Archive for February, 2008

PhotoDropper – making blogging with CC pictures painless

Monday, February 25th, 2008

This is something I have really been waiting for! PhotoDropper is a plugin for WordPress that enables you to seemlessly search for CC licensed pictures in Flickr and other databases, and with a click insert the picture into your blog, complete with the photo credit. I have always found it a pain to have to [...]

Prokem, bahasa gaul, language inventiveness

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

One of the problems I had when learning Indonesian in Jakarta was that what people actually spoke seemed to be very distinct from what was in my textbooks (never mind that my textbooks were also about 20 years old, but most importantly they taught a very refined Indonesian. I remember on the title page was [...]

Is Chinese the new French?

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

Although it was Eurocentric, I like to think back at the time when all serious scholars in Europe were expected to know at least French (and by association perhaps Italian and Spanish), German, English and some Greek and Latin. When you read a book, and there are frequent citations in those languages, that are not [...]

Peranakan literature in Indonesia

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

My problem with doing research is that I come across so many interesting topics, and it is hard not to pursue them, and get lost. Sometimes I write books down in my “books to read” list, or download pdfs meaning to read them later. Sometimes I spend hours on things that I absolutely do not [...]

The Gardener, by Rabindranath Tagore, II

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

3. In the morning I cast my net into the sea. I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty – some shone like a smile, and some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride. When with the day’s burden I went home, my [...]

Cat’s Crossing, and list of Toronto-related fiction

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

I’ve always loved reading literature or watching TV-series/movies about cities and places where I have been/are. When attending high school in Italia, it was a special treat reading a novel in Italian where the protagonist would explain that his mother was from Trieste, and his father from Milano… I lived close to Trieste, and I [...]

The Gardener, by Rabindranath Tagore (excerpt)

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

2. ‘Ah, Poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning gray. ‘Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?’ ‘It is evening,’ the poet said, ‘and I am listening because some one may call from the village, late though it be. ‘I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and [...]

Using Wikipedia as an authoritative list: National libraries and IFLA

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Looking through a bunch of old PDFs I have downloaded, I came across this little tidbit from the IFLA Newsletter, June 2007: Help needed: Directory of National Libraries on Wikipedia The Standing Committee has discussed the creation of a Directory of national libraries worldwide, taking into account existing lists such as that maintained by the [...]

Indonesian government wants to buy text book copyrights

Friday, February 8th, 2008

From the excellent [i:boekoe] blog on book culture in Indonesia, comes a press release about the Indonesian government. I have translated it below (slightly shortened): The Indonesian government buys the copyright to textbooks (From the newspaper Kompas, February 8, 2008) The Indonesian government has decided to buy the copyright of textbooks for primary, secondary and [...]

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