Philosophoric Acid

Removed Infolinks In-Text ads

2011-02-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

Now that I have got an Adsense account, I have to choose between Adsense and Infolinks since the agreement with Google (term 3) does not allow me to display any other advertisements. So I am removing Infolinks from this blog. May be I'll use it elsewhere.

Added Infolinks In-Text ads to this blog

2011-02-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Greetings Earthlings!
This is to inform you that I have just signed up for a pay per click advertising program called Infolinks. Infolinks is an In Text advertising service: they take my text and create links within it. If you hover with your mouse over these double underlined links, you will see a small dialog box containing advertisement related to the text marked. You can choose to either move the mouse away and go on with your browsing, or to press on the box and go to the ad page which is relevant to the text. Click here to learn more about Infolinks Double Underline Link Ads.

Update (10 Feb 2011): I have removed Infolinks in-text ads from this blog.

Don't Quit!

2011-01-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

Long long ago, when I was a little kid, I read a joke in a kids magazine. It went something like this:
"Hey! Did you hear about that man who decided to swim all the way from Karachi to Dubai, all by himself?"
"No. What happened? Did he make it?"
"Well, when he was just a mile away from Dubai, he was too tired and swam back to Karachi."

Yesterday, while I was looking at LibreOffice's screenshots, I came across this beautiful piece of poetry (attributed to Kristone) which reminded me of this joke.

DON'T QUIT!

When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit.
Rest if you must but don't you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out.
Don't give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow.

Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver line of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst,
That you must not quit!

Kristone

Why don't people enjoy their work? And why don't they do something they can enjoy?

2011-01-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

Everyday while going to college, I see lots of faces. They seem like they don't want to go to work. It is as if they are being forced to go there against their will.
And I wonder...
Why don't they do something they can enjoy? Why do most of my classmates study the topics "everyone is studying" instead of what they like? Why do I see so many people doing MBA while they really like Botany or Physics? Why don't they understand that, if they do something they enjoy doing, they can do more work and they can do it better than others? Why do they think that "the only way to do it is the way everyone else does it"?
I wonder why.... :-/
And then I think to myself, "What a funny world!

Pakistan Science Club

2011-01-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

Recently I got introduced to Pakistan Science Club when I noticed a referral link to the science forum I started long ago. They are doing a very good job of presenting science as an interesting topic to young students, something that most of the schools fail to do. So I thought I should also do some free advertising for them. ;)
Here's their web-site.
http://paksc.org/pk/
I hope you will find plenty of interesting stuff there.

Writing Urdu in GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux

2011-01-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

Greetings Earth creatures!
You are some truly bizarre creatures! You cannot even accomplish a simple task of enabling Urdu keyboard layout from your keyboard preferences.
So today, I'll have to walk you through the steps.

In this tutorial, I am using a default Fedora 14 install with GNOME desktop environment. What you have to do is, go to that System menu on the top, mouse over Preferences and from the sub-menu that appears, click on Keyboard.

You will see this window:

By default you see the US English keyboard layout. Now press the Add button to add another one. You will be presented with a list like this:

You can select keyboard layout by country...

or you can select by language.

Here we choose the popular layout designed by CRULP (Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing). After you have chosen the layout, click Add.
As you can see, we now have "Pakistan CRULP" in our list of keyboard layouts.

Now you can close this window and start typing Urdu in any application right away! To switch layouts, use that little applet in the notification area (commonly found on the top right).

And if you are confused about which key to use for which alphabet, right-click on the Keyboard Layout Indicator applet and select Show Current Layout. It will show you which keys are mapped to which characters.

The End!
Now go enjoy writing Urdu anywhere you like. In Firefox, gEdit, LibreOffice, or even on your forehead.

LibreOffice project's first stable release

2011-01-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

I just saw the news that LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable version of LibreOffice has been launched 4 days ago. I know I am late. :D But there might be many more who have missed it, especially some of my friends. So I thought I would post this on my blog to notify them.
For more details, read The Document Foundation's press release. Don't expect me to tell you everything while I am busy downloading it myself.

I love this screenshot! :)

For those of you who don't even know what LibreOffice is, I'll take the time to copy and paste the introduction from its web-site.

"LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. You, too, can also get involved!"

And...

"LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation.
The LibreOffice software is developed by users, just like you, who believe in the principles of Open Source software and in sharing their work with the world in a non-restrictive way. At the core of these principles is the promise of better-quality, highly-reliable and secure software that gives you greater flexibility at zero cost. Beyond this, the driving factor behind the community is personal choice and transparency, which translates practically into wider compatability, more utility and no end-user lock-in to using just one product."

In simpler words, it is a free and open source Office productivity suite.
Now stop wasting your time reading my blog and go to LibreOffice's home page to download a copy for yourself. It is available for GNU/Linux as well as the dreaded, evil operating systems known as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Urdu translation of Drupal

2010-06-20T03:24:00.001-07:00

We have recently migrated the Urdu translation project to Drupal's localization server. If you want to help us with the translation, come along and join us at localize.drupal.org.
Click on this link for Urdu translation.

