Many times people ask me on how to setup Non-English Languages (specifically Tamil or Hindi) in Windows. They get confused on the jargons - LIP/MUI, etc. So far either I demoed the whole thing to them in one of my presentations or referred them to Microsoft BhashaIndia website (Incidentally this was developed by Vishwak for Microsoft).

Now my good RD Colleague Scott Hanselman in his usual brilliance has posted this which demystifies the whole topic. Though he talks of Chinese Language, it is relevant to all non-english languages.

Apart from this post, check out these Microsoft websites:
Downloads for languages (BTW, I want to ask someone in Microsoft.com on why should this be inside /industry/government channel), which includes many of the Indian Languages including Hindi, Tamil & Telugu; FAQ on Windows XP LIP

Before I continue, let me say I am a novice to finding music online, so if there are more options than I list here, please leave a comment about them. I normally just buy CDs from shops and on coming home rip them immediately to my laptop. Then I burn MP3/WMA versions for listening in my car for personal hearing.

When it comes to genuinely buying Indian Music online (Tamil film and Carnatic Music in particular) there are few choices available. Most of the sites sell CDs and since they are in physical format their catalog is very limited. Even those whose catalog is sizable, the site design and the search features are pathetic. Most of them require you to browse their catalog page after page rather than a simple search box.

So no wonder last week I was not able to find what I wanted. I suddenly recollected the good numbers that A R Rahman has done in "DUET" movie. Accompanied by Kadri Gopalnath's mesmerizing Saxophone music and brilliantly acted by "இளைய திலகம்" Prabhu, I believe this album to be one of all time bests of Rahman. I am certainly not impressed by Rahman's recent works including Sivaji.

So I searched for "DUET" CD in various shopping sites including Rediff, Indiatimes, Fabmall and also in ChennaiOnline's Tamil Songs database, I didn't find it. Then I went to HamaraCD - where you can create your own audio CDs of your favourite songs. Unfortunately the site allows only Audio CD format so the number of songs are limited to about 13 and so no MP3 formats. And it costs Rs.300 including shipping.

Anyway's, I went ahead and compiled DUET and some of the other what I consider best songs of Rahman into an album. Surprisingly I got the CD delivered in less than 3 days and the whole CD was neatly printed, customized and music quality was excellent. Great show!. I just wish they did their website a little better designed and intuitive.

I had a very similar experience last month as well, when I wanted to buy few India Music CDs and gift it to one of my American friend in USA. None of the sites ship to USA and those who do don't have any choices. I thought I cracked this by finding and ordering a set in IndiaPlaza, but after few days they come back and asked me to fax my credit card number with the 3 Digit code for verification. Forget it, I called one of my colleagues in USA and asked him to buy it in local Indian Store and post it.

So much for legal music online!

In my voluntary role as Vice-Chairman in INFITT I am currently helping in maintaining the website of INFITT.ORG. One of the things is to get myself familiar with a Web CMS called Joomla! - which is a LAMP based Free Open Source CMS that is targeted for small community websites.

This post is about problems we faced in Joomla! for Tamil Texts and two quick fixes that solved it for us.

1) The CSS Problem in the Top Navigation Menu. The menu in IE 6.0/7.0 will have the text appearing below the menu - invisible to naked eye. It turned out to be the CSS had issues, which we fixed and republished in our implementation. If you face the same issue, please download the fixed template_css.css from here or view it here.  

2) Pages had problems displaying Tamil in IE 7/Vista. Tamil text were displayed but as jumbled non readable characters. It turns out to be that charset is not set to UTF-8. I changed the flag to set it to UTF-8 in the file /www/templates/js_education/js_template_config.php in the Joomla! instance we had.

If you are using any of the Microsoft Search tools like MOSS 2007, Desktop Search, Vista Search, SQL Server FreeText Search or Indexing Server you will need a piece of software called IFilter. IFilter is a set of DLLs designed for each file format that you want to be indexed and searched.

Microsoft ships for their file formats in Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) when you install the Office Suite in the machine. Out of box, the search tools include for IFilters for Text, HTMLs, etc. But if you need to index additional file formats most commonly for PDF (Adobe  Acrobat) you will need to download IFilters for them and install. The installation will not give you any User-Interface Application or will you need to configure anything. Just install the IFilter package and reboot your machine or indexing service. That's it.

