Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Google's Blog Search

The same clean, cool and extremely fast UI. But the results are different. Now this will only search the blogs. Definitely a very good news for the bloggers. That is why one loves Google.

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Even Blogger has changed its opening screen to accomodate the new blog search. Any way Blogger is also part of the Google.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

This is how i got telugu in Linux

The first I do every day after turning on my box every day is to open the eenadu paper online edition. But today I logged on into the linux OS(fedora core 2) for the first time on this box. So when I opened the enaadu paper, I could see nothing but a lot of garbage. What the hell is this it did not happen like this before when I am in windows. So I downloaded the eenadu.ttf, from the enaadu site. But where should I keep that file. Or how should I make the browser know that it has to use this font in order to display eenadu paper.

So, at this point of time I decided to search the net to know the further action I have to take. The first place I went to is the wikipedia site for telugu language. There it told me get the pothana font (a font for Unicode telugu). And then store it in a directory(~/.fonts) in my home, and then use the command "fc-cache" to update the font cache. But I thought that "-cache" is an option and "fc" is the command. This is where I totally went wrong. And naturally the command did not work, and wondered why the wikipedia guys went wrong.

But my desire for viewing eenadu paper in linux is still not fulfilled. So I went in my own approach. I created a directory in the "/usr/share/fonts" directory, and named it as "ttf-files" (you can give any name here). And then copied all my font files,eenadu and pothana, into it. Next, I added another record to the "fonts.cache-1" file, which is present in the same "/usr/share/fonts" directory, stating to check the fonts in the newly created directory. The record I added is something like " "ttf-files" 0 ".dir" ". Then I logged out and logged in. Opened the eenadu paper and started to read it happily.

But I feel the wikipedia has provided a generic way to install fonts, because you may not have the same directory to share fonts in all versions of linux.

Lesson that I learnt that day is when you read something read it very carefully, never skip or ignore passages. This is because I misread the procedure in wikipedia, which is very simpple procedure, and went through a very long process which took me a considerable amount of time to get the job done.