Just completed a tiny DTD for DocBook corresponding to the small set of tags for which I had written the XSLs. I am so glad it works! (http://dev.gentooexperimental.org/~n9986/beacon/editor/ works best with firefox)

Now on it is just a matter of adding more elements to get a richer tag-set for DocBook till the mid-term evals. The basic infra is all set up (will try to keep improving usability though).

Also added a brand new and better CSS.

On the other side I think I should try and get more community involvement into developing the editor as the number of DocBook elements is *huge*.

I'll start by explaining what beacon is and how it works.

Beacon is a What you see is what you mean editor which relies heavily on XSL for XML to HTML conversions and vice-versa.

Most of the work involved in making a plugin is writing the two XSLs. One is required for converting the XML to HTML so that it can be displayed in the browser. And the other for converting the HTML back to XML. All these operations are done on the server side using PHP (or Python).

One may wonder, why rewrite XSLs if they already exists, like for Docbook for example. The reason is that Beacon needs some 'hooks' in the generated HTML so it can pick up the nodes using Javascript. This is required to do multitude of tasks like rendering inline editors, maintaining structural sanity, addition/deletion of new nodes, etc. Since HTML and Docbook XML tags are very different, there needs to be some way to map the XML tags over to HTML. These hooks are done using title attribute on tags. So for example, the tag will be rendered in HTML as:

< p title = "docbookPara"> Somethings are best with a title < /p >

Title tags tend to be most unobtrusive here and works well for DOM manipulation which is made even easier thanks to jQuery.

Once the HTML has been rendered, some Javascript magic makes it editable via inline editors of various types. We are still working on the node adding/deleting feature. Once that is done we will have a more or less a complete editor.

The validation of the generated HTML is kept in check via a Javascript based DTD.

So the user cycle of Beacon is:

new document -> XML -> HTML -> XML

All ajax-y communication is handled by JSON (except for file upload which uses an iframe of course).

Since its a web based it relies completely on Ajax for any post first page load. The UI is pretty much like a desktop Application with Tabs, sidebar etc.

To sum it up, a plugin now requires:

1. Couple of XSLs
2. Javascript based DTD
3. Some trivial PHP code
4. CSS + some template XMLs

I will write a tutorial on how to make a plugin for docbook next. Will be nice if folks chip in to get in as many tags supported as possible.

Over ten years have passed since I first encountered the marvel called Linux. My first experience of what parts of the world fight out to their graves to call either Free Software or Open Source. Frankly, although I personally use the former term I have never considered the people preferring the latter to be my mortal enemies. But this is not the only facet of what I am speaking about today, so more on this age old war a bit later.
Today was a day which passed to fast for my liking, but as it drew to a close, I came across a book on the life of Bill Gates. As I leafed through, I thought of why, despite all the roadblocks he faced, and with half the intellectual world turned against him as if he was the devil's cousin, he managed to build the largest ever personal fortune and one of the largest business empires in the world. Even that on a concept considered flawed at best and fascist at worst.
As a FOSS enthusiast, whatever that is supposed to mean(ever heard of people developing or popularising the use of ATMs being called ATM enthusiasts), I strived to understand why, despite the best efforts of some of the best minds of today, GNU/Linux never quite faced a formidable threat to the quintessential, albeit repressive, MS Windows.
GNU/Linux was the first great attempt at a free OS that I know of(no, I'll not humour certain people by explaining what free means), giving end users extreme usage flexibility and security, but with great power, as they say, comes great responsibility. I feel(repeat... I feel) that most contributors to free software have been found lacking in this respect.
The previous statement may sound blasphemous given my own humble status. But it is not a statement I am making without rhyme or reason. I had once attended a talk by Richard Stallman, the guy who started it all. At that time I was not aware of the so called factions in the Free Software community. I found his words on freedom and its moralistic aspect in software development very inspiring, and there was hardly a point one could disagree upon. However, since then I have come across several people putting forward the same views, but their words, instead of further convincing me, rubbed quite the wrong way.
This is because of two main reasons, one being that they spoke of issues like nomenclature, which any end-user would consider secondary, if at all, the other being that they offer arguements of RMS, never their own.
RMS, in his own right, can argue all he wants, followed by his infinite contributions, but people with no idea of what he means menacingly echo his words at grossly inappropriate places at even worse times. This in turn scares away potential new users and angers(pisses off, rather) developers who have much more pressing matters in their minds. If all this effort was spent at developing more software or going out and telling new people about this wonder, I think these ends would be much better served. If it was all about freedom, should people not be free to call stuff they have helped create, whatever they want to? Moreover, it would go easy on those people who are entering this world if instead of bickering within, someone bothered more about welcoming the newcomers. After all, isn't the whole idea pointless if everyone fights over it and no one uses or improves it. The humongous wastage of precious time and bandwidth recently on the openSUSE-marketing mailing list angered and saddened me to no end. But then, everybody's free to their all important opinion, even if it messes up the very things the perpetrators purportedly stand for.
In all that I said, Gates' success was attributed primarily to our failure as Free Software evangelists. But to say that this is the only reason would be unfair to both him and his detractors.
First: Bill's side:
His enterprise and vision are exemplary, but in his own words - "Vision is free, so it gives no competitive edge whatsoever". He worked hard, mostly because he wanted to make money, which I must say is not so great an incentive for Free Software people, but at least a bit for the love of it.
Also, his one track mind focussed at making his company huge, helped - "Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don’t evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, ‘how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?".
So did his egotist attitude, which helped him believe he was right, even if it meant that the rest were all wrong - "It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.".
This, though helpful to his bank balance and stock prices, is not necessarily a good way of looking at it, but it sure pays good. Bill Gates did what no one seems to do in what could have been a much better FOSSworld, got his priorities right, and minded his own business(all meanings intended)!

