Malayalam font for Mac

So, after all these years, we have a Malayalam font that works in Apple's macs. Well, almost. My brother and I have been working on getting Rachana to work, and it looks quite good now. The goal has been to make a font that can use every glyph provided by Rachana. You can see in the screen capture that it seems to work quite well in Firefox, but not so well in Safari (where the kind of chillu usage in wikipedia is causing some trouble).

Update (Sep 7, 2009): You can find the alpha version of the font here.

Obscurantism

I had to look up "obscurantism" on wikipedia. That is what came to mind on reading how a new auspicious day for buying gold has become en vogue in South India. More here. Of course, I'd imagine that for some of the costumers it is just another festive occasion, with apparent discounts and such. Or they are just following an emerging tradition. But I'd also imagine that many really consider it auspicious.

Turns out, obscurantism is probably not the right word, going by wikipedia. But it comes close. What would be a word for deliberately manufacturing superstition?

Power outage

1. There is a power outage on campus. I hope nothing melts down/blows up. But on the brighter side, if you'd excuse the pun, we will save some energy, I suppose.

2. I tend to listen to the regional news broadcast by All India Radio, Thiruvananthapuram, online. In these days of power shortage (there), what with all the summer and heat and drying up rivers, load shedding is the way to go. Not surprisingly, they have an interesting public service announcement that they run half way through the news bulletin, exhorting everyone to switch off their refrigerators in the evening peak hours. (Or, maybe it is a little surprising?)

Interestingly, the only thing that forces the state to suspend the load shedding is the high school exams (SSLC), as they have done again this year. I wonder if it reflects right priorities (kids, education) or a misplaced one (exams).

3. The last power outage I experienced (enjoyed?) was when my parents were here last summer. Everything was fine, except that I had to let a large load of laundry soak overnight, and the parents had to make do with a cold breakfast.

Updates

A few small updates.

First the Germany trip (December first week).

The morning after Obama won the elections I was in Chicago, to get a German visa. It was quick and painless and got over in the morning. My return train was not until later in the afternoon. So I walked around looking for a cafe, and trying to pick up a newspaper on the way. Well, it wasn't easy. But finally I did manage to get one before heading back, at a crowded corner (and certainly looked odd in that crowd, buying less than four copies).

My first conversation in Germany (not counting the one at the railway ticket counter) was at the hotel check-in: "You are from... (looking at the computer monitor), ah, USA. So, how do you like Obama?" and later in the elevator (with another hotel staff member, on being told that I'm coming from the US, but I'm from India): "Oh, that means you can't become the president of USA."


My photo-activity (no, I don't quite mean that) seemed to be in for a revival, with the crowded Christmas markets at Frankfurt and Mainz. Until, I tried downloading all the photos on to my laptop using the USB cable and drained the battery. (Buying a charger didn't seem an exciting option.) So for the rest of my days in Germany I didn't have to continually worry that I'm under-utilizing photo opportunities.

After Christmas I was at UCLA for over a week. Nice and warm. I suppose I shouldn't be complaining that those were not the coldest days in Champaign. As always I did lug my camera along, and didn't use it much at all. Until my brother (who decided to come along, to escape a cold and lonely winter) and I visited the Getty Villa. Here's a random selection.

A few more photos are here.

And finally, today's news is that the little server in my office has been hacked into. It was a spam injection into the RSS feed of my somewhat dormant wordpress blog. Possibly sometime around Christmas (modification date on some files was Dec 28). Thanks to the folks at REN-ISAC for catching it. Not sure what all damage has been caused, but I did spend some time updating wordpress and removing an apparently new root user from my MySQL server. (I know, sounds bad!) In any case, for now, I'm not offering deals from an "online Canadian pharmacy."

Photos

Just a couple of random photos.

The first one is titled "Working from Home." (And you will be justified in wondering what I was doing with a camera: welcome to the pleasures of working from home.)


The second one is called "Noh Photography." Why? Because I went for my first ever Noh performance (I went to watch, just to be clear), and started taking a few photos before I was told, "No sir, no photography." (So sure enough the photos have no Noh in them; it shows the setting for a little tea ceremony they had first.)

Onam Flowers

Except for vague memories of having collected chemparathi flowers as a little kid, I can't really recall making a pookkalam ever. Let me put this one up here so that I won't forget again.

(From Saturday's Onam get-together on campus. Yes, UIUC does have more Malayalis.)

Bhopal

It's not new, but New York Times has a good summary of the continuing tragedy in Bhopal. Some of us were part of commemorating the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, but I don't think at that time we really realized that not much would have changed in another four years.

The demise of the blog

The death of the blog be blamed on Facebook (because it lets me make quick one sentence status updates). I'm afraid that sounds like one of those fast-food culture things: unlike the good old days when we used to sit down and read/write a long blog post.


Anyway, to keep things alive around here, here's a photo, from today morning. (Yes, parents are visiting, and brother and I took them around Chicago.)

Unicode 5.1.0

Unicode 5.1.0 has improved support for Malayalam.

And having the new code-points for the chillus means that the chillus produced by this keyboard I made some time back (quite some time back, in fact) are now according to the standard.

After 333 days

So after 333 days, today I rebooted my computer!

(The remainder is mostly a note to myself, so that the next time around I'll know what to do when things break.)

Since there was a kernel update waiting to take effect, it was a good idea to have updated the kernel-dev packages as well, just in case. In fact, this time it was indeed the case: on rebooting (after 333 days, sigh!) the graphics card drivers wouldn't work with the new kernel.

