Nimbupani Designs blogs

Book Reviews for November 2009 — Part 1

divya — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:41:32 -0800

I know! November has barely begun and here I am posting my book reviews already thanks to my two-week vacation!

I had a great time in Chennai and Bangalore, meeting very interesting people and drinking in the new developments. It could be my hallucination, but there seems to be an abundance of opportunities here. Service providers are falling over themselves to provide creative solutions (Per second billing has arrived in India without government intervention, and where are we in U.S.?). This trip has definitely made me rethink where I want to be 5 years from now.

Now, here are my reviews!

The Bolter

The Bolter talks about a woman of the privileged class in the 20s, who like many of her generation, liked to experimented with drugs, sex, travel to avoid boredom. The author seems to have idolized the protagonist (her grandmother) — I guess that is usual in most biographies. It is a breezy read, and a good book to point at conservatives when they talk about morality in “good old days”
Spirit House: A Vincent Calvino Crime Novel

This book is written for an American audience panting for the sense of exotic while really looking for the familiarity of US crime thrillers. Avoid, unless you are one of them.
Portland Noir

Portland Noir is a collection of short stories written in the style of Raymond Chandler. It is also the first time I came across lesbian crime stories which were sensible and did not sound trite or derogatory. A good read if you like Noir.
The Diary of a Social Butterfly

I was very curious about this book as it is written as a diary of a Page 3 socialite of Pakistan. It is a collection of columns by Moni Mohsin published in Pakistan’s Friday Times (I will spare you of the pain of viewing their antique website). As a column, each chapter works really well, but as a collection in a book they appear tedious and repetitive. Here is how one chapter looks like. The author is very “punny”, lovers of the English language might enjoy it.
Everyman

Aravind Adiga recommended Philip Roth, so I picked up Everyman which is a book about death. It was an engrossing, but melancholic read. The book is quite “existential” if I may say so and I really liked it for showing no pretenses about death or life.
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder has a lot of similarities to The Whuffie Factor, but unlike Whuffie Factor, this is actually well-written, and clear. If you are as addicted to being online as I am, nothing mentioned here is “revolutionary”. Read this book if your only online activity is facebook/gmail.
Purple Hibiscus

I “loved” Purple Hibiscus. It is beautifully written and very engrossing. I probably liked it more because I could relate to the story of Kambili (the protagonist). I am shocked that a “debut” novel has been written so well. It captures Nigeria and the religious divisions vividly without stereotyping or making them exotic to appeal to global audience. If there is one book you want to read this year, I would recommend this one.
Escape

Escape has an interesting premise: What if cloning replaces reproduction and women were exterminated? This story tracks the journey of a girl from a country of clones, who has never known what it is like to be a woman, to reach a country where women exist and are treated with respect. It is an interesting read, the story parallels Children of Men somewhat.
Chasing the Monk’s Shadow

This is yet another bad travel book, but it is not apparent at first. Mishi Saran travells through China but is home-sick for “India” in every chapter. So, Mishi Saran comes to South India and misses “North India”. It is amazing that she travelled almost exactly the same path taken by Xuán Zàng, but her overly romanticized view of India is annoying. The last chapter is quite an insightful look at life under Taliban rule in Afganistan and the errors of the U.N. mission there. Despite the redeeming last chapter, I am still inclined to classify Chasing the Monk's Shadow as poor travel writing. I never feel this way reading books by William Dalrymple or Pico Iyer, but some travel books just make me squirm and this was one of them.
My Friend Sancho

Was quite disappointed with this novel. It is probably because I had very high expectations of it.
The Writerly Life

Writerly Life is a beautiful set of essays by R. K. Narayan. Most essays are still relevant and are insights into how he crafts his writing. After reading this, I think R. K. Narayan was the embodiment of The Common Man. This book is a must-read, irrespective of whether you like his writing or not.
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit

City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit is a run-of-the-mill crime thriller. Another reason not to trust recommendations from people I don’t know. A snappy read for getting through a flight journey, but not very interesting otherwise.

