This week turned out to be pretty eventful. We had our monthly LUG meetings at the West Bengal University of Technology, and, as usual, I set a new record in punctuality by turning up just 10 minutes before the meeting ended (picture below). But since I was coming from college (around 3 hrs journey by long distance bus), the LUG members refrained from participating in physical violence ;-). More pics of the conference are available here.



Karunakar was speaking in that meeting, and on the next day (Sunday) morning, Indra-da and myself went to the guest house where Karunakar was staying. We had some general chitchat about the future of l10n, specially FLOSS l10n (and came up with an idea on uGuntu Consultants), and in keeping with tradition, this meeting was called the Indic SpoonFeed Meet (Picture below).



In other news, the annual GNOME Foundation elections for Board of Directors are scheduled for the end of this month. We had to send out notices to around 120 members asking them to renew their memberships, and then the brave and valiant Vincent Untz processed all the applications by hand. This year, 19 candidates are running for the 11 member board, with around 400 eligible voters (the voter list is not final yet, since we are still to process a few applications, and since some of the members have not yet send in their renewal requests). However, as soon as the election period is over, we need to get a (semi)automated application processing and members’ database system in place - the existing manual system is simply not going to work any more. Also, we need to make sure before the next elections that a mechanism for anonymous voting is in place - so the next year is going to be a busy one for the membership and elections committee.

Recently, I have also been looking at QEMU. I ran some stuff with it, and I guess it would become my #1 tool when I start working on a custom distro project optimized for Indic stuff, as I/we have been thinking about for the past few days. More on this will be posted later.

Speaking of distros, Red Hat has released a set of Free Indic fonts called Lohit. The Bengali one looks quite good - though there are some minor issues (mostly related to the OTF standard). I’ll put them in bugzilla when I get some time.



And in general life related new, I have joined a band at college - it is called “bhaaraaTe uchched koriaa thaaki” (ভাড়াটে উচ্ছেদ করিয়া থাকি) - which, translated into English, would roughly be “We get rid of troublesome tenants”. So I guess you would be able to imagine the general aural quality of the songs we sing ;-).