Falling back to English when translation of a particular string is not found is not always the best solution. As a practical example, our Aymara users would prefer that the fallback language be Spanish, and only if the Spanish translation is not found, English should be shown.

I was wondering how to implement this for Sugar and its activities, and I realized that something like this is already implemented in Python’s gettext implementation. So after some changes to Sugar, I had the following:

In the screenshot, the Restart Game pop-up is not translated into Aymara, and so it shows up in Spanish as Reiniciar Juego, while the rest of the strings are in Aymara.

Of course, there is a lot more to be done – the Sugar control panel language selector needs to be changed to allow selection and ordering of multiple languages, and currently this works for activities, core Sugar needs to support this feature as well.

After many months of hard work, OLPC XO Software Release 8.2.0 has been unleashed. This release includes a much improved Sugar 0.82, a transition to Fedora 9, and many more changes and fixes under the hood to increase reliability and security.

Upgrade instructions are available here.

• There might be a Barcamp Kolkata soon:
  
• Got Table of Content support working in Read Activity
  
• Wrote a small PDF viewer tool with support for the Journal which is then used by mozplugger to show PDF files within Browse. (You can put the file in your journal if you like it)
  
• Infoslicer is awesome. Here’s a Youtube video demo of it.
  
  
  

Durga Pujo changes the face of the city, at least to a certain extent. Here are some of the things I came across while wandering around in the neighbourhood (all of these are makeshift structures, in case you are wondering):

Sometime I feel sad.. thinking that these will be pulled down by the end of this week . But, on the other hand, as they say, “আসছে বছর আবার হবে” (we’ll be back next year) .

কেন চেয়ে আছ, গো মা, মুখপানে।
এরা চাহে না তোমারে চাহে না যে, আপন মায়েরে নাহি জানে।
এরা তোমায় কিছু দেবে না, দেবে না- মিথ্যা কহে শুধু কত কী ভানে।।
তুমি তো দিতেছ, মা, যা আছে তোমারি- স্বর্ণশস্য তব, জাহ্নবীবারি,
জ্ঞান ধর্ম কত পূণ্যকাহিনী।
এরা কি দেবে তোরে।
কিছু না, কিছু না।
মিথ্যা কবে শুধু হীনপরানে।।
মনের বেদনা রাখো, মা, মনে।
নয়নাবারি নিবারো নয়নে।
মুখ লুকাও, মা, ধূলিশয়নে- ভুলে থাকো যত হীন সন্তানে।
শূণ্য-পানে চেয়ে প্রহর গণি গণি দেখো কাটে কিনা দীর্ঘ রজনী।
দুঃখ জানায়ে কী হবে জননী, নির্মম চেতনাহীন পাষাণে।।

Just noticed this:

photo credit: Wayan Vota

The Free Software User’s Group, Bangalore, is conducting a National Public Meeting on Software Patents on the 4th of October (Saturday).
Be there if possible.