Santhosh Thottingal » Community

Indic Language Computing Workout, Pune

Santhosh — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:29:15 +0000

On 22nd August, I conducted a workout session with Praveen on Indic Language Computing at Red Hat Office, Pune. The plan was to solve some of the issues in Devanagari support for the encoding converter Payyans. But most of the time was spent on Introducing the concepts of Indic language computing to participants. Project Silpa was also introduced and demonstrated. Students from College of Engg, Pune and other colleges attended. Red Hat sponsored the venue at their office. It was very interesting to interact with energetic and enthusiastic students.

Wikimania 2010, Poland

Santhosh — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:25:44 +0000

I left Chennai on Wednesday(8th) and reached Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. Rest of the people from India for wikimania- Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian, Srinivas Gunta, Arjun Rao were already reached the airport and I joined them. We reached Gdansk Airport by 12.30 PM. Our accommodation was at a students hostel of Gdansk University. Language was a big issue since most of the people does not understand English and only know Polish Language. The lady at the reception of the hostel we stayed was using Google translate tool for communicating with us. The Gdansk city is a very beautiful city with streets of big brick made tall buildings.

The conference started on Friday morning. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. talked about the strategies of foundation, and it followed by a QnA with wikimedia board members. We presented the Malayalam CD to Sue Gardner. She remembered the International free software conference she attended at Trivandum on 2008 december.
Our workshop on offline wikipedia versions started at 2.30. Martin Walked introduced the workshop to participants. Manuel Schneider from German wikipedia explained the Openzim format for offline compressed storage of wikipedia and the available readers on desktop computers and mobile phones. Shiju Alex introduced the Malayalam wikipedia offline verision 1.0. I talked about the issues and solutions for providing an offline version, particularly a non-latin complex script wiki to users in CD ROM or DVD. I demonstrated sample offline wikis on Hebru, Tamil, Polish, English, Japanese with the wiki2cd tool. There were a couple of questions on wiki2cd and openzim. Kul Takanao Wadhwa and Tomasz Finc from wikimedia foundation who are focusing on offline wiki projects attended the workshop and we had a discussion after the talk.

Offline wikipedia people: myself, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker, Manuel Schneider

The offline wiki workshop continued with Pediapress team. They are the people behind the recently added export book/PDF feature of wikipedia. Unfortunately this feature require lots of improvements to get work with Indian scripts.
We met Gerald M, who focus on language support of wikis. He is such a person with amazing passion towards our local language wikipedias. We discussed on the technical issues of the local language wikis. Siebrand joined the discussion and he pointed out some improvements in wiki2cd software.

Discussion with Siebrand on wiki2cd improvements. From left 2 right: Tinu Cherian, myself, Gerard M, Siebrand

On the second day I met Volker Haas, the developer of PDF export/books feature of wikipedia. The library used by the extension of creating PDFs is Reportlab. But it does not support complex scripts such as Indic or Arabic. We have a long discussion on possible solutions. Discussed the Reportlab code. the mwlib code, and the s/w which I am writing now a days to provide complex script pdf rendering APIs. We will continue to try out some of the options we have to solve this issue soon.

Martin Walker, who presented the Article Selection process of English wikipedia along with us in the workshop invited me and Shiju for a dinner with his family. And we went for that.

The third day started with plenary session by Jimmy Wales. He talked about small language wikipedia and the issues faced by them. He emphasized the need for offline versions of wikipedia to reach more number of people and talked about the Malayalam Wikipedia offline version.

Jimmy Wales with Malayalam wikipedia CD

Mayooranathan from Tamil wikipedia presented the issues and statistics of Tamil Wikipedia Community. On Monday and Tuesday, we spent time by roaming around the Old Town of Gdansk. Visited St. Marys Church , the biggest brick made church in the world. We climbed the 400 steps of the tower of the church. From the top of the chruch, one can see the entire city. We went to the Baltic sea beach -Westerplatte on a boat and visited Wisłoujście Fortress

* Creating Malayalam Wikipedia CD: http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/creating-malayalam-wikipedia-cd/
* Wiki2cd: http://thottingal.in/blog/2010/04/17/mlwikioncd/
* Wikipedia Sign post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-04-19/News_and_notes#Briefly
* Gerard’s Blog: http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/04/best-of-malayalam-wikipedia.html
* Gerard’s Blog: http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/04/cd-dowloaded-4390-in-10-days.html
* Gerard’s Blog: http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/07/malayalamwikipedia-success-story.html

Attending Wikimania 2010

Santhosh — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:32:45 +0000

I will be attending Wikimania 2010, Gdansk, Poland. This annual international conference of the Wikimedia community is from July 9 to July 11.

