I would like to run a small mini poll about user opinion on Myanmar unicode 5.1 fonts and the Zawgyi one fonts. Please take a few seconds to complete the following poll. Thank you.
Bamarlay has started using Myanmar Unicode 5.1. A few days ago, with the recommendation of my father, who is a PHP geek (although he is an old man), I tried using Myanmar3 font and keyboard. After a few days of testing, frustration, error, searching for help, retrying, I finally decided to make a switch to a Myanmar Unicode 5.1 font.
I used to use Zawgyi-one on my blog as well as to write word documents. I have success and failure. Zawgyi is the only Myanmar font I have ever used, and the only one I know how to type. I cannot type the famous Win fonts and keyboard. A few articles on this blog were written in Zawgyi. However, today, I have decided that it is time to switch to a more advanced and standardized as well as easier system. It is time to change.
Here are my experience and impressions using Myanmar Unicode fonts.
Fonts
There are a few Myanmar Unicode fonts available for free download. The supposedly official Myanmar Unicode font, Myanmar3 is free to download, as well as the keyboard and keyboard layout. Others are Padauk font, Parabaik font and MyMyanmar fonts. Among them, Myanmar3 font is the ugliest and the MyMyanmar font the most beautiful. However, none of them are as beautiful as Zawgyi.
Keyboard
I use the keyman keyboard with Myanmar3 keyboard. At first, it was quite strange to use this keyboard which is quite different from Zawgyi keyboard. However, after a few hours of trying, I found it much much easier to use Myanmar3 keyboard. There are only two position of keys – normal and shift, which is different form Zawgyi which has 4 positions. This means easier to write difficult “Pat-sints” which are so common in Burmese language.
Using with Microsoft word
One of the problems I consistently found when using Zawgyi with Word 2007 is that, whenever I open the word file written in Zawgyi, it only shows boxes. I have to manually change the font every time I open the document. This is quite annoying. More annoying is that when I write the document in more than one Myanmar languages (sometimes I have to write in Burmese and non-Burmese ethnic language in the same document). In that case, I have to manually change line by line whenever I open the word file. With Myanmar Unicode 5.1, it eliminates this problem.
However, the problem is not altogether gone if you use supposedly official Myanmar3 font. I have Zawgyi, Myanmar3, MyMyanmar, Padauk and Parabaik fonts installed. I don’t know why, but Word cannot recognize Myanmar3 if there are other Myanmar Unicode fonts installed. All words written and saved in Myanmar3 are changed into Padauk font whenever I reopen the file. Well, no problem. Padauk is more beautiful than the ugly Myanmar3. And as they all use the same Unicode standard, the words stay the same. Usually, I end up writing and saving in Padauk font rather than the Myanmar3 font.
Now, here comes the biggest problem. My current site, Bamarlay, is written in Zawgyi-one (at least a few articles). Most blogs I follow use Zawgyi-one. All my facebook friends use Zawgyi-one. My Firefox and Chrome refuse to show Myanmar Unicode fonts if I have Zawgyi. If I change the default fonts to a Unicode font, I cannot read Zawgyi. That is too frustrating. Moreover, if I write in Myanmar Unicode, none of my online friends will be able to read what I write down. Sucks!
My solution
I now use Myanmar Unicode 5.1 standard font when writing in Microsoft Word. I stick to Zawgyi with my browsers (both Firefox and Chrome). I use Zawgyi-one to write comments in blogs and updates in Face book so that other people can read what I write down.
My Suggestion
Try Myanmar3 keyboard to write in Microsoft Office Word. It is very easy to learn and fun to use. You will definitely fall in love with this keyboard. But use Padauk or other Myanmar Unicode 5.1 standard font. They are more beautiful. Use Zawgyi-one for your online use. If you use Unicode font online, none of the people out there will be able to read what you write down.
For Bamarlay site, I will stop posting in Burmese for a while. If I post any post in Burmese, I will write in both Zawgyi and Myanmar Unicode (two separate articles, more time consuming!).
If you have any experience using Myanmar Unicode font, please share your experience here. Any comments are welcome.