So, time for some introspection, I guess. It is in our hands that we have our future. Will we, in our blinded views, lose our way, or show the way to the 7 billion others, who look to us for deliverance from proprietarity(btw, is that a word?)

I finally finished writing a working implementation of the YMSG16 authentication as described in this article. The authentication seems to be working quite well, but nothing else does. The server still does not respond to the older binary type messages. So the next thing I tried was to wireshark the windows based yahoo messenger ( my employer provided the windows box for me :D ) and I found out two things:

• The Authentication probably is what is described in the carbonize site, but there looks to be a different way to get the initial challenge string
• All messages go to and from one server in the form of HTTP POST and responses

There some more cookies involved as well, which is what Adrian was probably talking about in the comment to my previous post. Thankfully, since ayttm is on YMSG12, we are still online unlike pidgin, so no need to rush in a fix for this just yet. That said, the popup says I have until August 15th till YMSG12 dies too. I need to see how pidgin has fixed this. Maybe the fix is much simpler than revamping everything to do what the windows YMSGR is doing.

मंदी की मार में, आदमी तो आदमी, लगता है कंपनियाँ भी पैसे के लिए कुछ भी करने को तैयार हो गई हैं. विश्व की नं #1 पैसा-लेन-देन वाली कंपनी पेपाल ने एक नया विचार गढ़ा है. आप सभी से थैंक्यू सर्विस नहीं ले सकते, लिहाजा पैसा देकर काम करवाएँ. कोई भी काम. छोटे से छोटा और बड़े से बड़ा. डू स्टफ़ फ़ॉर मनी नाम की यह सेवा देखते हैं कितना लोकप्रिय होती है, और जनता के काम आती भी है या नहीं. जो भी हो, वहां पर लोगों को एक दूसरे को काम बताने की होड़ सी मच गई है – पर, फोकट में नहीं. पैसा देकर.

मैंने समीर ‘उड़नतश्तरी’ को बेनामी आरती फिर से ढोल मंझीरे के साथ गाने का निवेदन किया, तो इसने मेरा हिन्दी अनुरोध अस्वीकार कर दिया. ये जमूरा प्रोग्राम हिन्दी नहीं समझता.

 

फिर से अंग्रेज़ी में अनुरोध भेज दिया है. देखते हैं समीर भाई झांझ-मंझीरे के साथ आरती गाने का काम करते भी हैं या नहीं. यदि वो फिर से आरती गा देते हैं तो समझिए कि यह प्रकल्प सफल है!

The artwork by Shreyank:

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Last weekend, I setup my blog with WordPress installed on a new domain (www.ankit644.com) and migrated my blog posts, comments everything from http://l10nblogs.indianoss.org/ properly. It seems to be working fine now.

So, I will be taking down http://l10nblogs.indianoss.org/ by next weekend…

pem is the expense manager.

The developer behind this magic

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Sangita! If there was anyone in my life I place after my mother it would be her. Even though she is just a year older to me she always held that place of a woman I could go to for comfort. I have known her since I was fifteen. We grew up together, kept in touch for a long long time but as fate would have it, life took somewhat divergent paths about ten years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

It's been very quiet in here. This month has been a marathon of coding and a lot of other events on the home front.

First off, a few non-GSoC related developments:

• I finished college. (Phew!)
  
• I got placed in Red Hat as an Associate Software Engineer. (gleee!)
  
• I won the Sun India Code For Freedom contest for my B. Tech Project. (ZOMG!! yes that was COMPLETELY unexpected!)
• I went out for a small trip this weekend after almost 2 years.
  

Now to the DocBook Editor...

I started off by learning XSLT (tough!) and making an initial RPM for Beacon and submitted it for review. I created a Feature page and worked on deciding on an initial subset with the help of the Fedora-docs list.

Here are a few links to complement the above:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocBook_Editor_Documentation
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DocBookEditor
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocBook_Editor

Then, I constructed an initial XSL by referring to the example DocBook file in the Fedora Documentation repository and based on the initial tag set that was selected after a community review.

Initially, I fixed a few bugs in Beacon to learn the source code and worked on making it more convenient to add plug-ins by changing the implementation so that beacon needs only a DTD from the plug-in makers (which is us) rather than having us code the whole Javascript. A successful implementation of this would save a lot of time in feature addition and creation of plugins.

