Internet

It was a surprise this morning to see an article on Deccan Herald which seems to add so much to the strengthening notion that people writing in media still do not cross check their Internet findings.

Not that I'm a big fan of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, or that I have any interest in political stuff surrounding it. But take this: a website called sangh.com is linked by rss.org to what it calls the "media" section. Sangh.com, running on an apparently old version of PHPNuke (which says a lot that the website has long been neglected from its maintainers) has cartload of spam linking to adult sites.

People using Tata Indicom Broadband (and several other services here in India) seem to be affected by heavy packet loss in their Internet connections. When I called up the Tata Indicom Customer Care almost in what seemed to be the umpteenth time I was calling them in last two days, I was told about some "submarine cable damage", "main server issue" and few other such things. Earlier they had a reason to believe it was a local issue and they said they will get it rectified in "6 hours".

[:http://mysorepost.wordpress.com/|Rasheed] just called me up to inform that there will be a program telecast tomorrow on Mysore Akashvani (FM 100.6, Mysore) about Kannada on Internet. The program is a live conversation scheduled at around 8.00 AM.

Catch it if you're in Mysore.

Finally, something we had planned for a long time now has been getting its shape. [:http://sampada.net/docs/2898/the_best_of_sampada|Best of 'Sampada'] is a book that you can read on-line comprising of the very best Kannada articles posted during last two years on Sampada.

All articles have been classified under the taxonomies they were tagged in. Feedback, suggestions for improvement [:http://sampada.net/contact|are all welcome].

More books like this one on Sampada [:http://sampada.net/books|can be found here].

[:http://dli.iiit.ac.in/|Digital Library of India] has been unveiled, but with a shocker of an interface. But not much can be expected out of a "Government of India" project, as they always manage to find just the right technologies (or people?) for their job (Why, e-governance in India is all ready to go Microsoft's way. When M$ boasts riches, we can all show our kids its logo and say that our government of poor people is one of their key customers).

They use TIFF format for image scans of thousands of books probably from libraries all over India. There are two petty interfaces which need you to download a software to be able to view. The software, in turn, needs to be registered to be able to use.

Last month, it was the [:http://ildc.gov.in/Kannada/kdownload.htm|disappointing set of tools] released by TDIL, and this month, the DLI. Not to mention, the projects are obviously worth a lot, but shabbily done. Idea seems to be right, but implementation has been terribly bad.

A Quick Script

To overcome the toil between interest for books on DLI (which otherwise are not easily available) and the irritation of shabby interface, I wrote a (shabby) script that batch downloads the TIFFs.

After a long time, we managed to squeeze in another [:http://sampada.net/podcasts|podcast on Sampada]. There's a long list of TODO, though, on Sampada with some basic features (such as XML for the podcasts) not working all that fine.

But the good thing is, we've caught renown Kannada poet Nisar Ahmed talking on some of the most interesting and contemporary issues making the podcast even more interesting this time.

While editing the audio on [:http://audactiy.sf.net|Audacity], I was caught wondering why we hadn't yet posted any of the previous recordings in [:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Vorbis|Ogg Vorbis]. Ogg Vorbis is the free software alternative of mp3. So, [:http://sampada.net/podcasts/7/K-S-Nisar-Ahmed|from this edition of podcast], there's an Ogg Vorbis file accompanying the regular mp3 file. Enjoy! :)

Dr. Rajkumar's [:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGSA4n3kMo|this particular song] from an old film [:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGSA4n3kMo|has gathered] lots of peevish comments from people who conspicuously are non-Kannadigas.