Stutimaṇḍala

Friday, June 16, 2006

Internet Explorer: IE 7

If you are an internet-explorer buff and not willing to change to firefox, then there is some good news for good CSS rendering. If you have Windows XP with SP2, then you can install IE7 Beta. Apart from good CSS rendering, they offer better pop up blocker, tabbed browsing, better security, and a phishing filter. Click on the link below:

IE 7 Download

Screenshots:


Notice that dotted line is displayed dotted, instead of dashed as by IE 6.


This is a new welcome feature. The font has been smoothed for an easy reading. IE 7 beats firefox here.

Hover on hyperlinked images works now in IE 7. In IE 6 this was a major bug.

Poetry Competition Tips

Worried about how to proceed in the poetry competition with ‘‘seemingly formidable’’ rules? Note the catch-phrase — ‘‘seemingly formidable’’.

Here are a few tips that will help you out:

Tip1: If you know the rules of counting syllables according to cha.mda.h "saastra, then no problems. If you don't, then grab these rules from your favorite source. If you don't find a source, you can contact us as well.

Tip2: If you know the rules of counting syllables, say 1 and 2, and have never written using the rules, then try a simple rule like chaupāī.

chaupāī has just two rules:

i) Total weight of syllables, 1 and 2, should add up to 16.
ii) The last three syllables are not allowed to be 2 2 1 or 1 2 1.

Example of chaupāī:

a) http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_tulsi/sutikshna_stuti.htm
b) http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_tulsi/siva_krita_rama_stuti.htm


Tip3: Don't forget to ask any questions; but please remove poet's block and get started. This competition will repeat only once a year.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Diacritic Styles

Dear Visitors:

At stutimandal, we always think of providing new features to the visitors. This week we finalized the appearance of diacritics page. You can check its trial version here.

For those of you who don't know about diacritics --- it is an agreed method to write all the Sanskrit alphabets in english. There are many such conventions, of which we are using a popular one. You can follow the resources link at stutimandal to check their pronunciations.

If you can read Devanagari or original Sanskrit lipi, then there is no need to read diacritics. However, the translations from now on will follow the diacritics convention. We are working on improving the diacritic support for the past 100 poems. Keep visiting!

Wishing well,
Stutimandal