I will be presenting wik2cd, the tool I wrote for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 there in a joint workshop with wikipedia offline developers. I will be joining with Manuel Schneider, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker in the workshop titled: Creating offline version of Wiki content – Solutions and Challenges. Apart from this, I will be meeting pediapress team, the team behind wikipedia’s latest PDF/Book export feature. There are some issues in this tool for working with Indic languages, mainly because of the PDF rendering engine not capable of rendering complex scripts.

Thanks to Wikimedia foundation for granting me a scholarship to cover travel expenses.

Conferences : FOSS.IN and NCIDEEE

Santhosh — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:14:16 +0000

FOSS.IN 2009 starts on 1st December. I wanted to attend all 5 days but I have another conference on Dec 1st to 3rd at Chennai. I am attending National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 – (NCIDEEE 2009) at Loyola College, Chennai. So I will miss the first 3 days of foss.in.
We have a workout on Project Silpa during foss.in. I am also planning to have a workout with Debayan and Jinesh to get his tesseract-indic OCR work with Malayalam.

See you at foss.in!

Openoffice Indic Regional Language group

Santhosh — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:48:00 +0000

We just formed Indic Regional Language group for Openoffice. This is as per the Openoffice Native Language Consortium Plans. The objectives of such groups can be read from here. Basically the group is meant for better coordination among Indic languages to make Openoffice experience in our language better.
The announcement of this group is here

Thanks to Charles-H. Schulz, we got a mailing list indic@native-lang.openoffice.org. To subscribe login to http://native-lang.openoffice.org

We just started, and I will soon setup a wiki page there. To start with , I will collect the list of issues pending for Indian languages from people from various languages and will find out people from various languages as point of contacts. Feel free to contact me for anything related to Openoffice in your language.

Update: June 3, 2009: This is our wiki page

Localization: What are we missing?

Santhosh — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:19:00 +0000

[This blog post is kind of self criticism and written not forgetting the valuable contribution that l10n communities are doing. ]
Some observations on the Localized desktops in Indian Languages
* Not all localization team members try the application that he/she translate at least once before working on the PO file. Result: If somebody does the localization without understanding what the application does and try the en_US interface, he/she miss the context of the strings. An example I have seen : the string “Querying” was translated to xx_IN language string which means “Questioning” instead of the required string corresponding to “Searching”. Sometimes we miss to understand how much space the string is going to take in the screen and we translate a small English word to a long xx_IN string to make the meaning clear. Result: Ugly interface.

Tamil gedit from Ubuntu 8.10(Click to enlarge)
* Not all localization team members *try* the application that he/she translated after completing the PO file or even after the application is released. This happens when he/she translates many applications(sometimes if it is part his/her job).
* Practically, there is no process called *testing* localized desktop in our SDLC. L10N members translates a PO file and sometimes he/she translates it as text file rather than a user interface. It is must that we should bring some process to make sure that the localized desktop is tested for usability, contextually correct translation, spelling mistakes, wrong short cut keys, fuzzy strings , non translated strings in main interface etc etc.
* Since the ratio between the total number of applications in a desktop environment and number of team members is very less, we end up in translating one application by many people. Result: inconsistent translation and no ownership for ensuring the translation quality. Ramadoss from Tamil team was suggesting that ideally , for each application there should be a person from each language , who is responsible for timely translation, testing. He can take more than one application responsibility but not more than say, 10. Practically, this requires a big l10n community per language and unfortunately we don’t have it as of now.
* Peer review, one of the important and mandatory process in l10n is not happening properly when the release date is approaching. L10N communities often try to meet the percentage of completion somehow. IMHO, the new l10n tools frameworks often miss to give importance for peer review in the workflow they design. FOSS community, being inclusive in nature often welcomes new l10n contributors. I have seen many members improving their l10n skills after making the corrections as per the review comments from others. When a new l10n workflow allows every contributor to submit their translated PO file without the peer review from community, the ultimate result is very bad user interface. We have seen this many times with Rosetta translations of Ubuntu. Everybody going there tries out the Rosetta “features” and leave few strings “translated” there. And Ubuntu takes those strings for their immediate release. Upstream translations are never taken on time or the “translated” strings are never submitted to upstream. Result: Very bad localized desktop with many spelling mistakes, inconstant translations etc.. We ml_IN team used to watch who is “contributing” through Rosetta and make him work with the community. I hope the new translation frameworks will give sufficient attention to this problem. If we are not keeping a balance between newbie translation and quality assuarance , our localized desktops will not improve.

