TamilNadu govt school textbooks available online

Got to know this news from Tamilulagam discussion list.

Tamil Nadu Government has published its school texts books online(its has been mentioned as for viewing purpose only).
Its available at this URL: http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/

It might be helpful in many ways to students and parents(who are computer savvy). And more importantly it provides open access to the content thats being taught in Tamil Nadu schools.

I dont think any other state in India has done this yet.

Good move by Tamil Nadu Govt.

Verdict within 110 hrs of commiting crime in India!

Gone are the days in India where courts deliver judgement after ages...

A court in Namakkal (my native place), India has delivered verdict in a murder case within 110 hours of the crime.

Tamil bloggers meet at Pondicherry

Last week I had a chance to attend tamil bloggers workshop in pondicherry. The workshop was organised by pondicherry tamil bloggers

This workshop is a continuation of a series of workshops organized by tamil bloggers in various parts of tamilnadu recently.

About 200 members participated in this workshop. Participants were introduced to technical details of creating and maintaining their blogs in tamil language. Its well organized and there were lot of publicity done. Pondicherry Legislative Assembly speaker and Bharathidasan University vice chancellor are some of the noted figures who participated in this workshop.

I took a session on using ekalappai - tamil typing software for windows.

You can the pictures taken in the workshop:
http://tamilveli-news.blogspot.com/

This shows that tamil bloggers are growing in numbers and getting organized.
In this bloggers meet, some of us decided to take tamil computing workshops to next step. Thus "Project Tamil Ready" was born. More details about project tamil ready is in chella's blog.

My assumption is, there are roughly 3000 tamil blogs which is the highest in any Indian language. Even in hindi there are roughly only about 1000 blogs (if anybody else have a disputing figure please feel free to comment).

Tamils Protest in Malaysia

I have lived in Malaysia for about 4 years and have known the problems faced by the tamil community.

I watched with heavy heart some of the videos in the net. The way the peaceful protest were handled by Malaysian authorities is very bad. The world leaders should condemn this.


Ethnic Indians protest in Malaysia



Sucking tear gas and laced-water

How to increase the VMWare (preallocated) disk space.

I have started using ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) recently. But for some of our office work, I needed older version of ubuntu(6.06). And for that I used VMWare.

Initially I allocated 6GB space to ubuntu 6.06 virtual machine, which I found that is not sufficient for my work. So decided to increase it to 10GB. And after some search in google found a way to increase VMWare disks spaces. Following blog entry is to record the steps which I followed and it might be useful for others also.

I initially tried to increase ubuntu6.06 virtual machine disk size using the following commands:
$cd /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu6.04
$vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10Gb Ubuntu6.04.vmdk

It gave the following errors:
Using log file /tmp/vmware-msubramanian/vdiskmanager.log
This disk is part of a snapshot chain in '/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu6.04/Ubuntu6.04.vmx'.
The selected operation can only be executed on a disk with no snapshots.

I found I have snapshots of ubuntu6.06 vmware disk.

Used the following method to remove the snapshots:
In the VMWare menu, used the Remove Snapshot option,
VM --> Remove Snapshot .. ( This is done while the Virtual machine is switched off)

Again tried using vmware-vdiskmanager it worked.

$vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10Gb Ubuntu6.04.vmdk
Using log file /tmp/vmware-msubramanian/vdiskmanager.log
Grow: 100% done.
The old geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 783/255/63
The new geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 1305/255/63
Disk expansion completed successfully.

WARNING: If the virtual disk is partitioned, you must use a third-party
utility in the virtual machine to expand the size of the
partitions. For more information, see:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1647
$

Tamil blogging community gets media coverage.

Oflate the number of bloggers who write in tamil language have grown considerably. I assume there could be more than 1000 active tamil blogs currently.
tamilblogs.com aggregator(which I maintain) aggregates content from about 650 tamilblogs.

Recently tamil bloggers held a get together in chennai. And it was covered by popular tamil TV channel Makkal TV. This TV show can be seen in YouTube here. This sort of media coverage for a bloggers get together is a good sign. This will help to get attention of the public towards blogging. And this will lead to increase in the number of tamil bloggers.

I would love to see a strong & responsible tamil blogging community which will act as an alternate media.

tamilblogs opensourced!

I have been maintaining http://tamilblogs.com for sometime. This is a blogs aggregator which aggregates over 650 blogs written in my native language tamil . Initially I created tamilblogs.com using an opensource blogs aggregatory - gregarius . Later due to performance issues I switched to another opensource blogs aggregator called lilina.

Later I added mysql database support to tamilblogs using code from another similar opensource project lylina. Some of my tamil blogger friends have requested me for the complete sourcecode of the software used in tamilblogs. After few more such requests I thought opensourcing this tamilblogs software would be helpful to many.

Thus was born the new blogs aggregator by name tamilblogs here: http://code.google.com/p/tamilblogs/

Right now one of blogger masivakumar has joined me in this project. I hope many more will join and enhance this project.