लेखन

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...

Unicode 5.1 release was announced earlier this month on 4th April. Here I have put a diff taken of Unicode 5.1 character database against that of Unicode 5.0. My buddy, Parag also did a nice job of summarizing the Indic specific changes, that I am trying to restate now. So, here go the updates on Indian scripts UCD: A. New Indic Scripts Added to Unicode: 1. LEPCHA: Lepcha is a language spoken by the Lepcha people in Sikkim in India,and parts of Nepal and Bhutan. The Lepcha script (also known as "róng") is a syllabic script which has a lot of special marks and requires ligatures. Its genealogy is unclear. Early Lepcha manuscripts were written vertically, a sign of Chinese influence. Lepcha is considered to be one of the aboriginal languages of the area in which it is spoken. Total number of speakers numbers near 50,000. Unicode Range =>U1C00 to U1C4F Chart URL => http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1C00.pdf 2. OL-CHIKI: The Ol Chiki script, also known...

..on Sundays. This is a bit off topic, but just to warn others who might be interested. If you are on a weekend shopping and are planning to buy some gift items, and don't want to give the gifts without proper covering, make sure if the shopping center or the mall wherever you are shopping is providing Gift Wrap service or not. In a peculiar event this Sunday, the shopping assistant at Big Bazar (Vashi) informed us that the articles will be gift wrapped at their Costumer Service counter free of cost. But after clearing the cash counter, when we reached the C.S. counter, we were denied of the service saying that it is not provided on Sunday. huh? If there would have been a huge crowd, it could be still understood. But with their decaying reputation, this Sunday wasn't much busy at BB. The man on the counter was so much reluctant to provide the service that he actually offered us to take the goods back, sending us back to the floor we got it from and returning the money, but not ...

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 is a second day in freed.in and I can say it was worth being here so far. Most of the people were seen faces at foss.in but its always good to meet old friends again and again. Additionally the lower density of people here is a good thing in a way that you get to interact more with the people you want. Something not possible when there is a lot of crowd around. First day was all spent attending the talks. I spend good time with KK, talking passionately about free software and philosophy. I see the influence of Nagarjuna in him. But he has his won way of saying things. He is a lot aggressive while Nagajuna is a lot humble. Something he admits himself. Anyway there were conclaves going on parallel but so far i.e. the last session of day two, I have not been there. Today was much special. Gora made sure that I get introduced with Andreas Vox, the scribus developer. It was really nice talk to him about various tech savvy issues related to page layout, text layout and lot more. I did n...

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,...

The long awaited Samyak fonts are finally in Fedora . Being one of the major initial projects in my career, Samyak will always remain close to the heart. Thanks to Pravin for packaging them very well in accordance to the font SIG's guidelines and thanks to Parag for reviewing it. Thanks to Sandeep Shedmake as well for driving this in. His contributions for licensing/copyright text correction and few other bug fixes really made it happen. I had plans to put them in fedora's last two releases as well, but something else always kept it away from priority. Somebody must have said, 'never forget to thank yourself'. So here I am, patting my own shoulder for being the initiator of the design for these fonts. One more reason to fall in love for this, the name ' Samyak ', given by me, still remains a source of inspiration and attachment. Finally how can I forget Dr. Nagarjuna G., who has been the initiator and the guiding force behind the entire project. A special tha...