Links for 2009-10-28 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Web Design 1 | WaSP InterAct Curriculum
Looks like a great course for designers getting started with web standards

Links for 2009-10-26 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Declaring Languages in HTML 5 | Nimbupani Designs
How to use multiple languages in a HTML 5 valid document

Declaring Languages in HTML 5

divya — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:28:35 -0700

Web Development is infinitely more troublesome when you have documents in languages other than American English. The onus is on us web developers and server administrators to make sure browsers and search engines can detect the right language. Here is how you can declare the language of your document in HTML 5.

What is language declaration?

This is a way to specify what language a HTML document or a snippet of HTML text is in. Language declaration does not provide information on character encoding and the text direction (right to left or left to right). Those need to be declared separately.

Why specify a language?

Language information can be used for:

Text to speech converters (e.g. speak Canadian french rather than french)
Selecting the right fonts for display (e.g. use traditional chinese script instead of the simplified one)
Selecting the right dictionary for browser spell-checks in forms (use UK English rather than US English)
Rendering the page correctly — in short deliver the document in its most natural language as possible.

Language processing

In HTML 5, there are 3 ways to declare the language of a HTML document:

As a pragma directive e.g. <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

As part of header in HTTP response, e.g. below:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 10:46:04 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) PHP/4.2.3
Content-Location: CSS2-REC.en.html
Vary: negotiate,accept-language,accept-charset
TCN: choice
P3P: policyref=http://www.w3.org/2001/05/P3P/p3p.xml
Cache-Control: max-age=21600
Expires: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 16:46:04 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue, 12 May 1998 22:18:49 GMT
ETag: "3558cac9;36f99e2b"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 10734
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Language: en

Example from W3C article on Internationalization Best Practices

As lang attribute on a HTML element e.g. <div lang="fr">, or a xml:lang attribute on XML documents like MathML and SVG.

The first two ways of specifying language is used to identify the intended audience of the HTML document. This information is used in the following ways:

Search Engines use this for determining which document to include in search results (e.g. it will not show a document with content-language set as Chinese if a search is looking for english documents, but most search engines use more than these two to determine which documents to show).
Content negotiation by Apache servers based on the language preference set by the users on their browsers.
Identify the default language of a document This concept is new in HTML 5. If you specify only one language using the above two methods (i.e.<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en"> instead of <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en, fr"> ), then the text of the entire document is processed as that language (except for the text that is contained in an element which has a lang attribute, which is processed as the language tag value in lang attribute).

The last method is to explicitly declare a language to be used for text processing by the user agent. Use the lang attribute if you want the browser to process the text in that HTML element in a specific language.

The language code that comes after Content-Language or content in meta http-equiv or in lang attribute need to be from subtags in the IANA language subtag registry. You can read more on choosing language values here

Default Language of a Document

Unless you explicitly use the lang attribute to define the language of the document, HTML 5 specifies the following inheritance rules to determine the language of a HTML element:

The HTML element has a lang attribute (e.g. <span lang="en">), if not —

The nearest parent of that element has a lang attribute, if not —

The document has a single language tag set through pragma directive (e.g. <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">), if not —

The HTTP header Content-Language contains a single language tag, if not —

The document is treated as that of an unknown language.

Bottomline

This is not the last word on detecting the language of a document, but for the time being, if your document has content that is mostly not English, use the lang attribute on the <html> element to specify the language. If there are elements of the document which use language other than the one specified for the whole document, use lang attribute for each such element.

Links for 2009-10-23 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Pedana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
cheap kalamkari work!

Links for 2009-10-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

a Themers toolbox # 1 | morten.dk
Handy list of modules for a Drupal themer

Links for 2009-10-11 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Modifying your site's email "From" header | stella | CivicActions
Changing the header of an email, could be useful to prevent being marked as spam.
Hiding Views Output Until User Input | The Worx Company | Oklahoma Web Design
Wow, I didnt know about this.

