लेखन

What is scale? Is it the number of customers a company has? Is it the number of products that are sold? Is it the amount of revenue the company makes? Is it the amount of infrastructure one has? Or is it the number of features the product has? Well, it can be all of this or none of this. When an organization talks about scale it is not just a number. When an economist talks about it, again it’s not just a number. For an economist, the scale is about doing more with less. Scale is about perspective, about relationship between two or more variables that ultimately help you generate optimum value for your efforts. Consider this, let’s say you are into making a lollipop. Selling 10 lollipops you earn $100 revenue of which $10 is you profit and $90 is the cost. When you increase you production you start selling 100 lollypops and earn $1000 revenue with $100 as your profit and $900 as cost. Did you really benefit from the scale here? In absolute terms, of course. In terms of ratios t...

We have recently been featured as the startup of the week on the StartupBootCamp Fintech Mumbai website. Just sharing the link to the original post by SBC here: https://www.startupbootcamp.org/blog/2017/05/fintech-mumbai-startup-week-manage-fortune/ Thats Sameer (Founder and CEO)  and myself (CTO) Will write more about the startup, what we do, how you may benefit from it and how has been our experience in separate posts. Till then, do check out our platform at  ManageMyFortune.com

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...

With the changing times and across levels of education, one thing that might have remained constant is that good teachers always teach how to think instead of being just the source of information on what to think. They use all the resources around them to help student's build their personalities. The goal of education cannot be mere preparation for earning livelihood in future. Coaching and training are enough for that purpose and anyone with proper access to the information can gain enough knowledge to earn a living. Better society is not formed by better earning future generation alone, it is formed by better ideas, innovation and evolution of human values, generation after generation.  Given the technological advances and access to enormous information, students of 21st century are not dependent on formal coaching for making ends meet. Before a teacher starts teaching a topic in classroom, some of the students may already have number of different pieces of information on...

A lot of Android devices, platforms and apps have several issues regarding rendering of non-English text especially that of Indic text. Though many of them claim to support various Indic and other languages, it usually either means that they have a font for that language included or they have some of the native apps supporting all these languages. But this does not mean all the app will be able to render the non-English text properly. This usually happens for one of the following problem being present: 1. No fonts added in the device (or the native android system) 2. Fonts are not accessible by the third party application 3. App has its own Unicode font, but the native android system does not support text layout rendering for the language 4. App has the font and the android system also supports the language, but the sdk for the particular platform does not have widgets integrated with the complex text rendering features. This problem gave birth to the idea of developing...

Most android devices come with set of fonts already installed for all the general purpose use with variety of styles and various languages. There is also something called 'fallback' font which ensures that in case a required font is not available, the system falls back to this font with wide range of characters and more generic style to display the text. But sometimes, you really want to use that specific font which is not there on the device or you just 'have' to use a some non-english font because the system by default does not have the font for the language you wish to use. Though upfront it looks like a simple task of installing the font, unfortunately android does not yet provide a simple way of doing it in user space. It is possible for an application to provide a custom font and use it within the application, but that's not really installing it on the device, its applicable only within the app. Recently while working with some Indic languages on androi...

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

Reply to this and the kinds.. Its wonderful how the highly literate and even the ones considered to be belonging to the policy making cult, who do rigorous analysis of things and subjects of wide variety, end up coming to such ill-informed (should I say insane?) conclusions and opinions when it comes to simple computer security from viruses, trojans and spywares. Even the computerized CAT could not survive such attacks. Why not just use a system that isn't vulnerable to the viruses and is just simply more secure than anything else in its class? Its a 3 decade old fact that Unix like architecture/systems are highly immune to virus attacks. And it is not the lesser user spread causing less viruses being created but the simple architectural design that prevents the harmful program's actions. Let it be any of the Gnu/Linux distributions, Mac OS(again unix like) or any Unix, they are all immune to most of the security problems and many of them are very much desktop user friendly. B...

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...

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,...

Finally I got a dedicated line internet connection installed back home after what felt like extremely tedious and very long three weeks of application, call center talks, complaints and repairs. I had discontinued the same service(You Telecom) some time back due to same problems. But when I felt an urge for it on weekend trips to home, there was no other option available even after a year. I really wanted to give a try to Airtel connection this time. But anyways, the 'broadband' connection is up and giving a 15kbps download speed (out of expected 192kbps). The cable modem I got with has two ports, one for ethernet cable and other for usb. When I asked their engineer if I can use these two lines to connect two machines at a time, he denied and said it would need a router. That didn't answer my curiosity about two lines and I gave it a try. My Fedora 8 machine picked up an IP which is strangely not belonging to the modem's network. But after setting up the pppoe connecti...

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...

So finally, I am giving out this long awaited draft: http://tinyurl.com/34yckl It addresses some of the OpenType, Unicode and fonts related issues. Many of the issues discussed here, have been the source of conflicts, especially for ml_IN. Thus it was an utter need to provide a detailed analysis like this. I hope the illustrations made there provide some common guidelines. There is certainly a scope for improvement. I would like to hear from various communities if they want some of the other left out issues to be also addressed. The draft is open for discussion and feedback.

It was a lazy Saturday and I spent a lot of time playing around with the layout of this blog on a frustratingly slow home wifi connection until I got settled into this fairly well structured design. Next I kept wondering how to categorize the posts, when I finally looked into a proper source i.e. Help section on blogger itself. Should I have started posting, I would have noticed the labels field. Anyways, its a Sunday early dawn and I am still up, not cared to get up in morning. Earlier today(or should I say the last day now) the bandwidth played bad on me. My email client kept complaining about mail deliveries and still I got acks for few of the mails. Bearing all the trouble I still managed to reply on the Lohit fonts issue. Now going back to relax to a movie , goodnight everyone. [LC: not again.. I am struggling to publish even this post.. is someone from reliance broadband reading this?]