Sayamindu's Ramblings

Crossing milestones…

Sayamindu — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:06:14 +0000

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 :-).

28th April 2008

Sayamindu — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:29:56 +0000

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

13th April, 2008

Sayamindu — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:40:29 +0000

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 :-(.

Paint with Color Based Object Tracking

Sayamindu — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:29:07 +0000

….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!

User Interface Developer for Sugar

Sayamindu — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:32:31 +0000

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.

Projects for Summer of Code 2008

Sayamindu — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:29:39 +0000

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.

21st March, 2008

Sayamindu — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:59:09 +0000

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.

Free software translations for people who do not know English

Sayamindu — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:06:14 +0000

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.

Sugar in Hardy

Sayamindu — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:28:35 +0000

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.

Pictures from our college carrom room

Sayamindu — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:35:51 +0000