लेखन

On Sunday, 21st December 2014, we had the Fedora 21 Release Party at Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (TIFR). I thought I would put together few major points from the event as a report and follow-up. But it seems few participants have already done a good job of writing excellent reports on the event. So just wish to pass on links to their blogs for detailed reports. If you are wondering what's there to report on a small party like this, then please do read them, they may seem interesting and educating. 1. Trupti Kini's take on the event 2. Praveen Kumar's report as a speaker Thanks to both Trupti and Praveen! Special thanks to HBCSE and the team in Gnowledge lab, and especially Dr. Nagarjun who has been our inspiration for working on free software, for helping us out in managing the event, letting us use the space, and most importantly guiding us for future directions. [P.S. Will write separately about the contemplation over and ideas that emerged dur...

[Continuing from previous post ].. Open source and free software community has been growing and preaching its philosophy for over decades. This preaching has also been supported by solid product lines that are freely available, better in performance and are more addictive than any other proprietary software around. Yet the ground realities of the software world are still largely favorable for proprietary model. Comparing market shares, or user base would be futile since open source hardly follows any market mechanism. It is very difficult to keep track of number of open source users. Hence the only method to understand the popularity and usage patterns is to call hundreds of common software users and ask them what software do they have on their home computers. I have been a part of a marketing campaign and fortunate enough to be present in the actual execution at various places, which gave an opportunity of understanding thousands of common computer users. With no exception, all of the...

"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!

They say, "i18n is not a feature, its an architecture". Its not about downloading and configuring stuff around thats available somewhere in pieces, its about creating something that was not there at all. Me and Pravin have been recently working on getting few of the yet-to-be (digitally) visible languages to meet a minimum technical support/usability criteria. On this background both of us came up with an idea of having a talk or demo on this at foss.in 2008. But looking at the amount of information and practical work involved with the entire thing, a workout looked like a more sound option. So we proposed the workout with title, " Creating Language Support Architecture (i18n) For A New Language On Desktop " which is right now in the first shortlist . The plan is to start with essential theory and some demo about the work, followed by some real work with the help of participants. The proposed abstract is as follows.. Aim is to guide developers from languages that s...

The pango bug #441654 about mprefixups for Malayalam, better known as "Kaarkkodakan" issue has now undergone a history of one year and has caused a lot of pain among Malayalam users. It has also seen a lot of patches like this so far. But none of them neither solve the problem completely nor were they fit for Pango's coding style. Now, finally I have come up with a patch that looks pretty much generic and does not affect the coding style much. Also the testing done so far proves to be fine. All the test cases reported so far have been fixed up without anything else getting affected. Manilal has also did his bit by doing the testing himself and posting the screen shots . Now if everything goes fine and Behdad's critical eye doesn't spot any problem :-), hope to see this one getting committed for next pango release soon.

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...

It all started with Kushal's query about python's strange behavior regarding % operator. But my own digging went on so much that I got tempted to write an entire post than just a reply. Kushal, you might find the answer for your query somewhere at the end. Integer division is far more interesting than one could imagine. Especially when it comes to negative numbers. Even more interesting are the topics of remainder, modulo and truncation. In general, for given two integers N and D, you would simply divide the absolute values |N| by |D| and if only one of them carries negative sign you would mark the quotient negative otherwise positive, the remainder would carry the sign of N. Now take an example, -2/3. Your quotient would be 0 and remainder would be -2. Now try the same thing on Python. You will get -2/3 = -1 and -2%3 = 1. Now lets rethink of both manual and python's results. Your manual quotient is zero because the absolute value of N is less than that of D. But thinking ...

This weekend got contributed for the first Indic Mashup workshop. The idea initiated by Karunakar finally took shape inside Red Hat premises at Pune. The participants were expected to come from various language communities. So most of the Red Hat's Localization team appeared on a Sunday morning. It would have been great if more linguists and i18n contributors around Pune and Mumbai would have participated. But except Karunakar and Localization team, the only linguist present was Ravi Pandey who is a font designer and Marathi, Sanskrit expert. Still the crowd of 13 and the issues were good enough to discuss and work upon for 10 to 5 schedule. Various issues from keyboard layout to collation tables, a lot got discussed. I thought related bug reports could also have been filed at appropriate places, but that might need more focussed workshops in near future. Now we are clear what issues are there and what can be done for them. I think this is a very good achievement for now. So far,...

Assuming you are using a Gnu/Linux box with input methods(mostly scim) available to input many of the Indic scripts and have Lohit fonts installed. Open gedit and start typing anything. Now keep changing the keyboard layout to write something in each language say Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil and so on. Don't worry if you don't know the languages, just type garbage. You will notice that most of the scripts supported by Lohit fonts are more or less scaled to each other. Now try typing Telugu. Still the size is scaled? Yes, they look matched in size. But did you notice the hight of that cursor? This is an issue with Telugu that even though the font on average looks scaled properly, the cursor size is not. And thus the spacing between two lines is also unexpectedly large. Of course you can reduce the size of the cursor by reducing font size, but it still remains out of proportion to the glyph sizes and thus giving ugly line spacing. It appears that the cursor size is determin...

Linus Torvalds made it clear that the Linux operating system is going to stay under GPL (General Public License) 2 and not migrate to GPL 3. Read more on LinuxDevices.com GPL has been a bit confusing for me. Now whats new with GPL 3. Why should anyone migrate from v2 to v3? Can anyone make things clear? Please comment.