Hold Open The Glass Door...Please

A sharp edged knife

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:19:40 GMT

I was reading Nirav's post about becoming an Enlightened Worker. I particularly liked this point:

"Surround yourself with people you admire and respect. When you work with someone better than you, your performance will improve."

This is something my dad always told me when I was younger and I feel with each passing day. Working or socialising with smarter people helps retain a sharpness in the thought process, as well as building up a practical sense to resolving problems. Being the smartest among the pack may get you to the top, but like the full-moon, the only open path would be to wane and fade.

The other ones I liked from the list are:

First recognize that you are responsible for your own future.

Mission statements for your organization and life are key to enlightened work. The mission statement is a compass to guide your priorities and decisions so you do not become lost in day-to-day activities.

Your self-confidence increases when you know you have done good work. Good results come from healthy self-esteem.

Speak your mind and share your ideas. Do not keep them to yourself.

Under-promise and over-deliver. Keep all commitments.

Be flexible and learn to live with uncertainty.

Celebrate the successes of others.

Wealth and power won’t make you happy. Health, love, and peace of mind will.

"Peace of Mind" = Definitely

P.S: And yeah... am married to a smart guy too.

Dhvani needs more love - in Bengali

Wed, 07 May 2008 10:06:41 GMT

santhoshtr has been looking for volunteers to help him out with Dhvani in Bengali. You need to be fairly skilled with programming in C, a native Bengali speaker (reading, writing, comprehension and understanding of correct pronounciation skills) and of-course excited enough to work on an award-winning project. Catch hold of Santhosh and do let him know if you like to participate in the project.

Fedora Localization Project Steering Commitee (FLSCo) - Election Results

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:22:20 GMT

A few days back, I had blogged about the FLSCo Elections. The results are now out and we have the first FLP Steering Committee. Congratulations to a great team and wishing them the very best.

The First FLSCo:

Piotr Drag

Holiday!!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:12:08 GMT

Indigo answered my prayers and now I am off home, on their spiffy new Pune-Kolkata flight (via Ahmedabad of course). But much much much cheaper than the other airlines. So I shall be away from mail and IRC for two weeks. Meanwhile I am pretty much anxious, that I might return to find sankarshan opening a chocolate factory inside the house. See ya folks!

Fedora Localization Project Steering Commitee (FLSCo) - Elections

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:30:52 GMT

The first Steering Committe of the Fedora Localization Project is on the way to be formed. The nomination period started on the 7th of April 2008 and closes on 13th April 2008. The elections would be held between 14th April - 20th April 2008.

The Committee would be comprised of 7 members with one member being designated as the Chair and Project Leader.

The top four vote-receivers serve on the FLSCo for 12 months and the next three elected candidates would serve in the Committee for 6 months

The Candidates have to be part of the Fedora Localization Project (i.e. member of the cvsl10n group)

The members of the cvsl10n group would be eligible to vote

More details about the Elections can be found here.

If you are an active member of the Fedora Localization Project and would like to be involved in creating new ideas and implementing long-term strategy for the project, please put in your candidacy at the Nominations Page.

:-)

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 04:37:05 GMT

The bug, reported earlier, has been fixed over the weekend. Thanks danwalsh and Stickster.

:-)

umm.. politically correct?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:43:55 GMT

This bug might cause a few guffaws, but then imho the messages would look more apealing to me once corrected. Nothing personal, danwalsh. :-)

Gnome Documentation - Terminology Recommendation Announcement

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:14:29 GMT

Shaun McCance has sent in an announcement about the Terminology revamping project that is being undertaken for Gnome Documentation styleguide. Everyday a term (or a group of related terms) would be sent to the gnome-docs list for discussion. Once a consesus is reached on the terms, the Completed List would be created. Eventually, the list would also contain language recommendations for both Gnome Documentation and User Interfaces.

A rough list of the terms is can be found here. This list has been collated from various documents.

<quote from Shaun's mail>

For the curious, my plan is to change the GNOME Documentation Style Guide to something more like the GNOME Manual of Style. That is, it will contain language recommendations for both documentation and user interfaces. There may be sections that deal specifically with documentation, if needed, but the core of the document will not be documentation-specific.

