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While the media initially went all gaga over the new Rupee symbol which somehow seems to have pushed us into an "elite" club, the reports have started coming in that it will be a while before the symbol gets into regular usage. Anyone with interest in Indian language computing is well aware of the fractured state of the Unicode usage. Most of the media houses still use a proprietary font for their content. Even govt uses many incompatible fonts in the data created by it. Result is a typical " जल बिच मछली प्यासी" situation. Even though large amounts of text is available in digital format, it is useless for a lot of purposes. A lot of people cannot view it properly without installing tons of fonts, it cannot be searched or indexed and it is useless for most computing purposes. Lack of huge amount of digital text is one major problem hampering research in NLP for Indian languages. With the introduction of Rupee symbol, the situation can become even worse. First it ...

Inaugural issue of Pothiz - a new free online magazine is now available on Pothi.com !  Jaya  is the force behind this one. I am also trying to write a story for the next issue - a sci-fi epic :-D. Entries are due by 16th July. Let's see how far you can continue to write code and story without mixing them up too much!

What is a Facebook Vanity URL? Facebook vanity url is a url like http://www.facebook.com/pothidotcom which is shorter and easier to remember as compared to the default http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pothicom/18749584929?ref=mf How can you set it up for your page? It took me a bit of searching to find this but you just need to visit http://www.facebook.com/username and you can setup vanity urls for all your pages.

After about one year of having used the VPS based on Ubuntu Jaunty, recently I had the need to go look at my Apache logs. Now Apache log on my desktop machine are always nicely rotated by logrotate without me having to do anything. However on the server, I found a gigantic 1.2 GB other_vhosts_access.log staring at me with no rotation whatsoever in last 1 year. So I began to learn about logrotate. Running logrotate by hand produced the following which was obviously not true. abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log weekly (52 rotations) empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log log does not need rotating The contents of the status file (/var/lib/logrotate/status) which logrotate uses to determine which log files need ...