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Sun Four Chitra Puja

Today is the auspicious monthly day of Chitra. The puja for Gurudeva was performed, with his blessings shining on us all from within.

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END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of our phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming three-day retreat,
until Tritya Tithi, Sun One, Thursday, May 19th.

Andre Garzia Here from Brasil

Thanks to the generosity of the Digital Dharma Drive donors, we were able to hire our long time developer, Andre Garzia from Brasil part time on a regular monthly basis for a year. Andre went to California to a high-tech LiveCode developer conference and flew over to Hawaii to work with Sivakatirswami for three weeks.

He and Sivakatirswami are master-minding a back end database to contain the metadata for all our media assets: publications, audio, video, still images, and other web resources. These will be served dynamically on the new Himalayan Academy Digital Library web site.

We looked at all the content management systems available today and decided to build our own.

Last week Andre completed the framework for publications and delivery of ePub books. This week he is working on the framework for audio. He and Sivakatirswami review and discuss the diverse array of our requirements.

Audio is tricky. For a single Natchintanai song we may have 10 different versions by different artists, one of which is the model to be used for learning… then we have the lyrics in Tamil, a transliteration and a literal translation and PDF’s to along with each one. Creating a data structure to contain all this and keep it clear, uncomplicated and efficiently coded for super fast delivery, easy data entry, editing and update is a big challenge.

Hmmm. For Bodhinatha’s talks we have something called “location given” and we will need another field for that… let’s call it “geo_location” and we can use it for other media asset that my relate to place on the planet.

Andre has years of experience and watching him write LiveCode is like watching a musician play music.

Andre is creating desktop client applications that Sivakatirswami and the team here can use to upload subject, titles, descriptions, language, category etc information for every single media asset on the server in California.

“Getting the data out to a web page is the easy part. Getting it in and making it maintainable, flexible and easy to update… that’s the hard part and that’s what we need to be thinking about….”

Oh No! The unicode titles for Spanish, Russian and French publications are breaking everything!

No problem… Andre doesn’t believe in problems. At the end of the day he only has solutions.

When the new web site is up you will have no idea all the man hours that will have gone into the “back end” of the site. We look forward to providing you deeper richer access to all the resources on the web site and after that some cool new features which we will keep under wraps until they appear later this year.

Andre is also interested in the teachings and reads Gurudeva’s books. Here he is attending our Sun One Homa.

Thanks to all the Digital Dharma Drive donors and thanks to Andre for his hard work and focus.

Word of the Day

Shankar and Aparna Visit Iraivan Temple

Shankar, Aparna and daughter Sahana from California were back today to see more of Iraivan Temple, and some other areas of the grounds.

We caught this image as Sahana wandered around the temple exploring and talking out loud to someone, we’re not sure who. Perhaps she is asking, ‘What is this language behind me on the pillar?’

Enjoying Muruga Hill

Archives are now available through 2001. Light colored days have no posts. 1998-2001 coming later.

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