July, 2009 | Digital Wealth

Solar Eclipse 22nd July 2009

Eclipse time again. These celestial happenings are among the most watched in the world, and I like to watch them too. Some photos:

More photos below, click to enlarge:

When viewed from the Earth, the apparent size of the sun and the moon is the same. If the sun were smaller, the Bailey’s beads would not occur, and if the moon were smaller – the eclipse wouldn’t be total. Yes, I know it won’t always be like this: the moon will keep moving away from the other and in several years the apparent size will be smaller so total eclipses won’t occur. For the moment though, is it a coincidence or did Mother Nature design it like this?

Eclipse teaches us that naturally, there is no one who can reign supreme all the time. When the sun shows up, the stars & the moon are gone: defeated. There comes one day when the little moon eclipses the mighty sun. So I see a lesson there from nature.

I have also a post on the eclipse of 2008, and a collection of various eclipse photos showing both lunar and solar eclipses.

First Pauri (Step 1)

To continue the series of Japuji Sahib wallpapers, I present the First Pauri (Japji Sahib) below. Japji Sahib shows us the way to uplift yourself from falsehood to Truth in 38 steps.

In the first lines of this Pauri ‘soch’ refers to the sanskrit work ‘shauch’ which means ‘to cleanse’.

There are two wallpapers of the same size as earlier, having the Pauri in two parts (click to enlarge):

Its also available as a single image:

Anniversary! :-)

Today happens to be the first anniversary of this blog. In my own opinion, it has come a long way. To commemorate this, I am releasing a downloadable digest of postings.

Today happens to be the first anniversary of this blog. In my own opinion, it has come a long way. To commemorate this, I am releasing a downloadable digest of postings categorized into three main categories:

	Computer / Programming / Security / Software Project Management
Drawings & Photographs
	Sikhism & Thoughts

If you prefer, you can order crisp color printed copies of these magazines, which will be shipped to a location of your choice in US, UK & Canada: for convenient reading for a small fee. Click on the topic you are interested in: Computers & Programming, Sikhism or Photography.

The following are some other headlines that made news on the day Digital Wealth was born:

Performance tuning applications & process

Shows you how to detect and fix performance issues, with SQL queries, processes and applications without making it to complex.

Oracle performance tuning PDF guide download here: Guide.pdf

Oracle performance tuning video tutorial:

Have written an integrated document which incorporates a summary of the video tutorial, and its available for download here.

UPDATE: An updated version of the above document is available here: http://blog.2cent.me/computer/20130410/oracle-performance-tuning/ (now includes case studies to showing application of the performance tuning ideas suggested.

However, if you are new to the topic, I recommend watching the video tutorial first to get some background.

This includes additionally, process tuning and application tuning. It discusses the nuances of Oracle performance tuning, without getting into complex technicalities like cost based / role based optimizers.

Of famous backgrounds

This photo was never intended for my blog: I never considered it quality enough – but lets start at the beginning.

I saw that computer generated art is quite popular on Flickr – so I said why not? I spent all of 5 minutes in creating a piece of ‘art’. When finished, to me it looked okay but nothing great. So I uploaded it.

To me it looks like sound waves emanating from a beating drum. What does it look like to you?

Next day I was surprised to see that the photo had become my most popular photograph. Above in popularity some photos which I had spent hours ‘creating’. Strange is life, they say. So encouraged, I made some more photos in the same way, but this time spending a lot more time to make the result more beautiful. Whether I have been successful is for you to decide.

Creating a ‘difference’ in portraits

I was reading a magazine where each article had the photo of the author besides it, but in a unique way: looking like something like on the right.

How to get this effect yourself? I will show you today.

In addition to Photoshop you need Microsoft Photo Editor to get this effect. You may have this already on your system, if you have MS Office or you may not – it has been discontinued by Microsoft. If you do not, you can download it from here or here: http://www.brothersoft.com/microsoft-photo-editor-128651.html.

First, open the photo in Microsoft Photo Editor, and then go to File->Properties. In the ‘Type’ field select Monochrome (1 bit) from the drop-down, and press Ok. Save the image.

Second, open the original photo in Photoshop (or any other photo editing tool like GIMP). Also open the photo modified through the photo editor. Drag the modified photo over the original, as to form a new layer on top.

Third, (for the modified image layer) bring up the Selective Color panel, by clicking on Image->Adjust->Selective Color. For ‘Colors’, select ‘Black’ from the drop-down – and choose suitable values for the sliders (or as shown below in the screenshot).

Fourth, select a suitable blending type from the layers window, and suitable Opacity which suits. For this image, we used ‘Overlay’ and 55%.

Save the image – flatten it before saving if you want, and you are done. If there is a way to do this without using Microsoft Photo Editor, please post comments.

There are variations possible, if you prefer. One is to ‘Invert’ the original image in Photoshop before submitting it to the MS Photo Editor (by going into Image->Adjust->Invert) and then proceeding as described.

The other is to use only the unicolor image produced by the MS Photo Editor, without blending it with the original. You could use a plain single color layer as the lower one, and do the selective color on the other.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31