Again Tamil gedit, but from Debian Lenny. Compare it with the Ubuntu version shown above(Click to enlarge)

* User feedback: The number of users who use the desktop in their own mother tongue, even though the % of translation is more than 80% for many languages, is very less. IMHO, It is because of a ‘dependency conflict’ of the following things
a) A person who is not good in English
b) A person want to use computer in mother language for some “purpose”
c) A person who is capable of spending Rs ~20K for a computer
Most of the cases, there is a conflict between any 2 of the following and that ends up in a) Person use his desktop in english b) Person not using computer at all. I am sure that if there are good number of users, we will not end up in interfaces I showed in the screen shots.
* One inconsistency I noticed across localized desktops is regarding the shortcut keys/accelerator keys. Some languages use English short cut keys and give at the end of the word in Brackets for eg: അടയ്ക്കുക (C). As you can see in screen shots sometimes we have small letter and sometimes capital letter for that. Some languages use letters in xx_IN itself. But there is no consistency. For Control and Alt keys, some language translate them, some others keep it in English. What is the problem with English short cut key? For using English short cut key , the user should be using English layout keyboard. For shortcut keys in xx_IN, one should be using xx_IN keyboard layout. For a user(assume that he use xx_IN desktop since he is not good in English) typing in xx_IN in gedit using xx_IN keyboard, is it possible to use the short cut keys if we give in English? Are we expecting that for using short cut key while typing the document, he change switch his keyboard layout ? (btw, anybody noticed that Apple doesn’t use Accelerator keys in its OS?)

bn_IN gedit in Ubuntu 8.10(Click to enlarge)

ml_IN gnome dictionary client in Ubuntu 8.10(Click to enlarge)

Suggestion/Ideas are welcome… How can we make our localized desktop more beautiful and user friendly?

Updates…

Santhosh — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:09:00 +0000

Praveen prepared videos from the matrix screen savers in 6 languages
This video is translated to Malayalam. For those who are interested in how to do that refer this
I prepared the glibc collation table for Malayalam . But still some more bugs to be fixed
We friends are working on adding Saka year system to KDE calendar system and it is almost ready . And here is the video : Saka calendar in KDE
Dict based english-malayalam dictionary is in developement and we are ready for a beta release. Rajeesh did a woderful job in preparing it
KDE Malayalam team is doing great job
Worked on hunspell to handle the agglutinative nature of Indian languages and found some problems with hunspell. Hunspell developer Nemth is looking into that
Sujith added Malayalam support to KLetters
Planning to attend fossmeet @ Model Engineering College, Cochin

സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യദിനാഘോഷം 2008: ഭാഷാ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് സെമിനാറും ഇന്‍സ്റ്റാള്‍ ഫെസ്റ്റും

Santhosh — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:47:00 +0000

സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യദിനാഘോഷം 2008
ഭാഷാ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് സെമിനാറും ഇന്‍സ്റ്റാള്‍ ഫെസ്റ്റും
മലബാര്‍ ക്രിസ്ത്യന്‍ കോളേജ്, കോഴിക്കോട്

സപ്തംബര്‍ 20, രാവിലെ 10 മണി മുതല്‍ വൈകുന്നേരം 5 മണി വരെ

സംഘാടനം: സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിംഗ്, മലബാര്‍ ക്രിസ്ത്യന്‍ കോളേജ്, കോഴിക്കോട്,