The sources for getting IFilters are many, I have listed few of them below:

• FoxIt Software IFilter - Download here (32 and 64bit). This supports 64bit of Vista and Windows XP, many of the other IFilters don't
• Adobe's own IFilter for PDF files - Download here. If you have the Free Acrobat Reader 8.0 or so you will get the IFilter also pre installed along with it  
• Search Windows Live Gallery for more IFilters here. Here you will find for PDF and several other file formats

இது ஒரு விடுதலை மனப்பாங்கோடு உருவான மென்பொருள் ஆவணத்திட்டம். இதன் அடிப்படை கொள்கை வாசகம்: "ஒரு சமுதாய முயற்சியாக, முன்னோடியான பன்னாட்டு பயன்பாட்டிற்கு உகந்த , அனைத்து முக்கிய அடிப்படை செயலிகளிலும் இயங்கக்கூடிய அலுவலகப் பயன்பாட்டுச் செயலித்தொகுப்பை உருவாக்குவது மற்றும் இத்தொகுப்பின் அனைத்து செயல்பாடுகளையும் மற்ற செயலிகளிலும் பயன்படுத்திக்கொள்ளும் வகையில் திறவூற்று ஆணையின் கீழ் API களாகவும் XML சார்ந்த கோப்புப் படிவமாக அளிப்பது ஆகும்"

The above paragraph is taken from Tamil OpenOffice page, but this post is not on OpenOffice or its translation in particular. I have just taken this as an example to make few observations I see in many technical documents in Indic Languages. Most of these documents seems to be literal translation from English, done by a non-native speaker of the Indian Language in question. Somehow when you read these you don't get the feel of reading it in your mother-tongue (Tamil).

For example, I am not able to relate very well to விடுதலை  being used to mean "Freedom" (as in Free to do what you want in the Open Source sense of the word). I checked in LIFCO’s Great Dictionary for “Free” and it says “not restrained, not bound, சுயேச்சையான”. Instead of விடுதலை, சுயேச்சை seems to be more suited for Free.  Look at திறவூற்று being used to mean "Open" (Open API's) I would have preferred to have திறந்த. Also notice how the second sentence in the paragraph has about 39 words. Yes 39 words in one sentence - can't it be broken into easily digestible smaller sentences.

In a recent visit to Landmark, I purchased an audio book titled "Built to Last". At the time of purchase I didn't realize it was the Audio version of the famous book by James C. Collins & Jerry I. Porras. Anyway after listening to 6 hours plus of the audio I think it is one of the best purchases I ever made. The Audio book turned out to be a more convenient format than the paper book, because I could listen to it in portions every day while I drove my car. A best use of the traffic jams that are now becoming common in Chennai.

This book is a classic and reviewed many times on the Internet over the last decade, so I will keep mine very brief. The book is a result of six years of research on what makes great companies great. It does this by identifying 18 "visionary" companies and compares them systematically with "successful-but-second-rank" companies over nearly 5 decades or more of data. I wonder with the power of Internet and access to more data, what the authors could have done more (I am yet to read their sequel Good to Great). The book shatters the core myth that visionary companies must start with a great product and be lead by charismatic leaders. The book talks on these main concepts:

• Preserve the core, stimulate the progress
• Other than your core purpose to exist, everything else can change - have to change
• Follow Darwin Survival Theory, try multiple things and quickly kill the non-prospective one's
• Have BHA (Big Harry Audacious) Goals one after the other to keep the motivation and juices in people flowing

This is a must read textbook for anyone running a company or managing a sizeable team in an organization.

The built-in file download applet in any of the browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera) leaves much to be desired. They don't support accelerated downloads (parallel downloads), most of their resume function don't work as advertised. So you will need to use a 3rd party download manager especially for huge file downloads. The 3rd Party applications since they hook into browser process they tend to slow or destabilize the browsers. Over the years, I have found GetRight to be the best download managers. 

After I moved to Windows Vista on a 64-bit Hardware I wanted something less resource hungry and with less frequent updates. I found Free Download Manager and I have been pleased with its performance for last several months. Check it out and the best part FDM is free and it is spyware free.

Expecting rains today we (myself, wife and kid) decided to spend our sunday evening today we decided to go to Spencers Plaza. On nearing it the sign in entrace said "Parking Full". I was sure it will be the same scene in Chennai City Centre, so we decided to drive somewhere. I remembered the recently beautified Haddows Road Park maintained by Chennai Corporation. Though we had doubts whether it will be open at 7:30PM, we gave it a try - and glad we did that. The park was beautiful, clean (surprising for a Corporation Park in India), well lit and was spacious enough for jogging and walking. It had a tiny play area by kids - could have been bigger but something is better than nothing.

