Pergola – High Altitude Dining

I had heard about the high-altitude Pergola at Hotel Accord about 6 months earlier, so when I had to choose a restaurant to treat my wife for my anniversary the choice was very much made.

I made a booking for two a day earlier. I did not know how busy the restaurant was during weekdays but just wanted to play safe. Pergola is on the thirteenth floor of Hotel Accord. It opens out to an amazing view of the Chennai city. We were at the hotel at about 8 o clock. I think we were just the second or third guest for the evening at that time but the place soon filled up.

We got a good seat. I was hoping they would have a TV so I can follow the T20 game that was on but that was not to be and so, for 5 minutes, we were looking at Chennai and identifying places we knew. Pothys was very much there and so were the floodlights of the M.A. Chidambaram stadium at Chepauk which was wonderful. We could see the infamous Chennai Traffic on Anna Salai. I have been to the Zafraan Exotica in Hyderabad and Pergola ran Zafraan very close on ambience if not better. The service was very prompt. We were handed a drinks\appetisers menu. A Mongolian Barbeque was on but we chose not to get too adventurous. We picked an appetiser that was made of Sesame Corn and a  sweetie Mary mocktail to go along with it. The appetiser took about 10 minutes to arrive which wasn’t too bad. At first, it smelled like our traditional Paruppu Vadai but the similarities ended there. The taste was very good and the sauce that went along only ameliorated the taste.

Then came the main course. The only disappointing thing was the variety of the vegetarian fare that you could have along with rice. It was limited to only 2, infact. One had mushrooms so we chose Murungai Elai Masiyal more out of force than by choice. We also ordered an Aloo Nazakat along with the naan bread. Again, the main course did not take too long. About 20 minutes waiting time roughly. We were glad we chose Murungal Elai Masiyal because it was absolutely scrumptious. It was mixed along with lentils and was the right dish to go with the rice. We were glad we took the waiter’s suggestions. We thoroughly enjoyed the sumptuous main course.

By the time we got to the desserts our expectations were running very high. If anything was a let down, it were the desserts. We opted for a Chocolate Fudge fixation but sadly the fixation was very short lived. I just wish Pergola spruces up their desserts menu. We finished our dinner at about 10. On the whole it was a memorable dining experience and I will definitely recommend Pergola. It is not too heavy on the pocket. It cost us 900/head but remember, this was a vegetarian fare without drinks. I would say it will be about 1500/head. Though, definitely not a candidate for casual dining, a dinner at Pergola is worth the time and the money for one of those special days.

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All-in-One Chat Client

Recently, I came across a download list for Windows at www.cnet.com. One of the applications listed there was Pidgin, an IM Client that lets you chat on multiple protocols like Yahoo, Google, AIM and MSN. I have been using Pidgin for about a week now and have found it really useful. So here goes a quick and dirty review of Pidgin.

The download and installation experience was  very smooth. Once you install the software you then have to configure the accounts you will use Pidgin with. Of course, you can add more protocols later if you want.

One of the biggest advantages that I have seen of Pidgin is that it is very lightweight and does not take long to load. That means that Pidgin has to do away with niceties such as video and audio conversation. Having said that, one of the features I have taken a liking to is new mail notification. Pidgin will notify you of any new mails if you turn the option on.

The other nice feature of Pidgin is that it neatly organises your groups from different chat clients. So if you have a group called “Friends”  in both gtalk and AIM, it will show up in one group under Pidgin. Pidgin, by default supports tabbed chatting. Though it is very convenient, sometimes, you can miss out when a new message comes in. Luckily, the customization options in Pidgin is quite exhaustive. If you go to preferences you can see a whole host of options.

For the want-all freaks who are not satisfied with the default features that Pidgin provides there is something in for you too; Plug-ins. Pidgin comes with a set of plug-ins, so you can include whatever you think adds “jazz” to your client. I have not quite started playing with them yet so I will hold my comments and suggestions. Pidgin is open source so you can also develop your own plug-ins. I will leave it at that for a start. As I said, I am still playing around with this so do feel free to leave me comments on Pidgin or anything else that you have come across.

Developing Websites in Regional Languages

Recently, I had a couple of queries on how to develop sites in Hindi, Marathi and other regional languages so I thought I will actually blog about it. I have also had questions on whether using images for regional text is the way to go but fortunately, .NET and Windows gives you better and slicker ways of doing this so read on. I am using Windows XP and VS 2008 but the steps should be similar for almost all the Operating Systems.

One of the first things that you need to do if you are developing sites in regional language is to set up your webserver to display this text. This is how you can do it.

Step – I

Go to Start -> Control Panel - > Regional and Language Options

Click Languages Tab and then check the two text boxes. If you are developing sites only in Indian Regional languages, checking the second check box should do.

Step – II

The next step is to add the ability to enter Hindi Text on your machine. This can either be your Development Machine or your web server.

In the same screen click on Details under the Text Services and Input Languages. You are taken to the Text Services and Input Languages Screen. This is the screen where you tell your computer that you wish to add the regional language of your choice as an input mechanism.

Step - III

In your installed services click Add and Select the Language you want to be able to input. This is how your screen will look when you do this. You will see that I have added Hindi.

Another small change that you will probably not notice is in your task bar. On the bottom right you should see EN next to the System tray. Click on that EN and you will see the screen below

Click on Hindi to be able to enter text in Hindi. The easiest way to check this is to open a Word document and type there.

Now we have our system enabled to enter text in Hindi. Its time we move on to our application. As I have said before I am going to use VS 2008 to demonstrate this to you. Open VS 2008 and create a new website. In the Default.aspx page add a calendar control. Open the web.config and add the following tag inside the system.web element

<globalization uiCulture="hi-IN" fileEncoding="utf-8" requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8"/>

 Now run the website. If you have done everything right you should see the calendar in Hindi, something like below