This is just a quick update of some new pictures at shelly beach. Just before my swim I was taking some random snaps and got this really good one of Damir standing at the edge of the pool staring at the sun with a massive wave just climbing over the side of the rock pool. Its a really cool picture and kinda looks like Poseidon rising from the ocean 🙂
The swell was high yesterday so swimming laps underwater was harder then usual, lots of current and ended up in different parts of the rockpool. Visibility was pretty bad but its good practice as moving sideways instead of forwards requires a longer breathe hold as im creating the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle which is according to Pythagorus’ theorem the longest side of the triangle 😛
Anyway some cool pictures of the sun rising above the big ocean swells along with nice morning meditation before starting the day 🙂
So yesterday we went to check out Gordon’s bay to do some free diving. We arrived right at the crack of day when the sun was just about to rise. It was a beautiful scene. The feeling you get when you see this kind of morning is one where you want to spread out your arms breathe in all the air you can get, smell the ocean, savour it and just slowly let out the air. The weather was warm, there wasn’t much wind and it seemed we where the first ones there.
We unloaded the make shift buoy and took out all our gear. We found a nice rock and placed all our equipment there claiming it to be ours for the day. Damir took out his phone and started taking snaps of the beautiful scenery, then proceeded to SMS people and get them jealous by showing them the pictures 🙂
The waves were pretty strong as we started to go down the dive ramp but we managed to get down without slipping or hurting ourselves, we then started to make our way to the middle of the ocean when we were struck with blue bottles …. dozens of them all around us with long tentacles. We didn’t notice them until Damir started screaming “Sh*t blue bottles and the thing just stung me … F*rk”. So here we where in the middle of the bay surrounded by blue bottles at the crack of dawn. Then a few seconds later I got stung on the leg, chin and shoulders. It went from a great morning to an absolute disaster.
We swam back into shore and went to the coast guard to ask what we should do. The coast guard was still closed because we were there so early so we spoke to a few people and googled what the remedies were and the best suggestion was to use warm water. We couldn’t get warm water from the shops because they were all still closed but what I did have was a nice bottle of water that had been standing in the sun for a very long time so it seemed to be warm enough. I washed my leg, shoulders and chin with the water an Damir also did the same with his arm.
After a few minutes the pain went away and my leg automatically started healing (now the marks from the blue bottle jellyfish is no longer visible about a day later). Damir still has a line on his arm from where the tentacles were but its getting very faint and should heal in a few days.
We decided to go to Clovelly instead as there didn’t seem to be any blue bottles there. We had a few good dives, relaxed on the buoy and took some videos. On the way back to the car we saw that NOW Gordon’s bay was full of people, there were scuba divers, snorkelers swimmers and sunbathers. It seemed like the blue bottle issue was now no longer a problem so we went back to Gordon’s bay.
We walked down the ramp and paddled out into the middle of the bay and Free Dove the main wall and followed a pack of scuba divers who were doing some training and marine sight seeing. It felt good to see scuba divers around because if any problems arose there would be much help around. We followed them around the trail and checked out much of the ocean life, even saw a sting ray ! 🙂
What started out as an awesome day, then turned into a bad day ended up as a great day with lots of learning experiences. I learnt that if there are lots of seagulls in the water its a sign that there are lots of jelly fish (don’t know if its true but will look it up), learnt that its a good idea to bring a thermo with hot water so that if jelly fish attacks again, we can mix it with some cold water and wash away the poison and last but not least, its probably a good idea to bring a first aid kit in the bag for cuts and bruises.
All in all it was a great day and next week hoping to get Gordon’s bay in the first person and also take lots of wild life shots. The 3rd person free diving video is above, hope you enjoy.
Below are the directions to gordon’s bay from the main city of sydney:
So I finally got around to getting a diving buoy so we can move into deeper waters and let boats know that we are there along with being able to rest and do some breathe up’s in between the dives.
I was torn between buying an official diving buoy or creating a make shift one but after some consideration (for now) my self and damir have decided on just creating a makeshift one.