Links for 2009-10-10 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Twiga - First alloco!
looks and sounds delicious!
Contributed modules for Securing your Site | Cracking Drupal
great set of modules for making the site safer (even if you have not allowed users)
Menu CSS Names | drupal.org
Awesome! I hope it adds the cssname in addition to the usual classnames, coz it would be great to have both!
Nodewords | drupal.org
Finally available for Drupal 6
Switching Drupal tpl.php files at will: Old Switchy McTipplefep's Trick | Nick Lewis: The Blog
Exactly what I need for my new blog design
Block Page Visibility | drupal.org
A pain that is now collected into 1 module
Drupal Performance Tip: Block Visibility | Lullabot
Take away: Do not use regions to show/hide blocks, but manually set the block visibility to avoid sql overload.

Book Reviews for October 2009

divya — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:33:00 -0700

I am going to India soon, so I wanted to get my book reviews out before that. I had two nights of insomnia thanks to an allergy and managed to read these 5 books before the month ended. Here are my reviews:

Relentless

I last read a popular thriller in 2000. I picked this book up because Stephen King cites Dean Koontz as a master of this genre. I was extremely disappointed with Relentless.

There are way too many similes and metaphors in this book disguised as humor. Of course, he plays it to his audience by making snide remarks on the “authenticity” of Wikipedia entries.

This book reads like a sarcastic attempt at writing a thriller. The story is about how the protagonist (an author) tries to fend off a psychotic reviewer. The plot does sound like it requires you to leave your brain behind to read such silliness, but at times it gets too far.

It uses time tested tactics of dropping a fictional bomb at the end of every chapter to make it a real “page turner”. It angers me that authors need to resort to such cheap tactics to get the reader to plod on to the next chapter.

So, unless you are looking for a mindless page turner to get through the torture of flying, do not read this book.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

Central America has had a violent past and a uncertain present. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? documents the assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. The murder seems straightforward, but 7 years of research documented in this book proves otherwise. This book exposes the corruption within the church, the rampant human rights violations in Guatemala, the power of the army, and the dishonest relationship of the U.S. Republican governments with the Guatemalan army.

It is compelling to read but very depressing. The book suggests the “right of passage” for the members of the intelligence unit of the Guatemalan Army was to kill a random citizen of Guatemala. It also explains how justice never gets done in courts — witnesses, judges, lawyers, their children get murdered or they flee the country. This case has been through so many courts and several drastically different rulings because of that.

The U.S. National Security Archive has declassified some information on the U.S. activities in Guatemala till 1993 which are not pleasant to read.
How to Travel Practically Anywhere

How to Travel Practically Anywhere is one of the rare books that I actually enjoyed reading, despite picking it up on a whim from the library. Susan Stellin has a great sense of humor and gives a lot of practical tips. The first chapter deals with the different kinds of travel books available — I didn’t know about Bradt Travel Guides which are guide books for rarely visited places.

It also gives some practical tips on how to ask for discounts and when to ask for them. The only criticism I have is that, it is written for an American audience and the information given seems to be US and Euro-centric. Nevertheless, a good read if you are a wannabe traveller (like me!)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This book was released after the death of the author Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with a story on illegal activities of a Swedish global corporation but ends with a gruesome murder mystery. I really enjoyed reading this book at one go. Stieg’s life was no less interesting — he exposed several extreme right and racist organizations of Sweden and lived under death threats.
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

This book is a hilarious take at how fairy tales would be, if they were written by politically correct authors. Politically Correct Bedtime Stories has interesting plot twists and endings for fairy tales we take for granted. It is a slim volume and very hilarious. But, I would have rather read these as a series of blog posts than as a book! It is hard to suppress laughter while reading it, so I recommend you dont’t read it in the library.

Links for 2009-10-07 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

VADS: the online resource for visual arts - Resources
Exhaustive collection of images and graphic design posters

About Fonts in SVG

divya — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:30:23 -0700

One area in my webfonts investigation that I wanted to know more about, was the state of SVG fonts.

What is SVG?

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG was created to fill the need for a standardized vector graphic solution for the web (read about the history of SVG). SVG uses XML to describe 2D graphics. So, a circle is defined in SVG as:

	<svg width="12cm" height="4cm" viewBox="0 0 1200 400"
	     xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
	  <desc>Example Circle</desc>
	  <circle cx="600" cy="200" r="100"
	        fill="red" stroke="none" stroke-width="0"  />
	</svg>

See the sample SVG.

