December turned out to be a pretty busy month for me – here are some of the stuff I have been involved in/working on:

• FOSS.in: As always FOSS.in ‘09 turned out to be an amazing affair. Being someone who works remotely, this event is probably one of the best opportunities for me to have “real” interactions. It’s a place where I can simply sit down, have long face to face conversations, come up with new ideas, be inspired, and most importantly, have fun. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the people behind the event for making this possible. I have some photos in this Flickr photoset.
• Book reader: This month’s priority has been stabilizing the Sugarlabs/OLPC book-reader code, and a large number of important bugfixes landed during the last few weeks. More in this status report.
• Arduino: At FOSS.IN, thanks to the efforts of the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, I managed to get hold of an Arduino clone board (it is terribly difficult to get hold of one in Kolkata). I had heard of Arduino before and wanted to get one, and the session on it at FOSS.in by Russell Nelson finally served as the “kick” which made Kushal and me call up the local distributor and get a couple of boards for ourselves. I have been playing around with sensors support in Sugar for sometime (I helped make the Measure activity work on XO 1.5 hardware), and realized that this would be yet another interesting way to connect Sugar with the “real” world. So after a couple of weekends worth of work, I got Arduino support in Turtle Art.
  
  
  
  
  
• XO keyboards: There may be a new AZERTY keyboard for the XO laptops very soon. See this wikipage for details.
• Pootle: The Pootle developers have released version 2.0, which is a vastly improved edition compared to the previous releases. I have been testing it out with plans to upgrade the Sugarlabs/OLPC translation server soon. While testing, I added a quick (and ugly) hack to implement msgfmt –check style syntax checking in Pootle. This would definitely make the process of integrating the translations with the upstream code much less painful – and here’s a screenshot (click on it for a larger version):
  
  
  

Last week I took a mini vacation and went to a trip to the Sundarbans (the largest Mangrove forest in the world, formed on the delta of the Ganga and the Bramhaputra). I hadn’t realized that it was so close – Gosaba, which is the gateway to the forests is only around 2 and a half hours drive from my house. (we took a “package tour”, which minimized the hassles as we got a car taking us from Kolkata to Gosaba, and at Gosaba a launch was waiting to take us into the forest)

We arrived on a day when Cyclone Reshmi was approaching the region, and the first night in the forest was to put it mildly… interesting . Fortunately the skies cleared up on the second day, and for the next two days, we had an awesome experience, including one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life.

More photos in this Flickr set.

..and no – I did not see any tigers – we were busy hopping around from one watchtower to another.

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) .

• 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.