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 

Fontconfig language matching

 Posted on March 4, 2016  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I had to spend a few hours to debug a problem about fontconfig not identifiying a font for a language. Following the tradition of sharing the knowledge you acquired in hard way, let me note it down here for search engines. The font that I am designing now has 3 style variants, thin, regular and bold. All has same family name. So if you set this family for whatever purpose, depending on context, thin, regular or bold versions will be picked up. [Read More]
fontconfig  fonts  typography 

Experimenting eSim- A tool for Electronic Circuit Simulation

 Posted on December 4, 2015  |  Kavya Manohar

I did not have much exposure to open source Electronic Design Automation tools during my graduation course in Electronics and Communication Engineering. My institute had proprietary EDA tools in the lab and all my experiences were limited to them. I must confess I never tried to explore the FOSS world for alternatives until I was in a need to offer a lab course on basic circuit simulation. Web searches took me to the design suite eSim . [Read More]
EDA  electronics  eSim  FOSSEE  kicad  labmanual  ngspice  opentextbook 

അധിക നിമിഷം (Leap second)

 Posted on June 27, 2015  |  Santhosh Thottingal

ഈ വരുന്ന ജൂണ്‍ 30 നു് ഒരു പ്രത്യേകതയുണ്ടു്. ആ ദിവസത്തിന്റെ ദൈര്‍ഘ്യം 24 മണിക്കൂറും ഒരു സെക്കന്റും ആണു്. അധികം വരുന്ന ഈ ഒരു സെക്കന്റിനെ ലീപ് സെക്കന്റ് അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ അധിക നിമിഷം എന്നാണു് വിളിക്കുന്നതു്. നമ്മള്‍ സാധാരണ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്ന കൈയില്‍ കെട്ടുന്ന വാച്ചുകളിലോ ചുമര്‍ ക്ലോക്കുകളിലോ ഒന്നും ഇതു കണ്ടെന്നു വരില്ല. അല്ലെങ്കിലും ഒരു സെക്കന്റിനൊക്കെ നമുക്കെന്തു വില അല്ലേ? പക്ഷേ അങ്ങനെ തള്ളിക്കളയാനാവില്ല ഈ അധിക സെക്കന്റിനെ. സെക്കന്റ് അളവില്‍ കൃത്യത ആവശ്യമായ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറുകളിലും ഉപകരണങ്ങളിലും ഇതു പ്രശ്നമുണ്ടാക്കാനുള്ള സാധ്യത വളരെ കൂടുതലായതുകൊണ്ടു് ജൂണ്‍ 30, 11 മണി, 60 സെക്കന്റ് എന്ന സമയത്തെ, എന്നാല്‍ ജൂലൈ 1 ആവാത്ത ആ നിമിഷത്തെ, നേരിടാന്‍ ലോകമെമ്പാടുമുള്ള സാങ്കേതിക വിദഗ്ദ്ധര്‍ കരുതിയിരിക്കുന്നു. [Read More]

Translating HTML content using a plain text supporting machine translation engine

 Posted on February 9, 2015  |  Santhosh Thottingal

At Wikimedia, I am currently working on ContentTranslation tool, a machine aided translation system to help translating articles from one language to another. The tool is deployed in several wikipedias now and people are creating new articles sucessfully. The ContentTranslation tool provides machine translation as one of the translation tool, so that editors can use it as an initial version to improve up on. We used Apertium as machine translation backend and planning to support more machine translation services soon. [Read More]
algorithms  machine translation  mediawiki  wikimedia  wikipedia 

Making of Keraleeyam font: From ASCII to Unicode

 Posted on December 26, 2014  |  Kavya Manohar

Keraleeyam is a new unicode malayalam font designed for titles. It was originally designed in 2005 for ‘Keraleeyam’, a magazine supporting environmental movements in Kerala, with ASCII encoding and was distributed along with Rachana editor software. Unicode font feature tables for malayalam are complex, which include diverse rules for ligature formation and glyph positioning. Keraleeyam which was originally ASCII encoded, contained no such rules. It would have been a herculian task to manually add the rules for each glyph. [Read More]