LAHORE: A Pakistani court Wednesday ordered authorities to block Facebook in the country over a page encouraging users to post caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) on the site.

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Everybody Introduce Prophet Mohammed Day!’ is a dawah campaign in response to ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!’. Our campaign is targeting 1 Million internet post on May 20th introducing Prophet Mohammed, may peace and blessings be upon him, to Non-Muslims.[more details: facebook group page]

The events like “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” which spread hate between group of peoples should be stopped. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to insult and spread hatred between peoples. We all are humans our average life is 60 and we should spread the love instead of hatred. Our prophet said “do you know what is better than charity and fasting and prayer? It is keeping peace and good relations between people, as quarrels and bad feelings destroy mankind” [quoted from Muslims & Bukhari].

photo from boston.com

If you wanted to donate money or help people of Haiti than make sure you contact the right person. Your responsibility is to check the authenticity of the organization or the people claiming to help Haiti victims. Following is the link of an article by lifehacker which list various websites and links which are not fake.

read full article from lifehacker

Google Language tool provides translation between different languages and is widely used all over the world. Few of my Turkish and Egyptian friends frequently use google language tools and they are not satisfied with the translation. Sometimes translations are wrong or does not fully depict the words or even convey the meaning. The most important reason for bad translation is the beauty/semantics in each language which are impossible to translate. This tool translates major languages of the world except one. It is a national language of the country which has very high profile IT industry.

Urdu the national language of Pakistan and the 5th world most widely spoken language [according to SIL (1999)].  George Weber’s wrote an article about the world’s 10 most influential Languages, and Urdu was rated 10th.

Also according to him Urdu is 4th most spoken language in the world with 4.7 percent of world population.

According to wikipedia countries with large numbers of native Urdu speakers are[source]:

I see these facts and I wonder why google language tool does not have urdu translation facility.

Apart from google there are various other websites which provide Urdu to English and vice versa translation but only to single word [other words they have English<->Urdu dictionary]. I would like to appreciate  http://www.urduword.com/ and http://www.hamariweb.com/ for providing best translation and other language services. Also google labs for providing Roman Urdu tool. But the need for sentence/phrases translations is still there and very few people are working on it.

Hats off to the guys from http://www.paktranslations.com/ who are putting lots of efforts and had initiated a first step towards urdu language tool. Currently they are in beta phase so only English to Urdu translation of sentences and  websites are facilitated by them. They are continuously working and making lots of improvement in their tool. Their tool is not accurate but something is better than nothing.

The facts that Urdu is spoken all around the world, it is under top 5 most spoken language, 10th most  influential language, and have lots of quality literature are clearly shouting Urdu should be included in Google language tool.

I would like to hear your comments what do you think why google has not included urdu in language tool.

I had never created 360 panorama or small planets before. I had previously read various articles and seen very interesting photos as well. I was very excited to make something like it, but never got a chance to make it.

On my trip to Blagoevgrad and Rila Monastery Trip with ESN people I found a very interesting place. There was non-functional spring in the middle of the steps and they were forming a perfect circle. At that point I thought how about a group photo by making small planet shaped circle. So I calculated number of people and walked around the circle. I gathered people and asked them to hold their hands around the circle and stay still. I went to middle of the circle and after I was satisfied with the formation, I adjusted the focus of my camera[in auto focus mode] and switched to manual focus. It is very important to have the same settings[aperture, shutter etc] for all your shots. I could have taken the 6 or 8 shots but I was not using the tripod so for better alignment I took 10 shots covering everyone.
When I came back I stated stitching the photos using Photoshop. I used photo merge option of adobe and selected “perspective” in “Layout”.  I loaded 10 photos and they had very high resolution and the result was the picture having size of 28.2 MB. I purpose that you should reduce the size and then continue otherwise adobe might crash and you might lose your data [or you should save psd formats side by side without reducing the size].

The photomerge option resulted in Raw Panorama of the shots and each photo was in Layers. As I had told you I did not used the tripod and few people were not aligned perfectly. Thats why I had to carefully align the picture manually. Also I wanted to make small planet shaped circle so I had to be careful with the ends of the picture.
After I was satisfied with the stitching I applied “Polar Coordinates” filter [Filter->distort->polar coordinates]. My first small planet was ready … but what the … The ends were not perfect[it needed extra adobe photoshop magic...].  I had to do some basic adobe photoshop in order to remove the deficiency. [Always use tripod or try to learn advance adobe photoshop].

The resulted picture as you see is not very satisfying… I tried various adobe photo shop techniques to squeeze the people and make it perfect but it was taking too much effort. Now I search for some tutorials and wanted to look others similar pictures. After reading some stuff I realized I was doing the same thing but if I add some empty space at the lower part of the picture, the inner circle will be more wider and people will look better.

I had already saved the straight Panorama so I increased the height of that image and applied the filter. This time the result was much better. But I did not kinda liked the inner white circle, so I thought how about stretching the grass[lower part of the image] and this increased the height of the image as well. After doing that I applied the polar coordinate filter and the end result was the following picture.

I learned a lot from my first experience and next time I will do better than that.  Try increasing the height upto the width and see you will have better results. I am open for suggestion and comments, do let me know what you think.

[You can find very good resources  here here and here]