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How would you accelerate the adoption of OLPC in India?

July 29, 2010 by sankarshan · 2 Comments 

OLPC News has an article with the original headline (in fact I took the lazy way out and re-used it). It seems to be posted by ‘Guest Writer’ but the footer of the article says that “Satish Jha is the President and CEO, OLPC India” so I guess OLPC India is in some form involved with the content that is has.

It is an interesting piece. There’s another interesting thread on a mailing list here.

I would have expected it to talk more about the possibilities of doing OLPC stuff in India rather than becoming a somewhat neither-here-nor-there kind of non-committal response to the $35 device that the Ministry of HRD so loudly released. To understand what can bring about the adoption of OLPC India, one would have to probably go back to a post I wrote some time back.

The problem that was highlighted still remains. There is no community of any form,shape or sort around the OLPC in India when compared to OLPC efforts/initiatives and deployments in other countries (the nations that are so eloquently held up as shining examples of OLPC success). There is a significant lack of a downstream community of volunteers and participants and, more importantly, a lack of any sort of publicly discussed plans as to whether any educational institute would volunteer students for a while to keep the deployments going forward. Then of course there is the added discourse around availability of the actual XO hardware.

When I met Dr. Nagarjuna at GNUnify (that’s February this year), he indicated that he was actively looking at using the Sugar Desktop Environment on standard COTS desktops available much easily from vendors because there wasn’t much clarity about the how and when of the hardware availability. In fact, this has been a murmur that has been around for a while – what specifically is the value add of the hardware if the desktop environment is available via a standard Linux desktop/distribution. Which is where an active group of developers working on activities that would be useful in the context of the deployment is a good thing to have. And for that to happen, there needs to be work on building a downstream community – contributors who use the artifacts provided by OLPC and Sugar to develop their own thing.

A distinct advantage that OLPC/XO/Sugar has is brand recognition. Anyone who is peripherally involved in doing things around Free and Open Source Software in India know these names. They may not fully understand the depth of work or, the roadmap of the individual projects, but the name recognition is a jump-off point that should be utilized much more. For example, in a space like the College of Engineering Pune, which has a fairly active mailing list for FOSS related stuff, holding a 2 day event with the aim getting work started on new or, un-maintained activities, teaching the basics of testing/QA stuff would probably be more useful than just wishing about growing a community. I am fairly certain that there would be other institutions like CoEP where a day-long or, similar camps can be organized. Why aren’t they happening ? On that I have no clue.

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A question, a survey, a conversation and some feedback

June 25, 2010 by sankarshan · 1 Comment 

During the recent elections Richard Stallman had a specific question for the candidates. Copying from the archives, here’s the question:

Here is a question for the candidates.
To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance at the practical level and at the philosophical level.
GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical level. How will candidates use the user community’s awareness of GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom?
At a stretch the question is similar in theme to the questions/concerns around GNOME and Free Software ideals that come up from time to time. I recall reading similar questions during earlier elections and, it isn’t specifically new or, something that has come out of the blue.
I came to know of the survey when I read the micro-blog from Lefty. And, then we had a bit of conversation.
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable about the survey.
The line of reasoning is as follows – as a member of the GNOME Foundation one has the right to express one’s opinion about the direction and focus of the Foundation by supporting the appropriate (set of) candidate(s). From the perspective of a Foundation it is perfectly valid to focus on areas which are aligned with the very reason for the Foundation and the project to exist. In fact, focussing only on those areas wouldn’t and shouldn’t be taken amiss. In short, the Foundation can choose to exercise what it should work on in the near or long term future or, it shouldn’t. As long as such goals and tasks do not appear to be detrimental to the cause of Free and Open Source Software things should work out nicely.
I hasten to add that similar should be the focus of the Free Software Foundation as well. The survey attempts to somewhat codify this implicit responsibility areas and, I do get the feeling that the specific question
“In what way would you ordinarily refer to “an operating system based on a Linux kernel and using mainstream, mainly community-developed components and applications”? (Distributions representing such include Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Open SuSE, etc. Android does not qualify, nor does WebOS, etc.)”
is implicitly divisive. An “us/them” meme that has been festering on the foundation-list for a while now.
I did not participate in the survey. I don’t want to. I’d rather like GNOME to focus on being an excellent desktop environment with strong technical and technology focus going back to the times when I started using it as my primary desktop. The Board needs to work out its focus and, work on the project’s future with much more rigor than it does now. To me the survey is just a passing distraction. Mildly entertaining but probably not productive.