Apart from the DTD, I was learning the tools more from implementation perspective like JavaScript and jQuery library used in Beacon.

The last week has been the most exciting. Working with Nandeep Mali, the lead Beacon dev and my point of contact for the Beacon upstream, we got the DTD feature implemented to some extent and its working like a charm. The WYSIWYM is also working and just few more additions need to be done to make this a solid XML editor.

The DTD is actually a giant Javascript object which contains details about every node and its structure (like child, parent, siblings). One may think that why not use an existing WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE. This is not very feasible because WYSIWYG editors are notorious for
the output they produce. This is what Beacon is trying to avoid by adding a different type of editor. The user will be places with a fill-in-the-blanks type of editor so the generated XML will retain its sanity and conform to Docbook DTD. Makes it easy for the Docs team as well.

Now for the treat: http://dev.gentooexperimental.org/~n9986/beacon/editor/

The above URL is a demo of what we have been working with (I hope the Gentoo URL is not a problem. Beacon was a Gentoo SoC project and I cannot get PHP with JSON and XSLs on my fedora account).

The work till now mainly consisted of writing the XSLs for DocBook and making changes to the beacon core. One final enhancement in the usability of beacon would be a drag and drop feature that has not been committed so far as it is very slow at the moment. Once that is ready it will be very easy to add nodes at any point and still not mess up the corresponding XML.

I have been writing the DTD for DocBook since yesterday and will be able to commit it by very soon. So we can expect another blog post about it very soon.

Has been a fun journey so far. More to come in the next post.

This weekend we are organizing a small gathering at Pune for the Fedora faithful. Details about the Release Party are here. Besides getting the Fedora folks to hang out together and share notes, we hope to have some fun, get some show-n-tell going. Photographs and event reports would eventually follow as well.

As an aside, I am posting this using gscribble – a yet another offline client for Wordpress blogs being developed by Roshan. I had to rebuild it to get it working for F11 and, the truly bleeding rpms are here

If you have not registered yet. please go and register at http://in.pycon.org/2009 .

You can downlod it from here.
Lekhonee is a desktop client for Wordpress.

New features:

• Tag support
• UI improvement for editing last entry
• Bug #507518 fixed

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Sugarlabs, creators of Sugar desktop environment for children recently released Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) Strawberry flavor. Strawberry is based on Fedora 11.

openSUSE Education team have also been working on getting Sugared up openSUSE in various (yet to be named) flavors :). Thomas C Gilliard (satellit) has put up openSUSE-Sugar VMWare appliance, get it from here. Apart from VMWare appliance openSUSE-Sugar is also available in live CD and USB/flash stick version.

Here are the instructions for running VMWare appliance. To deploy USB stick image, download the image - openSUSE-Sugar-liveUSB-unstable.i686-0.X.X-BuildX.XX.raw.bz2. and run this command to deploy on the stick plugged in /dev/sdX.

bzcat imagename.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4k

Run dmesg to find out where the USB is plugged in, replace /dev/sdX with the actual device, for example: /dev/sdb and umount it before running this command.

We also have openSUSE Li-f-e : Linux for Education DVD that has Sugar launcher right on the gnome desktop, it contains same number of activities as Sugar only flavors.

David Van Assche(nubae) and the Moodle team are putting together great numbers of useful courses on newly launched education portal http://linux-for-education.org. Here teachers and students can find courses that helps learning their preferred subject with the aid of Li-f-e and other educational distributions. Check out the courses on Sugar and Perfect openSUSE Education Desktop.

Happy learning…

I’ve posted some pictures from last month’s discussion on using social media for mobilisation, with Dina Mehta and Peter Griffin at CIS. Here’s the report and earlier Twitter feed.

Nothing significant; just some faces. Helping with attaching names to faces appreciated.

I spent the last two weeks cleaning up the website for the Centre for Internet and Society. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Here is a guy who sells dosas and rice items in his push cart every evening.

I didn’t realize that he was my entrepreneurial benchmark until my friend explained it to me:

• He has at least 100 customers everyday because he is there for 4-5 hours every evening, and we’ve never seen him without customers.
• 100 customers * 40 rupees per customer = 4000 rupees per day
• 4000 rupees per day * 30 days = 1,20,000 rupees per month
• ⇒ A roadside push cart wallah makes more than a lakh a month!

And he doesn’t intend to go to VCs any time soon

It’s only when you get into this entrepreneurship thing that you realize how hard it is to make money.

I hope every wannabe will plan to have at least as good as this guy’s cash flow ASAP for their startup.

---

© swaroop for Swaroop C H - India, Technology, Life Skills, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Of late there has been a significant increase in the number of texts talking about “community”. This could well be a perception bias as well, since I have been looking around trying to see what others are writing or, thinking about groups of people, communes and so forth.