ഫോസ്സ്‌സെല്‍ നാഷനല്‍ ഇന്‍സ്റ്റിറ്റ്യൂട്ട് ഓഫ് ടെക്ലനോളജി – കോഴിക്കോട്

വിവരസാങ്കേതികവിദ്യയുടെ മാനുഷികവും ജനാധിപത്യപരവുമായ മുഖവും ധിഷണയുടെ പ്രതീകവുമാണു് സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേറുകള്‍. പരമ്പരകളായി നാം ആര്‍ജ്ജിച്ച കഴിവുകള്‍ വിജ്ഞാനത്തിന്റെ സ്വതന്ത്ര കൈ മാറ്റത്തിലൂടെ, ചങ്ങലകളും മതിലുകളും ഇല്ലാതെ, ഡിജിറ്റല്‍ യുഗത്തില്‍ ഏവര്‍ക്കും ലഭ്യമാക്കുന്നതിനും ലോകപുരോഗതിക്കു് ഉപയുക്തമാക്കുവാനുമാണു് സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേറുകള്‍ നിലകൊള്ളുന്നതു്. സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേറുകള്‍ വാഗ്ദാനം ചെയ്യുന്ന മനസ്സിലാക്കാനും പകര്‍ത്താനും നവീകരിക്കാനും പങ്കുവെക്കുവാനുമുള്ള സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യമാണു് സ്വതന്ത്ര വിവരവികസന സംസ്കാരത്തിന്റെ അടിത്തറ. ഈ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യം പൊതുജനമദ്ധ്യത്തിലേക്കു് കൊണ്ടു വരുവാനും പ്രചരിപ്പിക്കാനുമായി ഓരോ വര്‍ഷവും സപ്തംബര്‍ മാസ ത്തിലെ മൂന്നാമത് ശനിയാഴ്ച ലോകമെമ്പാടും സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യ ദിനമായി ആചരിക്കുന്നു.

ഈ വര്‍ഷത്തെ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യ ദിനം മലയാളഭാഷാ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിംഗിനു് പ്രാമുഖ്യം നല്കി , ഈ മേഖലയില്‍ ഇതിനകം നടന്ന പ്രവര്‍ത്തനങ്ങള്‍ മനസ്സിലാക്കാനും വിലയിരുത്താനും ഉപയോഗിക്കാനും കൂട്ടായ പ്രവര്ത്തനത്തിലൂടെ അവ മെച്ച പ്പെടുത്തുവാനും ലക്ഷ്യമിട്ടുകൊണ്ടു് സംഘടിപ്പിക്കപ്പെടുകയാണു്. സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിംഗും കോഴിക്കോട് മലബാര്‍ ക്രിസ്ത്യന്‍ കോളേജും സംയുക്താഭിമുഖ്യത്തില്‍ നടത്തുന്ന ഈ പരിപാടിയുടെ ഭാഗമായി ഫോസ്സ്‌സെല്‍, നാഷനല്‍ ഇന്‍സ്റ്റിറ്റിയൂട്ട് ഓഫ് ടെക്ലനോളജി – കോഴിക്കോട്, ഇന്‍സ്റ്റള്‍ ഫെസ്റ്റ് ഒരുക്കുന്നു. വിവിധ സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റു വേറുകള്‍ , ഓപ്പറേറ്റിംഗ് സിസ്റ്റവും പ്രായോഗിക പ്രവര്ത്തനങ്ങള്‍ക്കുള്ളവയും, ആവശ്യമുള്ളവര്‍ക്കു് സൗജന്യമായി ഇന്‍സ്റ്റള്‍ ചെയ്തു് ഉപയോഗക്രമം പരിശീലിപ്പിക്കുകയാണു് ഇന്‍സ്റ്റള്‍ ഫെസ്റ്റില്‍ ചെയ്യുക.

സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വേറിലും ഭാഷാ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിലും തല്പരരായ ആര്‍ക്കും പരിപാടിയില്‍ പങ്കെടുക്കാം. കംമ്പ്യൂട്ടര്‍ ഉപയോഗത്തില്‍ മുന്‍ പരിചയം വേണമെന്നില്ല. സെമിനാറില്‍ പങ്കെടുക്കാന്‍ മുന്‍കൂട്ടി പേര് റജിസ്റ്റര്‍ ചെയ്യുക. സപ്തംമ്പര്‍ 18 നു് വൈകുന്നേരം 5 മണിയ്ക്കു് മുമ്പായി ഡോ. കെ. വി. തോമസ്, മലയാള വിഭാഗം, മലബാര്‍ ക്രസ്ത്യന്‍ കോളേജ്, കോഴിക്കോട് എന്ന വിലാസത്തില്‍ (സെല്‍ 9447339013, മെയില്‍:mcccentenary@gmail.com) നിങ്ങളുടെ റജിസ്ട്രേഷന്‍ അപേക്ഷകള്‍ എത്തിയ്ക്കുക. സ്വന്തം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറില്‍ സ്വതന്ത്ര ഓപ്പറേറ്റിങ്ങ് സിസ്റ്റവും പ്രയോഗ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകളും ഇന്‍സ്റ്റാള്‍ ചെയ്യാന്‍ ആഗ്രഹിയ്ക്കുന്നവര്‍ സിപിയു/ലാപ് ടോപ് കൊണ്ടുവരേണ്ടതാണു്.

