We went through a nightmare today morning 11 AM. While deleting a few invalid entries from our data, we accidentally wiped our User table! Yup! clean slate! All our users since we started gone blank!! We take backups of our database three times everyday, and the last backup from 10 AM had data for all but 2 users. We’re back to normal now, but unfortunately we don’t have any data on those two users now. Our apologies to them, hope they read this and come back again :).
Lesson learnt - no matter how much RAID you have, how many MySql slaves you have, always, always back up your DB. We keep backup copies of our DB for 3 times a day for last 7 days, 1 time a week for last 4 weeks, and monthly backups. We don’t have transaction logging for InnoDB turned on though, could that have saved the day in case of such accidental updates? Need to check that.
December 15th, 2007
Hey! We bring you the first ever review of the top cameras and camera phones on itasveer.com.
While 65% of our traffic is from India, much of the remaining is from the Indian diaspora, thus this is probably one of the first statistical analyses on camera usage from an India centric perspective.
So, without further ado, here’s what we found.
For those who want a quick summary: Sony and Canon are the top camera brands with more than 50% of itasveer members using them. The top Point & Shoot model is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC W5, the top DSLR is the Canon EOS 350D and the top camera phone is the Sony Ericsson K750i. About 10% of users uploaded images clicked from a camera phone on to itasveer.com
For those who love graphs and charts and more data, here are the details. [Warning: This is a long post, but with lots of tasty graphs and charts.]
The Top Brands
Canon and Sony are the most widely used brands on itasveer.com with as much as 50% of our members using them. Noteworthy is that a surprising 10% of our users use cameraphones and Nokia and Sony Ericsson figure in the top 10 brands.
The Top Camera Models
The Sony DSC W5 is the most widely used camera on itasveer.com. Interestingly, the Sony Ericsson K750i figures in the top three! Canon EOS 350D is the most used DSLR camera. Animesh, the photography aficionado among us also owns the 350D and swears by it (which, by the way, did not lead to any skewness in the data :)).
The Top Cameras by brand
We also thought it would be useful to list the top 3 cameras, both Point & Shoot and DSLRs for our top camera brands. These are the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC W5, Canon Powershot S2 IS and the Nikon E4600 in the case of Point & Shoot and Canon 350D and Nikon D50 in the case of DSLRs. For your reference, we have also added the camera’s rank within its brand on flickr.com in brackets next to the camera model. (Click to enlarge)
The Top Cameraphones
Finally, the top camera phones in general, and also by brand on itasveer.com. After the Sony Ericsson K750i which figures in the top across all kinds of cameras, it’s Nokia all the way with the N70 being the most popular cameraphone from the Nokia stable.
Methodology
The data used for the analysis is actual data from itasveer.com for the period April 2006 to August 2007. The top cameras have been evaluated based on the number of users using a camera model. The model is automatically detected from the photo’s EXIF data, however, this is not possible for about 10% of the images uploaded on itasveer.com which haven’t been included in the analysis.
So let us know what you guys think! Which are your favorite cameras?
September 5th, 2007
When we put DoodlePad together, Ashish used to call our mug preview ‘chaude kaan waala aadmi‘ (a guy with broad ears). And yes, that’s precisely how it looked. So the challenge was, make Mugs in DoodlePad look like mugs.
So, with the latest release, DoodlePad now features a three-side view of your design put on mugs. Here’s what we’re talking about,
A brief about how it’s done. The problem at hand here is, cylindrical transform for a flat image or wrapping an image around a cylinder shape (the mug in our case). Going through a lot of existing 3D texturing libraries for Flash, we found they were a little too heavy for what we needed. So we decided to do it on our own. This was accomplished by splitting the image into a large number of vertical strips and placing them at coordinates calculated using simple coordinate geometry. The larger the number of strips, the better is the preview but slower is the performance. Larger number of strips also makes the job simpler as we don’t have to worry about skewing the strips, since the width and hence the skew gets negligible.
That’s it for the jargon. Hope it helps somebody.
For all our dear users and users-to-be, Happy Designing :)
April 17th, 2007