We purchased a second hand truck tube from the kind folk at “tyres for less” for $10 which I think was a great find since it was cheap and also impossible to find anywhere else as now tyres are generally tubeless. I also purchased some rope from Bunnings (30m) for $3.99 (it on special so I bought 2) and a lead weight to let the rope sink. I think to complete the make shift buoy we need to paint the tyre bright orange and also purchase a rope roller so we can roll the rope down without leaving any slack or having to go through the hassle of rolling it whilst in the water but for now this will do just fine. The idea is to take it for a spin tomorrow at Gordon’s Bay.
This morning after the usual rock pool swim I decided to go out into the open waters. The swell wasn’t to big, sun was shining and the ocean was nice and calm. Water wasn’t really to deep about 3 meters or so and I didn’t have a buddy or a buoy so I didn’t want to risk going to far in on my own.
Every morning I swim in the pools but I had never swam outside of the rock pool at all at shelly beach and was curious to see what was around. After diving down I saw a few small fish, lots of blue bottles (which thankfully didn’t sting me and lots of seaweed).
It was somewhat dull because it was still close to shore until on the way back I saw an octopus. It was pretty big and as I started to take my camera out to take a picture it must have seen me and scurried back under a tiny rock. I decided to wait for a while but still the octopus didn’t want to come out.
I swam away for a while to see if there where other interesting things to see and when I came back the octopus was out of its hiding place but poped straight back in as it saw me approach. Sucks … so all I managed to get was a picture of my friend the octopus hiding under the rock to scared to come out (I guess you can see one of its tentacles in the picture).
This is basically an extension of the post below. On todays swim I managed to get there before the sun rose and decided to keep my camera on so that I could capture the sun actually rising over the horizon.
I had left my camera on for about 30 mins before the memory was full but managed to catch the sun rise over the horizon in the last 6 minutes. I trimmed the rest of the video and have only left the best part for you to see. Added some nice relaxing music to the sunrise.
I am what you would call a bit of a geek and love to play with different types of technology. For the last 8-9 years I have worked in corporates doing either development, design or architecture on either software projects, hardware projects or a combination of both whilst also in my spare time tinkering with all sorts of crazy stuff 😛
After years of working in larger companies about 1.5 years ago I (along with a friend of mine) decided to venture out and develop our own technology to hopefully make a living building and doing our own thing.
So it’s been one hell of a roller coaster ride but we are doing OK, it has its ups an downs but I wouldn’t have it any other way. One things for sure is it definitely beats the norm ! Also, as a result of building this business life has changed (in many ways) for the better in lots of unexpected ways.
We developed a site called BlipADeal found at http://www.blipadeal.com which is a platform for consumers around the world to find the best deals and coupons around. We also provide a large repository of deals and coupons for developers to access via our API’s. You can visit the site to get more information but in this particular post I mainly want to discuss the technologies that we used to build the service both on the mobile and web fronts.
The website
So the website was built using multiple different technologies which include, python, php, javascript, CSS, JQuery and HTML. Mainly the backend was developed using python frameworks and functions as an API so whenever the front end needs any new data it will make ajax requests and will receive only the specific information that it needs.
PHP is used to develop the front end dynamic pages. We could have used a python template library but decided that it would be best to use PHP so that updating designs on the fly would be much easier and would allow us to split the architecture much easier as traffic starts to grow (I might go through the architecture in another post later on).
JQuery and CSS is used for all the communications between the rendered HTML and the backend business logic and processing whilst also being used to render the presentation layer that interacts directly with the user. All data passed between the backend and the frontend is done through JSON objects. Its a nice little architecture and easily extendable to handle mobile requests also.
All of the software sits on top of the amazon cloud which runs EC2, S3, RDS and a whole host of other little services conveniently handled by amazon. Amazon is great and I think many founders can attest to how easy it has made their lives !
The Mobile Applications
In addition to the website we have also developed mobile applications so that users can easily receive their deals and vouchers on the go. So far we have supported mobile applications on both the main platforms, Android and iPhone. To save time we wanted to develop the application for both platforms using the Titanium (TA) framework but discovered that for android development there are very serious limitations.
We developed the iPhone application using Titanium pretty quickly and easily. All the code was developed using javascript and it was clean, easy and fast to test however once we came to developing the BlipADeal application for android we found the following limitations which actually where a pretty big deal.
