Archive for March, 2007
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TN Budget trivia
Posted on March 24, 2007 | No CommentsPolitical parties do things in style, and the TN Budget of 2007-2008 was no exception. Among other things, I found the last line of the budget speech interesting. Along with the date in English (23 March 2007), it had a tamil date as Panguni-9, Thiruvalluvar Aandu 2038. Till I read this I did not realise that there is something called Thiruvalluvar aandu – a good discovery from this year’s budget! -
A chirpy note on TN budget 2007-08
Posted on March 23, 2007 | No CommentsTamil Nadu has many significan policy success stories – in part due to getting the budgetary priorities right We are living in a time when positive media coverage of budget is restricted either to tax cuts or for reducing fiscal deficits. Despite the fact that enormous proportion of India’s GDP is spent by the government, media hardly discusses what governments spend on, and how. State government budgets are crucial to national development given that states are in charge of important areas such as education, health, water, etc. Given my interests, I have closely followed education, health, child care and a few... -
Map my word dictionary in Google Personalize
Posted on March 21, 2007 | No CommentsMap wy word creates a graphical output of various meanings of a word and enables us to find related words with a click Note: This feature has been disabled in Google Personalize, and visual thesaurus is not a free product anymore I often struggle for words when I am writing long pieces. Beyond a point it becomes boring to use the same word again and again across pages and I desperately start looking for new words to express my ideas. I then started using Wordnet of Princeton University. Wordnet lets me navigate to related words (going beyond synonmys). Apart from... -
Playing the muscleman in the SJC annual play
Posted on March 21, 2007 | 1 CommentCyril invited me to do a small part in the SJC annual play, a valuable source of “free attendance” I was pleasantly surprised when Cyril invited me to play a small part in the Tamil Play for the annual day of St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchy. I was to be a muscle man who beats up Cyril with a few others towards the end of the play. Since I had no dialogues, I started skipping away to the library and other activities after two rounds of practice. I got together next only for the grand rehearsal. These are normally held only... -
Tamil Nadu state budget 2007-08: News & Analysis
Posted on March 20, 2007 | 1 CommentThe Tamil Nadu State budget 2007-2008 was presented on 23 March 2007 by Finance Minister Prof. K. Anbazhagan. This page has automatically generated news and analysis on the budget The budget related documents can be found in the website of Tamil Nadu government here. The budget papers for this year have not been updated as yet in this site, but the budget speech can be read here. The webcast of the speech is available here. The speech is conveiniently divided by sections, so incase you are interested in just one section (e.g. Tax, education, social welwafe, etc.), you can easily... -
News, weather, fun with Google Personalize
Posted on March 20, 2007 | 1 CommentWith some great new improvements Google Personalize is finally something to take seriously The last time I used Google Personalize, it was not a greatly attractive thing. But in a span of few months some new features have been added that make Google Personalize a great online utility that one could use on a day to day basis. To start with, instead of going to google for search, I can set it to go to Google personalize. In that page, I can have snippets of news from selected sources, local weather, my custom search engines, and an assortment of other... -
Remember the milk task manager in Google personalize homepage
Posted on March 20, 2007 | 1 CommentThe finest online task manager can easily be integrated with Google personal home page Google personalize has improved by leaps and bounds in the last year. Apart from a sleek Ajax page where we can drag and drop (and rearrange) various items of our interest, they have now added a “tab system”. Most importantly, it now permits us to “add stuff” that includes an assortment of Google widgets including, remember the milk. To add your tasks from rememberthemilk.com into my Google personalize home page all I have to do is to click on “add stuff” on the top right, and... -
News on Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra, Tamil Nadu Budgets 2007-08
Posted on March 17, 2007 | No CommentsThis is an experimental feature to collect 10 news items on budget in each state I have been trying to various socio-econoimic policy issues across states regularly. The problem with regular news search is that they often throw up the same states. To search state by state using the state names is cumbersome. I am working on a system to automate the process. For example, I gave the keyword “budget” here. My Yahoo pipes system automatically generates four queries: “Tamil nadu budget”, “Kerala budget”, “Karnataka Budget” and “Ahdnra budget” (without quotes), gets the top 10 results for each, puts them... -
News & Analysis of State budgets 2007-08
Posted on March 17, 2007 | 1 CommentThe following are automatically generated news on state budgets covering many states To check out budget news from South Indian states, click here. -
Google custom search engine: frame size problem
Posted on March 17, 2007 | No CommentsI was excited at the prospect of adding Google CSE to my website – but it does not fit my 3 column site I have always wanted to customise search engines and was thrilled when Google campe up wtih it’s CSE. I quickly created a few. Though they offer the codes to display the search in my site, I was not able to implement it in my wordpress site due to Javascripts. This problem was solved by the an ingenuine idea at easywordpress. Using the suggested method, I successfully got the CSE on my site and the results were displaying....
