Birthday Celebrations

As one gets older, one stops enjoying one's birthdays. But today was something special.

Yesterday, Shreeram our sysadmin, was doing a demo of OpenEnrich in our conference room and was creating a profile for me. One of the required information in my profile was my date of birth and I gave it hesitantly.

Then I also announced to everyone in the room that the date happened to be tomorrow and that I would like to celebrate it with my family --- all my team-members and offered that I would buy everyone lunch the next day.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to come to the conference room at lunch time to see a birthday cake with candles waiting for me.

Moreover, when one reaches a certain age (I prefer not to disclose it), one comes to a point when one does not start enjoying birthdays.

For me, this day has been a day of recokning to make me understand that most successful people have been successful after the age of forty. Maybe the best years for me to be the highest productive has just started.

At this age, most people come to what's normally referred to as 'mid-life crisis'. For me it is more of a day to get my batteries recharged to march ahead with added determination.

The cake that my team bought me today tasted much better than any of the cakes I have had in my life... and I do not think it was because it was bought at a special bakery. I think it has that special ingredient that I will cherish for a long time...

Build Your own locale for Windows Vista

I remember last year when we were developing the Nepali (Nepal) locale for Windows XP which got shipped out as a ELK from Micrsoft. Before this, whenever we were entering data we had to select eitherHindi or Sankrit as the language identified. That is all history now.

Similarly, I have been working with Ranjana script opentype fonts and Prachalit script open type fonts. However, so far, Nepal bhasha script has only be entered into the computers as Nepali and the time for creation of a Nepal Bhasha or Newari locale has come.

Yet, the time also has come for us to be able to build and distribute our own custom locales in Windows Vista.

Microsoft Windows Vista currently supports more than 200 locales (100+ languages), and yet this covers only a fraction of speakers worldwide. Microsoft is now moving towards a more extensible model for international support that will empower users to create and share customized solutions in the international space.The Microsoft Locale Builder provides a way to extend and modify the set of locales that Microsoft ships with your own regional and cultural data. The Microsoft Locale Builder was created to support customers in regions without built-in Windows locales as well as customers seeking to modify locales that they are already using. Customers will be able to add support on their own timeline without having to wait for new releases of Windows.Microsoft Locale Builder will also allow corporations, governments, universities, and special-interest groups to generate and easily share custom locales on Microsoft Windows Vista.Download available at:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=12ADFFC8-A4DA-424B-8D62-17C1E0FFC116&displaylang=en

Microsoft kills Windows 98: Great News for Nepali Computing

Every cloud has a silver-lining. The news that Microsoft has decided to put Windows 98 to bed may be sad news for tens of thousands of computer users in Nepal, who have been able to use their computers even in very low resources. But when we are thinking of computing in Nepali language (I mean not just being able to fool the computer to display some devanagari characters while storing the data in ASCII characters but being able to compute in Nepali language 'I repeat'), Windows 98 has been the biggest hurdle.

Here is a link from BBC on the death of Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5164450.stm