Number 1 problem is that it would compile the whole javascript V8 engine into the APK binary file. So in essence this made the binary 20MB + where the binary should only be about 1 meg in total. This might not be a concern in places such as Australia and US where the mobile internet has pretty decent speeds but in some other asian regions (where we have a substancial user base) a 20MB file will simply be to large to download for everyone.
Number 2 problem is that its really difficult to have it supported on most of the devices and screen sizes, it just does not scale as well as if it was a native android app. This again is a big deal in Asia where many people purchase the more esoteric Android devices with weird screen sizes and models that Titanium complied applications simple wont run successfully on.
As a result of these pending problems we executed the mobile development in the following way, iPhone completed and done in Titanium whilst Android done natively using Android java.
The question always gets asked as to whether its better to develop natively or to use titanium. The answer to this is it really depends. As I described above, developing for Android using Titanium is a nightmare in my own personal experience. You have to develop many exceptions in your code and in the end to have a code base that works on both devices becomes really messy internally. This is simply not because of Titanium along but also because of the fact that there are some widgets that are not transferable between different devices.
If you want to develop for iPhone and want to get something up quick smart and you have existing skills in javascript using Titanium will exponentially increase your productivity. This means you could hook up and app in a week and have it on the store approved and ready. As far as my own experiences go with playing around with Titanium there has never been anything that I couldn’t do on the iPhone however I have never developed games and extremely complex layouts so there could be some limitations which I have not yet hit upon.
In terms of achieving a native looking app that functions well and is responsive, titanium can do this without any issues or problems on the iPhone platform. If you want to get something out as an MVP and don’t want to spend to much time on the MVP just to test the idea and want to do without spending more time developing the application natively, its the perfect option that in the intrim will buy you time to redevelop the application natively later.
I had a good deep sleep last night after finishing a days work on fixing up our mobile application for BlipADeal. I finished about 11:30pm and went straight to bed allowing me to wake up at the planned 5:30 in the morning so I could head to the beach and catch the sunrise, something that I have been trying to do for a while but keep missing by about an hour 😛
Jumped into my car and drove to shelly beach, road was pretty empty this early in the morning so it was a nice quick drive. Since its a Saturday morning people are probably still hung over from Friday night drinks after work 😛 I got to the car park expecting to easily find parking but was surprised that there was only one left. I guess people are also here to enjoy the beautiful morning 🙂
When I got to the esplande (the name of the walk way right by the beach) it was full of people taking pictures. I always keep my water proof camera in my bag incase there are some great shots to take underwater so I pulled it out and began snapping some pictures and taking a few videos of the beautiful sunrise.
The sky was pretty cloudy but you could see that it was slowly blowing away and soon would be clear skys. The sun was sitting just below the clouds and it created a beautiful horizon where the top was filled with clouds and the bottom with the blue sea with the sun right in the middle (almost like the light at the end of the tunnel 🙂 ) Took some shots of the beautiful scenery for everyone to enjoy.
It was very peaceful with very light breeze on the shore, however the oceans had really high swell and as a result surfers, body boarders where all out taking advantage of the ocean and the great morning. After my swim I dried of and put my running shoes on and ran up and down the esplande for about 40 mins. Now back at home finishing of this blog post and ready to crank open the editor and begin hacking away 😛
3 idiots is probably one of the best movies I have watched of all time and definitely makes the top 5 in my list. If I was to count how many times I have watched this movie, I can say that it would definitely exceed 20 ! The 3 characters Racho, Farhan & Raju are absolutely loveable and their story together through all the hardships of life and college is so heart warming that after you watch it, you just have to repeat certain parts of the movie just to laugh, cry or cheer them on again. 3 idiots is one of those movies that I would watch when I need some cheering up or if I want to have a bit of a laugh because it simply touches on almost all emotions.
The story basically revolves around 3 college students all from differing backgrounds who have successfully gained admission into the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) in India, where competition to get in is tough and only about 1% from all applicants gain admission. Each of the 3 friends (Racho, Raju and Farhan) all have different reasons as to why they are doing engineering (For a better life and to escape poverty, pressure from parents to become engineers and simply the love for the subjects) and as a result alter and change their journey and their view point as they progress through the years and learn more about themselves, their friends and about life and what it is they really want to do.
