Manjari Font

 Posted on July 23, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I am happy to announce the new Malayalam font I was designing for past several months. The new font is named “Manjari”. Malayalam blogpost: https://blog.smc.org.in/manjari-font/ Malayalam script is known for its curly characters with beautiful loops. Encoded in unicode around 2001, it is relatively new to the digital age. The script has been evolving from rectangle shaped to oval shaped types of varying proportions. The popular culture is more of oval/ellipse shaped curves, mainly because writing methods using stensils or pens demanded less sharp corners. [Read More]

A short story of one lakh Wikipedia articles

 Posted on July 16, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

At Wikimedia Foundation, I am working on a project to help people translate articles from one language to another. The project started in 2014 and went to production in 2015. Over the last one year, a total of 100,000 new artcles were created across many languages. A new article get translated in every five minutes, 2000+ articles translated per week. The 100000th Wikipedia page created with Content Translation is in Spanish, for the song ‘Crying, Waiting, Hoping’ [Read More]
wikimedia  wikipedia 

FOSS migration of electronic circuit simulation lab

 Posted on July 15, 2016  |  Kavya Manohar

My proposal for migrating basic electronic circuit simulation lab to the FOSS tool eSim has been approved. The source code and documentation of experiments can now be downloaded from here. eSim is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. eSim is developed by FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) – an initiative of MHRD, Govt. of India. FOSSEE promotes the migration of labs in educational institutions from proprietary tools to FOSS only ones through lab migration projects. [Read More]
electronics  eSim  foss  FOSSEE  KTU  Open Education 

ഡോക്ടർ ബി എം ഹെഗ്ഡേ – മാതൃഭൂമി ആഴ്ചപ്പതിപ്പിൽ വന്ന അഭിമുഖത്തെപ്പറ്റി

 Posted on July 3, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

മാതൃഭൂമി ആഴ്ചപ്പതിപ്പിന്റെ കഴിഞ്ഞയാഴ്ച പുറത്തിറങ്ങിയ പതിപ്പിൽ(ലക്കം 16) ഡോ ബി എം ഹെഗ്‌ഡെയുമായി അഭിമുഖമുണ്ട്. കവർസ്റ്റോറിയാണു്. ലോകപ്രശസ്ത ജനപക്ഷ ഡോക്ടറാണു്, ആരോഗ്യം സമൂഹത്തിന്റെ ആരോഗ്യമാണെന്നൊക്കെ പറഞ്ഞുള്ള ആമുഖത്തിനപ്പുറം വായിച്ച് പോയപ്പോൾ എന്റെ പരിമിതമായ ശാസ്ത്രവിജ്ഞാനത്തിനൊരിക്കലും അംഗീകരിക്കാൻ കഴിയാത്ത കപടവാദങ്ങളാണു് കാണാനിടയായതു്. പത്മ ഭൂഷൺ ലഭിച്ച, മണിപ്പാൽ യൂണിവേഴ്സിറ്റിയുടെ വൈസ് ചാൻസ്‌ലറായിരുന്ന, നിരവധി ബിരുദങ്ങളും വർഷങ്ങളുടെ വൈദ്യശാസ്ത്ര അനുഭവപരിചയവുമുള്ള ഇദ്ദേഹം ഇങ്ങനെയൊക്കെ ശാസ്ത്രത്തെ അവതരിപ്പിക്കുന്നതിൽ എനിക്കത്ഭുതമുണ്ട്. ആരോഗ്യരംഗത്തെ സാമ്പത്തിക ചൂഷണങ്ങൾ, ഡോക്ടർ രോഗി ബന്ധങ്ങളിലെ തെറ്റായ പ്രവണതകൾ തുടങ്ങി ആർക്കും അംഗീകരിക്കാൻ അത്ര വിഷമമൊന്നുമില്ലാത്ത വിഷയങ്ങളുടെ മറവിൽ ആധുനിക വൈദ്യശാസ്ത്രത്തെയും അതിന്റെ നേട്ടങ്ങളെയും അപ്പാടെ നിരാകരിയ്ക്കുകയാണു് ഹെഗ്‌ഡെ ചെയ്യുന്നതു്. അദ്ദേഹത്തിനു ലഭിച്ച ശാസ്ത്ര വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെയും അലങ്കരിച്ച പദവികളെയും അപ്പാടെ ചോദ്യചിഹ്നമാക്കുന്ന രീതിയിലുള്ള നിരീക്ഷണങ്ങൾ നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടിലെ ലാടവൈദ്യൻമാരുടെയോ കപടശാസ്ത്രവാദക്കാരുടെയോ വാദങ്ങളിൽ നിന്നും ഒട്ടും ഭിന്നമല്ല. [Read More]
reading 

When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

 Posted on May 28, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I read this book after my friends recommended it and wrote the following note at Goodreads I am not rating this book. Not because of the book is bad. It is well written, I read it in a single day. But just that it gave me lot of pain and I would not recommend any of my friends to go through that pain. The reading can be felt very personal, like watching a friend – the author of the book – suffering. [Read More]
reading 

Gujarat Files – Rana Ayyub

 Posted on May 28, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Fear – That would be the single word I can use to describe my feeling after reading the book. My belief in Indian judicial and paraliamentary system is not a firm one. This book shakes it badly. I am nobody to judge the facts revealed in the book, but what make me afraid is there is very less chance that these facts are verified by the current Indian political and legal system. [Read More]
reading 

Introductory Workshop on Version Control Systems

 Posted on May 23, 2016  |  Kavya Manohar

The IEEE student branch of College of Engineering, Chengannur is doing a commendable initiative conducting a week long student quality improvement programme. I was invited to give an introductory workshop on version control systems as part of ISQIP 2016. It was a good experience to be with a group of enthusiastic youngsters. The need of version control systems and demonstration of version controlling using git was done during the workshop. The slides of presentation is here. [Read More]
git  IEEE  talk  workshops 

Feedback on KTU Syllabus of Electronics and Communication Engineering

 Posted on May 18, 2016  |  Kavya Manohar

Kerala Technological University (KTU) published a draft syllabus for the third and fourth semesters of Electronics and Communication Engineering for the coming academic year. It raised widespread concerns regarding: The depth and vastness of contents The obsoleteness of contents Sequence of introducing concepts and the pedagogy involved FOSS friendliness To discuss the matter and collect feedback from a wider academic community, KTU called for a syllabi discussion meeting at its office on 13th May, 2016. [Read More]
Education  Elctronics  FOSSEE  KTU  Open Education  Open Source 

Internationalized Top Level Domain Names in Indian Languages

 Posted on April 27, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Medianama recently published a news report- “ICANN approves Kannada, Malayalam, Assamese & Oriya domain names“, which says: ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved four additional proposed Indic TLDs (top level domain names), in Malayalam, Kannada, Assamese and Oriya languages. The TLDs are yet to be delegated to NIXI (National Internet exchange of India). While Malayalam, Kannada and Oriya will use their own scripts, Assamese TLDs will use the Bengali script. [Read More]
idn  unicode 

Redesigned font download page of SMC

 Posted on April 6, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

The font preview and download page of SMC has a fresh look now. The intention is to provide a font preview, typography showcase, download site in single page. Every font has multiple illustrations of usage and the text used is editable if you want to try your own text there. The old page which was also designed by myself was not mobile friendly. It provides a single page view to compare the fonts, each represented as cards. [Read More]
design  typography  web  webfonts