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Bollywood Movies on Goolge Video

I was browsing Google Videos today and clicked on the 'Top 100' link and chose 'India' to see what was being posted by my countrymen. I was very surprised to find two videos that were over 2 hours long at the first and third positions. The first one had 158,314 views and the third one had 33,453 views. They both turned out to be complete Bollywood movies. Now, if this isn't copyright infringement, then what is. Google does not have an easy mechanism to flag a video as copyrighted material. Check out t his page for yourself to see what I mean. One of the videos was posted by a site called megaload .com. (no hyperlink here to save you the trouble. Take my word for it when I say...) It turns out to be a parked domain with only a zillion pop-up ads to boast. Come on guys...if you want to watch a movie, pay for it. But, just look at the number of views and the ratings. I bet most of these have come from outside India. I live in the UK and it is not very often that
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En Route to Ethiopia

I am making this entry from an internet kiosk in Amsterdam Airport. I am on my way to Ethiopia as part of a team from the Southern Ethiopia Gwent Health Link . After a month of hectic preparation I am hoping that I can contribute to this visit. I will be teaching health professionals in Ethiopia how to make the best use of computers in medicine. The primary focus is going to be E-learning. We are hoping to get them to interact with us more via the forum that I have created at the link's website. If I get one out of every four attending the course to register on the forum and start posting, then my visit would have been a fantastic success. Well, of all the zillion other problems that they have, I wonder if they will have the time to sit in front of a computer and bother to post to forums. We will know in a few days time. More from Ethiopia.

Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

My best time at a laparoscopic cholecystectomy yet - 36 minutes flat. My previous best time was 45 minutes. And, no I wasn't racing against time. Honestly. It is always a bad idea to race against time, especially in elective surgery. I just got lucky this time. Like a boss of mine said, the more operations you do, the luckier you get.

Tamil Translation Messages for Mediawiki

I have created a new MessagesTa.php for the Wikipital project. This contains a larger number of translated messages in tamil than the default file that ships with MediaWiki 1.7 . A lot has been derived from the work done for the Tamil Wikipedia but I have added a considerable amount of stuff. This file, I hope, will be very useful for all Tamil Wikis. Remember to replace விக்கிபிட்டல் with your own project's name or {{SITENAME}} before you install using this file. You can download this file from here . While at it, also check out விக்கிபிட்டல் . Please link to this blog to download the file until I upload it to a more permanent location. I don't want people cursing me for a broken link to my googlepages.

தமிழில் விக்கிபிட்டல்

Wikipital is now available in Tamil. There are a few issues that I will iron out over the next few days. It took a good deal of work to get the MessagesTa.php file in order inspite of the fact that many of the messages have already been translated for the tamil wikipedia project . The completed file has got a much larger number of translated messages than the default tamil translation file that comes with Mediawiki . I am sure this will be useful for numerous Tamil Wiki projects.Check out my exclusive entry to download this file. விக்கிபிட்டல் உடல் நலம் மற்றும் மருத்துவம் சம்பந்தப்பட்ட தகவல்களை இலவசமாகவும், கோட்பாடின்றியும் அளிக்கின்றது. கூடிய விரைவில் மற்ற மொழிகளிலும் விக்கிபிட்டல் உருவாக்கப்படும்.

Signs, Signs Everywhere

How many signs do we see everyday on average? Little boards telling us where to go, what to watch out for, where to tread carefully and a lot more. Shops, roads, cars, buildings - there is a signboard in every one of them. I work in a hospital and have for the past 18 months taken exactly the same route to the surgical ward on level 3. I am curious to see how many signs my eyes glance at everyday. There are plenty - but have I ever read them? Let me try and recollect. 'Cosultant Obstetrician On Call', 'Maternity...???', '???Access to Theatres, ITU, CCU Only', a board on the inside of the lifts listing out all the wards and what floors they are on, 'Ward 3/4', '??Access for Staff Only', etc. I am sure that these are only a fraction of the actual number. I will pick up a dictaphone tomorrow and actually read them all into it as I walk the walk. Oh, and on a completely different note, I completed uploading the tamil version of Wikipital. It is now

Wikipital is Live

Wikipital is finally online. Thanks a lot to my brother-in-law, an SpR in Paediatrics, the site is online and content is increasing by the day. I am still working on the translation files for Tamil, my mother tongue. That should go live hopefully within the next fortnight. I have used Mediawiki to do this. More later. The site is at www.wikipital.com