Ravi

Some of the Tamil writers websites / blogs :

1. Paamaran

2. Charu

3. Maalan

4. Jeyamohan

5. Sudhangan

6. Pa. Raaghavan

7. S. Ramakrishnan

NHM Converter is a free-of-cost Tamil font encoding converter tool from the makers of NHM writer. 

Now, NHM Converter is available online too. Since this is browser dependent, now we have a converter for Linux, Mac operating systems too. Earlier, Suratha’s Pongu Tamil was the only available tool.

The downloadble version is available for Windows and will be soon made available for Linux too.  

Some of the features of NHM converter are:

    1. Embedded fonts. You don’t need to install any fonts.
    2. Speed of the conversion as conversion takes place at client side. We used NHM converter for the Tamil Wiktionary Automation project and it helped us convert font encoding of large MB files with ease.
    3. Auto detect encoding
    4. Extendability 
    5. Sometimes it will be helpful, if you want to type in a 8 -bit encoding without any font. (another usage of font embedding feature)

1. Do you use more than one gmail account for managing official, academic, friendly mails? You can read them all through just one account. Go to your secondary email accounts - > Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP and enable forwarding. You can also set filters to make things easier.

2. You can not only read different mail accounts at one place but also can send out mails using different IDs. Go to Settings -> Accounts -> Send mail as, add the secondary mail ID and then verify it.

3. You can modify your email id as you wish by just adding a + after your mail ID. For example, ravi@gmail.com and ravi+tamil@gmail.com are one the same. You can add different +labels and give it to different people. So when they send mails to those addresses you can use filters to sort them. You can use them just for fun too. Try sending a mail to your crush with +iluvu

4. Do you have a user name with a dot in between? Don’t worry where you place the dot. It will work wherever you place it. And even without the dot it will work. This means, people cannot create another user name by just varying the dot placement. This assures people can’t fake your user name that easily. For example, ravitamil@gmail.com , ravi.tamil@gmail.com and rav.itamil@gmail.com are one and the same.

5. Instead of having a @gmail.com address you can also replace it with @googlemail.com address and vice-versa. You can use this to create filters and manage your incoming mails.

Loved all the songs in Happy days Telugu movie. The movie which made me a Tamanna fan

Get Your Own Hindi Songs Player at Music Plugin

Chatting is one online activity which can eat your time and get you in trouble if mismanaged. I am trying to list down some practical tips from my experience regarding this.

1. Do not stay signed in always.

This is the golden rule of time saving in online chat. Your chat application is not a mobile phone to keep it on always for people to reach you. People can reach you by mail, phone if things are urgent. And if you want to check whether people are online you can always sign in for a moment and check things. But if you keep it signed in always, unknowingly you will be wasting too much time in unavoidable and unnecessary conversations.

2. Do not open chat applications during Windows start-up.

Can we say this as Silver rule? When you set the chat application to sign in on starting up your computer, besides delaying your start-up time and slowing down your system, it can get people jumping at you to chat before you take care of other activities for which you started the computer.

3. Do not accept chat request from unknown people.

Yes, you need to network, promote your website / business and socialize but you need not accept anyone who sends you a chat request. Before you accept a chat request make sure you know something about the person and get genuinely interested in him. If you aren’t sure who he is ask him by mail. This will help you to keep your buddy list uncluttered and also help you maintain your privacy.

4. Use Google Talk Chatback badge.

It helps you to chat with people without having to accept them as friends.

5. Hide online friends.

I am less likely to pick a chat with my online friends without a purpose. So let me hide them showing their status automatically. If I have a purpose I can always check their online status and initiate a chat. But seeing their status by default can be distracting.

6. Do not visit chat rooms.

Full stop. It’s a plain waste of time and addictive.

7. Visit IRC support rooms only on a fixed hour and on a fixed day in week.

If you are a benevolent geek and would like to help folks by visiting IRC support rooms, fix an hour and day once a week when you would do so. Being logged in there for ever will kill your time. That you are being helpful wouldn’t get back your time.

