Few days back, trying unsuccessfully to port my blog to the main drupal that runs the rest of my site, some careless backing up messed up the Unicode on the database. Don't be surprised or confused if you see the Kannada posts on this blog looking awful with question marks in between, now and for coming few days. It will now take me a long long time to retype them back if I don't find a work around to set the characterset right on the sql and restore back the data.

UPDATE: 1.5.0.2 shared build is here.

Tired of switching back to the Firefox 1.0.7 whenever viewing Kannada websites, I decided that I would try a hand at building the latest Firefox (1.5) from source.

This was long due... many of the Blue Radiant users had emailed me asking for few changes in the theme. Here they are. As is evident from the statistics and number of downloads, this theme has thus far been the most popular among all the Wordpress themes I've designed. The updated release is for WordPress 1.5.x and 2.0. Though the updated version is not fully ready for Wordpress 2.0, yet, it works fine under that. I'll discontinue maintaining the old (0.1 version) of Blue Radiant from now on and build over this new one (1.4). Changes include:

• New Top menu listing the pages.
• XHTML now validates.
• Wider middle column.

[:http://hpnadig.net/donate|Donations] for the theme are welcome. The donations would help me spend time in future on improving this theme and other themes designed by me. Screenshot:

I recently downloaded and installed Wordpress 2.0 (stable version not released, yet) from wp's subversion repository... and I didn't have regrets about the upgrade. Wordpress has gotten better, with TinyMCE now coming *with it* by default, some nice changes with theme admin page and the "Compose" or "Write Post" page in the Admin panel.

Several readers of my blog had mailed me asking the files of the Parishuddha_hp theme (the simple theme that made up the design of my own blog until yesterday). Here it is now. I'm no longer using it on my blog, so you can take it, modify it and use it. (But just make sure you retain the credits and a link back).

is not *activism*, but "reading habits among Kannadigas vis-a-vis other communities".

Though the above quoted message was not my opinion, it endorses what has been on my mind for a long time now. The words are from an article that appeared on Deccan Herald today. This highly sensible article speaks out the very notion that has been on many minds of the new generation Kannadigas:

"What Kannadigas lack is the reading habit vis-a-vis other communities, be it a newspaper or any other form of literature. "

"More than a fighting spirit, what needs to be improved upon are reading habits, study of literature, and recognition to latent literary talents so that this get its due space in the comity of Kannada society."

"Even this crisis is showcased in terms of the Kannada movie world, and, unfortunately, it is the movie buffs who decide the pro-Kannada movements."

"For, the development or otherwise of a language depends upon the growth of literature. But unfortunately, in Karnataka, it is the movie field which rules the roost."

Couldn't agree more. :)

Firefox 1.5 - released very recently, is very much worth the upgrade. Its sleek, faster than before while loading pages and has got some nice changes the Firefox users were looking forward to.

But, this latest stable version for Linux segfaults on Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10). Maybe its something to do with SCIM, again (I use SCIM 1.4.2).

Meanwhile, on the Windows version, the first change I could spot was the difference in the way the "Page not found" error dialog was showing up - now, they have the message appearing on the page itself rather than dialog box. This has been a much needed modification on Firefox (when opening multiple pages at a single time, multiple dialogs used to prop up before this).

The second change quite conspicuous on upgrading, is the feather lightness of the browser. The pages also seem to load faster. The usual 'GTK like' menu is missing from the default theme.

There's also a handy command Ctrl + Shift + Del that clears "Private data".

More changes on the release notes of 1.5 and the unofficial changelog.

Still to fix the age old problem

Few of those Unicode related issues on Firefox are still to be solved. But of course, since Firefox is an Open Source project, instead of blaming them for not fixing the bug for 1.5 release, someone interested in solving this has to pitch in and contribute a patch.

The discussions on bugzilla's bug reports were suggesting that these issues had something to do with the Uniscribe API support on Mozilla. The bug report has been there for almost 2 years now, unsolved.

Although its a sad thing nobody has taken this issue up seriously until now (and Mozilla still continues to badly render Unicode, and Indic in particular), Mozilla still is 'ok' for Indic users if not 'all is fine'.

Hope someone will tackle this age old issue with Mozilla - Indic and would come up with a patch soon. The discussions on bugzilla do seem to suggest that good amount of work is needed to be done, for this to be realised.