Saravan's Blog

Seattle

2006-11-08T17:38:55-08:00

Vaiko's Antharbalti

2006-11-08T17:38:55-08:00

The month old drama has come to an end. Vaiko has joined hands with Jayalalithaa for the assembly elections. DMK's inability to accomodate Vaiko's request and the pressure from the cadres has brought MDMK to ADMK alliance. This proves again that there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics. Surely switching of alliance has dented Vaiko's credibility, but who cares when credibility does not get him votes. People who talk/worry about credibility usually wont vote in the elections. And this is not new in Tamil Nadu. DMK has done this several times recent being ditching BJP to join Congress in 2004 Parliament elections. Although Vaiko would have maintained his credibility by going alone but that would be sucidal for his party. Now Karunadhi's job made easier. He has more seats to share with his allies.

Jayalalithaa has brilliantly played her cards in forming the alliance. By roping DPI first and MDMK next she effectively split Thirumavalavan and Ramadoss. If MDMK joined the ADMK alliance first then Ramadoss would have managed to bring Thirumalavan into DMK led DPA. Now it would be near impossible for Ramadoss to bring Thirumavalavan into DPA. Jayalalithaa is also wooing Vijayakanth and Karthik to her alliance. The show has just begun. Sitback and enjoy!!

RaagaAdSkipper Greasemonkey script update

2006-11-08T17:38:54-08:00

RaagaAdSkipper greasemonkey script was broken due to recent greasemonkey release for Firefox 1.5. I have updated the RaagaAdSkipper to support Firefox 1.5. The updated RaagaAdSkipper script can be downloaded from userscripts.org.

Greasemonkey 0.6.4 version works only in Firefox 1.5. If you are using Firefox 1.0.7 or older version then you must use Greasemonkey 0.5.3. Greasemonkey 0.5.3 will not work in Firefox 1.5. More info in Greasemonkey blog.

TimesPagingRemover, HinduPrinterFriendly Greasemonkey script update

2006-11-08T17:38:54-08:00

TimesPagingRemover script was broken due to the recent redesign Times of India website. I have updated script for the new TOI webpage format and fixed other few bugs. Download the improved TimesPagingRemover script now!!

New version of HinduPrinterFriendly script is also available. The majar additions in this version include support for Business Line website, printer friendly page formatting and removal of ads from the printer friendly page.

Also checkout my other Greasemonkey scripts.

Padma - Freedom from fonts

2008-05-31T05:39:05-07:00

Update: Vikatan, Kumudam and Dinamalar websites have migrated to Unicode. So you need to enable Tamil Unicode to view these sites. Padma is not required to view these sites in Firefox.

Þ¬î àƒè÷£™ £iUP ˜zf\RÖ
If you want to read the above text then you can either install Vikatan, Kumudam, Shree Tam 0802 and Elango Panchali fonts in your system or simply install Padma.

Padma is a technology for transforming Indic text between public and proprietary formats for Mozilla based applications. The technology currently supports Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Devanagari. Indic scripts suffer from lack of standards support in various OS and platforms. As a result, many public and proprietary schemes have been adopted over time by different groups and businesses. Padma's goal is to bridge the gap between closed and open standards until the day Unicode support is widely available on all platforms. Padma transforms Indic text encoded in proprietary formats (ex: dynamic fonts) automatically to Unicode. Padma also has support for transforming from ISCII and transliteration schemes like ITRANS and RTS (Telugu only).

Padma is developed and maintened by Nagarjuna Venna. Although padma initially supported only Telugu scripts, later Nagarjuna added support for other Indian languages. I helped him in adding support for tamil fonts. Padma in addition to Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi fonts supports Tamil fonts Vikatan(Vikatan), Kumudam(Kumudam), Shree Tamil 0802(Dinamalar) and Elango Panchali(Dina Thanthi). Padma is available for download from mozilla update website and mozdev.org website.

When the text transformed from proprietary font to unicode by padma, the text size looks big in screen. I have written a greasemonkey script PadmaFontEnhancer to fix this. PadmaFontEnhancer script supports only tamil websites Vikatan, Kumudam, Dinamalar and Dina Thanthi. This feature should be available in padma's next version.

Any feature request, bug report or font support request can be either sent to padma at mozdev dot org email address or you can leave it as a comment here.

Happy Birthday Firefox!!

2006-11-08T17:38:54-08:00

Firefox turns 1 today. For more details visit Mozilla and Spread Firefox websites.

Halloween

2006-11-08T17:38:54-08:00

I know Halloween is popular in America. But I was surprised to see straws, scarecrows and plastic pumpkins hanged in lamp posts. This looked like thoranam which will adore indian street lamp posts during party meetings and festivals. Some Pics taken at my place,

HinduPrinterFriendly - Greasemonkey Script

2006-11-08T17:38:54-08:00

For some people reading news in Hindu website is a horror. For me Hindu website is a kurangu kaila kudutha poomalai. So I have trained another monkey to fix that. HinduPrinterFriendly Greasemonkey script rewrites all links to hindu website to printer friendly page. Poor IE users can install greasemonkey IE cousin Turnabout Advanced Version to use this script.

Lot of users downloaded my RaagaAdSkipper script thru Desipundit. Thanks JK for spreading love of monkey.

