लेखन

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.

It seems like there is some problem with comment posting on Anivar's blog . So I decide to put my reply as a separate blog post. Here it goes: Few factual corrections and comments: 1. About the pango bug 357790 and the patch on it: The patch on this bug is a mere clean up version of the patch on bug 121672 which was originally created by LingNing. This was also based on the inputs given by Ani about the grammar of 0d30 and 0d31 which was later resolved (to 0d30 only) through discussions with smc. Point is not to transfer the responsibility, but to acknowledge that pango genuinely has a problem that it does not behave the way Uniscribe does. Another problem in this case is that, Uniscribe bahavior has changed from its version in XP to Vista and we are yet to fix this bug completely. Anyway, my patch was reverted one year back (see Comment #32 on bug 357790 ). Ever since then I have urged on concentrating on the original issue which I still continue to. And Lohit was agreed to b...

First: _Some updates on Lohit Malayalam fonts_ Recently, there has been a huge agitation by Malayalam community about the bugs in the f9 final version of lohit fonts. You can get a glimpse of it here . Most of these were either last minute hickups or not reported at all until then. But whatever it was, the final product could not be buggy. So, within a short span of time, all these bugs ( #444559 , #444561 , #444563 ) were fixed for Lohit and tagged into for the f9 final. So the version in fedora and latest upstream, lohit-2.2.1 is free of all these bugs. Malayalam users would be able to find the fixes in the following screenshot. Second: _Some comments on the events going around_ After working for so many years on so many languages for so many different tools and applications, sometimes for some organizations, sometimes just out of passion, I (or should I say we, the language computing guys) have developed this immense love for all the languages of India. They are all rich in their he...

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 ...