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Or, where we talk about digital future of the Bengali language

June 21, 2010 by sankarshan · Leave a Comment 

ABP Pvt Ltd has a history that goes back to 1922.

From the website

“In 1922, Anandabazar Patrika first came out as a four-page evening daily that sold at two paise and had a circulation of about 1,000 copies a day. Eighty-five years later, Anandabazar Patrika reaches out to over seven million readers, every day!

Today, the ABP Group has evolved into a media conglomerate that has eleven premier publications, three 24-hour national TV news channels, two leading book publishing businesses as well as mobile and internet properties. Touching the lives of millions of readers and viewers, daily.

We believe the legacy you leave, is the life you lead. We see ourselves as repositories of best practices and processes. And, at times, when we don’t have the very best within, we open windows to look out for expertise. Not surprisingly, ABP is associated with companies and personalities revered across the world.

In the world of journalism, we are not just a media house. We are really an alma mater.”

Given the reach of the group and, the important role it plays in giving shape, form and direction to the literary content that is produced from Bengal, it is not too much to expect them to be at the forefront of technology when it comes to news and content published electronically. The association with Ananda Publishers, which publishes books from a variety of authors for a consumer base that spans ages, it is not too hard to anticipate that they will be heralding change and, changing for the better.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Bengali/Bangla and digital standards, the group is one of the laggards since they stick to an antique non-standard technology. In short, it is surprising that they are yet to think over adopting Unicode as a part of their online version.

This lack of interest in adopting Unicode has created an unique situation. The digital content published by the ABP group requires extremely unorthodox parser development to be encoded into Unicode and, used in any form of language study. The inability to be able to easily use the corpus is all the more important from the perspective of being able to extensively use Bengali/Bangla in the digital domain. Additionally, while browsers have demonstrated improved support for Unicode, the online content, including the shopping cart of Ananda Publishers, are unfit to be rendered on such browsers. Stop here for a moment and imagine a plethora of mobile and portable devices which may have extensive support for Bengali/Bangla at the user-interface level, the ability to input, print and render Bengali/Bangla but, would be unable to work with the content provided by the most circulated Bengali newspaper in India.

A group of folks led by Golam M Hossain have devised a prototype of an Unicode Proxy for Anandabazar Patrika. The attempt is not aimed at facilitating the reading of the newspaper, that is a happy collateral. The experiment is focused on demonstrating that it may not be difficult for Anandabazar to adopt Unicode.

Please read this page and if you desire to support it, write in with your name and affiliation to support the petition. If you know someone at ABP/Anandabazar who would be interested in a discussion, it would be good to get a conversation going.

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On the road to an Indian language GNU/Linux OS

May 27, 2010 by sankarshan · 6 Comments 

The history of Indic localization of Linux (GNU/Linux …) may never be written down with the amount of detail that it deserves. Especially to ensure that the significant events are well recorded.

Lest we forget, with the help of sayamindu and karunakar I came across the following dates:

  • IndLinux Hindi v0.37 (Milan) released on October 2003. It was a LiveCD that allowed you to check out a localized GNU/Linux desktop environment, input and display
  • The AnkurBangla LiveCD was also released somewhat later that same year
  • From May 2004 onwards, the Utkarsh Project released and maintained Gujarati Localizations
  • In November 2004, Fedora Core 3 shipped and you could choose to boot into an Indic locale and get your work done. You can also check this page for the RHEL release that happened.
  • In 2006, the IndLinux project released Rangoli
  • In June 2007, Debian Etch was released with an installer localized in Indic languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil). As a consequence, Debian (and Ubuntu) users may experience a full Indic-localized system from scratch.

So, before you go and listen to folks talk about the “first Indian language GNU/Linux Operating System” on the media channels, keep these dates in mind.

Update: This does not in any way claim to be the only dates that are relevant. So, if you do recall the dates of releases from other groups working on Indic L10n on Linux, please feel free to leave them in comments with URLs if possible.