Checkout my other greasemonkey scripts MozTxtAlign, TimesPagingRemover, RaagaAdSkipper

RaagaAdSkipper - Greasemonkey Script

2006-11-08T17:38:53-08:00

Kaadhal yaanai varugira remo
Mutha thanthathil muttuvom remo...

Xoom.com send money to your loved ones...

Kannum kannum nokia nee kollai kollum mafia
Cappucino coffee eh sofia...

How many times u have wished the brwoser automatically skip those xoom.com ads while listening to songs from Raaga.com. Here comes a Greasemonkey script, RaagaAdSkipper to solve this problem. Apart from skipping ads, this script also adds following Winamp keyboard shortcuts to Raaga Player,

z - Previous Song
x - Play
c - Pause
v - Stop
b - Next Song
Up Arrow - Increase Volume
Down Arrow - Decrease Volume

Ofcourse you need Firefox and Greasemonkey for this script to work.

Having problems in playing songs from Raaga.com in Firefox, checkout Configuring Real Player in Firefox from MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Bye Bye Yahoo Messenger. Welcome Google Talk!!

2006-11-08T17:38:53-08:00

Tommorw Google is going to launch a new IM service branded as Google Talk. It will be based on open Jabber protocol. You can connect to Google Talk using any Jabber compatible IM client like GAIM, iChat. Google Talk service was available today for some time, but later it was disabled. More details on Google Talk Review and slashdot.

Greasemonkey Update

2006-11-08T17:38:53-08:00

Greasemonkey 0.5 beta was released two weeks back. This version has all Greasemonkey APIs enabled which were disabled due to security vulnerability. I have updated my script to make it work in this versions. I have moved my Greasemonkey scripts to the website Greasemonkeyed.com, a repository of Greasemonkey scripts available in the planet. Visit my profile page in Greasemonkeyed.com. or you can directly go to my Greasemonkey scripts page, MozTxtAlignFix and TimesPagingRemover. Dont forget to rate my GM scripts.

Greasemonkey Vulnerability

2006-11-08T17:38:53-08:00

Yesterday Mark Pilgrim author of the book Dive into Greasemonkey discovered serious security vulnerability in Greasemonkey extension of Firefox. Due to this vulnerabilities some websites may be able to read files in your computer. Greasemonkey developers has released a patched the version of Greasemonkey. Install latest Greasemonkey 0.3.5 version to avoid any potential exploits. One of my greasemonkey script TimesPagingRemover will not work in the new version. I will soon release an updated version which works in Greasemonkey 0.3.5.

Visit Greasemonkey blog for more info. Update immediately to Greasemonkey 0.3.5 to avoid any exploitation.

Doomsday Conspiracy

2006-11-08T17:38:53-08:00

After reading about incidents like this and this, I am afraid possibility of this happenning is not far.

Greasemonkey for Times Group Websites

2006-11-08T17:38:52-08:00

Times Group websites score a big zero in terms of Usability. The main irritating feature is the presentation of a single article in multiple pages. I have written a Greasemonkey user script, for fixing this problem. This user script automatically detects multiple page articles and shows the whole article in a single page. Now the user dont have to click Next link 10 times to read a news article. Download TimesPagingRemover user script now. TimesPagingRemover user script works for TOI and ET websites. Firefox browser with Greasemonkey extension is needed for this user script to run. Check my last post for Greasemonkey and user script installation instructions.

Update Available

2006-11-08T17:38:52-08:00

An update available for my Greasemonkey script MozTxtAlignFix . The Greasemonkey extension is required for this script work. The instructions for installing Greasemonkey and User Scripts are available in Dive into Greasemonkey website.

The latest version contains following updates

Automatically detects the websites with Tamil Script (Script Courtesy: Krupashankar) and automatically changes the CSS Rules that causes bad display of the Tamil Fonts in Firefox Browser.
Option to undo the changes made to the page by the script.
No more pain of adding Tamil website list to override.

Mozilla Bug # 270012

2007-03-25T14:59:28-07:00

Mozilla firefox has some problems in displaying tamil unicode fonts for certain kind of style rules. Although this bug has been reported to Mozilla, it is not fixed still now. viewing tamil blogs thru firefox had become a nightmare for the firefox users. Tamil blog owners are not changing the templates to make it firefox compatible either they are not well versed with html/css or they simply dont want to change their templates for minority firefox users.

Recently I came across a firefox extension called Greasemonkey. It allows users to run scripts to manipulate the webpages to suit their needs. I have written a Greasemonkey script to fix this firefox bug temporarily. To install the script following steps has to be followed,

Download and install Greasemonkey extension
Open the MozTxtAlignFix script
Select Install this script button. Select Tools-->Install User Script in the menubar.
A confirmation dialog box will come with the list of default tamil websites and select OK button.
Now a dialog box will be displayed for the sucessful installation of the script.
For adding a new website select Tools-->Manage User Scripts and add the new website url to the "included pages" section.
Now refresh the page to see the changes

This script works fine with Firefox 1.0.3 and Greasemonkey version 0.2.6. One drawback is the user has to manually add the websites to override. I will update the script to fetch the tamil blog websites from the pre configured website without user's manual update. Comments/Suggestions welcome.

First Post

2006-11-08T17:38:52-08:00

Although this blog has been created two years back, I didnt post anything in this blog. I am hoping to update this blog regularly. Thanks for visiting.