Some of the common aspects of the texts I have stumbled across include attempts to have a model defined, description of a rudimentary framework of tasks, an analysis of infrastructure that facilitates collaboration and, a broad overview of the character of a community. Either way, I am a bit tired about “community” as a word and, I feel that it is beginning to suffer from over-use and under-statement. A primary driver for that feeling is the tendency to look at “communities” as if they were thriving specimens on a petri-dish, isolated and unperturbed in their own imaginative evolutionary cycle. That is simply untenable as a hypothesis and, impossible in real life. Communities are constituted by groups of people and, people react to the push-pull of daily life around them – the political issues, the personal issues and, the social intricacies. As much as communities try, other than a basic tenet that binds them together, there isn’t much difference between the growth of a community and, the evolution of family. The same basic principles of Belief, Responsibility, Accountability and Trust ensure that the forward momentum is not stalled.

The paradox is that having stated the above, I ended up attempting to box-in the “community” into some nice tangible parameters so as to enable explanation. Fun !

The decline of a community or, even a sub-aspect of a community can also be traced to a larger sense of hubris and, a lack of plan in terms of moving forward to embrace change. The hubris part is perhaps derived from moving away from a central core idea that was the genesis of the community and, attaining a false sense of being indestructible to external forces. Statistics are important – but statistics are external representations of symptoms – for example, wiki edits; commits to version control; activity on mailing lists; number of contributors; mass of consumers all these indicate how the community (or, tribe) is moving forward. They do not capture whether the general direction is based on the central core theme and, is moving across a wider spectrum without getting too diluted.

Why can’t “communities” be replaced by “tribes” ? Makes for a better understanding of the complexity of interaction that ensures a sustaining environment for a group of people who perceive a need to exist. And, would be able to come together to arrive at decisions that ensure sustenance. Most communities/tribes are specialized formations of people who find a common space to talk about and extend their areas of interest. As such, the need to “fabricate” a community is somewhat redundant while the need to work on providing a “commons” is important.

ps :The post is rambling in essence, at some point I’d like to re-visit this and, collate the other thoughts.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.4.1

Over at SANIsoft in the past few days we released two small but very useful bits of code. The code was written to itch the classical ‘I need it’ itch. I do hope there will be more like me out there who would like to solve the same problems.

• jQuery auto-correct plugin – Once attached to an input field of a form this plugin will automatically replace / correct common typos like ‘teh’ and ‘taht’
• DateTitle – A WordPress plugin for automatic post titles If a title of a post is left blank this plugin will automatically insert todays date in a format of your choice.

The links to downloads and demo are on the pages which I have linked above

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

Now that we have separate tag stack for each frame, I wanted to have the something similar to vim tab support. Emacs wiki is an excellent resource for finding new emacs extensions. For tab support i found

o tabbar mode
o elscreen

Of the above what I wanted was elscreen. I liked elscreen because of its similarity to screen. But getting separate tag stack for multiple elscreen window turned out to be complex.

The solution was to see how easy to get the emacs frame support do what i wanted. Emacs no-window-mode already allowed creating multiple frames. So what remained is to have a sane key binding that allowed creating new frames and moving between multiple frames easily. Here is what i ended up writing.

(defvar frame-browse-mode-map (make-sparse-keymap)
  "Keymap used in frame-browse mode.")

(defun select-frame-1 ()
(interactive)
(select-frame-by-name "F1"))

(defun select-frame-2 ()
(interactive)
(select-frame-by-name "F2"))

(defun select-frame-3 ()
(interactive)
(select-frame-by-name "F3"))

(defun select-frame-4 ()
(interactive)
(select-frame-by-name "F4"))

(defun select-next-frame ()
(interactive)
(other-frame -1))

(defun select-previous-frame ()
(interactive)
(other-frame 1))


(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "c" 'make-frame-command)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "1" 'select-frame-1)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "2" 'select-frame-2)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "3" 'select-frame-3)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "4" 'select-frame-4)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "n" 'select-next-frame)
(define-key frame-browse-mode-map "p" 'select-previous-frame)

(global-set-key "\C-t" frame-browse-mode-map)

(प्रिया से क्षमायाचना सहित)

आज पहली बारिश ने सत्यानाश कर दिया,
पॉलीथीन से तने झोंपड़े को सराबोर कर दिया,
एक झोंका हौले से आया और तिरपाल ले गया,
फिजा ने कान से टकरा कर जैसे, एक गाली दे दिया।

पानी की धार रुखसारों को छूती हुई...
कान के पीछे से नीचे चली गई,
मौका देख एक धार कमीज भिगो गई,
धार की बेहयाई...
खून बन कर आँखों में उतर गई।

नजर उठा जब आस-पास देखा...
उड़ कर आए टपरे, फटे तिरपाल...
इन्द्रधनुषी पॉलीथीन शीट, नालीदार चादरें...
असहाय पड़े थे इधर उधर,
हम दीवाने से बरसात में उन्हें उठा जमा रहे थे।

मन बावरा बदहवास हो गया,
इन धड़कनों पर इसका राज हो गया।

सुन बे मौसम! बदल दे मिजाज अपना जल्दी
घबरा रहे हैं हम कि कहीं
“हमें तुमसे नफरत न हो जाए”
---

