hand was in the bag, I instantly powered on the camera, made the guy think I was going to climb up the stairs – only to turn around point and shoot! He was caught off guard and moved out of the frame after I shot the photo. Oops! Too late ;-)

Invest in some real Mannequins guys.. That's the least you can do!







External References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannequin

Sunday, February 17, 2008

What Not to Do on Duplicate Records

You've probably grabbed a bunch of records from the database, pumped them into an array and then tried to delete the duplicate records. The result is a dataset that is messed up, the reason why is unknown.

Lets look at the array:

// Your query here
$SqlSelectRow = mysql_fetch_array($SqlSelectResult)

This behavior occurs because you perform the action on the contents in the array. Updates to the array are not reflected on the database, and therein lies the problem.

Be sure to directly update records in the database or have the array update contents in the db.

An easy solution though is to set the column as 'unique' and then dump the dataset. Be sure to remove the unique attribute once this process completes if you want duplicate records during future inserts.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Mobile Technology Forges Ahead At Barcelona

Interesting developments this year at the wireless industry meet in Barcelona.

Sony Ericsson decides to bundle Windows Mobile on smart phones.

Yes! This just *had* to happen sooner or later. Sony has designed and produced great looking hardware, be it notebooks, cellphones, flat screen TVs etc. Back in the Palm days, the Sony Palm PDA had the best form factor.

Designing software apps for a mobile device is a challenge. Small screens, restrictive input methods, tiny memory RAM/ROM and the User Interface real estate is limited.

Symbian is an obnoxious OS on a cellphone. I can never figure out the flow of logic on a Symbian OS. The UI is big and ugly, menus are nested way too deep and any setting that involves a network configuration … ouch .. good luck finding your way around.

I hope Sony decides to get rid of Symbian altogether, go full steam ahead with the Windows Mobile OS and release loads of applications off the Windows Mobile SDK. There is a great cloud of win mobile applications already, so finding developers should not be hard.

Windows mobile has been doing great on HTC devices. To keep the innovation going, HTC now has a giant of a competitor.

The newly announced Sony Xperia is packed with a gorgeous 800x480 touchscreen, WiFi radio and Mobile 6. The microSD flash support (a first one from Sony?) signifies Sony’s seriousness in embracing open standards and making its presence felt in the market.



I guess what really spun this development is the Apple iPhone. The iPhone was the *first* in telling users, “Hey look, we’ve re-created the software stack”. There are features like touch and a full fledged desktop class browser that users can now look forward too. Not to mention a gazillion of other features that cellphone companies never bothered about.

Motorola is in trouble today because of crappy software. The RAZR cellphone did not have a rock solid OS. Plus, adding in features and installing apps was hard and impossible. Hardware with pathetic software slapped on is junkyard scrap. Sony would be in this state too, had they not jumped the Windows Mobile route.

Interesting to see how this is going to go ahead. Robust windows mobile on sexy hardware that seamlessly integrates with the desktop. Good times ahead!

More Details on the Sony Press Release