लेखन

This is going to be a long post and I am going to think aloud while typing it out. So before you lose interest, first of all, let me thank both Red Hat and CDAC for jointly hosting the FUEL-GILT Conference 2013 . The 2 days conference at Pune not just helped the default objective of advancing on the Fuel project but also revived the Indic computing community. It is after a long time that the stalwarts of Indian Language technology all got together on the same platform and worked on ideas and tasks that have been waiting for a long time. The significant highlight of the event has to be the growing harmony and collaboration between the technologists, linguists, Government bodies and Open Source community. So what is FUEL? Going by the words on the brochure and what I understand over the years, FUEL started with a simple idea of standardizing the most commonly used entries in the menus and submenus of a desktop and hence the name FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization). Toda...

The Tamil Nadu state government in its IT policies declared two important points: 1. Unicode would be accepted as a standard for encoding Tamil 2. Tamil glossaries would be made available through Wiktionary I think this is a really good step in a state where there has been a lot of fight and controversy over the encoding standard. As far the glossaries are concerned, Governments should always ensure the public accessibility of the digital resources being created in their institutes, be it glossaries, corpora, fonts or research papers. Just hoping that these stated objectives would be achieved in a timely manner. Read more at: http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050454560400.htm

"Show me the code" is really showing its outputs. With help from Gora Mohanty and Ravishankar Shrivastava, we now have a new Chhattisgarhi (hne_IN) locale defined in glibc with changelog: "" 2008-12-05 Ulrich Drepper * SUPPORTED (SUPPORTED-LOCALES): Add hne_IN. * locales/hne_IN: New file. Contributed by Pravin Satpute . "" Thanks Pravin and Urlich for making it upstream, http://sourceware.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/localedata/locales/hne_IN?cvsroot=glibc I am sure there is a lot more to come in near future. - Cheers!

With the start of 5th day, starts the end of a journey. A journey of talks, presentations, discussions, BoFs and of course the workouts at foss.in accompanied by a nice not-too-hot-not-too-cold rainy climate in Bangalore, negated by the depressed concerns about the terrible happenings back in Mumbai. About the event, my personal highlights have been the talks, workouts and BoFs around Indic computing. It is interesting how the language computing forms a significant part of almost any foss event in India. The collation workout, Indic BoF, talks on text-to-speech, speech recognition, machine translations all went fine along with my own talk about language i18n support accompanied by Pravin on very first day. On other notes, the Nokia stall very well showcased maemo and N810, with the talks inline with the applications it runs. The workout on collation helped update the status of all the Indic sorting and proceed with the remaining ones like Malayalam. Bengali still remains uncertain. ...

Some time back somebody talked to me about how illogical the schedule of fedora is, why do you have the translations deadline before the final development freeze. There is no point in freezing the translations when your development is still going on. Why don't you do it gnome's way? they don't freeze their translations before development! Having received this unusual query all of a sudden and being far from internet connectivity to check the facts, I had no clear answer by then. But the logic had to be given. To go by facts, the example about gnome was wrong! Check the gnome's schedule , they have string freeze (the term they use for translations) a lot before the code (development) freeze. Having worked on both fedora and gnome l10n projects, I had an idea about the logic behind this, but I think it turned blur with the time. The logic is.. Development (or coding) and translations are two different tasks. In all the projects that need translations, have a set of langu...