Last Saturday, I appeared for what was the last examination of our four year BTech degree course. College life has ended for me, at least for the time being. It was fun while it lasted, bordering on insanity sometimes (can you imagine “normal people” participating in a sport which involves pouring rotten, and really stinky paper-maché over each other’s heads ?). The last few days were bitter-sweet, with a lot of memories, some of them happy, some of them not so happy, coming back all at once. I guess, in the end, all of us had a wonderful four years, years that made us mature, strong, and much more acquainted with the ways of the world. Thanks to everyone who has been beside me during the past four years, through all my ups, downs, successes and failures. Thanks a lot .

This week, I’m starting full time with OLPC. Apart from facilitating and helping with the l10n and i18n efforts (which I have been doing for the past six months), I also expect to start helping out with various parts of the OLPC software stack.

This part of life is called: interesting :-).

• For this year’s GSOC, I will be mentoring Julen Ruiz Aizpuru, who will be working on Effective user experience for Pootle.
• I badly needed a break this week, and so three of us from college went for a trip to Mandarmani, a sea side resort around 200 km from Kolkata. It is still somewhat isolated compared to the other sea side resorts nearby, and the last 7 km of our trip consisted of driving over the beach, and getting stuck in the sand, which was fun. However, due to Mandarmani’s isolation, and since we went there in the middle of the week (no weekend tourists), we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for the next two days, and it was an awesome experience. Some pictures
  
  
  
  Driving on the beach

  
  Desolate beach, dotted with red crabs

  
  The beach

  
  Sunset

The picture above (I took it during September 2006) looks very similar to a photo published in this month’s Linux For You. A scan of the page is available in Ravishankar’s blog.


…and it looks like this is not the first time Linux for You is doing this :-(.

….To use it, make sure you’re in a reasonably lit room. It won’t work in pitch black, but you don’t have to be sitting in a tanning bed either. Start Colors! and navigate to the second tab, Paint. Click on the leftmost icon, Palette, and enable both “Pressure Sensitive” checkboxes. Click on the Palette button again to close that window. Click on the rightmost button, the magnifying glass called Video Paint. Hold the charger out a foot or two from the camera, and hold the left mouse button to paint. ….

Awesome!

OLPC is looking for a UI developer for Sugar, the interface for the XO-1 laptop for children. Requirements include experience with C, Python, and GTK+. Knowledge of Gecko, X Window System, D-Bus, GStreamer, Cairo and Fedora Linux is preferred. For more details, and on information on how to apply, visit the OLPC careers web page.
[Update]: It seems that the email address originally posted (job-sugar@laptop.org), does not work. The correct email address would be (jobs-sugar@laptop.org). Apologies for the inconvenience.

I’m willing to mentor the following projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 for this year:

• General Improvements (feature additions) to Pootle
  
  While working with Pootle at OLPC, we have come across a number of feature requests, most (if not all) can be implemented within the GSoC timeframe. I have listed some of the high priority features here. The main requirements for this project is familiarity with Python and some basic ideas about localization. The mentoring organization for this is Translate Toolkit and Pootle.
• A Translate this Activity activity for Sugar
  
  Similar to the functionality offered by the “View Source” key in the OLPC XO-1 laptop, an activity should ideally allow the user to translate it. A Translate this Activity activity would allow the user to translate any given activity, and optionally let the user share the translation, so that it can be reused by other users in the mesh.
  The main requirements for this project is familiarity with Python, PyGTK and general idea about a typical gettext based software translation workflow. The mentoring organization for this is One Laptop Per Child.

• OLPC Nepal is having a translation night out - read all about it here, and feel free to join the fun.
• Warm Holi/Doljatra greetings to everyone.

Whenever we work on a PO file, we usually translate from English to the translate language. However, recently at OLPC, we had some Aymara translators who did not know English, but were quite comfortable with Spanish. We had been receiving such requests for supporting the display of an intermediate language in our translation system for quite some time now, and it was also a prominent feature request for Pootle, the web based translation software that we use. I was feeling a bit bored with my usual work, and decided to see if I could do something.


The straight forward way of implementing the feature would be to add yet another user preference which would store the list of languages in which the user would want to see the translations, but that seemed to involve significant amount of coding, and I was too lazy to do that. After thinking for sometime, I decided to take a short cut which should help us quite nicely now. Pootle can optionally show it’s interface in a non-English language, and I thought I would take advantage of that. Within around an hour (which included figuring out some of the Pootle code and understanding jToolkit), I had a patch which produced this:

So, if you select your UI language as Spanish, along with the original msgid, you will also get the corresponding Spanish translation when you are translating a message. I think this should do for now - though the “proper way” is probably the right thing to implement at some point.

Just came across the excellent news from Jani Monoses that Sugar is finally in the Hardy universe. Though at the moment, apparently one needs to run Sugar in an Xephyr window (using sugar-emulator). Support for running Sugar as a standalone desktop environment (ie - you get the option of logging into sugar from GDM) would be really awesome.

