Interesting facts about Election '09

Poling station at high Altitude !!!

In no other country would you find the highest polling stations which are located at Thinghbu (alt. 12148 feet) and Mago (alt.12248 feet) and Luguthand (alt.13,157 feet) in Arunachal Pradesh. These are snow bound and located on the Indo-China border. And here are some more such facts:

- Lakshdweep 105 Polling booth accessible by boats only

-EVMs were carried to Minicoy Island by helicopter

Andaman Nicobar Island

-The Andaman Nicober group of Islands is one constituency and is 700 Km. long. Many places require 35-40 hrs journey by ships. Poll personal to some places has been dispatched by helicopter.

Arunachal Pradesh

-Four polling stations i.e 13-Lumta and 12-Pakke-Kessang (ST) Assembly Segment, 40-Mramboo under 41-Anini (ST) Asembly Segment and 35 - Upper Modoi Deep under 49-Bordumsa-Diyum Assembly Segment each have 3 voters respectively

-Many polling parties in Tawang, Kurung Kumey, Upper Subanisiri, upper Siang, Mechuka, Dibang Valley, Anjaw, etc have reqched their poling station by foot for 3-4 days from nearest helipad/road head.

-690 polling parties have been transported by helicopter to remote villages bordering Myanmar and China border.

Assam

-Porters have been engaged for carrying the polling materials for 5 polling stations as it involves a 40 km trek through an area infested with wild elephants in Bokaijan District.

Source :- http://in.elections.yahoo.com/

How to email in Malayalam (മലയാളത്തില്‍ എങ്ങനെ ഇമെയില്‍ അയയ്ക്കാം? )

It's hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It's such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Malayalam did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.


When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example,if you type "keralam" Google will transliterate it to "കേരളം" and in hindi "namaste" will transliterate to "नमस्ते." Similarly, "vanakkam" in Tamil will become "வணக்கம்." Google currently support five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon. In between, typing you can switch etween English and your native langauge using 'Ctrl + g' option.


This technology also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today!

Reading problem - How to install and enable Malayalam fonts?

Are you facing any trouble to read this blog? If you see some weird characters while reading the blog try to download and install the Malayalam Unicode fonts as follows.

For Microsoft Windows users:

Step 1: Download the latest unicode font AnjaliOldLipi and save in Windows Font (C:\WINDOWS\Fonts) folder.

Step 2: Close the browser and open it again. Now you should able to read this blog without any issues. If the issue persists verify your browser settings as follows.

INTERNET EXPLORER USERS

• Start Internet Explorer

• Go to: Tools> Internet Options> Fonts> Select Malayalam in Language Script> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Webpage Font

• Click OK and OK.

---

MOZILLA FIREFOX USERS

• Start Mozilla Firefox.

• Go to: Tools> Options> Content> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Fonts & Colors

• Click OK
  

GOOGLE CHROME USERS

• Start Google Chrome

• Click the spanner image at the right top corner and go to Options> Minor Tweaks> Change Font And Language Settings> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Fonts and Encoding

• Click OK, Click Close.

For users of GNU/Linux

For Fedora, CentOS, RedHat

For Fedora 10 onwards, nothing to be done to enable Malayalam. All fonts are packaged and rendering issues are also solved.

For older versions follow these instructions : Download appropriate repo file for your computer ( Fedora 9, Fedora 8, Fedora 7, Fedora 6). Keep it in the folder /etc/yum.repos.d

Open command line/ Terminal and use the command

$yum update pango

Malayalam Fonts are available here. (To view more fonts click here).

• To setup the fonts just copy it to ~/.fonts directory or open nautilus file manager and go to location (press CTRL+L and type location) fonts:/// and drag-n-drop font files to this location.
• If you want it to be available to all users copy it to /usr/share/fonts.
• You can check whether the fonts are installed correctly by running the command fc-list (eg. fc-list |grep Anjali ).
• Restart the running applications so that the new fonts are available to them.
• All applications which depend on font config will be able to use the newly installed fonts.

Font setting for Firefox browser is available at Edit->Preference->Content->Advanced. You may want to check the font settings to view the site contents. You may refer the following URLs for more information.

For Debian/Ubuntu/IT@School

For ubuntu 8.10 and above or Debian lenny and above, there is no need of installing anything separately. All fonts are packaged with them and there is no rendering bugs.

For Older versions of GNU/Linux distributions follow the below steps :

Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add a new line deb http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/smc/debian etch main. If you are using lenny or sid use lenny or sid instead of etch.

Open command line/ Terminal and use these commands.

# wget http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/smc/praveen.key.asc
# apt-key add praveen.key.asc
# apt-get update
# apt-get install suruma
# apt-get install ttf-malayam-fonts

For users of Mac OS X

1. Download the malayalam.ttf from this page.
2. Double click the downloaded file to install the font.

Reference :-

1. http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Read_in_Malayalam

2. http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Fonts

3 . Varamozhi Wiki

4. Unicode Org