Kushal Paudyal – The Official Website

I bought Google’s android based Motorola Droid X recently because I am a java developer by profession and I could write virtually any possible apps for this device with it’s open source OS and easy to use Andorid Development Kit. The phone is awesome – compared to iPhone from a techies’ point of view. I even updated my facebook status as soon as I received and reviewed the phone with “I got Droid X . Great Success. Everybody knows iPhone is for Ladies”, a parody of Borat’s quotation.

After using it for a couple of days now, I discovered a few problems/issues with this phone (which was expected). Just letting you know up front, I love this phone and it has tons of features that iPhone does not have. From bigger screen to intelligent apps, from multiple home screens to superb camera and HD Video recorder, you will definitely find this phone worth having at least for a year or two.

But today I am talking about the problems I found with this phone.

Unicode Font Support (Out of box):
By the term unicode font support, I do not mean that it does not support unicode fonts, but it seems to be missing the basic unicode fonts to represent some languages like Hindi, Nepali or Arabic. I operate several blogs in Nepali language and when I browse these blogs, the characters are just the repeated boxes. It was not a problem with iPhone or iPod Touch. Well maybe I will be able to figure out how to install the fonts or how to make it work, but for a general user who likes to have their language support this phone might be a discouragement.

Heating Problem
If you use this phone for a long time(4-5 minutes), the bottom back portion of the handset gets heated. It’s not too hot to make some barbeques but the heat is significant.

Occasional Hangs
Occasionally the handset seems to get hanged and I even experienced once that it automatically restarted when I was trying to play Need for Speed on it. I even had installed the Free Advanced Application Killer to kill any unwanted apps running in the background but still I found the hang or pause of the application now and then. I dont have to return this set for this problem, because the freezing of the set is not very frequent and irritating.

Droid Died and wont turn up (soon):
This happened today. My phone got drained totally. I was driving my car and I did not even have the car charger with me. So I came back to my office and plugged the phone to USB charger. The phone wont turn on. I pressed the power button for longer period, took the battery out and placed it back in. But no way the phone got turned on. It was only after 20 minutes the phone came back up with the battery power showing 5%. That was both shocking and frustrating. Other people also seem to have experienced this problem and their discussions are located at one of the forums here. The lesson is NOT to drain the battery or use a wall charger instead of a USB charger that provides low power that delays your handset charging.

This post will be obsolete in a few days.

To celebrate the Spain’s worldcup victory,SitePoint is offering a free e-Book download on jQuery. It’s a US$ 29.95 book and you get it for free for limited time.

Grab a copy of yours at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/thiscup

The following are the performer’s of this year’s airshow in Quad Cities (Eldridge, IA). I had been there last year, and I am not going to miss this year’s show either which is scheduled for 26th and 27th of June, 2010. I am hoping to shoot lots of interesting pictures and will provide the photos link once I return from the show.

• TORA TORA TORA – Increditble re-enactment (www.toratoratora.com)
• United States Navy Leap Frogs – Seals Parachute Team
• United States Navy F/A-18C – Hornet Wes Coast Demo
• United States Navy Legacy Flight – With Hornet and T2 Buckeye
• United States Air Force F-15SE – Strike Eagle Demo Team
• United States Air Force Heritage Flights – With Strike Eagle and Mustang
• Canadian Sky Hawks – Parachutes Team
• Lockheed T-33 Shooting Stars – Two Ship Dual
• Greg Poe – Fagen Endless Energy Tour
• Mike  Keenum – Hawker Sea Fury
• Northrop T-38 – Show Opener
• Jim “Fang” Maroney – Super Chipmunk
• P51 Mustang Acrobatic Dual – With two mustangs
• F/A-18E Super Hornet Demo
• VFA-122 Flying Eagles
• A-10 WestCoast Demo

This year’s Memorial weekend, I had been to Keystone, South Dakota, a place 800 miles away from the current city that I live in (Moline, IL) – which took us around 14 hours of drive one way. Me and my wife had a bunch of our friends accompanying us from Des Moines, IA for the travel and let me tell you right away, it was the most charming road trip I ever had in the United States. The lovely weather, the greenery of the summer time, and amazing 75mph straight roads with hardly any annoying 18 wheelers, lots of road signs and attraction, amazing animals and spectacular views made our travel worth remembering for years.

I have captured a lot of pictures form my trip and I would like to share some of them here. The following are the links to the ones I selected.

• South Dakota 2010 – Bison @ Custer State Park
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/02/american-bison-custer-state-park-south-dakota/

• South Dakota 2010 Fog @ Custer State Park
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/02/fog-custer-state-park-in-south-dakota/

• South Dakota 2010 – Badlands National Park
  Will post the link Soon

• South Dakota 2010 – Burros @ Custer State Park
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/03/burro-custer-sate-park-in-south-dakota/

• South Dakota 2010 – Mitchell Corn Palace (Outside View)
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/04/mitchell-corn-palace-in-south-dakota-outside-view/

• South Dakota 2010 – Mitchell Corn Palace (Inside View)
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/05/mitchell-corn-palace-in-south-dakota-inside-view/