</quote>

Sounds like a great idea, towards standardizing the terminology base.

Desperation

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:12:37 GMT

A piece of news in the paper today, that upset me a lot.

A heart-wrenching scene played out on the tarmac of Mumbai airport on Saturday morning, where an offloaded passenger was seen crying with folded hands, pleading in vain to the commander seated in the cockpit, who refused to take him onboard.
...
"There definitely was an emergency in his situation. Probably, he cannot afford another air ticket. Or it could have to do with the strict service conditions in the Middle-East, wherein he stands to lose his job if he fails to report on a particular day. Or maybe, his visa was to expire. Whatever the reason be, I have never seen someone cry and plead like this," the source added.
...

It is the sense of sheer desperation and helplessness, when a person loses all control and the walls close in.

ps. I don't know who was at fault and who was to blame.

Apologies to my orkut friends!

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:06:47 GMT

My apologies to everyone who got spam messages from my orkut account with some f00 link. I got some wierd message from a friend of mine due to which messages were sent out to everyone on my friends list as well as subscribed me to random communities in Qatar. And I was wondering since morning what was wrong with this service and why I have been receiving so many friend requests all of a sudden until PowerPork told me what it was all about. blah!

r0ckstars!

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:37:17 GMT

Raghu Dixit Project and Avial have been featured in the current issue of India Today. Way to go people.... and hope you continue making more wonderful music!

Ambigram Fever

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:39:06 GMT

Ankita has been making ambigrams for sometime now and she made one for me too!

Thanks Ankita!

LC session at Abeda Inamdar Senior College, Pune

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:47:08 GMT

Last Saturday, /me and Ani headed off towards Abeda Inamdar Senior College in the morning, for a session on Linux Desktop basics. The session had been organised by Ms. Malika Siamwala, a teacher with the Department of Mathematics in the college. Its located within the Azam Campus, a beautiful location that houses about 10 institutes and playgrounds. Ani and I walked through the sprawling campus, trying to locate the college and exchanging anecdotes about our own college days.

The session was scheduled to start at 10:00 AM, but we started a little later. (Ms.Siamwala welcomed us with roses too :O ) We were told that the students from the mathematics department were not familiar with Linux at all, however they would be using it in their labs (which recently underwent an OS change) pretty soon. I started by showing off the desktop features like the log-in screen, user accounts, file browsers etc. A quick straw poll revealed that most people in the room used their computers to write documents in a word processor, surf web pages in a browser, make presentations, draw, play music, watch movies etc. The OO.o writer, OO.o impress, gimp, firefox, xmms, xine impressed them pretty much. A small introduction to community-based collaborative participation in Open source software development followed. However, imho, it might need another complete session to pass on the message and to give them a relatable picture. Next up was Manjusha with an introduction about the Pune Linux Users Group. She also spent some time answering questions about Open source software for Mathematical and Statistical analysis. Smriti, Shruti and Rashmi - students at SCISR shared their experiences from GNUnify. It was really nice to see them again. By this time, there were close to 60 people in the room. Some goodies (read LC stickers and gnome badges) were handed out. I also handed Ms.Siamwalla a copy of the Fedora 8 CD set, Fedora 8 LiveCD, printed copy of the Fedora Installation Guide and Desktop User Guide and a CD containing a set of screencasts gathered from the links collected by Nirbheek, Ankita and Gayathri. Thanks a lot. :-)

After the discussions ended, the students trooped around us for a better look at the applications as well as the localized desktop on my laptop. Ms.Siamwala later took us to their Department room and we had yummy samosas and sweets. Later we went to meet the Principal of the College, Mr.H.Khan. He invited us to have more sessions at the college.

An enriching experience for all of us and I really hope to be back there soon.

A few images here (the lights were a little dimmed out and I messed up with the camera settings):

p.s. Special Note of Thanks to quaid for helping me with the PDF version of the Fedora Installation Guide and the Desktop User Guide. :-)

Translating Strings with Plural forms in .po files

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:18:03 GMT

Claude Paroz reported on the gnome-i18n mailing list today about the msgfmt errors that were showing up on the damned lies page against some files in a few languages. Bengali_India also has a few red medallions and the problem was baffling me since msgfmt checks on the files locally were not showing any errors. It was only after submitting them to the Gnome svn that the msgfmt error messages were showing up. After discussions on the gnome-i18n mailing list and irc conversations, the following seems the correct solution for plural form related errors for languages that do not have any plural forms.

