Last week, I had to go out almost on each and every day, which is quite unusual, as I try my best to remain at home (in front of the computer) during the holidays. I spent the entire Monday evening at the Oxford Book Store with Tania, on Wednesday, I spent the day at Suman’s house at Manicktala, on Thursday, I had a long nice adda session with Sayan and Shamashis (and had dinner at The Waldorf), shopped around for a mobile phone on Friday, and finally, on Sunday, I was at Dipankar-da’s place at Madhyamgram (trying to turn him into a beta tester for Bangla OpenOffice.org and the new Probhat keyboard layout).

However, surprisingly, I also managed to get a lot of work done during the past seven days, and managed to come up with the very first build of Bangla OpenOffice.org and a plan for handling the Bangla GNOME translations for the 2.12 release cycle.

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OpenOffice.org with a Bangla interface

A lot of thanks must go to Jamil for constantly bugging me to follow up the posts made in the OOo issuezilla;) and for getting the translations done in record time. I should also thank Dipankar-da for pushing me to fix the more difficult (and uncommon) issues like the rae-japhala bug, etc. I ended up with porting a number of fixes that we (Taneem, Tanmoy, myself) had made to Pango to IndicReordering.cpp in ICU. I will upload the modified file (and the relevant patches) somewhere very soon. I am also trying to come up with a Bangla language pack for OOo 2.0 - hopefully that should be done by next week. However, the translations are far from complete, and volunteers are required for doing the job. If you are interested, please get in touch with Jamil (jamil bengalinux org) or myself (sayamindu openoffice org).

Regarding the cell phone shopping that I mentioned earlier, I finally decided to go for the Motorola E398. From what I have seen so far, it seems to be a pretty good handset, and my laptop has no problems communicating with it via bluetooth (using GNOME Bluetooth and an unbranded el cheapo USB Bluetooth dongle). My old number (9830267155) has changed - if you want my new mobile number, please get in touch with me via email.





GNOME Bluetooth (or more precisely, gnome-obex-server) in action.



My pet cat (taken with the phone’s VGA camera)

…and finally, my college reopens on Tuesday. I don’t expect to see regular classes happening during the first few weeks (everyone would be busy with the new batch), and I plan to read the books that I managed to get hold of (courtesy Dipankar-da) during this period.

• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
• Data Structures using C and C++
• Theory and Problems of Data Structures

The last two books (along with Chapter 2 of TAOCP) should take care of the paper on Data Structures which I have in this semester.

Looks like sophomore year would be beginning in an interesting way :).