• South Dakota 2010 – Mount Rushmore
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/10/mt-rusmore-presidential-sculpture-by-gutzon-borglum/

• South Dakota 2010 – Needle Road and Tunnels
  Will post the link Soon

• South Dakota 2010 – Road Signs and Other Boards
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/06/random-road-signs-and-boards-from-south-dakota-trip/

• South Dakota 2010 – Crazy Horse
  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/11/crazy-horse-my-lands-are-where-my-dead-lie-buried/

• South Dakota 2010 – Deer @ Custer State Park

  http://sanjaal.com/studio/2010/06/17/herd-of-deer-custer-state-park-south-dakota-2010/

Like every year I visited Des Moines in Iowa this year for Asian Heritage Festival. One of the interesting part of this festival is the cultural fashion show, where the amateurs models display their country’s cultural outfits. It’s a nice experience to understand the multiple cultures – the traditional dresses they wear, the songs they sing, the food they eat, the sports they play.

This year I wanted to capture a complete coverage of the cultural fashion show and I must admit it without bragging that I was successful. Although post processing of hundreds of pictures that I have taken is a tedious job (photography is just my hobby – I got other things to do besides my professional job), I have promised to myself that I will do it slowly one country at a time. Visit the following links to see some of my semi-professional fashion photography work categorized by the country.

• Cultural Fashion – Nepal
• Cultural Fashion – Japan
• Cultural Fashion – Thailand
• Cultural Fashion – China
• Cultural Fashion – Taidam
• Cultural Fashion – Vietnam
• Cultural Fashion – Burma (Myanmar)
• Cultural Fashion – India
• Cultural Fashion – Phillipines

(If a link is not available above for any specific country, possibly I have not complete doing the post processing – I hope to finish them as soon as possible)

I used to think volleyball is something you play with your hands until recently when I saw a Kick Volleyball (also known as Sepak Takraw) tournament during Asian Heritage Festival 2010 in Des Moines Iowa.

This volleyball you could play with anything but your hands. You can use your legs, neck, chest, head but you cannot use your hands. It seems the game is popular among the South East Asian countries, although it is believed to have been originated in Malaysia.

They use a special netted ball to play this game.

I captured some action shots of this play on my camera. Few selected pictures are available in Sanjaal Studio.

I have published a few selected photos from my visit to Pella Tulip Festival this year. I took around 1100 pictures, selected some 150 good shots and have finished doing post processing on only 20% of those. I have uploaded the edited pictures to Sanjaal’s Studio.

The tulips (don’t expect to see the perfect bunches, because this year I focused on shooting dry, weathering and broken tulips) pictures are located here.

Th parade pictures are located here.

It’s tulip time again and I will be in Pella today to enjoy a rich Dutch culture. I will be posting the pictures and videos when I am back to my place which would be sometimes late Sunday. The weather is kind of  non-cooperative today, but since I am already here in Des Moines, we will make it to the festival at any cost.

This is a 75th Pella Tulip Time and I hope to have more fun than I did last year.

If you are a Java Developer like me, you would know who James Gosling is. He is the father of Java Programming language – the person who created an object oriented high level language for computers called JAVA in 1994. James Gosling created the original design of Java and implemented the original compiler and virtual machine himself. Today, I make my living developing software using the language he developed.

Sun Microsystems, the company where James Gosling had been working since 1984 and where Java was developed, was acquired by Oracle in 2009. Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle’s client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun’s developer products group.

But for some reason, James Gosling resigned from Oracle today.

The following is what Gosling wrote in his blog (nighthacks.com/roller/jag/) about his living oracle.

Time to move on…
Friday April 9, 2010

Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.

This is the new home of my blog. It contains all of my old blog entries from Sun: Sun’s blogging policy gave bloggers rights to their own works. The few more recent blog entries that I did at blogs.sun.com were written under somewhat more strict policies

[James Gosling / Photo By Peter Campbell]

I had seen a couple of wonderful time-lapse videos in YouTube, and I was inspired to make one. Finally after buying a rose flower from Hy-vee, I setup the camera and I was able to come up with my first rose blooming time-lapse. Here is the video.

How was this video made?
I put my DSLR camera (Canon EOS 5D Mark II) on a tripod and kept the flower by the window side. I used cable release to avoid camera shakes. Cable release is nothing but a remote trigger with a chord. Some cable releases have self timers, so you can program them to take pictures at specified interval. But the one I purchased over eBay for my testing purpose did not have one, so every now and then I had to manually press the button on my cable release. The camera and flower setup was static, meaning there was no movement of both these entities. Then I took shots at half an hour interval.

The rose denied to bloom fast, so, it took me three days for the video. The change of color (whitish to yellowish tint) is due to day and night effect. So there are three whitish tints representing three days and two yellowish tints in the picture representing two nights.

All these pictures were taken from a feet away and then later canvas was cropped from the middle so that you would only see the zoomed flower. There were around 300 pictures total, out of which I removed around 225 and selected a list of 75 pictures. The idea behind the selection was to remove the pictures that were almost identical and which would not assist much in the time-lapse video rather than delaying the blooming video. Finally selected bunch of 75 cropped pictures were then combined in Windows Movie Maker with each picture displaying for about half a second – thus forming the video.