[: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.
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.
[:http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%97%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%83%D1%81_%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B0/Edward_Chernenko|Edward Chernenko] of [:http://ru.wikipedia.org/|Russian Wikipedia] has put across [:http://tools.wikimedia.de/~edwardspec/cgi-bin/top100.cgi?uselang=kn|this very nice tool] that counts the hits that various language Wikipedias receive (Javascript snippet needs to be inserted on wiki to get it started, though). For many months now, Wikimedia has not been keeping page hit statistics on Wikipedia project since they add up to the load on the servers.
[:http://trac.edgewall.org/|Trac] is indeed a very useful software. When swamped with too many things to do, this is a good tool to keep track of all the tasks and issues in a better way (at least it has been that, for me). It even has a wiki that is very much similar to [w:Mediawiki|Mediawiki].
