this and that

Seveal months ago, I wrote how nice it would be to have a Wikipedia in my mother language Nepal Bhasa. Now, thanks to a medical student from Kathmandu (English Wikipedia user page, Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia user page) there is one. It uses the Devanagari script (Nepal Bhasa has her own scripts but they are not supported by Unicode yet. It sure is nice to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia in your language, and get encyclopedic knowledge in your own language!

As I mentioned in that earlier post, the Nepali wikipedia has already been in existence for some time now. If you know either language and wish to contribute, click here to learn how you can type in Devanagari on a Windows machine. Also, check out this Roman to Unicode Nepali Converter, developed by Deepak Khanal and Carleton alum Sujan Rajbhandary.

The World is a radio production of Public Radio International and everyday, it features a “geo quiz” which poses a question about a location in the world and information about the answer. Today’s question, to my pleasant surprise, was about a “royal park…at the foot of the Himalayas,” “Nepal’s oldest national park.” It was a very short segment but amidst the disheartening lack of coverage of news from Nepal in this part of the world, even a short piece about Nepal’s natural heritage was refreshing to listen to.

This Geo Quiz page has the question. You can also find out the answer and listen to an audio postcard from Nepal, recorded by Australian sound engineer Greg Simmons.

amrit_ayush

I went back home to Nepal for winter break, and got back to Minnesota on New Year’s day. I had a lot of fun with my family, and I also got to see my new nephew Ayush, who was born a year ago when I was in college.

Check out more pictures from the break.

Nepal rebels make peace promise: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6129314.stm

And the actual peace deal [PDF, 36KB]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08_11_06_nepal_deal.pdf

The problem is that many people will find it hard to simply sweep under the carpet, the thirteen thousand deaths from a decade-long conflict. Nevertheless, with the existing power structure, I am sure this is a positive step forward.

CBC, which broadcasts As it happens every night on Minnesota Public Radio, reports the finding of a giant rock-face three hundred miles southeast of Calgary, Canada, by a Google Earth user with the alias “Supergranny.” As CBC notes, “not all explorers require boats, or risk scurvy.” It is clear that with the power of programs such as Google Earth in the hands of anyone with a fast-enough internet connection, such discoveries are likely to occur more frequently.

Read more:

• CBC story
• Google Map picture of the face

I spent last summer (summer 2006) in New York working as a programmer (Java, some scripting, a cool templating language called Velocity, HTML, CSS) for a big investment bank. It was a very good experience: the work was interesting, I love New York, I met some very interesting people, and the monies were pretty decent. So much so that I am very likely to keep doing it, at least in the short run, after I graduate.

I am now a senior® !!! And I am actually doing comps®. For those unfamiliar with Carleton parlance, “comps” is short for “comprehensive exercise.” It is a big project undertaken by seniors in all majors: what one might call a “senior thesis.” The actual details vary from major to major. In my major Computer Science, comps takes the form of a group project in which we work on an interesting Computer Science problem. More information on Computer Science comps can be found here. I am part of the Recommender System For Choosing Courses group, though our project has somewhat changed direction: more on that later, hopefully.

I am also taking Artificial Intelligence and Elementary Number Theory, and I am doing an independent study called Human-Computer Interaction. They are all keeping me pretty busy, but I have also been making some time for table tennis, Mortar board and Yahoo! crosswords.

I just found out about this:

wehaveschiller.com: only at Carleton.

I usually prefer cold weather to hot weather; my usual argument is that while there is a limit to how much you can take off, there is no limit to how much you can put on (well, maybe there is a practical limit, but most of the time, it’s beyond what is sufficient). Besides, I sweat really easily.

Nevertheless, I doubt if there was anyone who didn’t welcome the warm clear weather here in Northfield during the past week. Here are some pictures I have taken around the campus; they are also at the gallery, where I will post more as I take them:

Tree and top of Skinner Chapel

Tai-chi in the sun: People in Prof. Qiquang Zhao’s tai-chi class

Close-up of a bench that didn’t fare so well through the winter

A plane and its contrails against the clear Midwestern sky. If you look at the actual size, you will see how surreal the plane looks.

