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Showing posts from January, 2008

I, the chief chef

It wont be easy for many people to believe that I could cook, but last night I tried this adventure once again. The story started out with some heavy snacks in the evening that made me and Sandy very full. So we both were not interested in having a proper dinner. I planned to make something like omelet to carry on the night and avoid going out to a regular hotel. Later on it came out that even Sreedhar Anna was not willing to go out and Pyadu had also came to our place. So plan for my personal omelet got canceled and Anna suggested rice and egg-curry. Since it was Tuesday Pyadu could not have egg due to his own rule to do so. So rice could not be made plain. It had to be something that can go alone. So the Khichadi/Masala Rice was the only option. Since Anna cannot even make a tea(he can at least boil the water which my some other friend cannot), it had to be me to take the charge of kitchen. It wasn't my first attempt to Khichadi. I had learned a bit about Indian style cooking by

Weekend networking

Finally I got a dedicated line internet connection installed back home after what felt like extremely tedious and very long three weeks of application, call center talks, complaints and repairs. I had discontinued the same service(You Telecom) some time back due to same problems. But when I felt an urge for it on weekend trips to home, there was no other option available even after a year. I really wanted to give a try to Airtel connection this time. But anyways, the 'broadband' connection is up and giving a 15kbps download speed (out of expected 192kbps). The cable modem I got with has two ports, one for ethernet cable and other for usb. When I asked their engineer if I can use these two lines to connect two machines at a time, he denied and said it would need a router. That didn't answer my curiosity about two lines and I gave it a try. My Fedora 8 machine picked up an IP which is strangely not belonging to the modem's network. But after setting up the pppoe connecti

Cursor size and Telugu

Assuming you are using a Gnu/Linux box with input methods(mostly scim) available to input many of the Indic scripts and have Lohit fonts installed. Open gedit and start typing anything. Now keep changing the keyboard layout to write something in each language say Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil and so on. Don't worry if you don't know the languages, just type garbage. You will notice that most of the scripts supported by Lohit fonts are more or less scaled to each other. Now try typing Telugu. Still the size is scaled? Yes, they look matched in size. But did you notice the hight of that cursor? This is an issue with Telugu that even though the font on average looks scaled properly, the cursor size is not. And thus the spacing between two lines is also unexpectedly large. Of course you can reduce the size of the cursor by reducing font size, but it still remains out of proportion to the glyph sizes and thus giving ugly line spacing. It appears that the cursor size is determin

Rendering Recommendations draft

So finally, I am giving out this long awaited draft: http://tinyurl.com/34yckl It addresses some of the OpenType, Unicode and fonts related issues. Many of the issues discussed here, have been the source of conflicts, especially for ml_IN. Thus it was an utter need to provide a detailed analysis like this. I hope the illustrations made there provide some common guidelines. There is certainly a scope for improvement. I would like to hear from various communities if they want some of the other left out issues to be also addressed. The draft is open for discussion and feedback.