Posts Tagged ‘freedom’

Posted on September 20, 2008 - by Sarath

Software Freedom Day

Happy Software Freedom Day Wishes !

I am having a odd experience with this SFD 2008. I missed the SFD event organised by SMC since I have been under bed rest after an unexpected surgery.
Moreover I had planned very early itself to organise an SFD event at Model Engineering College.
I registered the MEC-Tux team at MEC at SoftwareFreedomDay official website for recieving free goodies and were planning well how to conduct the event. Surprisingly the free goodies SFD received the Cochin airport and was caught by the customs. Somebody from courier services called me and told me to pay Rs. 1200 as customs duty. I got confused. I called Anivar seeking help. He told that it is some sort of misunderstanding and these goodies it come under the terms of gift. I went mailing the SFD team for receiving some disclaimer letter notifying that sent goods are gift-educational-material. I called back to courier services again and tried to convince that it comes under terms of gift-educational-materials and I can show them letter from the sender. Unfortunately the courier services team had collected the goods from customs and paid duty for it. So I was totally helpless to pay customs duty Rs. 1200 myself for releaving free goodies worth 75 euros. I denied the acceptance of the goods.

Thus my dream of celebrating SFD at college got busted. Soon after two weeks I became a patient and was hospitalised. My plans got > /dev/null .

As I heard from Hiran’s blog SFD was celebrated very grantly at Malabar Christian College, Calicut.

I’m helpless…

Join us now and share the software,
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Picture courtesy: SFD singapore team

Posted on August 27, 2008 - by Sarath

SMC Rocking again !

Swathantra Malayalam Computing is a FOSSy Organisation to promote malayalam computing. Recently SMC has been working on transliteration/ localization for KDE 4.1 – ml. I could also join the team and contribute by translating some 75 strings .

Malayalam is the first language Indian language to complete the localisation in short span of time. So ml became included with KDE 4.1.

I’m really late to blog about SMC’s KDE release party held at Trivandrum press club. I had planned to join the event. But I was down with fever. I badly missed the event.

It is a fascinating experience to work on translation. It isn’t that difficult to do translation. Technically it is much easier. There is are several tools like poedit, kbabel etc available for editing po files ( translation files). You could just type the translated equvalent word in the same format in the given space. Just have a look at screenshot of poedit.

Now SMC is working on Gnome localisation to malayalam. It would be great some interested people could volunteer to work on translation. It is much easier even type words. Phonetic keyboard tools like Swanalekha can simplify the task. I am poor at inscript keyboard layout. So I used to work with swanalekha fine.

Even though I missed the KDE release party, I am lucky to receive a certificate from SMC