(चित्र – कृष्ण कुमार अजनबी की कलाकृति)

Hi,

Kushal pointed me to this: http://bitc.bme.emory.edu/~lzhou/blogs/?p=71

…YEAH! :)

• Sitting in the bedroom balcony enjoying cool breeze and the lightening show. No rains yet #weather #
• Testing out Gravity twitter client – seems the $10 is worth it for the group feature alone! #
• http://twitpic.com/80cf1 – Heh! I found a 'For reasons of hygiene' sticker #
• Eating low fat probiotic yogurt – sounds awfully healthy #
• Damn! Where did the weekend go? #monday #
• @qtfan No one likes it but we mere mortals can't avoid it in reply to qtfan #
• @fox2mike Post a twitpic of the cards in reply to fox2mike #
• Announcing #jquery Auto-correct plugin – no more having to correct your teh and taht http://is.gd/18Wrw #
• @fox2mike cool does the back have to same photo in every card ? in reply to fox2mike #
• @sunshin3girl I am sure it would be creepy if they always talked about guys. Seriously is it that bad? in reply to sunshin3girl #
• @kalyanvarma The header image on this http://kalyanvarma.net/rainforest_faq page is broken in reply to kalyanvarma #
• RT @fossdotin: Not bad – The FOSS.IN page on Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/nszdx8) is seeing lots of signups #
• And then there were none!! My #wordpress stats seem to have been wiped off #
• @derherr Twitpic it man! in reply to derherr #
• SANIsoft: blog : jQuery auto-correct plugin http://tinyurl.com/my3dd6 #
• Livejournal: Reviving the journal: After a lot of reluctance I am pushing myself to revive the journ.. http://tinyurl.com/lrulov #
• LOL http://twittch.com/23/ I love the firefox girl in this #toon #
• @bluesmoon got any URL for amora? in reply to bluesmoon #
• @kbhargava @louiswu Thanks will look it up. in reply to kbhargava #
• Aasim seems to have acquired a good reading speed about 300 pages a day and he is not skipping #
• Livejournal: Taking screenshots on E71: My current home screenSince I decided that I want to be able.. http://tinyurl.com/nkrugz #
• @bluesmoon Thanks, Yes, I read the description of Amora – will try it out looks really really useful in reply to bluesmoon #
• Note to self: #wordpress silently gobbles up < and > instead to converting them to < and > if you are editing in the HTML mode #
• Heh! and twitter does not let type htmlentities I meant < is not converted to & lt; etc #
• Twitter feed seems to be very messed up at the moment guess should halt it for a while #
• RT @meerasapra: "I have all these great genes but they're recessive that's the problem here" #C&H @clubcalvin #
• http://twitpic.com/89o9z – Flowers sent by a client as congratulations to the programming team #sanisoft #
• http://twitpic.com/89t3x – After god awful days of heat looks like it will rain now. Continuous rolling thunder! #
• RT @BoBennett: If a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, it doesn't necessarily mean it's good advice. #
• Just back after a drive around in the rain and back to work – can happen only in #nagpur #
• Reviewing the hReview microformat #
• @gulpanag yes attempting 4×4 terrain in an innova is a bad idea. Learned it the hard way – a Pajero is best for that in reply to gulpanag #
• @ranjeet_walunj Are you not confusing schooling with education? in reply to ranjeet_walunj #
• A swiss card is indeed a handy thing to have – managed to repair my reading glasses – W00t for #insomnia #
• Final CakeFest Schedule Announced! http://cakefest.org/talks #cakefest #cakephp Soooo wishing that I was there #
• Bookmark: Wordpress Option Reference http://tinyurl.com/levllq #
• RT @kbhargava: HR Managers are vampires, always on the look-out for "fresh" blood. #
• Sitting watching rain and lightening while romantic songs of Rafi play in the background #
• RT @achitnis: In the end, he couldn't Beat It. Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson. #
• @nateabele Doing a Cakefest in India can be indeed considered in reply to nateabele #
• Bahaaron phool barsao, mera mehboob aaya hai… the Modh. Rafi mood continues #music #
• @codemaverik Not yet raining but the temperature is down to a bearable degree in reply to codemaverik #
• http://twitpic.com/8go15 – Sunset – the picture does not capture the lovely breeze blowing #
• My M$ Windows PC had unprotected sex with a strange Pen drive and is now infected with a nasty variant of W32 worm. AVG un able to cure #
• http://twitpic.com/8nht5 – It finally feels like the rains have arrived! #
• Combofix removes the 'Google is banned' variant of W32 worm. #virus #
• @shortwing Pictures? in reply to shortwing #
• Hoping for a midnight photo shoot #

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

Imagination is your key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world. Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

We finally finished upgrading the KDE Community Forums to a shiny new board!

