BBC on Biswa
April 29, 2008
We could make this an annual feature – lousy reporting on the Tablighi Jama`at’s annual Bangladesh ijtima`.
Install OLPC’s Sugar interface in Ubuntu 8.04
April 29, 2008
Sugar – the innovative environment (GUI and applications redesigned for a different paradigm of interaction) built for the OLPC XO laptop can now be installed directly from the Universe repository for Ubuntu Hardy in an almost complete form.
Found via Marching Up and Down the Square.
(Image from OLPC wiki. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5)
TOI – Swaminomics: India needs McCain as US President
April 26, 2008
S.A. Aiyar writes in his column:
Which of the three candidates for the US Presidency — Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain — will be best for India? Most Indians would opt for Obama or Clinton. But from a policy viewpoint, McCain would be best for India.
There have been a large number of such editorials in the Indian papers lately. Off-hand I’d say more than in the English language Pakistani or Middle Eastern papers, but my reading habits are biased by the fact that the Indian papers do a lot more with RSS (pun only partially intended – you’d think the Pakistanis could settle for atom!)
He is correct that most of the editorials seem to favor Obama or Clinton. The former seems to be the anti-imperialist favorite, and the latter (+1) is an old favorite of the NRI and NRI influenced crowd. Unfortunately Swamiji fills the next few paragraphs with some nonsense about gender and race which I won’t repeat here. Some of it is of the sort Americans would probably consider somehow distorted or misplaced (if you as an American have ever had to hear US history summarized back to you by someone who learned it from Indian schoolbooks, you know the feeling.) He also highlights some differences between how Indians and Americans perceive the world and America’s role in it’s history, of which many Americans are probably unaware, such as the fact that your average Indian of any political persuasion old enough to be aware of – if not remember it – views the Vietnam War as an act of American arrogance, imperial ambition, and naked aggression in which we got our just deserts.
Aiyar’s main perspective, though, is one which I think Americans should pay attention to:
However, what matters for Indo-US relations is not the colour, gender or war record of any presidential candidate. What matters is their position on key bilateral issues. And in this regard, McCain beats Clinton and Obama hollow.
There seems to be alot of focus on how a Democrat is necessary to restore America’s image. But Aiyar suggests – and I agree – that it is McCain who has the best chance of actually being able to bring us back to a position of respect-worthiness on the world stage, and to guide us back to a point where we can work positively with other governments and international bodies to shape effective and sensible policy on issues of international relations, global trade, development, the environment, and the restoration of peace and security in a real sense.
An overwhelming list of low-cost UMPCs
April 25, 2008
Way too many choices, with some interesting things expected in the near future.
Via Gizmodo
Video interview on Google’s opening up AJAX APIs
April 24, 2008
A few days ago, Google announced having officially, and “quietly” opened up their AJAX APIs to access from within server side applications, Flash, etc. By opening – and documenting – this, they’ve offered official approval while at the same time clarifying limits. Dion Almaer posted the video below to the Google Code Blog, in which Mark Lucovsky of the API team discusses some of those limits and expectations, the differences between this and the SOAP API, and more. It’s not great television, but it’s an interesting watch.
Two little questions on Google’s transliteration device
April 24, 2008
Some time ago Google set up a standalone version of their transliteration tool which was in place for Blogger, Orkut, and maybe some other services. It does Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam. I have two thoughts about it spinning in my mind. (I think I just saw the standalone for the first time, which is why I’m commenting.) I’m not even going to ask why they left out poor Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, Tibetan, Thai, Sinhalese, and so on. (Although I would note that by calling the “Hindi” option Devanagari they could appeal to speakers of Nepali and Marathi who can, presumably, use it to write their languages perfectly well.)
- Why the specific anti-Mac discrimination?
- Why default to retroflex?
They say the feature is supported in IE 6+ and in Firefox on Windows and Linux, and that it does not work for Macs. According to some comments in the discussion list it mostly works in Safari, and I presume it works at least as well in Ffox on the Mac. I just don’t understand why those offering a service which is completely unsupported and mission critical for no one would bother to specifically exclude browsers and Operating Systems. Why not just say “tested on x and y, your mileage may vary,” or something like that?
The second opinion reflects a pet peeve of mine. Most Indic languages have dental and retroflex versions of many consonants. Generally speaking, the dental version is (IIRC) the more common in most languages. The English consonant is somewhere between the two. Native speakers of Indiac languages hear it as the retroflex – and speak and transliterate it accordingly, whereas native English speakers are more likely to assume they are using the dental in their native tongue and to have a hard time distinguishing the two when hearing and speaking them in Indic languages. Anyway, in linguistic circles when transliterating from an Indic language using a roman alphabet, it’s common to use the unadorned equivalent letter for the dental, and letters with dots or other serifs as the retroflex. As everything has to be pure ASCII, Google is using capitals as their “marked” letter. This is similar to Gwynn’s dictionary. But it’s backwards! You need a capital every time you want a dental form. Uff. It just bugs me. I don’t really have anything more intelligent to say about it.
Lost in the Doxiodian City
April 24, 2008
Mast Qalandar – kashkul presumably in hand – wanders the khayabans and traverses the tree-lined street trees of Pakistan’s capital:
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN: The Nomenclature of Islamabad Streets
Hardy Mubarak
April 24, 2008
Ubuntu’s latest release – 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron, has been officially released. One nice touch I hadn’t noticed before today is that the download page now includes a checkbox for the alternate install CD – which includes the traditional “text-based” installer, and which is friendlier to those machines on which using the LiveCD is like swimming through mud. It would be nice if they also included a checkbox for choosing the torrent file rather than the http download. (And options for Kubuntu, Xubuntu, et al. or at least links to their homepages.)
Hardy’s LiveCD includes the Wubi installer, which makes it easy to install Ubuntu as an application (a rather large application) within Windows. It also includes a tool for easily configuring the Windows bootloader to boot from CD, so as to try out the LiveCD environment. (And by LiveCD – in case it’s not clear – we mean a CD which runs Ubuntu entirely from RAM and the CD without affecting your hard drive at all unless you decide to install to disk.) With each release there’s less and less excuse for not trying it out. (And if even downloading and burning a CD is too much for you – they’ll still send you some for free.)
If the download interface is down, try the release page, or the mirrors list. Best of all – get the torrent from one of these links, so that the more people download, the faster it gets, rather than just overloading the download servers.
Hardy is the newest Long Term Support release, replacing the two year old Dapper. If you have an old Dapper machine you need to upgrade in one step to Hardy, check out this tutorial.
Desicritics.org: The Wealth of Water
April 24, 2008
Desicritics.org: The Wealth of Water
Feeling wealthy isn’t just about having money. It is that exact feeling of knowing that you have enough and more, of that which brings you peace of mind.
