In my last post, I highlighted some problems that I face daily while using twitter in Urdu as well in English. A few days ago, I decided to experiment with the Twitter API and write my own client to fix some of these problems. You can see the result at www.twingual.com. It is a javascript only twitter client which supports neat Nastaleeq urdu fonts as well as transliteration.

It’s a work in progress and does not implement all twitter features. If you like it and want to see something you need everyday implemented, feel free to send a tweet.

Meanwhile, tweet away!

At times, it’s good to spend on something you used to love.

Today, I got a copy of the policy guidelines against sexual harassment in institutions of higher learning in my inbox which has been published by the Govt. of Pakistan Higher Education Commission. It contains a “listing of sexual harassment” along with “actual reported cases”. The last item in the list is

Forcing students to publish their research work in Supervisors name.

While the most obvious implication of this statement is that plagiarism (by the supervisor) is sexual harassment, I think there is a hidden message there as well.

 

  Research is sexy!  

Another example of sexual harassment as stated in the document is

Younger  faculty member was blocked  by Dean of the relevant  faculty  to get  higher  education (PhD/Phil).

Here, I’ll leave you to make your own implications. Write them in the comments, if you will, and read the whole document for more lols.

Ash Court at Girton. I should get more pictures of my college… someday.

outside university library

If you walk into my department, one of the first things you may notice is that some of the tiles on the floor are a black and there’s no particular pattern to it. These tiles actually encode a message. The curious amongst us are supposed to decode this but despite having spent 3 years in the department, I could never get the time until last Friday. The decoding should be pretty simple if you want to try your skills. The last 6 letters of the first word can be read off this picture. If you are too lazy, just click here for the explanation. (Anyone who has taken an Introduction to Computer Science course should at least try for ONE minute before clicking)

The code says : Computer LAboratory — AD 2001 — ☻. If you look closely, the tiles are in the form of squares and some of them are split in the middle such that the left half is always black and the right one is always white. Take each black-white combo as a 1 and the white-white combo as a 0. It’s a straight forward UTF encoding after that. Foe example, the row closest to the bottom of the pic is WWBWBWWWWWWWWWBW, where W is white an B is black. Taking WW = 0 and BW = 1, the code becomes 01100001 i.e. 97 in decimal and its ASCII equivalent is ‘a’. 

Geek Art!

(Oh! and clicking on the image opens up a high res version.)