Google Urdu translation (Alpha)

2010-06-19T03:35:00.001-07:00

In case you haven't read or heard the news yet, Google has added Urdu language among the languages supported by Google Translate. Right now, this support is in Alpha stage and needs a lot of improvement. If you want to make it better, read this article on how you can help:
http://www.urdujahan.com/blog/computer-technology/2010/teach-urdu-to-google/

Reading Urdu text (installing Urdu fonts) in GNU/Linux

2010-06-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

A lot of times, when I tell my Linux user friends about a great website in Urdu, or just type Urdu text in the instant messages, they tell me that they have trouble reading the text. This mostly happens because they don't have (Unicode) Urdu fonts installed. And unfortunately many of them don't know, or don't remember, how to install fonts in GNU/Linux so I have to tell them every time. Therefore, I decided to write a detailed guide where to point them when this happens again. And obviously, it needed to be written in English so that they could read.

Basically there are just three steps. Download a font, copy to a certain directory and update the font information cache to speed up loading. However, this guide will seem way too lengthy for such a simple task because of the additional information for new GNU/Linux users.

So let's begin.

First of all, check your package manager. Some Urdu fonts are available directly from your Linux distribution's software repository. Just open the package manager, search for packages containing "Urdu" and you are sure to find at least Nafees Web Naskh and PakType fonts. Install them from here if you like.

Now we proceed to manual installation of the fonts that you do not find in the package manager.

Here are some links to download some of the most popular Urdu fonts.

Fonts from CRULP (Nafees Nastaleeq, Nafees Naskh, etc.)

BBC's Urdu Naskh Asiatype font

Dozens of other fonts from UrduWeb's download section

Once you have downloaded some fonts, the next step is to install them. The fonts you download will mostly be in True Type Font (TTF) or Open Type Font (OTF) format. Some of them will be compressed as a ZIP, RAR or Gzipped TAR archive. Just extract them to get the TTF or OTF files.
Now copy these TTF or OTF files to either /usr/share/fonts or /home/yourusername/.fonts directory.

Copying to .fonts (notice the dot) in a user's home directory (eg; /home/saad/.fonts) will install the fonts only for that user account. Files starting with a dot (.) are hidden in GNU/Linux by default. To show them in your file manager, select View -> Show Hidden Files (Shortcut: Ctrl+H). If there is no .fonts directory already present, just make one and copy the (uncompressed) fonts there. Now that was simple! Wasn't it?

For a system-wide installation (for all users), fonts are copied to /usr/share/fonts. This requires root (the administrator user in Linux) privileges because normal users do not have permission to write to system directories. There are a number of ways to do this.

For example, if you don't like the command line, you can run your GUI based file manager as root (administrator) user.
In case of GNOME Desktop Environment, run this command: gksu nautilus
In case of KDE: kdesu dolphin
In case of Xfce: gksu thunar
(The commands gksu and kdesu are used to run a GUI based application as root)
Copy the fonts to /usr/share/fonts. Make a subdirectory especially for Urdu fonts if you like. And make sure that all users have permission to read them (by right clicking the files and opening properties->permissions).

If you are having trouble this way, then there's always the command line. :)

Open the terminal. And to make it easier, place all the TTF files in one directory.
First change directory to where you have these font files. For example:
cd /home/username/Downloads/Fonts
Then get "superpowers" by becoming root so that you have permission to copy the fonts to /usr/share/fonts (See the "sudo method" below if this one doesn't work for you). You will be asked for the root password.
su
If you like, make a subdirectory /usr/share/fonts/urdu to manage the fonts easily:
mkdir /usr/share/fonts/urdu
Now copy all the files ending with .ttf to /usr/share/fonts/urdu:
cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/urdu
Make sure that the installed fonts are readable by all users:
chmod a+r /usr/share/fonts/urdu/*
but not executable (for security reasons):
chmod a-x /usr/share/fonts/urdu/*
When you are done with your superpowers, exit root user and return to normal mode:
exit

In some Linux distributions (like Debian and Ubuntu), with the default configuration, you cannot become root with the su command. There you will need to add sudo before every command you want to run as root. For example, in this case:
sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/urdu
sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/urdu
sudo chmod a+r /usr/share/fonts/urdu/*
sudo chmod a-x /usr/share/fonts/urdu/*
In this case you don't need to exit. As soon as you are done with a command, you will return to being a normal user without superpowers.

After copying the fonts, run the fc-cache command to update the font information cache. This cache is used to speed up startup of applications that use the fontconfig library.

That's it! Your fonts are installed and ready to use. Any running applications will need to be restarted to take effect.

Hello World!

2010-06-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

Greetings Earth creatures!
Welcome to my boring blog.
Here you will find all the boring stuff I like, some of which includes Physics, Free and Open Source Software, Python programming language and HowTo's and tricks about using Urdu language in GNU/Linux (if I was generous enough to post something :P).