Open .po file in a text editor (like gedit) and insert the following line in the header section:

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;\n"

should look like this:

Once you encounter a string with a plural form there are two ways to go about it.

1. If both the strings contain a variable (like %d) indicating a number, then the translation can be done as per the language requirements for handling single and plural numbers. e.g.

msgid "%d file has been modified"
msgstr_plural "%d files have been modified"
msgstr [0] ""
msgstr [1] ""

In this case, after translation the string should look like the following in a text editor:

msgid "%d file has been modified"
msgid_plural "%d files have been modified"
msgstr [0] "%d-টি ফাইল পরিবর্তন করা হয়েছ "

Note: The %d has been retained in the msgstr.

2. The second way is the more important of the two and requires caution. If the singular version string does not have a variable, but the plural string contains a variable, then the translation of only the plural string has to be done. e.g.

msgid "one file has been modified"
msgstr_plural "%d files have been modified"
msgstr [0] ""
msgstr [1] ""

In this case, after translation the string should look like the following in a text editor:

msgid "one file has been modified"
msgstr_plural "%d files have been modified"
msgstr [0] "%d-টি ফাইল পরিবর্তন করা হয়েছ "

Note: The %d has to be present in the msgstr and will take the relevant number of "files modified" when the program encounters such a situation.

Also note, in both cases above the msgstr [1] "" has to be manually removed from the strings.

As a final check, please do ensure that the following command does not throw any errors:

msgfmt -vc -o /dev/null (filename.po)

For more information about plural-forms this document is extremely helpful.

Airport charges!! w00t!

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:01:40 GMT

Ok, I am not sure how this works out but from what I could gather from this report, the new airports at Hyderabad and Bangalore are going to charge something between Rs. 675 -1000 (Indian Rupees) every time someone decides to catch a flight from these places. This cost is over and above the "1. Fuel Surcharge + 2. Passenger Service Fee + 3. Air Traffic Congestion Fee" amounting to Rs.2025 that one has to pay as taxes for each ticket bought.

"Hyderabad International Airport Ltd is going to charge Rs 1,000 for international outgoing passengers and Rs 725 for domestic outgoing, while Bangalore International Airport Ltd will levy Rs 955 and Rs 675 for these, respectively. Taxes are over and above these charges."

I am not based in either of the two cities , but in Pune, which has its own share of wierdness related to air-travel, especially in my case,

First up, there are only three flights out from here that go to Kolkata (my hometown) and all of them are hoppers:

1. Jet Airways : flight out at 5:30 PM, reaches Kolkata at 9:30 PM (via Bombay)
2. Kingfisher: flight out at 5:30 PM, reaches Kolkata at 9:50 PM (via Ahmedabad)
3. Kingfisher ATR: flight out at 2:10 PM, reaches Kolkata at 8:40 PM (via Indore and Raipur)

(Just for the records, #3 always costs around Rs.2000 more than #2 and no one in their right mind would book on that flight for the entire sector. Its an ATR afterall and takes 6 hours!!)

The other way round the timings are like this:
1. Jet Airways : flight out at 6:05 AM, reaches Pune at 10:00 AM (via Bombay)
2. Kingfisher: flight out at 6:45 AM, reaches Pune at 11:00 PM (via Ahmedabad)
3. Kingfisher ATR: flight out at 7:15 AM, reaches Pune at 1:30 PM (via Indore and Raipur)

Add 1:30 hours more to the commute from the Kolkata airport to my home. The morning flights are such timed that one has to wake up at 3 in the morning. I don't know which terminal city in this case is an obscure destination, but given the number of Pune-based, Kolkata bound travellers we travel with from Mumbai (3-4 hours away from Pune by road) its pretty easy to assume that the flights would generally not be empty, if only

1. the prices were not so prohitive and,
2. the timings more convenient

One way fares between Pune-Kolkata starts from Rs.8000, which would be equal to the roundtrip fare between Mumbai-Kolkata.