You can convert almost any vector graphic to SVG format (here is how to save your Adobe Illustrator files as SVG). Typically, since SVG is XML (and a vector graphic), it will be smaller than other image formats.

The elephant in the room

Before I proceed, I must mention that IE (even IE 8) does not support SVG. Google Chrome’s native support of SVG is not as good as Opera, Firefox, or Safari either (see this excellent chart of SVG support on various browsers). Google has released SVG Web which allows SVG to be rendered on all browsers that support either SVG or Flash.

Fonts in SVG

Like in any vector graphic, SVG can have text. If you want the text to render a font on any SVG Viewer, you have 3 options:

Use web-safe fonts: This is the easiest. An example:

<text x="100" y="100" style="font-family: impact, georgia, times, serif; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal">
	Text using web safe font
</text>

See demo of SVG rendered with web-safe font

Use @font-face CSS declaration to specify fonts: Browsers will render text just as they render HTML using @font-face. For example, Firefox does not allow cross-site linking of fonts, so it will not render a font if it is in another server (you need to add a HTTP header to allow cross-site linking).
```
<defs>
  <style type="text/css">
   <![CDATA[
	@font-face {
		font-family: Delicious;
		src: url('http://nimbupani.com/demo/svgfonts/delicious-roman.otf');
	}
   ]]>
 </style>
</defs>
<text x="100" y="100" style="font-family: 'Delicious'; font-weight:normal; font-style: normal">
 Text using CSS @font-face
</text>	
```
See a demo of SVG text rendered with CSS @font-face
Use fonts defined using SVG’s font element: SVG format provides a common font format that will be supported by all confirming SVG viewers. An SVG font will have a file extension of “.svg” and will be formatted as XML. Here are some examples of SVG fonts. There are two ways of using SVG Fonts:
- Using external SVG Fonts: You can link to an external SVG using the font-face element of SVG (not the CSS @font-face declaration).
- Embed font within the svg file: Most Vector Graphic editors default to this option.
This page on SVG Fonts explains exhaustively how to use SVG fonts (and how to convert fonts from other formats to SVG). It has great examples of these two methods of using SVG fonts.

Using SVG Fonts for HTML

Using the CSS @font-face declaration, you can also specify SVG fonts instead of just TTF/EOT/OTF fonts. It looks like only Opera 10 and Safari 4 support SVG fonts in CSS (see a demo of SVG Fonts in HTML). There is a bug filed for Firefox but no fix yet.

Why use SVG fonts?

Universal support: Any conforming SVG viewer will render the text in the SVG font specified.
Store multiple fonts in a single file: You can create a single SVG file with multiple fonts and use the "id" of that specific font element to declare which font you want to use in your HTML or SVG document.
Open Source: The font file is completely open. If the font you are using is missing glyphs you can add the glyph you need.
Chrome Support: (Thanks for this suggestion @paul_irish!) If you use SVG font format in CSS @font-face declaration for HTML/SVG, it will now work on the latest releases of Chrome, Safari, and Opera (though not on Firefox!).

Disadvantages of SVG fonts

The main drawback to SVG fonts is there is no provision for font-hinting. The SVG standard states:

SVG fonts contain unhinted font outlines. Because of this, on many implementations there will be limitations regarding the quality and legibility of text in small font sizes. For increased quality and legibility in small font sizes, content creators may want to use an alternate font technology, such as fonts that ship with operating systems or an alternate WebFont format.
SVG support across browsers is still not consistent. The support for SVG fonts in HTML is even worse.

The Future

SVG has gained a lot of traction in the recent months. Projects like SVG Web can only make the adoption easier. Different browsers support SVG text differently. But, as someone said, these are interesting times for SVG.

Book Reviews for September 2009

divya — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:04:10 -0700

It seems like I read more books than there is space to review. So, Eric and Fiddlers (the last book written by Ed McBain) go unreviewed (in short: good reads). Here are the rest of the books I read this month:

What is it all about? Philosophy and Meaning of Life

Julian Baggini is the common man’s philosopher who uses plain english to explain and contrast different philosophies. This book is about the “Meaning of Life”, the eternal human quest to find meaning and purpose to life — in religion, in altruism, in culture, etc. It was good to read reasoned arguments (with references!) on why religion is not the answer to that question (short answer: purpose is what you make of it). If you are interested in philosophy but can’t be bothered to read Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, etc., read this book.