Rosie with Canoe House’s canoes

New flowers growing among dead foliage in the Canoe House lawn

If you want to get to the point of this post, skip to this paragraph.

From Wikipedia:

A web feed is a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to “top ten” lists of hit tunes. The two main web feed formats are RSS (which is older and far more widely used) and Atom (a newer format that has just completed the IETF standardization process.)

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

In less technical terms, the RSS “feed” for a site is basically a dynamic list of updates to the site that can be read using a program called an aggregator, without actually having to visit the site in a browser. There are many aggregator programs out there and even more aggregator sites that will read RSS feeds for you (for example, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s preview of start.com). However, the easiest way that I have found to read simple RSS feeds is to use browsers that have built-in aggregators, such as Mozilla Firefox and Safari (for Macs). For example, if you are reading this blog in Mozilla Firefox, you will see a small orange icon (something that looks like ), in the address bar (or in the bottom right corner for some older versions). You can click this icon to add the RSS feed for my blog to your Bookmarks folder or your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder (the latter is a popular choice) so that when you click that bookmark, you will be presented with a list of the latest updates to this site.

This process of web syndication is especially useful for sites such as blogs and news sites because their content changes a lot with time. Most popular blogging software and services (for example, Wordpress, Movable type, Blogger) have built-in code to automatically generate RSS feeds, and many news (and non-news) sites such as BBC News, Fark and Slashdot have RSS feeds.

So what has all that got to do anything with me? These days, I have come to expect most news sites that I read to have RSS feeds, but none of the major news sites from back home in Nepal that I regularly read (Nepalnews, Kantipur Online, Nepali Times) offer RSS feeds. So I decided to try to build RSS feeds for these sites. The process basically involves looking at the sources of these sites, finding out where the news items occur and how to identify them, and writing some PHP to extract that information into a valid XML-based RSS site. I could have chosen either of the two web feed formats, RSS or Atom; I chose RSS 2.0, which is more popular of the two. I also used HTMLParser, a PHP script by Jose Solorzano that parses html and returns tags and inline text.

The first result of this effort is the Nepalnews RSS feed. To use this RSS in Firefox, go to Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks… and then open File -> New Live Bookmark… from the menu. Enter the URL http://gridley.res.carleton.edu/~tuladhaa/projects/rss/nepalnewsrss.php for feed location and place the bookmark in your Bookmark Toolbar Folder. You should now be able to see a list of the news items from Nepalnews.com when you click on your bookmark. The same URL can also be used in any other Aggregator program that supports RSS.

I am still working on making RSS feeds for the other news sites, but it appears to be harder, mainly because the news items are somewhat spread around their pages. Once done, they will be available from my projects page.

One thing that I have read about before but realized more strongly when doing this, is the importance of using semantically significant tags when writing any markup document, especially webpages. For example, having an h1 tag to mark a level one heading as opposed to having a decoration tag such as font or a non-descriptive class makes it much easier to extract the headings from a page. In the end it all comes down to how well the format (for example, the layout and colors on a page) has been separated from content (the actual text on a page).

Time flies (fast!) when you are having fun. It’s already Spring Break ®, and it’s JUNIOR YEAR !!! Ah well.

So yes, winter term is over. It was pretty good: I enjoyed all my classes (Database Systems, Algorithms II, Microeconomics, Fencing, Guitar); we finally got a few computers set up for NEO (NEO is the on-campus organization that refurbishes old computers and gives, or has been trying to give, them to students who can’t afford them); the Table tennis club started practice; and I made some progress getting together my pages for the yearbook. And most importantly, I joined the Moustache Club :-{) (picture forthcoming).

