Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Yesterday, I got into a Vallam and traveled from Malakkara to Aranmula and back. It was wonderful.
Since I’m a newbie at everything from wearing a mundu (dhothi) properly to holding the nayambu (oar), it was a pretty interesting experience at first. You have to madakikutthu the mundu (fold the mundu over so that it looks like a knee-length skirt) so that you can sit comfortably in it and after a few tries, I managed to do that. [aside: I’m pretty sure true-blood Malayalis would wince at this point. My only advice: please don’t read on]. The vallam itself is about twenty to thirty metres long and seems to weigh a ton, but it’s constructed so well that just a finger-touch can move it on the water (trust me, I tried it). When about forty people get onto it, it remains amazingly steady and sure, although the getting in (and out) is an experience that’ll rival a roller coaster.
There are planks that go cross-wise the breadth and parallel to it from the edges so that you don’t usually step into the wet bottom of the boat. You sit at the very edge locking your legs back and across and it’s probably the closest I’ve come to the water without getting wet. It was also interesting learning how to row properly. The nayambu is a thick wooden oar with a longer handle. There’s a circular piece at the top that you’re supposed to grip with one hand, the other holding the top of the flaring edge firmly. And then you row. Easier said than done of course :-). After splashing my fellow boatmates about a thousand times, I managed to get the hang of it. A chetan sitting behind me (who bore much of the brunt of my attack on water) commented on the return-trip that for a newbie I did it very well indeed [this made my day :-)].
What distinguishes the Aranmula Vallam from its variations across Kerala (and the world) is the Vallapattu (boat-song). Resonating exactly with the rhythm of the oars, it’s a beautiful counterpoint to the entire experience: if the song moves faster, you instinctively row faster, and it’s so constructed (and sung) so that there are periods of relative inactivity and bursts of speed. It’s uber-wonderful.
The most common verse is this:
Thithithara thithithey thithey theke they they tho[..]om
The ‘th’ is a sound which is not in english: a cross between the t in ‘them’ and ‘tarrif’, also notice the alliteration. The [..] stands for a longer -o-, lengthening with an increase in exuberance.
It took around forty-five minutes to travel upriver and about ten minutes less to travel down. Not exactly fast (takes about ten minutes by car). I’ll estimate the top speeds to be around 25kmph, although this was not a race. I’m pretty sure though that more than the rowing, it’s the people who stand at the very behind of the boat (at an increased height) and who steer it - esp. the person who holds the odanayambu - who holds the key to a victory in a race. The rowers pretty much row as they please and unlike canoeing, it’s a game more of enthusiasm still rather than skill. I expect someone enterprising will change this soon: just off the top of my head, introducing pacing techniques and regular practice will increase the average speed of a boat considerably. Of course, then, it’ll cease to be fun and be serious sport, which is not the idea.
Me? I had a lot of fun.
Tags: kerala • shuttered eye • vallamkali
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Monday, August 27, 2007
Also see all the photos at Flickr, provides a really nice glimpse of the Onam world.
Tags: shuttered eye
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Friday, August 17, 2007
I don’t notice it often, but I keep my laptop plugged in and on for longer and longer nowadays. And except for Firefox (which I ditch and switch back every two weeks) everything else swims along fine.
[vishnu@Elena:~]$ uptime
23:16 up 10 days, 22:21, 6 users, load averages: 0.05 0.10 0.13
What’s yours? 
Tags: chaff
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Saturday, August 11, 2007
When I first thought of writing this post, my ideas were more about describing a good CSS organization and using reusable stylesheets. There are two tips in this area that I still recommend:
An element can have multiple classes: It’s a pretty simple idea, but isolate out layout styles and presentation styles. Even fonts and coloring. Make reusable classes as much as possible. A design like this rocks, esp. if it includes a small description of the classes used at the top of the .css file. At any point you feel an urge to create a new class, resist the urge and try to recreate the functionality using already existing ones. Break older classes further if you have to.
For e.g.:
.warn {
color: red;
}
.top {
position: absolute;
top: 5px; }
And this html:
<p class="warn top">You cannot do that, it'll wreck havoc!</p>
… is way better than combining those tasks. Why? Because you can reuse those classes.
Keep your page-specific CSS structured by an ID on the body: Again, a pretty simple idea, the <body> tag can take an ID that can be an indicator of the page name. Use that to create special styles for that page alone.
Example: you want the warning on product pages to appear in blue instead of the usual red, and you want more padding on top:
#product-page .warn {
color: blue;
}
#product-page .top {
position: absolute;
top: 10px; }
with this HTML:
...
<body id="product-page">
...
<p class="warn top">You cannot do that, it'll wreck havoc!</p>
... </body>
The advantage is that you don’t hack the CSS or add more styles. It just works.
I have more CSS organization tips, but the above two have worked wonders in 90% of the projects I’ve been involved in. Let’s move on to using tools to write better CSS.
Use a CSS generator: In the Ruby/Rails world where I mostly live nowadays, there’s an excellent plugin called cssdryer. Using this, the CSS above becomes much cleaner:
#product-page {
.warn {
color: blue;
}
.top {
position: absolute;
top: 10px;
} }
… which is lovely. Finally, nested tags! And variables, and all the power of ruby! [There’s also Sass]
If you are not in ruby land, use a CSS pre-processor. This article uses the m4 macro processor to generate DRY CSS.
Now, here’s one more lovely tip. Use a CSS framework. The most appealing one (altho in beta) is blueprint, since it only does a sweet grid system and good typography. Yahoo’s Grids seem bloated.
Tags: agile • css • design • DRY • web
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Friday, August 10, 2007
This is a fix for the excellent Miniposts plugin by Morgan Doocy. There’s a miniposts2 variant that includes this fix as well, but since I don’t use widgets yet (or maybe will never) here’s the fix. Took me around a half hour of hacking. Thanks to this excellent guide. [The problem was every time somebody commented I lost the ‘mini-postiness’ of the post. Kinda nasty.]
mini-postsphp.txt and just the diff.
Tags: code • PHP • wordpress
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