Again a weekend holiday came i.e Sunday. I decided to go out and do some good photography with my new Nikon Coolpix camera. So went to Mandapeshwar caves near my house. So here I introduce in short what these Mandapeshwar caves are.
Mandapeshwar caves are situated at a distance of 3 kms to the north of Borivli station(w). According to the history of caves which I have read so far, the caves date back to the late 8th Century BC. There is one huge cave, which is divided into eight chambers. There is small Shiv Ling inside the cave. You can also call it Shiv temple. As per the history Portuguese invaders constructed walls in front of the carved figures on the walls of the cave. One of the chambers has a carved figure of Lord Shiva performing the tandav. We can see a lot of artistic carvings on the chambers. I can say the caves built by the Buddhists, today worshiped by Hindus and were a part of the Portuguese invaders.
I saw that the empty chambers filled with water, some mutilated statues of Shiva and the Christian cross carved on the wall outside. From the caves you can see the Church of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception still standing today. It’s parish takes us back to 400 years. Today the area is called Mandapeshwar or Mount Poinsur.

The Archeological Survey of India(ASI) is in charge of these caves today. I saw auto-rickshaws parked outside the caves. Children from the nearby slum playing cricket and football. The caves are located close to areas like I.C.colony and L.I.C.Colony and the ST.Francis D’Assisi High School.

I had a nice session of photography of one our rich historical monument which needs to be preserved by us.

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On 24th August at 6.30 pm, I attended my first online demo of Mobile Authoring with Flash 8 which was conducted by Jonathan Duran. Well I am not a hardcore Flash developer but I enjoyed the presentation given by Jonathan. I am just putting down some of the things which I learned in this session :
1) Limitations of Flash MX 2004 Pro. version.
* Test environment based on desktop player.
* Same test player for all devices.
* No device skin emulation to test UIs
2) Flash 8 Mobile Authoring offers.
* Test environment uses actual Flash Lite Player.
* Test player is configured specifically for each device.
* Test against multiple devices at the same time.
* Use filtered trace output.
* Device skins with active keypad for UI testing.

Overall the presentation was good. Thanks Jonathan for this one.
For more information read here

Director is one of the best authoring tool I can say. I always faced a problem while playing a video in Director and it used to flicker when it was overlapped with a flash file. Now before going to the flickering thing let me tell you Director supports various digital video formats like AVI, MOV(Quick Time & Quick Time VR),WMV(Windows Media), RM(Real Media),the latest one is the DVD, MPEG and FLV.
Now coming back to the flickering issue which occurs when overlaying any two sprites that both have the Direct To Stage property. The reason is Director uses an offscreen buffer to composite the different sprite channels together.
Read more on this link : Overlapping QuickTime and Flash sprites cause a Flicker.

So on 8thAugust, Macromedia is once again out with a complete suite from start-to-finish having a range of creative tools, for interactive media, websites or applications. Macromedia Studio 8 speeds the design, development and maintenance process. The latest version has Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3 and Flash Paper 2. So on the 8th Day, 8th month of the year I became aware of Studio 8 on the Macromedia website and have started going through the new features. All the new features are exciting and again lot of new things to learn .

The first software which I learned of Macromedia was Director. Macromedia Director is a proven software for interactive CD presentations. An excellent authoring tool I can call it. Some of the Director resources one can look for :
Macromedia’s list of Director Resources
Doug’s Director Online
Macromedia Director Tech Notes
Media Macros

I was working on a Flash enabled website. The text matter was around two paragraphs. The main problem which stuck me was the text justification. If you change the text to dynamic in the .fla file the text was justified, but as soon as I published it to .swf format, I came to know the Flash player did not have the support.
But there is always someone who already had this problem and he managed to solve this. He is Mario Klingemann. This link was given to me by Abdul. Its a “Full Justified Text Component 1.1″. For more information visit the link here.

Recently I was going through the Dreamweaver section on the Macromedia site. Came through a very interesting article which explained the top ten things of Dreamweaver written by Mark Fletcher.
The Top Ten things :

Read more

On 30th of July,2005 again Indiammug met at Brajeshwar’s office that’s Oinam Software Pvt.Ltd., Andheri (East), Mumbai. As usual I left my office from Malad at 6.00P.M with bit of hesitation in mind whether to go for the meet or not, since the torrential rains had already struck Mumbai very hard on 26th July. But Mumbai was coming back to its daily life and the transport system was on its way. But did not face any problem in train nor on the road. Reached Brajeshwar’s office at 7.30pm without any difficulty. Well indeed I met good talents in design & development like Arindam, Ashok and others. Had a good chat specially with ColdFusion guru Arindam and others on various softwares, heavy rains in Mumbai and even our schooling, along with a taste of hot pizzaas, cold drinks and beers all sponsored by Oinam Software. The big battle started after everyones stomach was full and energy level high again and the Real.. oops!!I would say the Unreal Tournament started with the wi-fi ammunitions loaded. Even after playing games like Quake 3 and others a couple of months ago I was brutally killed in a minute as the LAN game started. So next time you all guys coming for the meet be prepared with gaming strategies. These are really hard core gamers. The one and half hour went very soon and I decided to leave even though I was getting a good grip on the big battle. But the big thing came, when Arindam told me that you have won a prize that’s a Macromedia Studio package and will arrange it to you from San Francisco. Aha!!! That was great. Thanks Brajeshwar for this one. Seriously I tell you all India mmug members a meeting like this is really a great one. You really share excellent ideas and explore new things. Something serious but also a good amount of fun. Do attend the next meet. Congrats!!! once again Brajeshwar for your new office and thanks for arranging everything. And the very best to all at Oinam Software.