It is not the definitive book about “Meaning of Life”. Do not have high hopes on attaining enlightenment after reading this book.

The references section starts with “You can also learn much which is true and wise in Douglas Adam’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. For more — but not too much more — on why the traditional arguments for the existence of God fail, see…” — can’t agree more!
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

Of all the movies and books I have read and seen about the holocaust, Maus is undoubtedly the best. It is written in first person by the cartoonist and describes his conversations with his father (who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp) about the holocaust.

The deep set prejudice of Vladek ((the author’s father) against blacks (despite being being subjected to the same as a Jew in germany) and the author’s own anger/insensitivity to his father are described without any excuses.

The survival of Vladek is a remarkable story. It amply showcases how ingenious and resourceful he had to be to survive. If there is anything to learn from this, it is that, choosing “Status Quo” without reason and on hope is the worst choice you can make.
The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

To be honest, I was really bored with some of the stories in this list (most likely because I didn’t understand them), but, “The Death of Doctor Island”, “Detective of Dreams”, and “Toy Theatre” were amazing! Gene Wolfe is highly regarded by critics and is considered an influential science fiction writer (though not the best-selling).
Create your own economy

I was hoping to read a lot more about what it means to be the information-whore that I am — not to mention my maniacal urge to classify them. But this book spends a lot of time on what it means to be autistic, why it is not a disability and how a lot of successful people may be autistics (7 pages to explain how Sherlock Holmes might be one!). By the end of the book, you are left hoping that you are autistic, as you are convinced that you need to be one before you can be called a genius.

I was disappointed as I expected something else. But Tyler Cowen has an entertaining writing style and is my guru for how he processes information, so all is forgiven :)
A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

The author is an unapologetic colonialist. I found his views disgusting despite his vivd, entertaining writing.

He berates the loss of “culture” and “peace” in South East Asia because of “development” — failing to mention the economic growth and improvement to healthcare such developments cause. He constantly stereotypes different races (it is appalling how he got away with that). I knew I was going to hate reading it when the word “manageress” cropped up every second page.

Nevertheless, he goes on like the ancient mariner. You feel compelled to read the book, despite his burdensome opinions. It gets repetitive, with every fortune teller saying almost the same things. There are times when he it seems like the so-called “facts” are just author’s opinions.

This book is written in the style of Ryszard Kapuściński but it fails on so many levels.

That concludes my reviews for this month! Did you read anything interesting? Do recommend in the comments!

Anatomy of nimbu.in

divya — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:13:34 -0700

My activities as a web designer were becoming more prominent and my personal site did not express that sufficiently. Hence, I created nimbu.in (and I tweet about Web Design at http://twitter.com/nimbuin).

While this site is, ahem, very colourful, it does not have a unique brand (other than the effusive colours). So, I set about creating a memorable but offbeat logo. I love the designs from the late 20s-30s and I found a perfect poster from my scrapbook to base my color scheme on (#1):

I used the other two pictures to guide the aged and comics-like look of the logo. The text on the logo is customized from different serif fonts I found on early 20th century posters.

The New Logo

Then, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I didn’t realise writing about myself would be such a difficult task. After about 3 re-writes, I arrived at the current text.

Two days ago, I started creating the website. Deepak Jois was consistently prodding me to design for vertical rhythm (he also asked me to “fix” the widows on the text, I refused — Web is not print).

This is my process to create a vertical rhythm in web pages:

Install and enable Pixel Perfect extension for Firefox Firebug.
Generate the grid and download the grid as an image.
Click on the Pixel Perfect tab on Firebug and overlay this image on the HTML page. You can position it exactly and also control the opacity.
Once positioned, use firebug to manipulate the CSS so that the text lines up vertically against the grid.

This site is the beginning of the switch to HTML 5 on my personal sites.

