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...

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...

It's been several months now that we have been brainstorming about the logo and caption. We all were thinking on lines of both creativity and value offerings. Gautam was continuously thinking on lines of how to communicate imagination and implementation parts simultaneously, the left and right of the brain. Many tag-lines popped up, but always there was something missing. Finally, me and joy took up these two words from Gautam and simply put a dot between them. It sounded so crisp! 'Imagination.Implementation'! Meanwhile, many of us were trying to come up with the design ideas. For me, playing with various shapes of 'K' and using whatever minuscule knowledge of calligraphy/typography I had, became my regular pass-time to keep myself awake in gaseous classrooms. In later stages, I got stuck on the idea of creating a character out of K that can personify the values we worked on so long. Finally emerged the k-man that is so carefree, cheerful, and aesthetic. Joy took t...

"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. ...

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...

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...

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.

After advocating font licenses to be other than GPL, I had to review the license of the self maintained Samyak font. Thus the discussion is on at samyak-users list. If you think there is really something about GPL with 'font exception' and OFL then please join the list and start commenting. The other list (samyak-devel) is not functioning an I'm trying to get it up. Should be ok within couple of days. Till then the general purpose IRC channel #samyak on freenode.net would be a good place to find developers and do some quick chats.

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?]