Internet

[Background: Kannada, like probably many other Indian languages, has seen its days run out completely as the primary language used to store, record knowledge. It may have been due to several factors, but back to local view of the world: local news, local language, local perspectives and everything local has now been catching up. Even FM radios in the city have switched back to the local language as the primary language of broadcast. Well, is it time the local language is also used more and more to document knowledge?

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.

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.

[: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].

[: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.

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.

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…|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.