TWers hailing the rain

... and me on the obscure right a hailstone in hand. This was quite an event !

New-comer to the Language

It was an interesting conversation I had. We happened to be at a common lunch table at the office canteen and started off by introducing ourselves to ward off boredom. It happens that this individual is from Murudeswar and speaks this language called Navayati. According to my friend, This language, he says, has strong influence of Konkani, Tulu and Marathi. And, as one may have guessed, there is a very small community that speaks this language. It has no script of its own and perhaps banks on from Urdu. He said that his friends/family write to each other in Navayati using the English script also, at times.

The Navayat community came to be, around three hundred years ago when the Arabs/Persians came over to this side of the Vindhyas and blended into the local population. And that's why they were Nava-ayatis (new comers) . I was curious about what brought the Navayatis to India. And the answer was obviously trade. Navayatis were mostly merchants.

I googled away for Navayat and found a few links. But not any information on the vocabulary of the language or its origin or script. From the old pages of a Konkani Culture website, it seems that NavAyati is probably a variation of Konkani, based on the castes or communities of people that speak it (Other variations of konkani are based on the region where it is spoken) That is when it occured to me that his name was Umar and not Kumar as I had first heard.

The Hindu also speaks of a Konkani meeting earlier this year, in which Navayat is mentioned as a language spoken in Bhatkal. Yes, there is also one more picture link with some relevant text.

Of Relatives and Umbrellas

Contrary to pleas by relatives and well wishers, my mother has a hitherto unknown distaste for carrying umbrellas in the summer. She has now come upwith this very ingenious excuse for not carrying one. She said she cannot see well with an umbrella. What, I question her. The answer is that her peripheral vision is affected. Now, just how does one refute such a claim.

My nephew, Sanat also has an issue with his umbrella, but of a slightly different variety. He has been recently presented with one colourful red and yellow printed umbrella. He was seen making several attempts since last afternoon to pull out the knob of the handle and dip the nose in a bucket of water. It is his firm belief that his unassuming umbrella will suddenly act as a straw that sucks in water. Further he hopes that the press button that opens the umbrella will also trigger a fine spray from the top. He has questioned knowledgeable elders such as me, his friendly and devoted chitthi, Amma, his learned grandmother and Sreesh the uncle that forever teases him. All of us have given him consistent, non-varying responses in the negative. But he refuses to be disillusioned and quotes his own knowledge and understanding of such umbrellas.

In conclusion, may I also point out that he was also trying to stand upside down and somersault in order to conquer his hiccups. This was a suggestion by another learned lady who also is his mother.

AllPairs, A Test Case Generation Tool

The last couple of days, I have been fervently testing attributes that have multiple values, and I have ended up with enormous grids trying to cover every possible combination with the optimism that no webby corners have been overlooked. And all at once, I saw a light, a host of golden solutions ! Ok, flowery language (pun intended) apart, Rajeshvaran directed me to this neat little tool called AllPairs. So now, this tool is based on the Orthoganal Array Testing Principle and works out the minimum number of pairs for you, so that all conditions may be satisfied. I used it to reduce 43 test cases to 8 and still felt good that the testing had achieved satisfactory coverage. This page from James Bach lists two more tools for test data generation!

Words, Puzzles and Programs

Am glad to be subscribing to The Hindu once again. The clue that I was a bit happy to solve was shop displays rope I am twisting. That translates to emporia. Was might pleased when the answer came to my head.

Nick Drew had told me about a word in English that is a term for all words that sound like what they mean. Like Splash, thud. I am scratching my brain for that word.

It seems that there is a Japanese number game called Sudoku, that is some kind of grid where you need to fill in numbers from 1 - 9 in some order and not repeat them so that it totals to something. Read that it is popular among england's rail commuters! Find more of those puzzles at Sudoku. This has been created by its British adopted parent, who has written some program that generates hundreds of such puzzles every day !

Speaking of Japan, here is what I read about this funky machinethat I read about that is supposed to translate baby babble into human understandable. Doh. I think that machine has previously acquired fame by translating animal noises for humans also !