Over the past few weekends, I have been working on a few (semi)hobby projects.

• Conversion of XKB data to M17N tables
  I discovered pyparsing while working on this. The tool I wrote is supposed to extract the data out of XKB symbol files, and convert them into a format which can be easily modified into M17N db files. In fact, for some keyboard layouts, the output was directly usable in m17n (via SCIM), without any kind of direct modification at all.
  The only problem with the script is that the parsing of the XKB symbol files take a significant amount of time, but in the end, it does provide something useful. [Gitweb]
• An image viewer activity for Sugar
  Sugar did not have a nice Image Viewer activity which I liked, so over the weekend, I hacked together a small activity which would perform the basic stuff expected of an image viewer (zoom, rotation, etc). [Gitweb]

From this week’s community news:

Among them was the mayor of South Beirut, with whom I spoke. ‘The American government sends bombs to kill the innocent,’ he said, ‘and the American people send us computers for our children. We are very grateful to OLPC. This means opening up the world to our children.’

Also, in related news, Sugar is being translated into Aymara. If you can help in this effort, or for that matter, any of the translation efforts, you are more than welcome to jump in .

My previous blog post on Baishakhi got a response from Prof Anupam Basu of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, as a comment and as a mail in my mailbox. Here’s my reply inline (the original mail is in bold and italics):

Dear Prof Basu,

Dear All,

I have come across Sayamindu’s blog posting and was amused, pained and surprised in the same breath.

Let us be objective first.

1. The release was on the 8th of September and it was planned to make the source code available upstream, within a few days as is expected of open-source activities. Please keep your weather eyes open on the SNLTR site. So, Sankarshan, you need not feel that the effort will go waste.

This is the first time in my life I have heard that a “open source” project releases the code after the binary has been released. I have seen projects which have promised to release the source code at some point, but until that happens, the project is proprietary (I am not a lawyer, but that’s how my understanding goes). What’s more, there have been, till date, at least three emails that I am aware of, asking for the source code. None of them have got any reply.

2. Mr. Toshi Kubota (mail cc’d to him) is a pioneer in Open-Source and Linux related movements in Japan. We will ensure that all gpl requirements are adhered to in accordance with his guidance. Please note that the inauguration was only day before yesterday !!!!

See reply to your previous point.

3. I wonder whether in the existing versions we could write words like র‌্যাপার, আর্য, and a few more could be written properly.

Please see the screenshot below, taken in a stock Fedora 9 system, without any modifications whatsoever.

By the way, r-japhala should be written as U+09B0 + ZWJ + U+09CD + U+09AF, according the Unicode 5.0 specifications.

4. I am not sure whether in the existing versions of Open-Office spreadsheet, computations could be carried out in Bangla.

I tried that in Baishakhi, it did not work for me. Also, the Baishakhi keyboard does not work for me (I’m running it in a virtual machine.) Is there any bug tracker where I can report these issues ?

5. I know ( because Indranil Dasgupta himself told me on the first day we were discussing and demonstrating a prelim version of Baishakhi Linux) that the existing Linux versions, printout of complex Bengali scripts through Firefox was not possible – thanks to Indranil – this problem is not there in Baishakhi Linux.

It works for the past two years, from what I understand. Here’s a blog post on this issue, made on 9th September, 2006
.
6. The contributions may be incremental, (as suggested by Sayamindu – a one line code), but that is there now. Baishakhi Linux need not make tall claims, it was a very low budget effort and the spirit should be to contribute more by pointing out bugs and improving on it.

Would be glad to do bug reporting and fixing (as far as my time permits). Can I have a publicly available bug tracker please ? I try to avoid working with closed systems.

7. We ensure that no credit titles will be demeaned. Last-Translator does not demean others I think and that is the convention. Still to err is human. So please play straight – point out any omissions in a constructive way.

There is no problem with replacing the last translator line. Everyone does that. The problem is, the translator credits which gets shown in the UI got replaced. We only append to translator credits, we never delete prior credits. For example, take a look at the following screenshots (one taken in my Fedora system. and the other from Baishakhi Linux). Both are the screenshots of the same application (Gedit).


That’s not polite.

I am amused because how fast we can react with blogs etc. , when they could have written to us directly.
I am pained because my invitations to some of the Open-Source groups to join hands in these activities was met with absolute silence.
I am surprised because I thought Open-Source activities call for Open-Minds, joining hands in an endeavor. I thought the philosophy was
“Let a hundred flowers blossom. Let a thousand thoughts contend”. As always, being in academics I was wrong. We are too fast in circulating over blogs without discussing when the avenues exist.

I have been actively involved with Free/Open Source Software, for more than seven years, with FLOSS in Bangla for more than six years. I think I’m subscribed to almost each and every community mailing list related to FLOSS Indic computing and FLOSS Bangla computing. I have never seen a mail from you to any community whatsoever, announcing this initiative. I just did a search of my mail box with your name, and I got nothing which could be relevant (and thanks to gmail I rarely delete my mails). It’s entirely probable that I did not get the invitation individually (and I have no problems with that). However, in that case, which community did you approach ?

Yes, we could have written to you directly. We did – asking for the source. And we did not get any reply.
In the beginning of your mail, you mention amused, pained and surprised. From my perspective, I’m not amused, I’m quite surprised, and yes, I am pained, and deeply saddened.

Best of regards,

Anupam Basu

–
অনুপম বসু

Have a nice day,
Warm regards,
Sayamindu

So that’s my reply, and here’s another one.

The government has recently shown a lot of interest about Free/Open Software, especially in the area of localization for Indian/Indic languages. However, this well meaning interest has resulted in some totally clueless individuals and agencies being delegated to work on these issues, resulting in a major mess. The prime example of this would be BOSS Linux, which has not bothered to work with the community in any way (at least for the translations), and a result, it looks like a large amount of work (paid for from the tax payer’s money) is going to be wasted. Gora has started a thread on the gnome-i18n mailing list on this, and we can see no easy way to reutilize the work done. Interestingly, as per the comments in Sankarshan-da’s blog post on this matter, the government agency responsible for this had actually contacted some people in the community (via a 3rd party), offering to pay around USD 0.07 per string translated. The condition was that the work needed to be secret and exclusive for BOSS. That’s interesting for an “Open Source” project, funded by the government.

Closer home, there’s this “Baishakhi Linux” distribution, which makes quite dubious claims such as “All Bangla compound words can be viewed and written in Baishakhi Linux, and this special feature distinguishes it from the other localized Linux distributions.“. After making this statement, they go on to show a list of “compound words” (conjuncts, or yuktakshars), of which, I believe only _one_ is not writeable in stock OpenOffice.org/GNOME, and the fix for that is a one liner (bug, with patch).
I downloaded the ISO image from their website (I didn’t see any link to any source code), and started it up in a VM. It looks like they took the existing upstream translations, made minor modifications to them (which includes adding the English msgid in parenthesis at the end of each msgstr). They took care, however, to replace each translator_credit translation with their own name. I ran msgunfmt on the Evolution mo file, and though the translator_credit had been changed, the header read:

“Last-Translator: Promathesh Mandal <promatesh@mat3impex.com>\n”
“Language-Team: Bengali <gnome-translation@bengalinux.org>\n”

In case you are wondering, gnome-translation@bengalinux.org is the email address of the upstream GNOME translation community for Bengali.
This kind of approach makes me pretty pissed off. In the past, we have included all the names possible in the translator_credit translation, IMHO that is the least the Baishakhi Linux people could have done.

It’s a sad state of affairs – it really is.