We changed a range of things, some of them being:

• The board software: KDE Community Forum now uses phpBB 3.0.5. We thank all phpBB team members, especially Chris Smith (cs278), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Nils Adermann (naderman) for always being around and monitoring the progress.
• A great new theme, a fine work by one of our admins, Ingo Malchow (neverendingo)
• A fresh new look to KDE Brainstorm:

• Topic tagging and tag cloud
• A little more AJAX here and there
• A lot of optimizations

We hope to have a smooth ride with this nascent change. Many thanks to the forum staff who made this possible.

Oh, and as there have been numerous things to look at, it is probable that we missed out a broken edge somewhere, since afterall, we are all humans
So if you find a bug anywhere on the forum, we request you to report it at the Upgrade problems thread or inform a staffer at #kde-forum on irc.freenode.net (See /msg sKreamer forumstaff for a list of staff)

Thanks, and enjoy!

Yesterday a couple of us (well, 11 of us actually) took a trail organized by Trek’Di to the Tamhini Forest. It was something I have not done before and, the completely different nature of sounds within the forest took me by surprise. Some photographs are here. There were elements of fun as well which is bound to happen in a diverse group of folks. The photographs have been from mobile phone cameras mostly, an indication of showers (which were heavy) did not encourage me to take the usual point-n-shoot along

I am a strict believer in the philosophy of the four 'R's - Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle. The story I had written a few days back about the death of a dear friend is proof for this claim. For that matter, that is not even the friend with whom I have shared the longest of my friendships :-). Humor aside the point is that it is possible to practice this philosophy. It might be a little difficult initially but it is just a matter of making up your mind.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Pooja’s menu for the month

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

Special delivery from back home in indore.

Originally posted at http://vsharma.net/577.

She is here

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

That is pooja and mom.

Originally posted at http://vsharma.net/576.

I was reading an article named “Why Can’t a Computer Translate More Like a Person?” by Alan K. Melby. The article is about the challenges that machine translation technology face to reach a acceptable quality of translation. He explains the importance of culture sensitivity required for machine translation programs. Article lists a number of examples where MT can go wrong if context , culture etc are not taken into consideration.  There are very interesting arguments about how reductionalism becomes a wrong choice while designing MT. If you are interested in  natural language processing or machine translation and wondering if there is any limit for computer programs to reach human’s language capabilities, please read it.

The article is written long time back, and Machine Translation technologies improved a lot. There are commercial as well as free translation products for many languages. There are research going on in intra-indic as well as english-indic translations.  I am not sure how far these technologies solved the challenges mentioned in the above mentioned article, but I believe that the questions are still valid.

The question is whether the programs can understand our culture, language usage , emotions etc. For translating limited domain or dry content, the machine translation may be effective, but in a general purpose use, I don’t know how effective they are.

Melby argues :

That key factor which is missing from current theories is agency. By agency, I mean the capacity to make real choices by exercising our will, ethical choices for which we are responsible. [...]. Any ‘choice’ that is a rigid and unavoidable consequence of the circumstances is not a real choice that could have gone either way and is thus not an example of agency. A computer has no real choice in what it will do next. Its next action is an unavoidable consequence of the machine language it is executing and the values of data presented to it. I am proposing that any approach to meaning that discounts agency will amount to no more than the mechanical manipulation of symbols such as words, that is, moving words around and linking them together in various ways instead of understanding them. Computers can already manipulate symbols. In fact, that is what they mostly do. But manipulating symbols does not give them agency and it will not let them handle language like humans. Symbol manipulation works only within a specific domain, and any attempt to move beyond a domain through symbol manipulation is doomed, for manipulation of symbols involves no true surprises, only the strict application of rules. General vocabulary, as we have seen, involves true surprises that could not have been predicted.

With all these advanced technologies, can we develop a universal , any-to-any language translation program? We have seen many examples where human beings are failing miserably in sensible translation. If you are looking for  english->hindi translation effectiveness, try this using google Translation

आप हिन्दी समझते है ? ==> You understand English?

So do you think that if there is any such universal translation tool,  it is nearly impossible and “only god can create such a tool” ?! . Heard about Babel fish (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)? .  The babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and is a universal translator which simultaneously translates from one spoken language to another. When inserted into the ear, its nutrition processes convert sound waves into brain waves, neatly crossing the language divide between any species you should happen to meet whilst travelling in space. According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, the Babel fish was put forth as an example for the non-existence of God: .

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. Q.E.D.

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic

Alan K Melby argues that Douglas Adams was saying that there can’t be any such fish.

The silliness of the above argument is intended, I believe, to show the futility of trying to prove the existence of God, through physics or any other route. Belief in God is a starting point, not a conclusion. If it were a conclusion, then that conclusion would have to be based on something else that is firmer than our belief in God. If that something else forces everyone to believe in God, then faith is denied. If that something else does not force us to believe in God, then it may not be a sufficiently solid foundation for our belief.

Adams may also be saying something about translation and the nature of language. I can speculate on what Adams had in mind to say about translation when he dreamed up the Babel fish. My own bias would have him saying indirectly that there could be no such fish since there is no universal set of thought patterns underlying all languages. Even with direct brain to brain communication, we would still need shared concepts in order to communicate. Words do not really fail us. If two people share a concept, they can eventually agree on a word to express it. Ineffable experiences are those that are not shared by others.

