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....

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....

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

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

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....

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....