Alluring nature and Indian village farms

The rain is in full swing here and my friends of Shivashourya trekkers, Mumbai recently had a Panhalgad to Pavankhind - Vishalgad 2011 Padabhraman activity trek. They also visited waterfall in Marleshwar on their return journey. The trek was as usual fantastic. Unfortunately I was not able to join them due to some reasons. However, they sent the photographs to me. The photos reminded me of my last year visit (Paalakhi mohim) to the same place. I am sharing some beautiful nature snaps that my friends shared with me.







I remember one very good quote from John Muir about the nature - "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves !"

Contributing to ScaffoldHub.org

Few months back, my colleague Pat Shaughnessy launched ScaffoldHub.org. It is a collection of Rails scaffold generators contributed by members of the Rails community.

The basic idea behind this website is to take rails standard scaffolding one step farther; it’s a gallery of different variations on the simple CRUD app that the standard Rails scaffold generator produces. Each of these is called a "scaffold."

Each scaffold might use a certain JQuery plugin (e.g. autocomplete or date picker) or Rails gem (e.g. Paperclip or Will Paginate). This is a great way to get a jump start on learning how to use that particular plugin or gem with Rails. In seconds you see something working in your app, and then you can take a look at the generated scaffolding code in detail to see how it works and adapt it to your needs.

Thanks Pat for building this site ! Pat has also written a nice blog about how to contribute a scaffold @contributing-a-new-scaffold-to-scaffoldhub

I contributed 3 scaffolds to Scaffoldhub.org. Initially, it took me some time to contribute my first scaffold to this site, however for rest of my scaffolds, it was really quick as I already knew the steps.

Here are my 3 scaffolds that you may want to try :-
(1) ClearableTextField - Standard Rails scaffolding with JQuery Clearable Text Field plugin. It shows up a cross icon to clear value when user inputs something in a form field and the icon disappears when you clear the field.

(2) WheelColorPicker - JQuery Wheel Color Picker scaffold adds color picker functionality to HTML form inputs in the round color wheel fashion. The Wheel Color Picker dialog appears as user focuses the input.

(3) Cleditor - The cleditor scaffold is based on CLEditor jQuery plugin which provides a lightweight, full featured, cross browser HTML editor that can be easily added into any web site.

Something good to read !

After a long time, I got a chance to read two wonderful books - 'The old man and his God' and 'Wise and Otherwise'. The books are written by Sudha Murthy. She has shared her own real life experiences in such a beautiful narrative way that they touch your heart. The most important thing behind narrating these incidences is to pass on a specific message to the reader so that he/she can think over it, can relate the stories to his/her own life experiences and last but not the least can act upon it.

The stories such as freedom of speech, the journey, two faces of poverty, the grateful tenant, an old man's ageless wisdom, forgetting our own history, a bond betrayed on rakhi day, light as many candles as possible, bahut kuch hota hain, Salaam Namaste, crisis of confidence, etc. teach us many things. I am sharing some good thoughts from this book.

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This is the reply that an old man from Kalahandi forest gave to Sudha Murthy when she showed him some Indian currency :
"This is just a piece of paper. For this paper, people fight, go away from our ancestral land,leave our forest and go to cities. Have we not led a complete life without the piece of paper? Our ancestors did. We are children of God, settled here happily without this paper. This is God's land. Nobody owns this land. No river is created by us. No mountain is made by us. The wind does not listen to us. The rain does not ask our permission. These are gifts of God. How can we 'sell' or 'buy' land, I do not understand. When nothing is yours, then how can you make such transactions?"
The writer ends this chapter with following question: Who is more civilized- this wise old man in the forest or those of us with our fingers on the pulse of the Internet?

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Everybody should know his/her own capacity and strength. One should also know one's limitations. It is more difficult to recognize our weaknesses than our strengths. Don't aim for the sky. Keep your feet firmly on the ground and work around you. There is so much misery and gloom, but it is better to light a single candle than to remain in darkness. Try to light as many candles as possible.

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Education means more than scoring good marks in exams or receiving certificates. Life is an exam where the syllabus is unknown and question papers are not set. Nor are there model answer papers. There are various types of questions that can come from any direction, but one should not run away. Education and financial independence are tools that can help us face difficulties, but confidence must be developed throughout life.

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Each patient is precious. If a patient dies, it is just one more hospital death for the doctor. But for the unfortunate family, it is a permanent loss.

There are a lot of good messages like above ones in these two books. I am sure I have lit a small candle of interest into your minds, and you are certainly going to read these books if you haven't already. Happy reading ! :-)