Apr
2008
Workshop on Localization @ MESCE organized by GNU Lab
I was thinking about writing about the workshop and I wrote a bit about it. Then, I saw Shyam’s mail and he has written a report much better than mine. So, I am posting it here(with a little bit formatting and editing) instead of mine…
We started the inaugural ceremony by 10:00am. Raju sir started by welcoming all to the workshop. Col.Induchudan sir, HOD of IT department was our chief guest. He did the formal inauguration of the workshop. Later Raju sir invited Jinesh to give an introduction about the workshop. Jinesh briefly explained what the workshop is all about. He started the workshop with an introduction and then handed over to me, to take an introductory session on how Malayalam is handled on computer(the user level things) and some very basics about Unicode.
The previous day, We a team of free software fans[FSFs?], including Mahesh, and first year CSE guys Manu, Krishna Raj, Vishnu, Savanan and myself was in the lab till 7:00-7:30pm installing the Malayalam locale, and the essential softwares in all computers. Thanks to the teachers at IT lab, they have been so helpful in setting that up. We saw, how interesting it would be if we could team up and hack every night in the lab… It was a new joy for us.
So with those installations, it was very easy for me to show the participants how it worked. But those are just user level hacks, every man with some common sense could study himself, with some time. We did that to show the students who are yet to start, that these things are so easy and its there for making our life easier:-). We showed them, the default inscript method of inputing Malayalam, the difference between lalitha and the usual keymap. Swanalekha was shown and finally ended up with tuxtype.
After this introduction the workshop changed to its second phase, explaining what we can do in this area as Engineers. How we can make a career around language technology, what all are oppurtunities around language technology that usually are not taken seriously while considering our career options. He explained about what
localisation(l10n) and internationalisation(i18n) is all about and the community efforts in this area.
There were some time left after Jinesh’s workshop, so I took a brief session on IRC. Which is one of the must-know kind of thing for an engineering student. Where almost every free software projects are discussed and where we get quality help, provided we behave well;-) [To add a lill thing to that- People, I am alone at our home #mes-fsf;-). So while being online, just try to be there at #mes-fsf. Its as easy as clicking this link and clicking connect there]
The workshop ended with the valedictory function which was chaired by our Director, Dr. K.P Mohammed sir. He wished all the best for our ventures and said that the idea to make use of the lunch time is good.
Thus the second activity of GNU Labs got to an end successfully. Raghesh sir’s and Raju sir’s strong support is what enables us to cover our disabilities and shortcomings in organising such functions and we will try to improve through activities.
Special thanks to all who attended and we hope, you people become active in the near future, that we together can move to more meaningfull activities than mere workshops like, if you people got interested in localisation, we can very well start a localisation group and start localising KDE who’s Malayalam status is quite low. Remember, you just wanna know Malayalam and absolutely no programming skill is required, you just want to know, how to edit a text in a computer… believe me!:-)
So we just had a good start and lets together go forward to build a better future.
Shyam’s original report can be found here. He just forgot to tell about the code of Swanalekha, which was very interesting to read with the comments in Malayalam. Its a good example on how to make code interesting to read.