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Where there is a will, there is a way

Debashish Chakrabarty — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 23:46:47 +0000

Opera website. Is it Hindi really?

Debashish Chakrabarty — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:34:30 +0000

WATBlog reports that Opera website has introduced a Hindi microsite. Looking at their website I wonder if what I was reading is Hindi indeed. “ओपेरा व्यवहार सबंधीय सुझाव एँव चालाकियोँ जानने के लिये ओपेरा समुह से मिलेँ”, If I ignore the punctuation mistakes, the phrase loosely translated back to English would mean, “To know Opera related suggestions and cleverness meet the Opera group”. I don’t think this is what they really meant

These people are using the same kind of Hindi that had almost killed it and that still makes people using it, feel awkward. They must understand that heavyweight sarkaari terminologies like “Adhibharan” doesn’t work and “Download” written in Hindi makes a better sense.

If only they had just browsed through the Hindi blogs and a few Hindi news mediums to get an idea. But then, all such organizations offload translation work to unknown companies where computer illiterates translate word-to-word with dictionaries by their side and without caring if anybody would ever read their work. Frustrating really!

Google’s might!

Debashish Chakrabarty — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 06:26:31 +0000

This is not to undermine the effort Google India has put in to create the Hindi transliteration tool for Blogger.com, but the title of a recent post at the official blog, “Now you can blog in Hindi” sounds too haughty. Probably Google does not know (or chooses to ignore) that Hindi blogging started way back in 2003 and had a vibrant community of 450+ bloggers blogging in the language (and almost all Indian languages) even before this tool arrived.

Battle of the blog

Debashish Chakrabarty — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:13:03 +0000

Indian Express recently did a story on Indibloggies. Though they got some facts wrong (for example I told them that “Tamil, Hindi and Marathi” are leading in the Indic blogging scene), I must thank the newspaper and Anuradha for the good words. I hope this would help its cause, that of showcasing the best of Indiblogdom.

You may read it from the epaper-grab here or only the article text here.

We are the web

Debashish Chakrabarty — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:20:39 +0000

The machine is us; we are the web! Amazing video.

WP 2.1 upgrade irks UTW

Debashish Chakrabarty — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 07:09:27 +0000

I was bit late to realize this, but after the recent WP upgrade to 2.1 there has been few hiccups with the UTW plugin (specifically release 3.141592 , that I use). The UTW tags would just vanish whenever a new comment was being posted or when you try to edit the post. Fortunately, there is a cool fix available till a new release of UTW comes out.

Update: It seems the problem is also with Bunny tags, a plugin that my Hindi blog uses. The fix could be found here.

Blog from Pramati’s founders

Debashish Chakrabarty — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:23:23 +0000

Jay and Vijay Pullur, founders of Pramati Technologies have started their blog Software (Ad)Venturing, where they would write on topics covering software development, product innovation and building new business. This gotta be an interesting read. [Via]

Xobdo – an online English-Assamiya dictionary

Debashish Chakrabarty — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 10:26:08 +0000

More and more people are taking to writing in Indian languages on the net and online dictionaries play a vital role here. I had once mentioned Shabdnidhi, an AJAX enabled online English – Hindi dictionary. Priyankoo, who is the first Assamese blogger, recently informed me about another such project called Xobdo, an online English-Assamiya dictionary. The collaborative project was started by Bikram Baruah, a petroleum engineer based at Abu Dhabi. They already have over 2500 words in their database and you may contribute too if you know the language, Xobdo has made available an online tool to type Assamiya directly. Kudos to Bikram and his team!

A facelift for the pundit

Debashish Chakrabarty — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:24:46 +0000

Well actually, one of my favorite reads Desipundit has gone for a complete revamped look and man “what a site”. There is really no parallel for Chug’s ethnic designs. He has done brilliant gratis designs for the Indibloggies in the past and remains one of my favorite web-designers. Desipundit’s approach is very professional, the way they have amalgamated various facets of blogging together. I however feel that they should try to host the Wiki on their own server, the way Hindi blogdom did for Sarvagya. In addition, the articles, once completed, may be contributed to Wikipedia to enrich their content.

The Indian HR thought leaders

Debashish Chakrabarty — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:20:34 +0000

Gautam Ghosh has started a series “The Indian HR thought leaders” on his blog. He would soon be quizzing Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of Naukri.com on their attempts to embrace RSS feeds. Great going Guatam!