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On the Goddard bus

May 25, 2010 by sankarshan · 11 Comments 

I installed Fedora 13 (Goddard) on two of my boxes. The profiles are here and here. On the X200 things worked out of the box, the only reason it took time was because I needed to back up the entire data on it before installation and then transfer it back. And, post install I’d to figure out which of the software I had in F12 before unleashing a massive yum install on the system. I wish there was a simple way to create a profile of applications and, thereon apply the profile to a freshly installed system to get the software just the way one desires.

On the HPMini210-1095TU, the wireless and the touchpad do not work yet. They aren’t much of an issue, though it would be nice to have them working and, suggestions are welcome.

The new release feels much snappier, the GNOME desktop looks good. A big thank you to all those who make it happen each time, on time.

Update: A new kernel, as indicated at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=590835 fixes the touchpad issue

 

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A new lekhonee-gnome release

April 15, 2010 by sankarshan · 3 Comments 

Sometime after the release announcement, Kushal asked me to use it to post a blog and see how things are. It took me a while to get to the blog (primarily because prolonged typing causes my finger joints immense pain and, it is easier to walk over to where Kushal is and do the “you seriously consider this a feature” thing ;) )

The new release is a re-write in Vala which came as a surprise to me since Kushal was toying with Vala only a couple of nights before the release. However, that did mean that a couple of us were the lab-rats in the “release early, release often and release private” game that he plays before pushing it to the build system. That is especially fun because at some point during the game all the lab-rats end up having different private builds which expose unique sets of bugs.
I wonder when this becomes a default option on Fedora.
Things I like about the release include
  • the unordered list creation button
  • newer icon set
  • the ability of not barfing on a wrong auth entry for blog
  • right click for spell checking
  • save as drafts

The bits I look forward to are

  • ability to handle multiple blogs or, account management
  • better WSIWYG rendering (the fonts look a bit weird for me)
  • auto-save of blogs

If you like to see it translated in a language of your choice, sign-up here.

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GNUnify’10 etc

March 17, 2010 by sankarshan · 1 Comment 

I wasn’t able to spend too much time at GNUnify10 – a weekday came in and, then there wasn’t enough time to do anything. A couple of things did strike me though.

  • The profile of the attendees was different from last time. If the organizers talk about the demographics, this observation might be validated but I got the feeling that the crowd was more of professionals than students
  • The event has introduced diversity and, that is a good thing to have
  • There have been new speakers as opposed to the “same old faces” talking
  • There were elements of avid interest in things Fedora where the speakers were enthusiastic and participated in rapid Q/A

I liked what I saw. Including Shreyank’s enthusiasm to not get off-stage till the “download link came up” :)

One of the things that I’d hoped would happen at the event is that the group of Fedora folks who met would sit down and discuss their goals for this year. By goals I meant the stuff they would be focussing on and, more importantly, how they would be measuring their achievements. I don’t know how much was discussed along these lines but it is a good time to start doing it. Keeping the focus on a few important things and then creating easy-to-visualize ways of looking at the achievements allow the contributors to assess themselves. Self-assessment goes a long way in removing any perceptions of anonymity that might be lingering on. And, it also creates a sense of involvement – of belonging.

The other important bit this would achieve is that it would make the developers more visible and approach-able. For too long I have seen developers have an aloof or, stand-offish approach to their projects. And, it isn’t because they are arrogant but perhaps it is their trait. Unfortunately, “they will contribute if they figure out that the project is good” isn’t a nice approach. Going upfront and talking about goals, plans and in general doing advocacy allows potential contributors the confidence to tinker with the code and, start contributing. Building up the confidence to tinker not because it is “good for the nation” but because it is “good for oneself” and, is profitable is a concept that needs to be repeated over and over again. The students aren’t rolling up their sleeves enough and, it is an urgent need to exhort them to do it. The world is moving forward at a fairly fast clip and they cannot take comfort in the “learn-by-rote-to-join-TWITCH” way of life in the various colleges across the country. In money terms as well as in time and effort an enormous quantity is invested in students, that shouldn’t go to waste.

The others have already blogged about the event, I’m waiting for Hiemanshu’s writeup.

Posted from GScribble.

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Rabindra Rachanabali and Bangla fonts

March 17, 2010 by sankarshan · 3 Comments 

The fonts that can be obtained from the site here display the following information. Now, how is one supposed to package (there isn’t a defined upstream as much as I could fathom) and redistribute (especially Bangla Akademi.ttf) them ? The fonts by themselves are fairly nice and, that’s a sad aspect as well.