And lets not even talk about the way the commercial jets take off from and land at this tiny little airport.

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:58:28 GMT

Overheard on #fedora-admin last night:

<$nick1> hmm i wonder how wikipedia will handle the power outage in florida
<$nick2> $nick1: what? PHP caused a power outage in flordia?
* $nick2 goes to tell everone OMG!!1!!
<$nick1> yeah too many people were trying to read the "good" articles on wikipedia :)
<$nick1> but seriously, wikipedia is hosted in florida somewhere

:-D

Too many t3s

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:28:54 GMT

Ever since I was Delhi bound for freed.in, I have been encountering t3rmin4t0r lookalikes quite a few times. First at Mumbai airport, there was this guy whom I overheard speaking in fluent bengali. Now, the chances of the real t3rmin4t0r speaking bn_IN is quite remote, hence any suspicions were easily discarded. After enjoying 3 days at Delhi, sankarshan and me boarded an Air-India plane to return home. The plane was on a Varanasi-New Delhi-Mumbai route and when we boarded there were already a few passengers inside. So, we located our seats and I nearly gasped. In the row behind us, 3 guys were fast asleep. Aisle and Window were sporting the same hairstyle as you-know-who-by-now. I sat down, fastened my seat belt and turned towards sankarshan to say something. There again...across the aisle on the same row. Yet another t3rmin4t0r.

Apparently 6-7 guys (somewhere between 25-35), including all the hairy ones, were travelling together. They were saying pretty rude stuff about the air-hostesses and doing mischiefs (like not following the instructions during take off and landing etc.) to get their attention. Initially, I thought they were a group from some high-paying IT company and were returning from a holiday after blowing up some good amount of money. Overall, pretty disgusting. However, after the meals had been served and everyone was settled in, a steward comes to them with a sheet of paper and a pen. He tells them that his friend follows their music and it would be really great if all of them could autograph that piece of paper for his friend. All of them quietly sign the sheet and then for the rest of the journey things were pretty much uneventful. Neat! They are a "hindi rock band", based in Mumbai. Not too famous I presume, but googling does help. :-)

Tazz, unfortunately, they were not performing at Eastwind Festival, but thanks for the list

FOSSKriti 08 and the new r0ckstar!

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:26:05 GMT

Looks like TechKriti '08 at IIT Kanpur was a blast and louiswu - the dude who had a big hand in making it happen has blogged about it here.

And here is to the new r0ckstar - our very own Ankita Garg - who spoke for 6 hours during her workshop on "Basics of the Linux Kernel". The other session was about LinuxChix India and we are all waiting for her to return and fill us in with the details. :-)

KDE localization - Identifying the branches for submission

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:58:31 GMT

I am writing this down so that I don't forget. Thanks to Karunkar for raising the question and Martin Schlander for the clarifications.

Release	Module-Branch	Status Page
3.5.x	/branches/stable/l10n/	status Page
4.0.x	/branches/stable/l10n-kde4/	status Page
4.1.x	/trunk/l10n-kde4/	status Page

GNUnify 08, LC-India BoF etc.

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:14:23 GMT

Albeit late entry about the event that was held at SCISR (Pune) last weekend - GNUnify 08. Besides the fact that the chirpy volunteers always make me wish that I was back in college and part of such a nice event, it was a nice occassion to meet up with friends, talk about stuff and generally have a good time. This year, I had a talk+BOF on behalf for LinuxChix - India. I started off with a general introduction about the group and then we moved onto the proposed agenda for the BoF. After the CityMeet last month, this was another nice brainstorming session. The session notes are up here, with a huge list of To-Dos that can be taken up during the year. Some of the tasks would be done locally, but overall the ideas are easily reproducable elsewhere too. Perhaps, the gang in Pune could lead the way. :-)

Another fun bit was the proposal to have the group's presence at various social networking sites. Barkha also seems to have received the same request at another event, where she was talking the very next day. Well, if the not-so-traditional forums help us take forward the idea amongst the youngsters, then it sounds like a pretty much fun idea.

A few of the *tireless* volunteers:

Even Karunakar turned up with the LC tee to show support. Really, sweet of him. He has been helping us all in the indic l10n community for a long time now and is a wonderful mentor. :-)

And Barkha, real sweetheart, brought us lovely home-cooked-her-mummy-made-yummy-stuff..

