Looking back at 2005
I’m quite enjoying the way people are turning their new year posts into an insight about them and their beliefs in the year 2005. So, in the spirit of capturing such essence, I thought I’d pluck a few phrases—from my year 2005 posts or comments—that I really thought conveyed something there.
It was not a good start.
One look at this week’s cover [of India Today] dried our throats, brought our hearts to our mouths.
I don’t know what incited me to write this—Have Indians really lost a taste for good things? I guess I couldn’t tolerate the collective mediocrity this voting and the nomination was doing for the Indian Bloggies. Above all, I wanted others (the world outside Indian blogosphere) to look at the winners with some amount of admiration than a smirk that would imply—Is this the best they could come-up with? No wonder they’re lousy.
Anybody that thinks only the appearance is the criteria (with no regards to standards) for a best designed award is an amateur (either by choice or by ignorance). An award system that does not appreciate the efforts of those who work with standards loses credibility.
My tribute to the one-man army in metallurgy, my most respected senior colleague and one who commands my respect, is none other than MRC Nagarajan.
In his seventies, he is a man very young at heart, a super-adopter of times, a stalwart of the Offshore industry and an authority on metals, I’ve not known a man who is still devoted to his field of specialty-Metallurgy.
Matt highlighted my review of WordPress and its default theme.
With version 1.5, this blogging software rocks! One of the leanest systems, highly customizable, intelligent and slick interface and bang-on the malice of the world wide web (read: comment and trackback spam). This version brings back the pleasure to blog.. Are WordPressers the only ones having all the fun these days or what?
Kottke went full time, and I became one of the many many micropatrons in support. It was also a time I realized from Matt’s post (and the fiasco that happened around WordPress.org site) that a tremendously useful blogging platform needed its users to help stand on its own. I was happy to donate my bit towards supporting WordPress. I also bought a t-shirt that I wear with pride.
In March, I released Plain Vanilla theme for WordPress. It continues to get a ton of love from users.
You could hack this GPL’d template to glory if you keep the basic structure the same (page divisions and other hacks that take care of cross-browser issues).
On XML feeds, I wrote:
A lot of us take feed for granted. That’s because we know how to use it. But I have a strong feeling that a lot of people don’t know what a feed really is or rather how to use them. I looked everywhere for some write-up, and I couldn’t find one simple down-to-earth explanation of what a feed is or how to use it. So, I just wrote one.
Eminent designer D Keith Robinson called it “a bit too detailed for my taste, but pretty straight-forward.” And while looking to tap into feed stats, I came up with feeds now managed by Feedburner.
It was heartening to note that Dhruva was raking up a storm in a world outside our own. My batch mate and CEO of Dhruva, Rajesh Rao announced on GITwackos—our alumni—that Thomas Friedman had two full chapters on Dhruva in his book: The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st century.
In May, We the media enlightened me.
Also, in May, realizing that many of my friends and colleagues thought that setting-up a website was a daunting task, I tried to connect with Roll your own blog site. It was indeed nice to know that Desipundit was setup with those instructions.
In June, I felt the need to write about why I blogged. This was a kind of response to a lot of my offline friends asking me the “why”. I blog because it’s a form of self-expression.
I was amazed by University of Sheffield’s breakthrough on developing a vibration monitoring system of a Stadium.
Putting a human behavioral pattern to curve-fit is worse than predicting natural forces like waves. The only way is to collect vast amount of data to find a pattern or a set of patterns for an in-depth dynamic stress analysis. It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to find a dynamic natural period of the crowd to keep it out of sync from resonating and creating the damage. Because the design needs to be generic while the crowd at different events is not, this is a major challenge.
In August, I reviewed Genie, a non-linear structural analysis software.
Today’s computers have reduced that pain a little bit. And, it’s nice to know that Genie is probably as fast as SACS as I watched the demo yesterday. I wonder if SESAM has gone the way SACS did by intelligently trimming the modal partial differential equation to cut computational time without losing too-much of accuracy.
I’m guessing this post has grown far too long in length than I had initially anticipated. And I’m tired. Hopefully, I’ll have a sequel to this post, if I have the time. If you’re in a hurry, you could always dig-up my archives =).