I have some friends studying on machine translation with Indian Languages. They are evaluating shallow transfer method(Statistical methods to the words surrounding the ambiguous word.) for this using tools like apertium. Let us hope that they will succeed in their efforts.

Let me give one example translation between Tamil and Malayalam where context matters.

In Malayalam, for ‘wait, wait’, we usually say, “നില്ക്കു് നില്ക്ക്”(Literal meaning:  ’stand, stand’ ) . For the same purpose , I have noticed that my Tamil speaking friends  use “இரு இரு” (Literal meaning: ’sit, sit’  ). Now if the translation is done without knowing this usage, it is going to be funny. Shallow transfer methods use multiple intermediate  languages for translation. For eg: If there is a translation  tool available for a->b and b->c and then a->c is possible through a->b->c . I feel that this is going to be a big challenge.. to keep the word meaning, context, common usage…etc.. Let us wait/sit/stand and see

Since we saw “a nonexistence of God proof”, let me give another one, that I read sometime back.

1. God is so powerful, he can do any thing,
2. God can create anything , if #1 is true
3. If #2 is is true, he can create a big stone that he cannot lift!
4. If he cannot lift a stone, then #1 is wrong, hence #2 also wrong. So God does not exist!

Looks very silly, right? or “Logical” ?

“Do you read fiction?” I asked Manish.

“Huh?” he stammered. Only minutes before, I had asked if he could write Python code to generate the Fibonacci sequence, my standard test for recruits. He was trying to work that out and I was growing impatient.

“Um, yes…” he tried to answer, but I wasn’t listening. I said, “There’s a book reading at Crossword in about fifteen minutes. Let’s continue there.”

Amitav Ghosh was in town to promote his new book Sea of Poppies. I had been seeing his books on shelves for years, but hadn’t read any, being generally sceptical of Indian authors. Many years back, when each new book cost me months of savings and days of careful consideration, I had on occasion hazarded a technical book by an Indian author, and inevitably ended up bitter. For all their cover promises, the books were always fluff.

Amitav Ghosh is good, Zainab said. But Indian fiction in English? Admittedly, I hadn’t tried any. Couldn’t hurt to try, given I can afford to buy and not read a book these days.

And so that evening, I interrupted the interview and took the candidate to a book reading, asking him to think out the code and dictate it to me later. Ghosh read an excerpt from his book and discussed it with his host. I hadn’t been to a book reading before and didn’t know what to expect. When the discussions ceased and people queued up to get their books signed, I joined.

At my turn, I put two books down on the desk. Ghosh opened one and looked up expectantly, then said “Who’s it for?”

“Huh?”

Who’s it for? For myself? I was picking a copy for myself. Who could it be for?

“For Kiran,” I said.

Wait, that sounded wrong. Someone was missing. Someone who should have come first. “…and Zainab,” I hastily added. “For Kiran and Zainab,” he wrote.

And that was how I brought home my first author-signed copy and ended up apologising for it.

…

Chandrahas Choudhury was in town this evening for his new book Arzee the Dwarf. Zainab said to say hi. She knew him? Well yes, through the Mumbai blogger circuit. I joined the queue and, when my turn came, offered a reminder of our brief meeting in Manipal last year. “Of course,” he said. “Where’s Zainab? I’m going to write this out to her too.”

“To Kiran and Zainab,” he wrote.

After a long gap Madhusudan took initiative for the FSUG Bangalore meet. I would like to thank Madhusudan for that The meeting was held at Cubbon park. Renukaprasad, Santhosh Vattam, Madhusudan and me reached there by 5 PM (which was the time set for the meeting to start). We discussed something related to GSOC, KDE, Koha and Kannada translation. Its a nice feeling when the contributors meet together and discuss about their projects. We discussed how well the project’s are going and how to bring newbies into the project and if any usability issues of the project(if any). I am happy that after 6 long months we came together for the meeting.

In the mean while Vignesh, Preeti Jha, Amit Gulati and Suman Mukharji came for the meeting. Everyone introduced to others. And again the discussion went on how some of them got into contributing into FLOSS projects.

Altogether it was a nice meeting. And I hope the new people who came to the meeting also loved it Once again a big thanks to all who attended the meeting.

Photos of the meeting could be found here.

Last night, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo was our guest speaker and he talked about how the “web is going social”, and how the “social web is going open”. We discussed all the elements that make up the social web today: identity providers, social web providers and content aggregators, and how each of  them are leveraging open standards and protocols such as OpenID and OAuth to create better experiences for their users. Check out his slides here.

This talk was a nice prelude to some interesting discussion about the role that the browser can play in handling the user’s data and identity on their behalf. Very relevant to this was also the recent experimentation by Weave on identity in the browser, and Myk gave us a demo of the auto-sign-in features.

