Reading Anandabazar on linux

I am using Linux seriously for last four years. One of the things I wanted to do on linux from the very beginning is to read my favourite bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika. I tried a lot, but my all efforts went in vein vain. People told me that you can not read Anandabazar on linux due to some font issues :(. But recently with help from Kolkata-Lug I got a work around by which I can read my favorite daily on linux. In this post, I try to give a how-to kinda description of what you need to do to read Anandabazar on linux.

First thing you need is an unicode enabled browser. And firefox is one such browser. But problem is indic scripts don't get rendered properly with firefox. To view indic scripts in firefox you need to use a different rendering engine, called pango. The default download version available on mozilla site is not built with pango. So with that version, you can't view indic scripts properly.

There are two ways to get firefox built with pango. Binaries available in fedora or ubuntu repositories are built with pango. So if you use these two distros and install firefox using yum or apt-get then chances are you'll get a pango enabled firefox. Other option is to build firefox from source yourself, though I don't have any clue on this. To check if your firefox has pango built in, input 'about:buildconfig' in your firefox address bar. Look for '--enable-pango' in configure arguments. If you see one such phrase, then you can be sure that your firefox has pango built in.

Next, you need an Unicode Bangla Font. Ankur has a good mini and precise how-to for installing Bangla fonts. But, I was not able to install the rpm from that site due to some dependency problem. So I had to opt for the good old tgz packages. The instructions are given there, and they are very straight forward indeed.

With this settings, you will be able to view most bengali sites. But unfortunately there are some *stupid* websites who don't like to follow the font specifications. They use their in-house proprietary set of fonts. Anandabazar is one among them. To get rid of this comes Padma, yet another firefox extension. Padma automatically transforms web pages that use the specified dynamic font schemes (Anandabazar is one among them) to Unicode. And once you have the unicodes, firefox is able to render them.

I was so happy to read 'Golmele Ginni' after so many days ;-)

Note: All these were done on a CentOS release 4.1 (Final) and Firefox 1.5.0.10.

India goes boom!

Few days back I dreamt of watching men in blue marching victory lap in WC final. But after Lankan riots, I dare to stick to my dream. Like loads of poor Indians, today I was also praying for Bermuda thrashing Bangladesh. But they are limping at 45 for 4 in a rainy ODI. Thing is WC is over for India this time. I curse myself for purchasing a tv only to see this to happen.

In spite of having so many *so called great* players in the side, such a fortune is really disappointing. People are saying we lacked commitment, we lacked passion and blah blah... But I think we are simply not good enough. In spite of having likes of sachin-dravid-saurav-kumble around for so many years, how many times have we performed really like a world class team? It's just occasional spark of genius, that own India some matches. And those very few occasions have been blown out of proportions really badly. So badly, that we started believing in non-existing abilities of our players. I think time has come for an honest investigation.

I think our senior players should take the responsibility and step down now. Report tells me sachin wants to play in the next WC also! wtf! Of course he can improve his personal records, but no way it's going to help indian cricket. We need new -N-fresh blood in the squad. May be likes of rainas, uthappas did not work, but some more efforts can unearth some real champion. Let us be optimistic..

Having said all that, I believe my fellow country men should stop behaving like a fanatic now. I don't understand what-the-hell you get attacking a player's house after his failure? Please stop these non-senses of physical harassment. Unless we mature as a nation, we don't have any hope either in cricket or in any other games.

How to embed wikimap in your website..

Are you wondering, how I got the map in my post? If so, the mystery reveals here.

Seagate is good!

For last few days, my hard disk was not in good health. I thought warranty is already over. I didn't know that now Seagate has an extended warranty of 5 years! They have a nice warranty checker in their site. There I saw my warranty exists till July of too far 2010! So happily I took my disk to Seagate Service Centre, Chennai. I was quite amazed with their service. They didn't even ask me a single question! They just took my disk and told it will take 3-4 days for replacement. And today they handed me a brand new hard disk.

The centre is located at Greams Road, Accel Frontline Limited IMS.

India goes gaga..

World cup has started finally with all it's excitement. India is fighting hard to get into super8s. Ireland has made the critics swallowing their insults for minnows. Bangladesh is on high in their new found out-of-minnowhood status. Pakistan is already out of the blue, which turned out to be too much for Bob Woolmar, a shocking loss to this once-in-four year extravaganza.

It hasn't started as expected for India. India have lost to a spirited Bangladesh in their first match. But watching yesterdays murderous Bermuda victory, you have to agree men-in-blue are back in business. Though you should (can) not make out too many things over this Bermuda victory, But I believe no one can hold us back from going to super8s. And once you are into next round, altogether a different story begins. I think we have a fare chance of bringing back the glory.

To watch them triumph, we have purchased a ctv few days back. We have gone for the *most cost effective* one. It's a "Sansui cine sargam - 22", costs only 6500 bucks! Though I am yet to press all remote buttons, I am quite happy with the product. Picture is good, Audio is mono, but that's enough for us. Let us see how the marriage goes..? I hope, I can see Rahul holding the cup on our tv!

I was asking my friend if he is watching WC? He told he is not, since him watching matches live, make us defeat! Another Amitabh Bacchan story..? I wish them luck. Please please bring us the cup this time...

My first wikipedia article

Few months back I thought of adding an article on my school in wikipedia. For some time I was thinking of writing on this experience. This post is not exactly a how-to-write-a-wikipedia-article, rather it's to tell what I learnt writing a wikipedia article.

Initially I digged hard and got an article on www on my school. I read and liked it. I started writing the article based on it. Later that turned out to be a big mistake. Problem is when you start doing something based on some other existing work, most probably your present work is bound to get influenced by the existing one. Editing is a difficult job indeed! After finishing the article, I found it has been flagged for copyright violation due to some right reasons. Though no one knew I had some such thing, but I felt extremely embarrassing. To remedy this, I decided to rewrite it but this time it must be totally from scratch. It really helped. It was much better an article.

Moral of the story I learnt is to write something in wiki, it's best to start from scratch. You need to be very careful about this copyright stuffs. You can not avoid copying always, in those cases be fare. Refer the references from your article.

Another thing I learnt is importance of objectivity. When you relate yourself to something, you often become personal in your point of view. That's what happened to me. School being one of my favourite thing, subconsciously I was trying to glorify it. Which can be true, but wikipedia is not the place to post my opinions. Being so you loose the objectivity, which is the main objective of wikipedia (in broad sense for every encyclopedia).

After all this self taught lessons, I was able to write a fresh article and get rid of copyright violation flag. If you are wondering what is this article, here is the link for you.

about new blogger..

I am blogging after almost few months. I like Blogger's this out-of-beta new interface more than the previuos one. Some of the things which I have noticed:

• One single signon with other google accounts: I used to forget my Blogger user id. Today I was surprised to see my blogger account getting opened without logging in. Then I found this is because I had already logged in GMail from FF.
• Option to upload a picture from local computer: Since I don't have any other online presence where I have my photo, I was not able to upload my photo earlier. But today I found that there is a new option, and you can see my face now :-) [Though I never claim that's a good thing!]
• Customized Templates: Templates can be customized more easily now.
  
• More options to customize my account: I think there are much more than previuos one. I am yet to explore all..
  

Start again..!

I want to start blogging again. Hope to be more regular this time..