Of late, some of my friends, who had been accessing my blog from the college lab were complaining that the design of the site was awful - much to my surprise. I decided to investigate today, and found the following snipped of code in the header.php file of the Wuhan theme (which is the default theme in this site):

Somehow, I had forgot to upload the file style-ie.css to the Wuhan directory, and so all IE users were seeing the site devoid of any CSS - no wonder it appeared “badly designed”.

After uploading style-ie.css, I looked up in my Yahoo! buddy list for anyone who could test the site (I don’t have windows in any of my computers), and found Ashikur-da. He sent me a screenshot of the site being rendered propely in IE - so I guess IE users would be satisfied now :-). In case of any cases of weird/unexpected rendering, please do let me know.

Yesterday, we went to have lunch at my boropishi’s (father’s elder sister) house. Boropishi is a fabulous cook (I usually land up at her house, uninvited, sometime during lunchtime, hoping to grab a bite), and she had prepared traditional bangal food, with shukto, koimach, etc, and posto bata (with shorsher tel) specially prepared for baba.



As usual, I ate like a pig, taking around five extra helpings of rice!!



My pishtoto didi came in late, and while she was having her lunch, I played around with her new Canon S2 IS.



After lunch, we had a long, nice adda session, with baba going into his (in)famous bhashon mode…



..and in the evening, when we came back home, I spotted the cat eagerly waiting for us on the terrace:

Thanks to the efforts of Baishampayan Ghosh, who almost immediately responded to my previous call for volunteers, the Free Bangla Font Project is shaping up nicely again. He has already updated the website and has started work on the fonts. Great work Baishampayan!! Keep it up :-).

As I had mentioned earlier, I need someone to take over the maintainership of the Mukta Bangla Fonts Project. I’m too busy right now to actively coordinate the project. I believe that right now, there is enough documentation available for anyone who has the right kind of passion and enthusiasm to take over the project. The TODO items that come to my mind immediately are:

• Update all the fonts to be Unicode 4.1 compliant (this mainly involves updating the font to handle Khanda-ta correctly)
• To make sure that all the fonts from this project which are included in the various GNU/Linux distributions are properly updated.
• To make sure that all the fonts handle our test case properly (I’ll be coming up with a document on testing Bangla fonts very soon).
• To update the website (a new theme for the site is already available)
• To take my (in progress) re-write of Akaash, and complete it.

If anyone is interested in taking up the job, please write to me at sayamindu gnu dot org dot in.

..and in other news, Kushal has uploaded some pictures of our Durgapur trip here.

Just came back home from Durgapur - will be going to college tomorrow early morning. I’ll try to post all the pictures from college.

So, I’m back to blogging after almost a month. A lot has happened in the past 3/4 weeks or so, especially in my personal life. There were also a few troubles at college, which, hopefully have been resolved, and life (at least in the work related domain) is more or less normal now, at least for the time being. My Hutch mobile phone is down (some kind of charger problem), so if anyone wishes to contact me, please call my Reliance no. (or on weekends, call my landline number).

I’m going to Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur tomorrow, to speak on Localisation and Free Software, and I’ll post a few pictures when I get back home. I’m also looking for someone to take over the maintainership of the Free Bangla Fonts Project - I’ll be posting the details within the end of this week.