लेखन

Its been about six months since I have been distanced form the regular spheres of open source and language computing community, partly by choice, largely inevitable. It was obvious that contributions will decline after leaving Red Hat. Life at IIM has also been busier than expected. Problem with student life is that it gives you some degree of freedom, but at same time, puts enough constraints to ensure the under utilization of that freedom. Feeling a bit sorry for missing the hat-trick for foss.in. It would have been third consecutive year of participation had I been able to do so this time. Hope things have been as interesting as ever at foss.in 2009. Anyway. Meanwhile the only significant touch with foss has been being on the user side of it. I haven't found any instance of any linux distro (in use by students) on campus except the one I am running, that too as a parallel machine. Even the B-school guys seem to be reluctant to leave the windows world. I used to wonder why many o...

"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!

We didn't have a great camera and skills with us but clicked every moment that looked interesting and worth saving. Here I have uploaded few pics taken from either Pravin's digicam or my cellphone cam. Lookout for ones that are tagged with ' fossin2008 '. Apart from foss.in, there are few taken while wandering around in the city of Bangaluru. There are few more, but they would better fit in my orkut profile. 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...

I think the term 'Language Support' has been used in more vague sense so far (please correct me if I am wrong). Also there has been a difference between a language being supported technically and a language that is supported with all the localization. Thus there has been a need to define the terms with more clarity. I think it would be good if we have two different sections for a language support namely, i18n and l10n. Recently I have tried to formulate a minimum criteria for a language to have "I18N Support". The same is documented here: https://fedoraproject.org/ wiki/I18N/ LanguageSupportCriteria On the same lines we may even have similar criteria for l10n support. Although the above has been defined from fedora perspective, I hope it would be common for most other distributions. Feedbacks are welcome :-)