I want your feedback!

Please do write in the comments here what you like about the site, or what you think can be improved (or what needs to be deleted NOW!).

A Bit of SVG and Canvas

divya — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:02:13 -0700

As you might have noticed from my previous writings on HTML 5 and CSS 3, I typically write about topics I wish to know more about, after spending a few weeks intensely ~~googling~~ learning about them. These two weeks, they happen to be SVG and Canvas. The interwebs are heating up with debates about the merits of each, and many are predicting a deathmatch. However, my research convinces me that each has its own purpose, but definitely their time has come.

What is SVG?

SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML. Some examples of SVG are the Wikipedia logo and this “Hello World” of SVG, a Tiger. View the source of those two SVG files to see how SVG looks like.

What is Canvas?

The HTML 5 spec defines it best: “The canvas element represents a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.”

This presentation by Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević, created in 2006, has a good explanation of the differences between SVG and Canvas, namely:

SVG is XML based. This means, every element is available within the SVG DOM (useful when you want to attach javascript event handlers for an element — say you want to make the SVG tiger’s muskers twitch if you click on it). Canvas is not XML based.
Canvas is rendered pixel by pixel. SVG is a bunch of vectors and needs to be manipulated as a group of shapes. An analogy in the Photoshop world would be, creating a rectangle using the “shape” tool in vs. using paintbrush.

Who Will Win?

Even though they are quite different in nature and purpose, there are several things that can be done using both Canvas and SVG. The recent popularity of the Canvas element seems to make some people sound the death knell for SVG. But, from what I have gathered, this is far from the truth.

Canvas is as good as an image — except it can be manipulated pixel by pixel. Right now, Canvas element cannot support event handlers (e.g. have a 20x20px wide rectangle within a canvas be clickable). SVG does.

Canvas, in its current state is not accessible. SVG however is quite accessible.

All this might change, as there is a task force that is looking into a Canvas 2D API. The very changes that might apply to Canvas might even get applied to the image element in future versions of SVG — which would a big win.

There are, however, significant performance differences between Canvas and SVG. The outcome of the experiment described in the previous link is that, Canvas is more suitable for a graphics-intensive game where many objects are redrawn frequently (like this Super Mario game), while SVG is best for applications that involve large rendering areas (like Google Maps).

Can I use them now?

Yes, you can. There are many initiatives to enable browsers which don’t support SVG or Canvas to render them using other means. Google has an impressive SVG Web project that uses Flash to render SVG in browsers that do not support SVG natively. Raphael renders content into SVG or VML using javascript (it is NOT a javascript API for SVG or VML). For Canvas, Google has an explorecanvas library that uses VML (or Silverlight) to render Canvas elements (you simply need to include the excanvas.js file, and it should work) in Internet Explorer.

Mark Pilgrim, as usual, has written an excellent article on how to use Canvas element, which is part of his book on HTML 5.

So, really, who wins?

Both. These are exciting times for SVG and Canvas. We finally have a native alternative to Flash for basic animation needs. Keep your eyes peeled on the HTML mailing list for breaking news. Or you can hear about them a few seconds later on my Web Development Twitter Stream.

Stalking Africa Online - Part 2

divya — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:50:08 -0700

In the last post, I described some African blogs to keep track of for stalking information about Africa. Here are some of my favourite places online for listening to African news and music and a list of books I liked.

The best part of African culture is the music. I stumble upon some amazing bands through these podcasts:

Afropop Worldwide has a good mix of West/South African music. But, I think it is too short and has less music and more commentary.
Radio Freetown plays choice hits of West Africa. They have not updated for the past 5 months, but the archives are well worth a listen.
World Passport, is mostly African music spiced with songs from other countries (mostly US). Pity they don’t update it anymore. The archives are great!

These days though, I listen to songs on Grooveshark.The songs stream quickly and are of good quality.

The only non-music podcast I listen to is the BBC’s Africa Today has a round up of African news and tries to be unbiased. I heard about Charles Taylor’s conversion to Judaism first here, before it made front pages elsewhere.