The sign in the entrance said the park is open from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. So next time you find yourself wanting a peaceful place to go in Chennai, give this park a try.

The Park on Haddows Road is further down from Shastri Bhavan on the opposite side.

Many times when you technical documents or just presentation you will find useful wanting to capture some portions from the screen. Earlier in November 2004 I had written about using OneNote 2003 to do it and in October 2004 I had posted about using a freeware Zabgrab to it.

Though OneNote (esp. OneNote 2007) will work with Windows Vista, Zabgrab doesn't. So in my laptop with OneNote 2007 I don't have a problem, but when I am using a Vista machine without what to do?. Apple Mac 10.x have an easy to use Screen grab tool in-built in the system menu.

The good news is Windows Vista bundles (out of box) a great screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool". The tool helps you to Capture a portion of your screen so you can save, annotate, or share the image.

 
(Thanks to my colleague Murari Rajagopal for telling me about this useful applet)

You can find the Snipping Tool either via Start > Accessories > Snipping Tool or by simply typing Snip into any Search window. But it is easy to create a shortcut for it by using the path %SystemRoot%\system32\SnippingTool.exe. This path should work in all Windows Vista (32 bit) editions. It also has rudimentary painting (pen) tool. The tool allows you to copy the URL associated with a screen area and you can control this in your application through this API

Very recently Chennai Traffic has become a nightmare. From anywhere to anywhere during day time nowadays takes nothing less than 45 minutes. Today I started from Asian Printers (near Royappetah Hospital) at 8.15PM and reached my house at West Mambalam at 9.15 - can you believe it, it took me 1 hour for a journey that should've taken me 15-20 minutes even during peak hours. I was spending nearly 40 minutes of this around Panagal park. It is the scene everyday and Chennai Corporation doesn't seem to be doing anything about it, though they made empty announcements. Media is abuzz that the reason why nothing is done around Panagal Park is due the undue influence of all the commercial establishments there, who don't wish the problem to be fixed. If the problem gets fixed it will mean people spending less time through the area and eventually less business. I don't understand the logic, if you solve the traffic problem here, you will have more people coming and hence more business. But who said everything in India and our politicians do things with logic.

Instead of this location Corporation is going ahead with building flyovers (bridges) in all the wrong places. I don't understand the need for building a bridge near Vani Mahal. Anyway's, the point of this post is why on earth anyone will begin work for two bridges at the same time on roads with traffic going in the same direction. I am talking about the Kodambakkam High Road/North Usman Road bridge and GN Chetty Road/Thirumalai Pillai Road (Vani Mahal) bridges here. Both roads take traffic from Panagal Park (and the surrounding areas) to Gemini Flyover (Anna Salai). Since both the bridges are being built at the same time, both the junctions have got the whole carriageway to single lane. Instead it would have been better planning to take one work after the other. May be the government wanted to complete both the bridges before their remaining 4 years in office

I have got some photos taken during peak hours in both the junctions, see them below:

In the last 3 to 4 months, Indian Exporters are loosing sleep due to Rupee Strengthening by over 10% in a quarter. Though certainly in the long run it is good for the country to let Rupee appreciate - such a speedy appreciation is affecting all exporters. In software exports, this clearly wipes out nearly 50% of the profit (assuming the average of 20% profit in Indian Software services industry).  I feel government is using this as an effective and probably only (non-controversial for Left parties) tool they have in controlling inflation. I believe it is up to individual exporters to device their own startegies to tackle, right from using tools like Hedging (which will help in short run from further appreciation) and to increase the rates and diversifying markets. All these are easily said but for small and tiny exporters especially for Non-IT exporters it can be very difficult and a matter of survival. 

Yesterday Infosys Q1 FY '08 results proves that the problem is serious enough. Though their revene have grown by 7.5%  in Dollar Terms; the revenue in Rupee terms has remained constant around Rs.3500 crores.

In this connection, instead of saying more I would like to refer you to this superb interview with Mr.Lakshmi Narayanan (Vice-Chairman of CTS). No one could have said it better. And that's what I admire about Mr.Lakshmi Narayanan, his ability to see the issue not only from the biggies perspective but from the entire industry's spectrum. Read the interview in PDF format: "Rising Rupee a Blessing for China"

Just when I was about to post this, I saw a story on governments relief package, I am yet to study it so I will talk about it in a later post.