കൂടുതല്‍ വിവരങ്ങള്‍ക്കു് ബന്ധപ്പെടുവാനുള്ള വിലാസം:

ഡോ.മഹേഷ് മംഗലാട്ട് , 94470-34697, maheshmangalat at gmail.com

പരിപാടികള്‍

Inaugural Session:
Welcome: Dr. Sreejith M.Nair
President: Mrs.Gladys PE Isaac,Principal,Malabar Christian College
Inauguration: Dr.M.R.Raghava Varrier

Software Freedom Day Lecture: Sri. K. H. Hussain
Topic: Language, Society and Freedom

Software Freedom: An Introduction: Sri. Anivar Aravind

Felicitation: Comdr. Percy Mackaden,VSM

Vote of Thanks: Dr.K.Rajasekharan

Tea Break

Session 1: Language Computing

Rapporteur: Sri. M.E.Premanand
Presentation 1: Language Computing: Current Scenario – Dr. Mahesh Mangalat
Presentation 2: Text, Hypertext and New Publishing – Sri. P.P. Ramachandran
Presentation 3: Swathanthra malayalam Computing:Mission, Projects and Practice:
A Demonstration– Sri. Jaison Nedumpala

Lunch Break

Session 2: Towards a Knowledge Society
Rapporteur: Sri.A.P.M.Rafeeque

Presentation1: Introduction to Free Knowledge: Concept Framework
and Practice: Sri.Anivar Aravind

Presentation 2: Content Licensing and Open Standards:Sri. Hiran Venugopalan

Presentation 3: Bridging Digital Divide: The Way Forward: Sri.Shyam Karanatt

Tea Break

Session 3: Panel Discussion

ഭാഷയുടേയും സംസ്കാരത്തിന്റേയും സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യവും ഭാവിയും

Moderator: Dr.K.V.Thomas

Participants: Sri. Kalpetta Narayanan, Sri.N.P.Rajendran, Sri.P. Suresh,

Smt.T.V.Suneetha, Dr.C.J.George

Vote of Thanks: Sri.T.M.Raveendran

INSTALLFEST is being organized in connection with Software Freedom Day by FOSS-CELL, NIT-Calicut and FSUG-Calicut.
INSTALLFEST will be open from 11.30 am to 5.00pm.
Various Open Source Operating System distributions and Application Software will be installed free of cost and training will be provided to install and use them. Please bring your CPU/Laptop.

Organising Committee:
Patron: Mrs.Gladys PE Isaac,Principal
Members: Comdr. Percy Mackaden, VSM, Dr.Sreejith M.Nair,
Dr.K.V.Thomas, Sri.A.P.M.Rafeeque, Sri.M.E.Premanand,
Dr.K.Rajasekharan, Sri.T.M.Raveendran, Sri.Godwin Samraj,
Sri.P.C.Prajith, Sri.M.C.Vasisht

Geo-visualisation, the FOSS way

Santhosh — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:07:00 +0000

My friend Jaisen Nedumpala has been developing a Geo-visualisation system for Cheruvannoor Grama Panchayath(Page in ml_IN) of Kerala. The system, developed using FOSS tools is available here

“Development of effective geo-visualisation based decision support system (DSS) involved primarily data compilation from collateral sources, setting up appropriate hardware configuration, design of database and design of a spatial DSS. ”

Jaisen used softwares like GRASS, UMN MapServer and ka-Map. He has written a detailed documentation(English) on how he developed this and what are all the tools used.

Say NO to Software Patents

Santhosh — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:44:00 +0000