Books

I have not read that many books about Africa, but I really liked the these:

The Famished Road — Fascinating mix of legends with the story of a young boy growing up in poverty.
The Yacoubian Building: A Novel and Cairo Modern tread almost the same path. They both present similar facets of Arabic Africa. The Translator has a slightly different viewpoint — that of a Sudanese muslim woman who works as a translator.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a very insightful look at Kenya from the time of the struggle for independence to current times — through the eyes of a Kenyan of Indian origin.
What Is the What (Vintage) is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a child refugee from South Sudan. This is a heart wrenching book. I took days to recover from reading this story.
John Le Carré’s The Mission Song is a gripping thriller based on fictitious events in Kivu (though it seems not far from the truth).

The full list of books I have read about Africa is here.

That completes my African journey! Any podcasts or books you recommend?

Stalking Africa Online - Part 1

divya — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:44:21 -0700

For the last two years, my secondary interest (apart from web design and illustrations) has been the African continent. I do not know where this interest came from. I suspect it must have been after reading No. 1 Ladies’s Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith.

I am well aware that I am pandering to a stereotype by referring to this vastly diverse set of people as “Africans”. Africa: A Biography of the Continent opened my eyes to the start contrasts in African regions. But, I hope this list below gets beyond such stereotypes.

If you follow Fox news or the CNN you might think Africa is either a continent constantly at war or filled with naked poor people clicking their tongues (yes, I am exaggerating a bit — only a bit!). If you want to know better, you have to look elsewhere. Here are some of my sources of African news, music, culture that I have come to love.

Chris Blattman’s blog
Chris Blattman talks a lot about Africa, aid, development, and conflicts. Very informative and entertaining for someone from the academia!
Foreign Policy Blog
Foreign Policy has the most thorough coverage of World News daily (even better than the BBC), as far as I know.
Seattle World Music Blog
I discovered Magic System through them. Enough said.
The Esteyonage talks about daily life in Liberia. I really like these posts on how people get by despite 85% unemployment in Liberia. The sidebar has great links to other blogs on Africa.
BibliOdyssey blogs about old artwork/papers that are in the online archives of libraries/websites from all corners of the world. The blog does not cover African stories frequently, but every post on African art/manuscript blows my mind.
Ugandan Insomniac blogs about Ugandan living, culture, and news. The African Reading Challenge was a great source of reading recommendations for books on Africa.
Wronging Rights is a hilarious but tragic look at the abuses perpetrated around the world. Every post is worth its weight in gold!
Africa Unchained is a formal look at news and projects occurring in Africa.
Elia writes about some little know films in or about Africa (among other things). A great read. There is an interesting twitter feed, but I am not sure if it is the author’s.
Jack Fruity writes about technology, aid, and development. She also tweets.
Nairobi Notes covers all things African. The author is more active on twitter
Congo Girl writes about everything in Democratic Republic of Congo. I actually like her twitter feed more!
Scarlett is a photojournalist based in Liberia. Excellent tweets and blog.
Rarin is an African software engineer in US. A perfect combination for my African information hunger!
Julia O is the publisher of Kenya Imagine (twitter).
Erik Hersman is the founder of AfriGadget.
Kaushal Jhalla organizes Bar Camp Africa in SFO, and writes about technology and Africa.
Tim Akinbo writes about Web, Mobile, Location based services on his blog (I like the tweets more, as usual).

I have created an OPML file if you are interested in bulk adding these blogs to your feed reader (it does not include twitter links).

I will cover the podcasts I listen to and books I liked in the next post!
Meanwhile, is there any other blog/twitter account you recommend following? Do post below!

Book Reviews for August 2009

divya — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:40:39 -0700

I regret to say, I spent most of my “reading hours” reading trivial Agatha Christies. I have no idea why I have such a fascination for her writing (even though it is racist, sexist, and what not). So, I have only 4 books to review here.

Death was the other woman

I picked this book randomly. I don’t have much success with randomly picked books, but my intuition never stops me from doing so. Yes, this book was one of those miserable failures. But, on the bright side, it seems like I can finally discern how to tell a good story.

Alarm bells rang when the author wrote this in her acknowledgements:

“Most women consider themselves lucky to have a strong, sensitive, caring man in their lives. I'm more than lucky, I have three.”