..travelling 10 hours on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

Ankita's talk is up next at TechKriti - IIT Kanpur.

Fruits, colors and breakfast

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 14:36:34 GMT

If one lives with a photography enthusiast , breakfast on a sunday morning gets delayed due to this:

Reminds me of Kathy Sierra's presentation on Creating Passionate Users.

Planets, some observations and tasks done

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:47:03 GMT

During the day I keep visiting multiple planets to get a general overview of things that people are talking about.

To start off (with some drumroll) there is a new planet exclusively for Indian women in the FOSS world: planet.linuxchix.org.in. Its still in a beta stage and Barkha is working to fine tune it. More feeds welcome and do drop in a mail to planet-admin at linuxchix dawt org dawt in to get on-board.

This morning I read Atul's listing of the FOSS events happening in the next few days all over India. This list along with Puthali's mail to the LinuxChix-India mailing list helped me redraw up the "Upcoming Event list" on the LinuxChix-India main page. There had been some complaints about the wiki main page looking cluttered. So as an attempt to correct it, the "Events" and "Upcoming FOSS Events" sections have been merged into Upcoming Events of Interest. A big list for February and March is in place already. Under each event, the participating members could add their talks/sessions etc. However, this format can always be changed if its not looking pretty. Also, there are new pages now for the CityMeets and Past participation by LinuxChix India members at various events.

(Also, my talk+BoF (one session) for GNUnify 08 got accepted. Its on the second day of the event i.e. 9th February at 3:30 PM in the afternoon.)

Ankita has done some work on the Task List page to segregate the tasks according to their status.

The other post that intrigued me was by Kart_ referring to the article about the EEE laptop and PC launched by ASUS. The opening lines from the article claim that the the EEE PC is aimed at "pupils, housewives, old persons, and teenagers". Are'nt "target users" of gadgets to be judged by the "use they put it into" and or "volume of usage", rather than their status/age.
What kind of "pupils or teenagers" are being talked about here?

What age (or perhaps baldness level) defines "Old persons"?

"Housewives"...ahem...I consider myself a "married working professional who also looks after the house she lives in" - does that count?

Home cooked food...

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:30:23 GMT

Thanks to Anuj's Mom...these days we (read hungry-for-home-made-food-maniacs) are getting the yummiest of food that we have tasted in a while. Thanks a lot Aunty and have a nice stay at Pune. :D

Also big thanks to Anuj for getting the tiffin boxes as well as for dragging us out of our seats to ensure we all get generous helpings.

RFC for bug 247233 answered

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:14:13 GMT

Thanks to Sayam and his dad for digging out an old book and sending it across in reply to the RFC call for bug 247233.

As per an extract from this document, the symbol looks best to be positioned as below:

The above reference is from the book titled Bangiya Shabdakosh by Haricharan Bandopadhyay published by the Shahitya Akademi. Right now Sayam is gathering a copy of the complete three volume set in Kolkata.

Lohit font - bugs and a baby

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:30:52 GMT

A bug related to the positioning of the ৺ (Isshar sign - U+09FA) was fixed by Rahul today after quite a bit of research by Amitakhya and me. The character was being positioned at-level with the other alphabets:

As far as everyone could remember, the dot within the sign would have to be at level with the matra - the horizontal bar on top of the alpbhabet, looking like this:

According to the Chalantika written by Rajshekhar Basu, this sign is used as a prefix for the following:

1. Name of a deceased person (শ্রী শ্রীমতি শ্রীযুক্ত etc. are used for living people)
2. Name of a deity
3. Name of a holy place

dd told me earlier that, since it was used mainly by printers there had been no standardization. That compounded the problem. It would be great to have an RFC on this matter. As of now the current positioning looks perfect in conjunction to all the shraddha chiti (শ্রাদ্ধ চিঠি) that I have seen over time.

Anyways, moving from the morbidness surrounding this entire symbol, its good to see so much activity happening with the Lohit fonts thats very much part of the Fedora Indic locales. It holds a special place in my heart because... I named them (shamless plug) 3 years back! :-D