There are many different aspects of the movie around dealing with pressure from parents, poverty, fear of the future and love, specially when love doesn’t make sense. The journey of all the 3 characters and how they overcome their own demons and obstacles is simple heart warming and will make you laugh, cry and cheer them on.
One of the things why I really loved the movie is because of the message that it tries to deliver to the audience and as a result a saying emerges from the movie which is simply – “All izz vell” – “All is well”. The movie has many life lessons and portrays them really well and the lesson behind “All izz vell” is a very important lesson that I have had to teach myself many times in the past. When things are really looking down, looking difficult and about to crumble just play a small trick yourself into thinking everything is OK, stay calm and in turn this will simply give you the strength to get through your problems. I think this works because if your panicing and stressing your head isn’t clear, but by clearing your head, getting rid of any fears, its simply just easier to face the problems ! It’s a great message because sometimes that small little trick can help you get through the most difficult of times.
In addition to all this acting by Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Ranganathan Madhavan & Sharman Joshi is absolutely legendary. Amir Khan also does a great job of looking like he is still in his very late teens to his early 20’s even though he is close to 50 these days !
Anyway, hope you get a chance to watch it, you can actually find the whole movie on youtube so simply search for “3 idiots full movie” on youtube and sit back and enjoy one of the greatest movies ever !
OK – So my attempt to translate the above (or at least the jist) into hindi is below. Please excuse THE MANY mistakes as I am still learning and this is my way of practicing 🙂
ठीक – मे translate तेषत ऊपर परयास कारेना नीचे है. माफ लिजे अगर बहुत बाननाना mistakes है. मे भि सिकि है. 🙂
मे बहुत पासानद 3 idiots है. वहो मेरा एक favourite movies है ! यह फिलम पर मेरा top फिलम list, definitely top ५ ऊपर. मे सोचता २० बेर देख है. वहो ३ लड़का रानचो, फारहान और राजु बहुत अचधा अैर loveable characters है. यह कहानि about उनके जिनदागि college अैर विपाति encountered है. उनके कहानि बाहुत दिल कुश अैर खाबि खाबि फिर देख over अैर over.
मुल कहानि है,३ कोलज लड़का विभिन्न से स्वीकार किया Imperial college of Engineering में. यह बहुत कोलज िनदिा में अैर यह कोलज से सिर् 1% स्वीकार किया है.
सब ३ लड़का विभिन्न कारण ICE में engineering कार राहे. एक लड़का क्योंकि माता पिता force engineering कार राहि, एक लड़का क्योंकि engineering favourite subjects है अैर एक लड़का क्योंकि बहुत पासानद engineering अैर भी मादात पारिवार है. लेकिन उनके जिनदगि परिवर्तन कोलेग में क्योंकि पयार, दोसत अैर पारिवार. जाब कोलेग खाताम वह फरहान अैर राजु खोज रानचो क्योंकि रानचो जानति, भात good bye नहि है. From there the plot thickens !
भी मे पासानद 3 idiots फिलम क्योंकि वह मेसेग बहुत अचधा है ! यह फिलम जिनदगि बहुत पाठ है. बहुत important पाठ “All iz vell” है. मुल मतलाब जाब जानदिगि मुश्किल है, आप trick yourself into believing सब कुछ ठीक है. यह आप हो जाना शाकति शालि अैर समस्या overcome साकता है.
भी Aamir Khan,Kareena Kapoor, Ranganathan Madhavan अैर Sharman Joshi acting बहुत अचधि वाला है ! Aamir Khan का चेहरा बहुत young है. यह बहुत अचधा है.
आप दख फिलम जारुर है यह फिलम youtube में. आप search “3 idiots full movie” youtube में, आप दख full movie साकता है.
