Eklavya

The latest film my wife and I went to see was called Eklavya. We saw it at our local movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. Much of the film was shot in the Devigarh Place in Upaipur, India. If we had unlimited money, then it would be a fun place to visit for a 2nd honeymoon! I enjoy movies like this one, because they have a point instead of being pure entertainment with no thinking involved. I liked how they took a traditional story from the ancient Mahabharata and came up with a story in the present that showed the same struggles as the original story. The struggle of following traditional values in a new age at any cost is such an important topic for today. The original story on the surface does not seem to be applicable for today, but the same question remains, should I follow dharma or not?

Names in Hindi

Rick : िरक
Sarah : सारा
Nathan : नाथन
Daniel : ढानेले
Andrew : एनडरू
Jake : जेक
Jessica : जेिसका
Evans : इळनस

Hindi Unicode Editor

Learning Hindi हिंदी

My current long term goal is to learn Hindi हिंदी. A group at work is learning Hindi during lunch breaks on Mondays. I am not a huge fan of the book we are using as the font is so small. It is the classic book for learning Hindi called Teach Yourself Hindi.

I really like the Hindi Script Tutor web site as I can see how the letters are drawn and can hear them spoken so I don't have to guess on either.

As soon as I can get a grip on the Devanagari script I am going to go thru the NC State Hindi site by Afroz Taj. He is also on local TV in Raleigh on Time Warner channel 18 from 9-10pm on Monday and Wednesdays.

These are my other 3 attempts at learning non-English languages:

1. 1980 to 1982 - while in India I was mostly in in West Bengal and Bangladesh so I learned Bengali using the LAMP method. The beauty of this method is immersion in the local culture. I lived with people who did not know English so I learned the language by listening and knowing what was the correct thing to say in the appropriate situation. This is so much better than learning by translating from English to Bengali. I taught myself to write and read the script only when I returned to USA when being around Bengali friends.



2. 1983 - to graduate at VaTech I was required to take a foreign language, so I chose Spanish and took a compressed full year of Spanish in 9 weeks in summer school. The class was 3 hours a day 3 times a week and we had to speak 1 hour of each class to our Cuban speaker in Spanish only.



3. 1987 to 1989 - while living in Saudi Arabia I taught myself how to write Arabic since I love the calligraphy of the language. I enjoyed the artist value of the language as they use it as an art form as well as a language. An example of this is Hassan Massoudy's art

So far I have learned how to write the vowels and my name is pretty easy to write: िरक, using this on-line Hindi unicode editor.

Geocoding

What in the world is Geocoding? The basic idea is to supply your address and find the matching latitude and longitude values like this free geocoding service. Maps within Google use this technique as well as other web maps. It is kind of scary how much information is available from your physical address or publically listed phone number if you also retrieve the census track number. While there is free US Census TIGER data, the alternative is expensive up-to-date Tele Atlas data.

Customer support gone wrong

My father-in-law told me that his Compaq Presario 900Z wireless internet just stopped working one day. Since it was his 80th birthday I felt sorry for him and told him I would get to the bottom of it. I decided to call Linksys since he was using Time Warner Road Runner with a cable modem with a Linksys router, which was all working fine the last time I was in his home. I knew better than to try Time Warner customer support, as I had done that before and failed miserably, in getting any help that is. I struggled thru for 1 hour with Linksys explaining the problem and then I was finally told that I had a hardware problem where I had to reflash the IP stack. What in the world did that mean? I then called HP as I could not find anything about this model on their web site. For 1 hour I then walked thru the same problem again only to find out he did not know what reflashng meant nor now to fix my problem. I then called Linksys again with my trouble ticket number and for another hour explained the problem all over again - I was not sure what the trouble ticket did for me if I had to start all over again. At the end of the hour, he told me he would try one final thing. That did not work, but at least it gave me an idea of what to try. Finally after 3.5 hours I fixed the problem. Man do I ever hate Windows even more and am all the more thankful for my Apple laptop and iMac desktop at home.

Indochine Cafe

For my father-in-law's 80th birthday he requested we as a family eat at Indochine Cafe in Wilmington, NC. Besides the fact that my mother-in-law insisted on paying for the meal, it was a great place to eat. The food was so excellent that I would go back any chance I get.

We tried many things, but the 3 I liked the best were the following listed from hottest spice-wise:

    1. red curry
    2. green curry
    3. yellow curry

The red curry was one of the hottest dishes I have put in my mouth and just kept getting hotter the more I ate. Finally my temples felt like they were increasing 1 degree in temperature every minute. Then the back of my neck started sweating. What a strange experience but the taste was so good. I also tried the green curry and it must have been the coconut sweetness that did not give it the same edge. It was also very hot but the hotness did not last. If you like coconut and hot food, then it is a perfect dish. The yellow curry was spicy with tumeric based spices and had a great flavor but was not hot at all.

The environment is so unique with Buddhist statues all around and lovely pottery as well. What a nice evening!

PHP code

I have heard from several developers that they hate PHP, but I have to admit that every time I need example code to help me do something the PHP documentation has never let me down. Why is that? The PHP documentation allows user comments, just like a blog and the comments are displayed at the bottom of every PHP command. For instance, I needed to find a way to read an MP3 file and return it to any browser to allow the user to save the file to their computer. Sounds easy, but it turns out the code is quite complex. I searched google for "read MP3 PHP" and found sample code that did not work, and then saw one line at the bottom of the sample that used a PHP function I had not heard of before called "fpassthru". When I went to PHP fpassthru, I learned that using fpassthru is actually much slower than feof and fread. The code I am using was taken from the post named file downloads verified by session vars : 22-Oct-2005 03:36.