8. Remind yourself that chat is not free.

People end up wasting lot of time in chat because they think it is free unlike a telephone call. Remind yourself that it is no free. If you are using dial-up connection, you can disconnect internet connection and save your money spent for the time chatting. Even if you chat from a free or unlimited broadband connection, remember your time is worth as well.

9. Think whether you will discuss the same if you had to call that person and spend money.

Else, it is equally worthless to discuss in a chat. Cut it. Consider chat as any other formal medium of communication and you would save time.

10. Focus in the chat.

Chat while you chat and don’t multitask. Would you feel OK if your friend left you in the living room and goes to clean his toilet, repair his car? The same etiquette applies for internet. If your response time is slow, people can easily find out that you are busy with something else and can get annoyed and leave the chat.

11. Do not open more than 3 chat windows.

Try to keep the number of chat windows as minimal as possible. For the same reason cited above. If needed put some in hold and try to finish the conversation with others.

12. Go for the simplest chat application.

I recommend Google Talk. When the application is simple, you would just focus on conveying the message instead of trying the playful additions in the chat application. Those are best left to teenagers, people new to online life and kids.

13. Use GTalk inside your Gmail.

14. Go for Voice calls.

Voice calls can cut much off the distractions in text chat. Unlike text chat, it is hard to prolong voice chat with not so familiar people. So automatically, nonsense and the time spent in it will be minimal.

15. Archive your chats.

They can be as informative as your mails and you would need it for future reference. When you share sensitive information like credit card number, hot rumours , scold someone remember to go off-record.

16. Stay invisible.

This gives you the power to decide when and whom you initiate the chat with.

17. You need not ping your friend always whenever you see them online and it is not rude to stay silent.

Some people might think it is nice and polite to say hello or start chatting whenever they see their friends online. But it is not necessary. Your friends’ telephone is switched on all the day. But you don’t ring them for that reason, right? Give your friends some space and time and good friends will always understand and stand by you.

18. Mail.

It can be precise, purposeful and time saving. Many times we don’t know how to conclude the chat and keep talking something.

19. If you want to ask some question or reply to your friends, Go for chat only if you know the answer is simple and if you need to do so immediately.

20. Remember to disconnect the webcam.

If you forget to do so, once you finish chatting with your friends, your webcam can still be online and people can catch your embarrassing moments

• Better Gmail - Gives lot of cool features for Gmail users.
• Better GReader - Features for Google reader users.
• GreaseMonkey - Useful to install lot of scripts. Must have.. Before installing any user script you should install this first.
• Padma - You can view non-Unicode Indic sites in Unicode. Also install the Padma enhancer script
• Adhiyan - To see non-Unicode Tamil sites in Unicode.
• TamiVisai (தமிழ்விசை) - To type in unicode tamil.
• Google Toolbar - Must have.
• IE tab - To view IE specific sites like dinamalar, vikatan.
• ScreenGrab - One-Click custom screenshots.
• PiLens - To view images from Picasa, flicker, google image search results more gracefully.

GreaseMonkey scripts

• RaagAdSkipper script - To skip the annoying ads in Raaga.com
• MozTxtAlignFix - Renders Tamil Unicode sites without alignment problem.
• Google Extra - Shows Google video, Youtube, Image search, wiki search results in Google search sidebar.
• Padma font enhancer - Supporting script for Padma Firefox entension.
• Gmail Beautifier.

Recently I moved Ravidreams.net from my friend’s web host server and went with the Daddy. Some lessons for those who wanna move their websites to another host:

1. Research. I heard about GoDaddy and was using it for Domain registrations for some months and I just went ahead and bought the web hosting service from them (knowing myself this is not a surprise as I bought my laptop in 5 minutes!). Later I found some other good web host servers with better ranking, packages, support credentials. Before you decide the purchase, ask your friends about their web hosts, the pricing, support and mainly the interface. My former host had a nice Fantastico deluxe enabled control panel. GoDaddy’s control panel was horrible and there was no Fantastico deluxe and I took lot of time before figuring out how to navigate. Being a big company in one service need not guarantee their strengths in another area. So do not trust any brand name for granted.

