Engineers Black Book

Nihal — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:48:11 +0000

The Virtuvian Man

The idea for the cover design of the ‘Engineers Black Book’ came to the author from a sketch of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ by the great Italian artist, inventor and mathematician, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo drew his inspiration from the works of Vitruvius entitled ‘De Architectura’

Marcus Vitruvius was a Roman architect who in the first century BC, authored a series of 10 books, each dealing with aspects of architecture, city planning & machines.

In his works, Vitruvius emphasises that ‘building’ should be based on the proportions of man, as he considered the human body to be the model of perfection. This is borne out by his emphasis on the rationalisation of geometry by means of small whole numbers joined together to arrive at the final construction.

He further justifies this by stating that the human body with arms and legs outstretched, fits into perfect geometric forms, i.e. the circle, the square and the triangle.Among other things, he notes that:

The outstretched length of a man’s hands equals his height.
The face from the chin to the top of the forehead equals 10% of his height.
The palm of the hand from the wrist to the top of the middle finger also equals 10% of his height.
The maximum width of a man’s shoulders equals 25% of his height.

In this manner, Vitruvius delineates the proportions of the male human body that Leonardo da Vinci later so faithfully and accurately reproduced in his now famous sketch
‘The Vitruvian Man’.

For further detail like contents of Book etc. Please visit Engineers Black Book Page

Flash Lite on Android( HTC Google Mobile)

Nihal — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:25:03 +0000

T-Mobile unveiled yesterday G1 – the first phone ever to be powered by the new Google mobile operating system Android. This new mobile OS by Google is a threat to other mobile OSes such as Symbian, Windows Mobile, and even the iPhone as it is backed by the Open Handset Alliance (Includes HTC, Motorola, Samsun, LG, T-Mobile, and others), it is almost fully open source, it is integrated with many of the Google apps and services such as Gmail, Calendar, and Maps, and it features an online application store.

The question raised by many Flash developers is “what about Flash Lite?”. The Android SDK is available for anyone to develop applications for it for free, there are no restrictions whatsoever on what kind of application you can develop, and anyone can install any application they wish – This is unlike the iPhone SDK which prohibit developing any ‘runtime’ and applications can only be installed through iTunes.

Bill Parry, a developer at Adobe, made a post on his blog saying that Adobe is “closely working” with Android licensees and that in the future “Android based devices will ship with Adobe Flash support”. Bill also says that the movement of Flash into more mobile devices is part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project.

This is surely good news for Flash Lite developers, especially as no signs can be seen for releasing Flash Lite on the iPhone even after the recent release of second version of the OS and even though reports were published three months ago about Adobe successfully running Flash Lite on the iPhone through emulation.

Flash Lite is currently available on Symbian and Windows Mobile, and according to Adobe it is available on 800 million devices shipped worldwide.

As a heavy user of various Google apps, I am very excited about Android, and the inevitable release of Flash on it will surely improve the chances of me getting an Android powered phone in the near future.