Taking a break from writing up my dissertation, I noticed the hash tag #ReplaceMovieTitlesWithSamosa trending on twitter. It’s getting quite common and you can see such topics trending once a month or so. While people are quite apt at coming up with funny topics, computers just might be good enough for the job. So I made this small JavaScript program which replaces words in movie names automatically and gives you an option to tweet them. ...
For under $1 million, every high school student in Punjab can have access to a computer. Number of high schools = 5600 (source) Price per computer = 16500 PKR (source) Total = 92,400,000 PKR = 976,206 USD Imagine a whole generation growing up on Khan academy lectures and the Gutenberg library. Imagine these kids using Wikipedia to get both sides of an argument and playing around with Wolfram|Alpha. Imagine them falling in love with physics by appreciating the mysteries of light and getting high on chemistry by designing molecules. Imagine them learning how to pronounce the word “measure’ properly and hearing Faiz reciting poetry as it was meant to be recited. ...
Last night, I took a look at the federal budget for 2012-2013. Apparently we will be spending about 25% in “Servicing of Domestic Debt”. Take a more detailed look here
With the increasing number of “opinion-dispensing apps” which enable Urdu users to write in Unicode out there on the web, there is (or will soon be) a need for getting some meaningful statistics out of the ever-present sentiment of the masses (or at least the web-savvy subset). This calls for resources which enable automatic processing of sentiment, one of which is a sentiment lexicon for Urdu. (For people uninitiated in computational linguistics, a lexicon is just a list of words). Since I couldn’t find any sentiment lexicon available for for Urdu on the tubes, I decided to put in some effort and create a new one. ...
(random 3 min mspaint sketch)
Twitter API has changed a bit so this post had to be updated. Check the updated post here Topic modelling means detecting “abstract” topics from a collection of text documents. The most common text book technique to do that is using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Simply put, LDA is a statistical algorithm which takes documents as input and produces a list of topics. One catch is that you have to tell it how many topics you want. There’s much more to it but since this is not a tutorial post, I will stop here. (If you are interested in how it works, read the references given on the wiki page.) ...
2006 وزیر اعظم کےمشیر برائےخزانہ ڈاکٹر سلمان شاہ نےکہا ہےکہ بجٹ 2006-07ء عوام دوست ہو گا2007 آئندہ وفاقی اور صوبائی بجٹ عوام دوست بنائے جائیں۔وزیراعظم شوکت عزیز کی ہدایت 2008 امید ہے حکومت عوام دوست بجٹ پیش کرے گی، صدر پرویز مشرف 2009 متوازن اور عوام دوست بجٹ پیش کیا گیا‘تنویر کائرہ 2010 نئے مالی سال کا بجٹ تاریخی اور عوام دوست ہے، پی پی پی 2011 آئندہ بجٹ عوام دوست ہونا چاہئے، صدر ذرداری 2012 بجٹ عوام دوست ہو گا، صدر زرداری 2013 بجٹ عوام دوست، ٹیکسوں میں اضافے کا عام آدمی پر اثر نہیں پڑے گا: وزیر خزانہ 2014 آنے والا بجٹ عوام دوست ہو گا۔ جس میں غریبوں اور چھوٹے زمینداروں کے لیے بہت بڑی خوشخبری لارہے ہیں۔ پرویز خان خٹک 2015 وزیراعلیٰ شہبازشریف نے کہا کہ وفاقی حکومت نے عوام دوست اورمتوازن بجٹ پیش کیاہے 2016 مالی سال دوہزار سولہ سترہ کا بجٹ عوام دوست ہوگا:وزیر خزانہ 2017 موجودہ بجٹ متوازن اور عوام دوست ہے: وزیراعظم 2018 بجٹ عوام دوست ہے، چیلنج کرتا ہوں اس میں ایک لفظ بھی تبدیل نہیں ہوسکتا: وزیراعظم 2019 وزیراعظم نے عوام دوست بجٹ بنانے کی ہدایت کردی 2020 وفاق کی طرح پنجاب کا بجٹ بھی ٹیکس فری اور عوام دوست ہو گا: ترجما ن پنجاب حکومت 2021 وفاقی بجٹ مثبت اور عوام دوست ہو گا ...
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. ...
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). ...