• Gnunify
  Tomorrow, I take an early morning (I hate those) flight to Mumbai, and from there, I plan on taking a bus to Pune, for Gnunify. I will be speaking on OLPC - a introductory talk, concentrating mostly on how to get started contributing to the project (as a developer/translator/etc).
• OLPC Translations
  Sameer Verma recently announced on the OLPC localization list that he has uploaded a set of slides on how to use our translation infrastructure (based on Pootle). And soon after, we got Chinese and Bulgarian translations for the slides as well.
  I also managed to put in some stuff about testing the translations during last week. We still need a lot of love for the translations though, and if you want to get involved, please do register at our Pootle server.
• Combining scripts with archives: The Nvidia binary drivers seem to be combinations of a script and an archive in a single file. Is there any tool to do this easily ?

• The beginning of 2008 has been a little rough for me, as I had fever and headache for the past few days (starting from the 2nd, to be exact). Luckily, things seem to be getting better now, and currently, the fever seem to have subsided, leaving behind a pretty nasty cough though :-(.
  My Hyderabad trip, on the other hand, turned out to be a refreshing break, and I met my little niece for the first time :-).
   
• It looks like I’ll be going for Gnunify, though the details are not finalized yet.

• Exams
  End semester exams are over. Only one more semester to go before I graduate. Yay!!
  
  
• Hyderabad
  I’ll spending Christmas in Hyderabad - and will be probably there fpr most of the week as well. I will be online though (hopefully), except when I’m travelling (it looks like I’ll be coming back by train - a 30 hour journey).
  
  
• New Camera
  I finally decided to replace my aging Canon A95, and thought that I would move to a DSLR. Kushal had got a Nikon D80 a few months back, and after playing around with his camera for sometime, I decided to go for the same. I also bought a 50mm prime lense to go with it. ..and I’m having fun with it
   
  
    
  
  
   
  
  
• OLPC Translations
  I must admit that the rapid progress of the OLPC translations has somewhat surprised me. The project is barely over a month old, and we have a very active and enthusiastic community growing up very quickly. I think that the decision to use Pootle has worked out very well for us, inspite of the initial pains, primarily due to
  • Low barrier of entry for translators
    You need not worry about VCS access, or having to understand PO files - you simply create an account, and start to translate the strings.
    This of course, requires that the language coordinator has to be extra careful before pressing the “commit” button, and check that all the translations actually make sense before they go into the master git repository at dev.laptop.org. But in some ways, this is also applicable to translations being done via other methods as well, and Pootle has a system where the language coordinator can actually approve each translated string before it is integrated into the PO file.
  • Support for offline translations
    This is very important, because it is wrong to assume that volunteer translators have good quality internet access all the time. Pootle allows you to download PO files, and upload them (with options for either merging the translations, or overwriting them) when you are done.

  In the end however, all of this boils down to having an active l10n community, and I would really like to thank each and everyone of the translation community for pushing things so far. You all rock :-).

• A report on XO deployment at Peru

  Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.
  Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska’s father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.
  “We never imagined having a computer,” said Arrendondo, a cook.

  The entire article makes for a fascinating read - it is available online here.

The Pootle server running at dev.laptop.org is now up and running. If you are interested in helping translate the software going to be bundled with the laptops, please do jump in :-). More information is available in the mailing list post that I made.
If you have any questions - you can take a look at the FAQ and if you still have questions, feel free to join us on #olpc-pootle on Freenode, or ask on the mailing list.
Helping setup Pootle was an interesting project for us, since this is probably the first time a Pootle deployment is talking to a GIT repository, and adding support for GIT to Pootle (and adapting it for use in our scenario) was a bit of a battle. The results of the initial “beta tests” seem to be pretty satisfactory, and the next few days will hopefully tell us how well the entire system is working.

OLPC India’s pilot project has been running at a rural school near Mumbai, and they have put up a very interesting report on the wiki.
In related news, a XO-1 arrived at my place today, and here’s a picture of it rendering some of Sukumar Ray’s work:

The organisers of FOSS.IN have released the preliminary list of speakers in the event and we seem to have a really interesting set of talks for the GNOME Project Day. From the FOSS.IN website,

• Andrew Cowie - The challenges and opportunities of properly writing multi-threaded GTK based GNOME programs
• Lennart Poettering - ZeroConf Networking with Avahi
• Mairin Duffy - Beginners guide to UI design
• Naba Kumar - Integrated communication framework for GNOME - elements of telepathy
• Ritesh Khadgaray - hunting bugs
• Runa Bhattacharjee - Gnome Translation Project-Your language on the Desktopv
• Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay - Bring your own hammer - I have the nails !
• Shreyas Srinivasan - Clutter: Fun with opengl interfaces

I would have loved to attend FOSS.in (especially the Project Day), but unfortunately my seventh semester exams begin on the 3^rd of December. Maybe from next year…


In other news, I have started to do contract work for the OLPC, and right now I’m helping out with the establishment of a smooth work flow for the localisation of various activities and software targetted for the XO. I’m pretty excited about this, especially since intially after getting a negative response from our HRD Ministry, it looks like the XO will be used by Indian children after all, through some other channels. That adds a new dimension to my work altogether :-).