How to get arkavattu properly in Ubuntu?

Getting kannada to display in your computer is very easy with Ubuntu. Latest version of ubuntu (11.04 in my case) supports kannada out of the box.

But for kannada input you need to add a few packages. The input method I prefer is Ibus. Install Ibus and related packages to get kannada input method working. This post is not about how to get kannada input. It is about a small tweak I did today to get '೯' (arkavattu) alongside of 'ha'.

Generally we type :
ಕ+ರ್+ಮ = to get = ಕರ್ಮ
Similarly
ಅ+ರ್+ಹ = gives = ಅಱ instead of ಅರ್ಹ

I didn't dig deep to find the key combination to get '೯' properly. Tweaked a little in the .mim file to get ಅರ್ಹ properly.

This is the fix:

open kn-itrans.mim file which has itrans keyboard layout (which I happen to use).

Navigate to the following directory:

$cd /usr/share/m17n

Open the kn-itrans.mim file in a text editor (like gedit) with root privilege:

$sudo gedit kn-itrans.mim

On entering sudo password the file opens. Move down till line 84 and comment out the line by entering ';'(semicolon) at the begining of the line. Save and close.

Restart ibus. And get 'ಅರ್ಹತೆ' for sake of typing it! It solved the issue for now, but I will update about the clean fix as soon as I get to know.

Hitchhiking on HGTG!

I have been listening to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy audio book for the past few days. It is the second time I am listening to the BBC Radio phonic work-shop's rendering of the much adored work of Douglas Adams. The sophisticated comedy and imagination without bounds in the writing of Adams coupled with high quality voice of the BBC artists makes listening a delight. Especially during such times as washing clothes!

Here is a snippet from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Much ado about growing up!

Recently I was thinking of writing an article about the transition from being a student to that of a working man/woman. One thing that occurred to my mind instantly was the image of a car coming to a stand still making screeching noise. Following was an odd vision of a bird perching on the tree and gradually spreading its legs as roots in to the rooted tree!

Not to scare you away with deep philosophical overtones of these images, I will cut it short. People who seem very fluid and floating starts or prepares to sink in, settle down and spread out roots.

I mentioned this rather serious thought to draw your attention to a rather silly thing of me getting a post paid mobile connection from Vodafone. I was a pre pay Tata Docomo customer. Along with the awesome Gprs and expensive call rates pre pay connection provided me with pretenses when I forget to call up people or message or just cut loose from a boring talk. "Sorry I had no balance" card was my diplomatic immunity! No one dared to contest that.

Now I have to give up that provision. Also should go with it is the habit of constantly monitoring the balance in my account. Mature people are expected to suffer shocks only at the end of the month, when bills arrive!

Another abrupt change is the obligation to pay for every single petty message you sent. Texting is not a working man's cup of tea. If you want to pay heed to your girl friend's nascent nagging of her mobile inbox not filling up in recent days, you have to empty out your pocket :)

There are solutions to this problem. Vodafone provides two sms packs worth 30 and 80 respectively. For the former pay you will get on a whole 350 messages for a single month and later frees your worries and allows you to text non-stop with 200 sms maximum limit per day.

With many of my friends preferring textual conversation to the vocal one, I opted for the 80 rupee pack. Meanwhile I was toying with way2sms to send messages. I came to know later about a non-market android app through which you can send messages. The pretty thing about the app was that you could access all of your mobile contacts. This app served the purpose for a while but soon I came to know that it took more than ten hours for the messages to reach the destination. Eventhough it is much faster than post office delivery system, justice delayed is justice denied! I breathed an air of relief when vodafone broke the shackles on my phone.

That's it for now. Please do have a look at my kannada blog here. I did some revamping there.

Stray Dog

Recently I got an opportunity to watch 'Stray Dog' by Akira Kurasawa. It is about an amateur homicide cop whose Colt gun is lost in a bus.

The young cop who still 'green' (referred so in the movie) takes responsibility for the missing gun and behaves in a way that is too sensitive for a cop. When he learns that some crook has got hold of his gun and had shot an innocent person while robbing he feels guilty and writes a resignation letter to the superintendent. Later the superintendent assigns him to investigate the case under a experienced cop.

The film essentially talks about the post war Japan. The crook whose is on the loose robbing people and killing them happens to be a war veteran who became desperate after his knapsack is stolen in the train while returning from the war field. This incident makes him so frustrated that he decides to take it out on the world.