Fixing the video: Figure out the graphics card model (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285), and download the relevant software from the NVIDIA website. Run it and, like it did this time, it might want to compile some modules against your spanking new kernel. Let it do as it pleases. Things may not look quite OK even after this (I tried running xscreensaver-demo using a GL* screensaver to confirm -- and got a bunch of "GLX" errors). Check/edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and ensure that in the Module section Load glx is there but Load dri is commented out. The instructions I was following also had me edit the Device section to read Driver "nvidia" instead of Driver "nv" (so that, I suppose, the driver installed by Nvidia's script is used; not sure why that script didn't edit that into the conf file). Quite unexpectedly, at this point, everything started working.

Fixing the wiki: This is why I rebooted the server in the first place. The wiki on the server was a little broken, thanks to mysterious SELinux issues. It was probably a consequence of software updates leaving the newly installed files in wrong domains. I thought rebooting will fix all that. It didn't. What did fix it was the fixfiles relabel command.

And today's was the last lecture for the semester.

Spring

NIU shooting

This was in a mail from the Chancellor, this morning:

The University has learned that U of I student has been identified as the
gunman in a fatal shooting at Northern Illinois University that left seven
people dead and more than a dozen more injured.

The entire University of Illinois family extends its deepest condolences
to the friends and family of the victims, and to everyone on the
Northern Illinois University campus affected by today's tragedy.

(U of I being where I teach...)

Update: And it seems the assailant bought a couple of his guns from around here. I wouldn't have guessed we have any gun shop in town...

The frozen bike

That's what happens when it's raining and warm in the morning/afternoon, but well below freezing in the evening. I should have thought about it, but like most of the time, I didn't. I just went down and found my bike all frozen. And I ended up breaking the cute bike-lock key -- could be something about things becoming brittle in the cold, or maybe I just applied too much force against a key stuck in ice. On the brighter side, that was only after unlocking the bike from the bike rack.

Anyway, at the moment, I'm waiting in my office for my bike (also in my office) to thaw so that I can ride it back home. (It's fun to listen to a micro rain, raining down from the bike onto sheets of paper spread on the carpet. Now you know what I do with all those announcements I get...)

I'll update when I get back home. I hope the road won't be too slippery... (Well, at least I'm not trying to ride a frozen bike on frozen roads, like the last time.)

PS: Yes, yes, I'm back from India, safe and -- despite everyone's curiosity -- single.

UPDATE: Yes, I'm back home, safe and -- thanks for asking -- in one piece. (OK, since my mom reads this blog, I can't keep pretending that it was such an adventure. Amma, trust me, my daily commute is too short to offer any sort of adventures, even on a frozen bike. And then it wasn't frozen either, at least for the first half of the ride...)

Still in India

This time around there was little opportunity for me to take any interesting photos. So I suppose I'll post some uninteresting ones, grainy and shaky (which, unfortunately, is probably the most interesting thing about them).

Ezhunallath: the Deity's procession (slideshow)

In India

So far, in this winter break: Chicago - Delhi - Chennai - Trivandrum - Bangalore - Trivandrum.

And here's from the morning skies of Trivandrum, about an hour back:

A conversation

With a friend, today evening.

Me: Yeah it's a nice house. It's pretty old, but it's alright. In fact it's kind of too large.
Friend: You know what you should do about that, right?
Me: Huh?
Friend: You know what you need to do if you're feeling the house is too large, don't you?
Me: I don't know. I think I'll just get used to it...

<later in the conversation>

Me: Oh wait, is that what you meant when you said I should do something about the house being large?
Friend: What did you think?
Me: Well, I thought you were saying I should get more furniture. You know there's room for more furniture here...

Green Revolution, Kerala Style

Or so goes the plan:

The policy will be ambitiously aimed at freeing Kerala of all chemical fertilizers and pesticides in five years.

Onam

Continuing the tradition of the last couple of years, Onam was celebrated with much enthusiasm and good food today. We were a dozen, plus two kids, for a potluck lunch. I made an avial, which literally translates to something like "cooked stuff."

(It's curious that whatever I make tastes fine in my kitchen, but at a potluck it always turns out to be a little low on salt. Notwithstanding my efforts to correct for this by adding extra salt before taking it for the potluck.)

In other news, now I have an orange coloured bike.

Updates

Several things happened since my last post, which I would have recorded here. (Not that they are all that important/interesting, but very few interesting things happen to me anyway.) This is probably a good time to update.

Firstly, I bought an apartment. It's an old building, with a toilet flush from the 1940's. Once I move in I may have more interesting things to say.

There was a work-related trip to New York. I stayed in the city for about a week, making sure that I can still stay (somewhat) cheap if I want to. I met up with many friends, old and new, on the way to NY, in and around NYC and Princeton, and on the way back from NYC. Several photos still need to be looked at.

On Sunday I happen to be flying out again, to Santa Barbara. Hopefully I'll be back by Thursday night, just in time to teach the first lecture of this semester's course.

The day before yesterday I took my new bike to the bike-shop for the 30-day tuning. Which was just as well, because whoever stole it today couldn't have taken it to the shop themselves. This time around the person who took it demonstrated a fair amount of ingenuity, expertise and guts (breaking the lock, twisting it using a metal cylinder -- taken from inside a cigarette stub receptacle near the bike-rack -- in broad daylight on a working day, in front of the department). I did call the police to let them have a look at the cylinder with the broken lock twisted around it. (Now you know how to steal a bike if it uses a cable lock. If I knew then, I would have bought the U-lock after all.)

And, Happy Onam!

Donation week!

Made two donations this week. First, the second one. It was a rather "involuntary donation." And being not present at the occasion I couldn't do it very well. So, if you were the one to get my bike, I'll be happy to give you the key to the lock too. I know, I was being too lazy to use it properly, but I'd like it to be useful for you (or, if you don't have any use for the lock, I could take it back and put it to good use on my new bike).

That's the donated bike in colder times (and a light snow). Or see it here.

The other donation was on July 4.