Dear Bhadra

I am glad to hear from you again!

You wrote:

> I am joining this group to get in touch with Venerable Pandita. He is my Pali teacher in 2003 while we were in Pa Auk Tawya Meditation Center. I had sent an email message to him but I am not sure whether I had the right address because I did not hear from him until now.

Actually what you had was my first Yahoo address. I made another Yahoo
address, which was easier to remember, and used it; but I failed to
notify others. Afterwards I moved to Gmail; my primary address is
ashinpan@.... It was entirely my fault that your message failed to
reach me.

> I had read some of yours messages and came to know that you had lost some of yours data. So I am happy to let you know that I had converted all yours notes to Unicode encoding, made some styles and corrected some errors. Please let me know how to send you the notes.
>

The data I have lost is what I have researched in Sri Lanka for my
thesis. Thanks a lot any way.

> I like the Unicode encoding system so my project will has to be in a system running Internet Explorer 5 or above which is able to handle Unicode font and XML files.

Have you tested it with Firefox, Opera, etc.? (They are alternatives to
Internet Explorer) I'd like to advise that you should stick to industry
standards rather than working for IE only.

> I had made something for the Declensions.

You might remember that our proposed project arose out of my frustration
in having to force my students to memorize declension tables, etc.. Our
objectives have been:
1. To get all possible noun stems and case-endings from the input of a noun
2. To get all possible verbal stems, verbal endings, and paradigmatic
forms from the input of a conjugated verb
3. To set up a dictionary available in the public domain to help the
user to find the actual components of the noun or verb submitted as
input (To be implemented after achieving the former two)

You proposed to use Visual Foxpro, and I agreed.

However, I have changed my mind. I now believe that cross-platform
compatibility is very important. For instance, there are many Mac and
Linux users in this group. I myself am using Linux on my machine.
Persons like us cannot use Windows-only programs.

So I think you should avoid a Windows-centric approach if you are to
have your software as useful as possible. At present, developing on Java
would be the best approach --- you can use the resulting software on any
machine having the Java runtime environment. What do you think?

> I would like to hear your comment.
> My email address is shibhadra@.... I only surf the net once a week. I may be going back to Pa Auk in September.
>

Please send me whatever you have to send to my address as an off-list post.

with metta

Ven. Pandita