Labs Night is also a chance for everybody to talk about cool stuff they’ve been working on, so Brandon gave us an update on what’s new in Ubiquity 0.5. There’s some really neat stuff in there: Ubiquity is possibly one of the first pieces of software that perform truly internationalized natural language parsing (0.5 rolls out with support for Japanese and Danish). Do check out this blog post for a detailed discussion of the features in 0.5.

I followed with an update on some of the work I’ve been doing with Jetpack – namely providing the capability for “jetpacks” to record audio. The code to enable this is checked into the repository, but you’ll have to wait until a release later this month if you’re not feeling brave enough to build the extension from source to play around with it. I was especially interested to know the kinds of applications that might be possible with this capability, so you if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. Myk also gave us a demo of the new streamlined way of subscribing to feeds using Snowl, check out this release announcement for more details on what’s new with the message reader you know you want to use!

Paul Tarjan from the Searchmonkey team at Yahoo! gave us some really cool demos demonstrating Searchmonkey Objects and YQL. I’m especially excited about YQL because it can make some of the back-end ubiquity code really simple and efficient. Incidentally, the Bing team was here at Mozilla just a couple of days ago and they also demoed some features similar to Searchmonkey Objects, albeit restricted to video and snippets of data for now.

Search is starting to feel exciting again, a sentiment similar to one we feel in the browser space today. There’s a lot of innovation in the area outside of the big daddy, and it is indeed heartening to see that major players in the web are beginning to recognize the importance of openness and competition

Labs Nights are monthly events, so we look forward to seeing you sometime in July to discuss more cool stuff that everyone’s been working on!

It has been while .. I was looking to use gmail chat from emacs and today I started using emacs-jabber & packaged it for fedora .. review request is waiting!

Another good news:

Mayavi whole stack review request is complete for all packages and in a day or two will be in updates-testing. It has been long long work .. 10 packages and lot of upstream bug reporting.

If you’re in Berlin or nearby, be sure to visit LinuxTag this week! LinuxTag runs through Saturday, June 27th. Don’t forget, Saturday is openSUSE Day at LinuxTag! We have great talks in store for everybody at LinuxTag, including presentations on LTSP in openSUSE, Wine on openSUSE, AppArmor, and what’s new in openSUSE 11.2.

Make sure you do not miss Easy-LTSP presentation by Jan Weber tomorrow, I have vested interest in that one

So as I finally got my hands on this new laptop, I cut out a drive about half the size of the full HDD (leaving me with a 160 GB and a 142GB partition). As I had a Kubuntu Jaunty disk shipped, I popped it in and went through the usual process, the same I have done countless times. With having Kubuntu 9.04 x86 installed on an ext4 partition, I could comfortably dual boot with the pre-loaded Windows Vista Premium and Jaunty. I noticed a big list of stuff that I needed to fix before having the box usable, unlike my older laptop which had everything working out of the box immediately after install.
So anyway, I began with the GPU, an ATI Radeon HD 4570 card, and finally this guide worked out for me. Also a backport modules installation gave me my sounds.

I am pretty happy with the performance, and it works out fairly well for me right now. Although there are a few things that don’t work yet. But I just cant seem to find the time from my office projects and other high priority stuff like the KDE Forum upgrade work in order to do extensive research on how to get these issues fixed. Or honestly, I am really lazy.. Not that these glitches bother me much, as I have started focusing on more critical stuff, I guess. So here’s what all that don’t work:

• The thing that bothers me the most, my display brightness. As for the articles google gave me, I found some unsolved issues with my model, and no workaround. It’s strange, and somewhat funny.. the keys are very moody. They work fine when I boot in, ie. before Kubuntu loads. Now if I adjust them beforehand, the keys works for a short duration even when kubuntu has loaded. If I don’t nudge them before bootup, I’m left with full brightness until I reboot. I also read that switching to the tty’s and back to tty7 can make the keys operational for some users, but not me.
• Next come sleep and hibernate.. I can’t suspend anymore, unfortunately. If I suspend to RAM, the laptop never wakes up. If I suspend to disk, upon waking up, I lose my display. But considering Kubuntu takes not more than a minute right from Grub to desktop, I can live with it for now.
• My bluetooth button.. its a combo button with F2, and well, Jaunty doesn’t seem to care if I go crazy hitting on those buttons hard. But as a pretty acceptable workaround, I switched my bluetooth on by booting into Vista a few days back, and never switched it off since then

But yet again, these are small issues, or “good to have” if you may call it. I’ll try to file bug reports if not reported already. I also need to configure Jaunty to recognize my full RAM (4GB of memory) which is currently shown as around 3 GB. I tried out the server kernel, but guess I need something else to have 4GB RAM on a x86 OS. Or if I manage, I’ll switch to x64 soonish. Save these points, other stuff like KWin works seamlessly, HDMI and media controls work fine as well.

So overall, it’s really good to have *buntu working on a Dell

Another TODO item ticked off a while back! It wasn't what I had originally planned, but the goal has been achieved nevertheless.

I didn't know I made myself a bucket list, long before watching the movie.