Chaoticity

Twingual: A twitter client for bilingual tweeple

awais — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:35:50 +0000

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!

Nastaleeq Urdu Typesetting: When will they get it right?

awais — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:25:35 +0000

Last night, I read about the new Nasteeq font available in Windows 8 and I just had to check it out. After leaving my machine up all night to install the consumer preview, I finally had time to examine the new “Urdu Typeset” out a while ago. Although Microsoft explicitly states it to be a ‘document’ font, it never hurts to check out how it behaves in a web UI setting. Here’s a screen shot of how the Twitter Urdu page would look with the font. I had to do some CSS overriding to get that right (body.ur for the curious).

Urdu Typesetting

While it does not look that bad, what bugs me is the fact that the English characters in the font are no way near good enough. The extra kerning for Urdu is probably to blame, but as it turns out, I haven’t been able to find a single Nastaleeq font which can render English as well as Urdu characters in such a way that they are legible enough when used in web pages. The nearest you can get is Alvi Nastaleeq v1.0.0 (screenshot below).

Alvi Nastaleeq v1.0.0

But even this font doesn’t quite give an elegant enough look which can be used in professional web pages. Until someone is ambitious enough to tackle this problem, we will probably wont see any useable Urdu+English interfaces. Any solution for us bilinguals will have to handle bidirectional (bidi) text as well. Meanwhile, an alternate is to either detect language and add spans with different fonts, or simply let go your desire to see Urdu Nastaleeq and switch to Helvetica.

Helvetica

دو ہِنسوں کا جوڑا

awais — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:40:13 +0000

When the sun comes out

awais — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:05:26 +0000

Purchasing Power Parity

awais — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:02:46 +0000

A new take on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP – no pun intended)

Brunch

awais — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:32:31 +0000

Indulgence

awais — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:27:46 +0000

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

Offered. pink drinking glass. Broken.

awais — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:05:54 +0000

Here’s a freecycle ad that I found to be quite poetic. All newlines were inserted later and were not part of the original post. The link at the end leads to the original posts but will only work if you are a member.

Offered.
pink drinking glass.
Broken.

A bit weird
maybe
It’s a drinking glass
pink coloured
about a half pint.

It has broken
and a slice
has cracked off of it.

Maybe,
just maybe,
someone is local enough
and can
make use of it
for arty purposes?

Otherwise
it’ll end up
wrapped in newspaper
in the tip.

No?
Collect
CB4.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cambridgefreecycle/message/206022

Fading colours of autumn

awais — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:26:28 +0000

“The web is sad”, said Webgrep

awais — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:47:00 +0000

A paper on “Positivity of the English Language” caught the attention of the main stream media recently. It claimed that English words exhibit a “clear positive bias”. The authors (which happen to be Mathematicians) based this conclusion on their analysis of data from tweets, books, news articles and song lyrics in English. The results showed that people used more positive words than negative ones. In spite of the fact that frequency based analysis is not exactly new in Computational Linguistics and the spread of this article in the media might be a good example for understanding why some news items receive more attention than others, the experiment is interesting nevertheless and finding out if other languages behave the same might be more intriguing.

While search engines can be used to perform this tasks, words are not the only source of conveying emotions in the digital world. Since the invention of the smiley, emoticons have played a major role in attaching sentiment to online text. There have been studies about utilizing emoticons for detecting sentiment in different text genres but most search engines do not support the query structure which returns results when searching for emoticons. The obvious solution is to have your own snapshot of the web and do a text search but this approach has always required a lot of storage and processing resources. Until now.

Blekko has introduced a WebGrep service which searches for your text in 4 billion pages but using text patterns instead of words. I will not hesitate to use the words ‘pretty cool’ to describe it. As a simple test, I’ve tried comparing a smiley face with a sad face emotion to gauge the total mood of the web. Sadly [sic], for 142 million sad faces (assuming one sad smiley per page), there are only 104 million happy ones (click here for details). While these statistics can be improved by including variants of existing emoticons, it might be taken as an indication that we need to be more happy.

One way to make that happen is to consciously avoid using sad emoticons when chatting and blogging (as in this post). We can then claim that we are making the web a better place, one smile at a time !