And, an evaluation version of the BitRock Installbuilder seems to be used for creating the font installer.


$ otfinfo -i Vidya.ttf

Family: Vidya
Subfamily: Normal
Full name: Vidya
PostScript name: Vidya
Version: Version 0.6
Unique ID: PfaEdit : BanglaTemplate : 30-3-2003
Designer: NLTR
Manufacturer: NLTR
Copyright: Copyright NLTR License: GPL
version 2 (or later, at your option).

and,

$ otfinfo -i Bangla\ Akademi.ttf
Family: Bangla Akademi
Subfamily: Regular
Full name: Bangla Akademi
PostScript name: BanglaAkademi
Version: 1.0 2008 initial release
Unique ID:
SocietyforNaturalLanguageTechnologyResearch(SNLTR),Kolkata,India.DesignedaccordingtoPaschimBangaBanglaAkademiStandardbyBiswarupBhowmik:
Aangla Akademi: 2008
Description: Society for Natural Language Technology Research
(SNLTR),Kolkata,India. Designed according to Paschim Banga Bangla
Akademi Standard by Biswarup Bhowmik, 24B Lake Road, Kolkata 700029
Designer: Biswarup Bhowmik, 24B Lake Road, Kolkata 700029
Manufacturer: Society for Natural Language Technology Research
(SNLTR),Kolkata,India. Designed according to Paschim Banga Bangla
Akademi Standard by Biswarup Bhowmik
Trademark: Bangla Akademi is a trademark of Society for
Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR),Kolkata,India.
Designed according to Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi Standard by Biswarup Bhowmik.
Copyright: Copyright (c) 2008 by Society for Natural Language
Technology Research (SNLTR),Kolkata,India. Designed according to
Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi Standard by Biswarup Bhowmik. All rights
reserved.

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A web-calendar for events – does that sound nice ?

March 10, 2010 by sankarshan · 4 Comments 

For as long as I can remember I have found the LWN.net Community Calendar very useful. It would perhaps be nice to have a similar web-based calendar for Fedora events across the world. Currently, the events are tracked by this page. That is nice but doesn’t give the visual representation of a month full of events world-wide.

It would be nice to have a calendar that integrates with FAS and, allows someone to post the details of the event. Another group of folks, can take a look-see at the posting and approve it to be listed. The original poster could choose to be the event owner or, add someone who is the actual owner. Since Events etc fall under the ambit of FAmSCo, perhaps they might consider this stuff.

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“I want a Fedora DVD, don’t know what to do !”

March 2, 2010 by sankarshan · 3 Comments 

Following up from what I had written sometime back on this, I would say that the time is good enough to do a rethink.

When it comes to India, traditionally, we have been producing media specifically aimed at distributing at events. We do get large amounts of face-time with our participants at any event and, invariably it leads to sharing of media or, requests for media. This is besides the production that is carried out by magazines across the country. During the F12 cycle we conducted a small experiment.

We did not produce any media.

Not even for events.

Since this was a shocking thing to do, we spent the entire cycle with bated breath trying to assess the impact. As on date, it seems to be minimal. In fact, it has allowed us to do interesting things. Things like ensuring that at events we have an updated tree around for anyone who wants to update their system or, even update their trees. We have had a moderate measure of success with spinning LiveUSBs. But more importantly, we have had “Local Points of Contacts” and, some enterprising folks come up to fill up the void. Or, in other words, the deliberate creation of vacuum allowed some “retailers” to come in to the picture and, become the source points to obtain the media.

Producing media, even when done in the bulk that we do, is an expensive affair and, add the shipping costs towards sending them across to events and, you can figure out that it was becoming more of a “mass media production house” kind of business without actually having a full-fledged team doing it.

The next logical step would be to figure out how to provide the information about alternative sources of media (even if they are not zero-cost) to those who cannot obtain it via the Freemedia system. Providing them with an option to choose a retailer from which to purchase the media from is a better option than letting their Freemedia requests go unattended. A system that allows such vendors to be listed and, based on regions, information provided to the requesting parties would go a long way in addressing this. Clearly mentioning that this is a pure information provider service with no assurances of guarantees would perhaps be the caveat that would allow us to begin ensuring that anyone who requests a media has the information about where to obtain one from.

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