Incidentally the cop who is in pursuit of his stolen gun and the mad dog killer happens also to be a war veteran and his knapsacks were also stolen when he was on the return journey.  The screenplay is deftly crafted to include the intricate details of the homicide investigation team. The personal level in which the crime is conceived, approved and committed. In this respect it stays separate from the run of the mill kind of cop stories.

You can get more of the plot here. The interesting things I observed are the conversations in the movie. In most of the scenes there are three parties in the conversation. Framing of the shots is such that every conversation has unique appeal. The placing of the players in the shot is worth studying.

Watching masters of cinema in action restores my faith in genius over the equipments. A camera is a piece of machine without viewpoint. It is the visionary director who imposes viewpoint on the camera. 

(Image courtesy: Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stray_Dog_1-30-27.jpg )

Malena: when beauty becomes the curse!

Here is the link my write up about movie Malena. It is published in this week`s Vijaya Next magazine. I will try to post an english version of the article for those of my friends who can't read kannada.

Here is the link to the article. Purchase of the magazine is much appreciated :) 

With two new machines and a fresh blogger!

It is nice to see the refreshing new look of blogger. I had thought that google had forgotten that it has a stone age blogging platform. In front of the features rich wordpress blogger used to seem dull. One had to stand on his head to know about the page visits or traffic statistics. Now it seems like the days of staying inside the closet is over for blogger. The UI is clutter free and has soothing design, could adapt to mobile and tablet and other small screens effortlessly.

Have an update from my side. My laptop was on artificial respiratory system for a few days and eventually went to coma. I purchased a new desktop yesterday. It is an assembled machine having the following configuration:

Processor: core I5
Ram: 8 GB
Graphics card: NVidia 1 GB
Hard Disk: 1 TB
Monitor: LG 23" LCD with LED backlight

For sake of mobility I purchased a sleek and trivially light weight Samsung N100 netbook. It has intel Atom processor. 2GB RAM and 250 GB Hard disk.

Since the desktop is an assembled one, I didn't opt for operating system installation at the assembly point. It is a huge rip off to pay handsome amount to get just an instance of the pirated windows OS. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 LTS edition on it but strangely the LAN stopped working. So temporarily windows is dwelling inside the hard disk.

The Samsung netbook had Meego Os pre-installed. I hastily formatted the hard disk and installed debian over it. Netbook refused to co-operate. Attempts to skim through the web references on a compact screen of my mobile and executing the commands led me no where. A visit to the samsung's official website enlightened me that they have system drivers only for windows 7 and xp. Thought of reverting to Meego but there was no recovery option and generous people at Samsung didn't bother gentle Meego OS to be burnt in to a disk! All resulted in approaching Blue screen God, windows 7.

I will be trying out a number of installations on these two machines in the coming days. So watch out for a series of logs in this respect. 

Break ke baad!

It’s been a long break. There were too many things happening. Finishing college, joining Saaranga Infotech, renting a house, organizing stuff in the house, preparing my own food...

I intend to give a new touch to this blog. I wish to make it more like an informal journal. I desperately want myself to break the habit of writing long passages about things that could be said in a sentence or two.

In the break after exams I collected most of the movies of Stanley Kubrick. However I could watch only a few. One of them was a short feature film spanning to about 15 min. It was about a professional boxer who clinically prepares for a boxing match. Kubrick’s love for details has its origins in this movie.

I also watched Dr.Strangelove, a satirical take in the cold war period, Full Metal Jacket about vietnam war.

Incidentally I came across another movie made about Vietnam war: Apocalypse Now. Made by Francis Ford Cappola. Cappola was inspired and influenced by Kubrick. He has paid tribute to kubrick by incorporating some of the music bits from kubrick’s movies. The cinematography of apocalypse now is artistic, will write about that movie in detail some time.

Read “Annana Nenapu” by Tejasvi. It was a refreshing second time read. I was drawn towards the photography hobby of Tejasvi and how he felt that it influenced him in writing. Had you read his karvalo and some short stories, you would never fail to notice the distance narrator maintains from the happenings even though he is part of it. Tejasvi gives photography the credit for this literary skill!

I have been cooking for myself as there are no decent hotels in the vicinity. Here is an illustration of where I started. The chapati I prepared today are definitely far better! All is in mixing the flour. You have to give a time gap of about ten minutes for the mixed flour to get soften. That was the trick I missed, got to know about it when I had gone home for Ganesh Chaturthi.