Anyway, I am staying on campus for Spring break, unlike previous years when I went on Habitat for Humanity trips (read this post, for example). Those were a lot of fun, but this time, I just decided to stay here and, as they say, “chill.” There is a lot I am planning to do, though:

• Start preparing for my internship this summer in New York
• Finish reading Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Watch a few movies
• Work on my new website (heavily under construction, so be warned)
• Start a website for Table Tennis club
• Learn more about Ajax
• Learn more Latex

I will post more about each of these things as I get around to it.

Speaking of spring break, I must mention that it is not exactly “spring” break, especially for people living here. A lot has been said and a lot will be said about Minnesota weather and believe me when I say that it’s probably all true. In fact, the longer I have lived here, more have I become convinced of the truth in the popular saying that Minnesota has two seasons: winter and construction. Actually, I would further say that Minnesota is confused about her weather, and is never quite sure what month it is and which hemisphere she is in. In fact, it’s mid-March now, and this week, we have had two big snowfalls. Of course, it looks good with covered in white, but I wouldn’t mind its being spring during, well, spring break.

Finally, here are a couple of pictures of what spring break looks like (more can be found at the gallery):

Bench outside Scoville

Bikes in front of Sales [Click for larger]

Here is a pretty good, honest and down-to-earth primer to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency by National Geographic, devoid of the usual hyperbole that accompanies Western media reports about Nepal. And two beautiful videos from a documentary on Nepal: Video 1 Video 2 (thanks to Jeshica Baral’s Facebook profile.)

And some others:

• www.blog.com.np: “United We Blog! for a democratic Nepal”: Nepalese journalists blog (mostly from the Kantipur camp)
• nepalnow.blogspot.com: Mostly pro-royal blog from a mysterious, probably American, “blogdai”
• www.samudaya.org: “Pseudo-intellectuals. Just like you” As far as I know, this site cannot be accessed in Nepal, but there is a mirror at everybodybreed.com.

Good stuff. (Nepali featured in Time magazine Global Health issue)

I have been unusually lazy about writing here but I hope to write more from now on. And what better day to start than one of the most auspicious days of the Nepalese calendar. Today is Vijaya Dashami, the most important day of the great Nepalese festival Dashain (called Mohani by Newars). Although primarily a Hindu festival, Nepalese people of all caste, creed and religion take time during Dashain to visit the numerous religious sites around the country, receive blessings from older relatives and relax with friends and families. Vijaya Dashami, also known as Tika (for the vermillion powder-paste put on people’s foreheads by their elders as a symbol of blessing), and called Chaalañ by Newars, is a day symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, the culmination of the fifteen-day Dashain celebration.

For me personally, Dashain has been one of the things I have missed the most since I came to the US. I miss waiting for Ba to finish the almost half-day long rituals, I miss watching Mama nag him to finish quickly so he can take his medicine, I miss having my brother, my sisters and my nephews all around, I miss watching out the window to look at colorful kites dotting the sky and I miss the sense of hubbub and movement that you sense all around you. And although it is probably cliché to say so, I definitely miss the food a lot.

Anyway, in the spirit of the postcards we used exchange among friends during Dashain when we were young, I wish everyone a very Happy Dashain:

This image, from Nepalnews, depicts the Hindu goddess Durga, worshipped during Dashain.

More links:

• Read more about Dashain.
• Story about Vijaya Dashami from Nepalnews.
• “Shopping: The inevitable part of Dashain”

Very nice.

I had heard about these but it actually happened to me today and apparently, it’s not so funny:

Err… is that the F1 on my TI-83?

Many of you probably heard of George W.’s latest bike accident, which resulted in ankle injury for the Scottish policeman that President Bush ran into, and minor scrapes for President Bush. Yesterday, there was an interesting conversation on Minnesota Public Radio about the crash. The program (I think it was All Things Considered but I’m not sure) invited a bike expert to comment on the accident. Part of the conversation was something to the effect of:

Expert: …so what happens sometimes is that on hot days, the asphalt on the road melts, and it gets slippery…

Presenter: So you are saying that global warming might actually have had something to do with this accident?

Expert: (laughter) As far as my knowledge in this goes, yes.