ဒီတစ္ပတ္ေတာ့ domain name server set up လုပ္တဲ့ အေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကရေအာင္။
Domain name server ဆိုတာက ကုိယ့္ဝက္ဆိုက္ ဘယ္ေနရာ၊ ဘယ္ IP address၊ ဘယ္ဆာဗာ ေပၚမွာ တင္ထားသလဲ ဆိုတာ ညြွန္ျပတဲ့ မာတိကာလို ဟာမ်ိဳးပါ။ ဒီ information ေတြကို name server ေတြက သိမ္းေပး ထားတာပါ။
ကိုယ့္ စိတ္ၾကိဳက္ ဆိုက္နာမည္လဲ ေရြးျပီးသြားျပီ၊ ဒိုမိန္းလဲ ဝယ္ျပီသြုားျပီ၊ web hosting service မွာလဲ ဝယ္ျပီးသြားျပီဆို ေနာက္တစ္ခု လုပ္ဖို ့ လိုတာကေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ Domain Name Registrar ဆီမွာ ကိုယ့္ ဆိုက္ရဲ့ DNS server ကို ေျပာင္းဖို ့ လိုပါတယ္။ တစ္ကယ္လို ့ domain registrar နဲ ့ web hosting service တစ္ခုထဲ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ဘာမွ လုပ္စရာ မလိုပါ။ က်ြန္ေတာ္ကေတာ့ သပ္သပ္ဆီ ထားေတာ့ ေျပာင္းေပးရ ပါတယ္။ ေျပာင္းတာလဲ မခက္ပါဘူး။ ကိုယ့္ website sign up လုပ္တုန္းက ပို ့လိုက္တဲ့ email မွာ DNS server address ပါပါတယ္။ ဥပမာ ns1.mydomain.com လိုမ်ိဳးေပါ့။ ပံုမွန္ DNS name server နွစ္ခု ေပးေလ့ ရွိပါတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ domain name registrar website မွာ “Change DNS server” or “Change Name server” ဆိုတာရွာ၊ ဒီနွစ္ခုကိုထည့္၊ ျပီး မူလက ေပးထားတဲ့ ဟာေတြ ျဖဳတ္ျပစ္လိုက္၊ ျပီးပါျပီ။
Bamarly.com has successfully moved to a new server. The migration took only one day, with no downtime. Within a few hours of name server change, my visitors can see the site on the new server. The new server is faster (16 CPU compared to 4 CPU of the previous server). The service provided by the support staff at the new web host is also excellent. Questions are answered promptly, within a few hours of ticket submission to the support team.
Bamarly.com is now proudly hosted by Host Gator. If you would like to have your own website, I highly recommend hostgator to you.
ဗမာေလး ဘေလာ့ကို web host အသစ္ေပၚ ေျပာင္းလိုက္ပါျပီ။ အရင္ web host က ေလးျပီး ခဏခဏ off line ျဖစ္ေနလို ့ပါ။ ပိုဆိုးတာက ခဏခဏ DNS ဆာဗာ ေဒါင္း ေနတာပါ။ (ဒါက ရိုးရိုး ဆာဗာ ေဒါင္းတာထက္ ပိုဆိုးပါတယ္)။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္ ေနာက္ဆံုး ေနာက္ web host ကို ေျပာင္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။
Recently, I was playing the online Facebook game, Realm of Empires. It really is a very addicting game. The developers claimed that they intend this game to be a 15 minute per day game. However, in my experience, I end up playing more than 15 minutes a day, sometimes waking up in the middle of night still playing this game.
The concept of this game is actually like Civilization game. However, it is a real time strategy game, with thousands of players (real human player) to compete with. The concept is to build your own empire, expand your empire, make friends and alliance to protect yourself from other hostile players, and survive.
You start the game with a small village in the chosen realm. Currently, there are two realms open to Facebook members. Realm 4 is an established realm while the Realm 5 is the realm for experienced players. For the new players, there is also a training realm where you can practice your skill and familiarize yourself with the concept and gameplay of this game.
There is a new player protection mode where new players are protected from attacks by old players. This usually last for a few days, during which time you can build up your defences. After this time, you are vulnerable from attacks from other players. The best way to protect yourself from such attacks is to join a powerful clan. You should try to join the clan that is strong near you. You won’t get much help from your clan members if they are far away from you.
After you build up enough troops, you can now attack abandoned villages near you. Pillaging these villages will give you gold much needed to build your structures. The goal is to build a palace to produce governors. Governors are used to take over other villages, so that you could expand your empire.
I started my empire in Realm 4. My starting village (now the Capital) is Hansawaddy at (-185, -198). I joined the clan Order of Knights. It is not a large clan but clan members are quite supportive. It is also strong near me so I feel safe around here. If you ever decide to play, you are invited to join our clan. Just message Rajadiraj and I will send the invite to you.
Here is where my village is:
Realm of Empire - my villages
Realm of Empire - my villages
This is what it’s look like. The large building in the background is my palace.
Hansawaddi from Realm 4
Hansawaddi from Realm 4
OK, I now have 6 villages in my empire. Not bad but still far away from those players with 20+ villages.
I strongly encourage you to play the Realm of Empires in your face book. If you like Civilization, this game is for you.
The website of the game Realm of Empires is at http://www.realmofempires.com/. Once you register at this address, you will be directed to your facebook account. Just log in with your facebook account and you are ready to play.
Myanmar Today blog is currently running a visitor opinion survey on Myanmar’s upcoming election in 2010. The blog is running a poll on the topics that everybody is interested in:
should NLD participate in 2010 election?
will Myanmar’s 2010 election be free and fair?
will NLD win, if it participates, in 2010 election?
Newer posts in Bamarlay's blog are written in Zawgyi-2009 font. Zawgyi-2009 is a new and upgraded font of Zawgyi-one and fully compatible with the old Zawgyi. Please download and install it at Zawgyi-2009 Font
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