So I bought myself a waterproof G-Shock watch by CASIO and it has now finally arrived. The specific model that I purchased was the MTG 900 8V. I bought this watch specifically because I needed a basic water proof watch to enable me to time my dives. I know there are more specialised dive watches but I will purchase one when I find out exactly which one I need. With this watch, at least I can do the basics and calculate my dive time and my rest time to ensure that I have the right dive to rest ratios. I also needed a watch seeing as I accidentally put my iPhone into a glass of water so I had no way of telling time 😛
So what is the MTG-900-DA like ? Its pretty dam good. The solid stainless steel finish is great, gives it a nice look that isn’t to sporty and out of place if you are wearing a suite but is also a tough as nails and can be taken pretty much anywhere. I have taken it to 20 metre depths, taken it sailing and all it needs is a bit of a rub and a rinse and its back to its new shiny self. The casio MTG-900-DA has a nice back panel light and really is just a practical watch for the sporty and active.
As usual I bought the watch online. I didn’t buy it from the well know websites such as amazon or ebay but from a smaller Australian online merchant. The rationale was that if i bought it from an Australian merchant it would arrive sooner as it would be local post (2-3 days tops), however this wasn’t to be. The watch arrived almost 3 weeks later. Reason being was the merchant mentioned that they didn’t get my unit number (even though I had typed it and even wrote it in the paypal special requests). The merchant said they did not get the paypal request so I guess that was the main issue. I didn’t hear from them for about 2 weeks and thought for a local delivery this seems to be way to long so I decided to send them an email. What I found to my amazement was that the merchant website didn’t have any contact email.
What I did then was try to reply back to the confirmation email that I received from them after the purchase. So I wrote them a short email only to have the email bounce back ! At this point I was beginning to feel that I had been jipped and I would never get my watch.
I put on my tech hat and began to do some searching and finally traced the merchants details and sent them a message. I received a response and sorted out the issue. Now that I have the watch on my wrist, all is well. As usual I had to take some of the links off the watch because they usually make it longer and to big for my wrist but after taking 3 of the links off it fits nice and comfortably.
Pretty happy with the watch, can’t wait to take it out for a test run and take some proper stats so I can improve my times …
Over the last couple of weeks I have been wanting to go to Clovelly to explore the underwater marine life. Clovelly is a great place to dive because its safe but still fun to explore. There are life guards present and the beach is actually enclosed like a massive swimming pool meaning that its not out in the open ocean. For obvious reasons this is a much safer environment.
The great thing about Clovelly is that even though its enclosed there is still very significant depths in different areas of the beach so that it is still fun to free dive and still a challenge. There is some decent marine life including the famous bluey groper and its deep enough so that you can practice various free diving techniques to improve your diving for when you go to deeper and more open waters.
One of the major disadvantages with clovelly is if there has been rain any of the previous days you can forget about visibility. You will get about 2 feet visibility and that is it. As a result this makes anything other then swimming laps unacceptable. However, today was a great day and the visibility was pretty good, not the best but still acceptable.
In the video I posted above, I was able to get clips of the famous big blue gropers, some other colourful fish (which I don’t know the names of yet) and even a wandering scuba diver roaming around by him/her self (ran out of air before I could approach and say “hi !” 🙁 ). The clip was taken without fins and no camera pole so its pretty jerky and can really be improved in future videos. Hopefully when I get around to buying/making my own camera pole and getting some decent fins, I can improve the quality of the videos.
Anyway, video posted above, hope you enjoy it ! I had a great time making it 🙂
Below are the directions from the main city of sydney to clovelly beach:
3 idiots is probably one of the best movies I have watched of all time and definitely makes the top 5 in my list. If I was to count how many times I have watched this movie, I can say that it would definitely exceed 20 ! The 3 characters Racho, Farhan & Raju are absolutely loveable and their story together through all the hardships of life and college is so heart warming that after you watch it, you just have to repeat certain parts of the movie just to laugh, cry or cheer them on again. 3 idiots is one of those movies that I would watch when I need some cheering up or if I want to have a bit of a laugh because it simply touches on almost all emotions.
So I bought myself a waterproof G-Shock watch by CASIO and it has now finally arrived. The specific model that I purchased was the MTG 900 8V. I bought this watch specifically because I needed a basic water proof watch to enable me to time my dives. I know there are more specialised dive watches but I will purchase one when I find out exactly which one I need. With this watch, at least I can do the basics and calculate my dive time and my rest time to ensure that I have the right dive to rest ratios. I also needed a watch seeing as I accidentally put my iPhone into a glass of water so I had no way of telling time 😛