This summer, I am in Eden Prairie, as a “Software Development Engineer Intern” at Stellent, Inc. which makes, among other things, content management software. The work is interesting; I have been doing some Java programming and learning a lot of stuff, mainly about Stellent’s own software.

It has a been a at-times-hot and at-others-rainy-and-stormy summer here in Minnesota. I have been doing a lot of biking, reading and movie-watching. Look out for a list and (hopefully) some reviews of books and movies soon. There are also more pictures now, including those from New York, the summer and my 4th of July vacation.

Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and I found today that volunteers have been working on a Nepali version. Currently, there exists only a main page, and half of it is in Sanskrit, but with enough people interested, it can grow pretty quickly. So if you are a Nepali and are interested in porting this wonderful open source free encyclopedia into your own language, go to http://ne.wikipedia.org and start creating pages. A good way to start is to take existing pages in other languages (such as English, or Hindi, written in the same script) and translate them. If you cannot see Unicode Nepali characters (and other Indic scripts), such as the following letters: नेपाली, follow the instructions here. To type in Unicode Nepali, you will need a Nepali keyboard layout, which you can download from the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya site (follow online directions, I currently have Windows XP Home and I use their Nepali Unicode Traditional tool). The wikipedia main page also contains a bunch of links to different tools.

The Wikipedia in Nepali also gave me the idea of starting a Wikipedia in Nepal Bhasa, which is my mother tongue. But doing so in any of its own scripts (such as the Ranjana) would be very hard, considering none of them are supported by Unicode yet. Still, I might start a few pages in Devanagari this summer if I have time.

I recently found out that Carleton has a really cool service: go.carleton, which creates shortcuts to long Carleton-based URLs into shortened URLs of the format http://go.carleton.edu/. As I am usually quick to use free nifty services, this and that is now also accessible through http://go.carleton.edu/33.

Last Thursday (May 5), bestselling writer Broughton Coburn came to Carleton to give a very popular picture-accompanied lecture on his book Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart. The book is about how Mr. Coburn brought an 84-year-old Gurung woman (”Aama”) to America in 1992 as what she called a “pilgrimage”—a woman that he had met and befriended as a Peace Corps volunteer in the hills of Nepal in the 1970s. In the lecture, he showed pictures from various parts of this journey, that he called an “odyssey,” and recounted events reflecting “Aama”’s view of America.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture, though it had a different theme from what I had expected it to have. I had thought the lecture would be about the woman who came to America, but it was more about America. Mr. Coburn’s main point was how “Aama” saw spiritual significance in almost everything in America—from Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park to a Mickey Mouse figure at Disneyland—things that American seem to take for granted. Various anecdotes and the beautiful pictures from both Nepal and America kept the mostly American audience amused and entertained.

Although it is always heart-warming for me to see foreigners passionately involved with Nepal—in this Nepali Times article, he says “[t]his is where I belong, Nepal is where I feel most at home”—I did feel a little uneasy at the whole presentation. It had a significant commercial flavor to it, as if in the many years in lecture circuit that Mr. Coburn has spent with this lecture, it had lost some of the personal significance it had for him. Not once did the lecturer, for example, mention the old woman’s name: she was the easy, typical “Aama” or “mother.” (Her name was Vishu Maya Gurung, as I found out later online, and she passed away some time after she went back to Nepal). And the tone was the superficial myth-like tone that well-meaning Western discourses on Nepal often end up using. In a way, such a picture is useful in kindling interest in Nepal and in helping the ailing tourism industry, but probably isn’t entirely honest.

All in all though, I was enthralled to see the hills of Nepal and familiar scenes from Kathmandu on a big screen at Carleton, and I am thankful to Mr. Coburn for doing all he has done for Nepal. And, I couldn’t help weeping a little inside when an audio piece of Mrs. Gurung singing a bhajan was played: it took me back home in one fell swoop.

More links:

• Broughton Coburn’s official website
• Other books by Broughton Coburn at Amazon.com, including Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman, his first book on Aama
• Broughton Coburn as a speaker, and reviews of his lectures