Yeah, it gets no better. Even though it is supposed to be a murder mystery set in the 50s. I would read Erle Stanley Gardner any day compared to this one.
Famished Road

I typically don’t read books that are sad or depressing. I really get involved and feel depressed all day. But, The Famished Road was in my book list of books about Africa, so I had to read it. It is depressing, but oddly fascinating. There are a lot of Nigerian legends referenced. The book is about Azaro who is a spirit child determined to live with his parents instead of typically trying to return to the happy spirit world. This review on Amazon has a great explanation of the legends of the Yoruba of Nigeria.

One thing that grated was the repeated usage of “urine”, “feces”, “sweat”. It seems to be a pattern with all “exotic” novels – to describe as much of bodily fluids as possible. I do admit, it revolts me. But, I don’t think it added anything to the story – maybe I am biased.
Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism is a book that was in the news for claiming Lonely Planet authors fabricate facts about places they vist. After reading that book, you will never look at a Lonely Planet (or any other guide book) the same way again. The author’s claims seem reasonable and common in all industries with freelancers (not just travel) – low fixed price project, no insurance, unreasonable deadlines. It is quite sad that Lonely Planet has evolved from a guidebook for those who “rough it out” to 5-star-loving-resort-hopping tourists. The author claims the budget travellers have shifted their royalties to Footprint publications.

It is a very well written book, almost reads like fiction!
The Whuffie Factor

“Whuffie” is a word that appears in Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but, in this book, is almost equivalent to “fluff”. I first heard Tara Hunt speak at An Event Apart and was dismayed. It was mostly a summary of this book and a plug for it. I decided to read this book before I criticized the contents of her talk.

If you read techcrunch, twitter, and subscribe to feeds, this book is not for you – definitely was’t for me! It reads like a “Who’s Who” of the “social media” world (how I hate that word!) And about 100 pages of the book are dedicated to how she created communities for Transit Camp Bay Area, and Co–Working.

More than these, I was horrified with how casually the book was written. I gulped as I read this – “As one who has launched a company using the power of online communities…” – in her profile blurb on the book and sentences like “…real cool factor of Moo cards is the self-design aspect the company gives you on its website.” Thankfully, I had not bought this book. If I did, I would want my money back for sloppy writing!

And frankly, I don’t think she has said anything new or innovative that has not been written about before – online. I would have been happier if this book was a blog.

Side Note: Why were they trying to sell this book at Bar Camp Seattle? Obviously the attendees are the wrong audience for this book!

I feel bad for trashing a book. But I felt so annoyed after reading it! Any books you recommend?

Nimbupani Designs blogs

Book Reviews for November 2009 — Part 1

The Bolter

Spirit House: A Vincent Calvino Crime Novel

Portland Noir

The Diary of a Social Butterfly

Everyman

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Purple Hibiscus

Escape

Chasing the Monk’s Shadow

My Friend Sancho

The Writerly Life

City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit

Links for 2009-10-28 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2009-10-26 [del.icio.us]

Declaring Languages in HTML 5

What is language declaration?

Why specify a language?

Language processing

Default Language of a Document

Bottomline

Links for 2009-10-23 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2009-10-13 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2009-10-11 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2009-10-10 [del.icio.us]

Book Reviews for October 2009

Relentless

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

How to Travel Practically Anywhere

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

Links for 2009-10-07 [del.icio.us]

About Fonts in SVG

What is SVG?

The elephant in the room

Fonts in SVG

Using SVG Fonts for HTML

Why use SVG fonts?

Disadvantages of SVG fonts

The Future

Book Reviews for September 2009

What is it all about? Philosophy and Meaning of Life

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

Create your own economy

A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

Anatomy of nimbu.in

I want your feedback!

A Bit of SVG and Canvas

What is SVG?

What is Canvas?

Who Will Win?

Can I use them now?

So, really, who wins?

Stalking Africa Online - Part 2

Books

Stalking Africa Online - Part 1

Book Reviews for August 2009

Death was the other woman

Famished Road

Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

The Whuffie Factor