2. Do not commit if you want to try the service. If you want to try the service, do not commit to purchase web hosting for longer periods. Most web hosts give monthly packages. So, you can try them. But if your site is not small, then moving often can be a trouble. So think twice before trying. And think thrice before trying. Because most of the web hosts give a cheaper rate only if you pay in advance for 2-4 years and it is a lot of money and you cannot cancel it if you find the service is lacking later. So, before you pay think about the money and period you are gonna be committed.

3. Get help in moving the site. GoDaddy did not have this support and it is not a pleasant thing to move data, databases and set them up all again especially when you are a newbie. There are lot of service providers who would help you do this.

4. Backup your data. You never know what happens when moving your site.

5. Support Vs Storage. You gotta decide about this. My previous service provider was a reseller and a small vendor. And he was also my friend. So I could call him for all silly questions and he would generally give great support. It was really important when I was a newbie. I would miss him in odd timings as he cannot afford 24X7 support. But whenever he is available the support is great. In a big company like GoDaddy, I usually get support queries answered in few hours barring the weekends. The answers are vague, formal and impersonal and I miss the personalised and friendly support. Also, I cannot hope to get really tricky questions answered by GoDaddy. But the other advantage with guys like GoDaddy is that the problems with their service can be global and you can hope to find solutions already discussed in Forums. When I moved to GoDaddy initially, I was lost for a while. But, once I found the way now, I benefit more from the almost 1000 times more storage space and bandwidth given by GoDaddy for almost the same price compared to my previous host.

6. Start thinking early before your current hosting expires. Because, then you may have the risk of losing your data if you don;t have backups. Also, if you need time setting up things with the new host, you cannot let your site down for days.

7. Keep an eye on the SQL files. I could not import my SQL database for WordPress since it was too big. There were hacks for splitting them and working around. But I was too lazy to try them all and went for importing just the xml file backup into wordpress. I really screwed this up as the import assigned new page and post Ids and lot of my links went broken and I had to manually fix them. Also, there is bug for UTF-8 encoding in WordPress. I forgot to fix this before importing and all the Tamil text became ???? marks Though you can avoid these careless mistakes and can redo things always, I would suggest one small tip to get the links intact: Always, link to the post title based PermaLink URL and do not link by post or page ids. This way, even if the page ids change in the moving, the PermaLinks and hence the internal links stay alive.

8. Risk the chicken. If you have more than one site and if one of them happens to be of lesser importance, try moving it first. This will allow you to afford mistakes and learn from them and you can move the important sites later with peace of mind.

9. Go for shared hosting. Most of the web hosting providers give a shared hosting plan for a slightly higher price than the basic plan. Go for it. This would allow you host multiple sites under the same account and save you lot of money. Even if you don’t have additional sites now, you may always have some in future or you may gift your best friends with a free hosting. With hosting becoming very cheap, you always have lot of storage space, right?

And there is one more thing which you should do after moving.

Write a blog post like this

Get Firefox 3 Beta 3 now. It’s address bar is awesome and I can’t live without it anymore I could even do away with the incompatible extensions for this feature’s sake. What do you like the most in Firefox 3 Beta 3? But except for Ubuntu, I cannot trust anyone for timely releases I guess. Waiting for the official release of Firefox 3.

Vidhyasagar and Karu. Palaniappan are back with another melodious album. Let God bless good music directors with good directors.

Get Your Own Hindi Songs Player at Music Plugin

Download Pirivom sandhipom movie songs

Hang On..

Why do I blog about songs? Even if you don wanna know, continue reading ! This is compulsory and not for those who want only

1. It’s the easiest thing to blog about and keep your blog updated
2. It helps to share my tastes and finds with friends.
3. It brings lot of search hits ! Can’t guess how much hits the music sites will be getting.

Ok..let me think for the fourth reason until the next blog post on songs

I started liking Shankar Elson Loy since Dil Chahtha Hai days. With Aamir Khan, it can only become better. Composing hummable songs in movies like this is no mean talent. If you see the movie, you will enjoy the songs more.

Get Your Own Hindi Songs Player at Music Plugin

download Taare zamen par songs.