Friday, June 24, 2005

Blogs, Geeks and Writing Skills

Blogs have undoubtedly improved the communication skills of so-called geeks. It feels good to note a number of techie writers like Chris Sells, Joel Spolsky write interesting articles not just on technology. But for blogs, I guess their sense of humour would have been restricted to official emails.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Tamil LIP from Microsoft for Windows XP

I installed the Tamil Language Interface pack for Windows XP available as a download from Microsoft. One word describes the product - terrible. I would assume the intention of developing such an interface is to enable non-English speaking people to use the computer more easily. The effort seems to be aimed at something else that I can't comprehend. But for the text that appears in standard Windows interface in Tamil, there is nothing to call it as Tamil interface. The language (use of words), structure of sentences, icons and stupid literal translation make it absolutely painful to use it. There is total lack of imagination in translation. Looks like we need a book on user interface designs in Tamil and make the architects of this tool read it. It seem Malan was responsible for the effort. This is one tool that neither Microsoft nor Malan can be proud of.

I uninstalled the application exactly 1 minute after I installed it.

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