Mugunth's Blog

TamilNadu govt school textbooks available online

2008-04-20T00:43:00.002+05:30

Got to know this news from Tamilulagam discussion list.

Tamil Nadu Government has published its school texts books online(its has been mentioned as for viewing purpose only).
Its available at this URL: http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/

It might be helpful in many ways to students and parents(who are computer savvy). And more importantly it provides open access to the content thats being taught in Tamil Nadu schools.

I dont think any other state in India has done this yet.

Good move by Tamil Nadu Govt.

Verdict within 110 hrs of commiting crime in India!

2008-03-01T10:40:00.000+05:30

Gone are the days in India where courts deliver judgement after ages...

A court in Namakkal (my native place), India has delivered verdict in a murder case within 110 hours of the crime.

Tamil bloggers meet at Pondicherry

2007-12-17T00:31:00.000+05:30

Last week I had a chance to attend tamil bloggers workshop in pondicherry. The workshop was organised by pondicherry tamil bloggers

This workshop is a continuation of a series of workshops organized by tamil bloggers in various parts of tamilnadu recently.

About 200 members participated in this workshop. Participants were introduced to technical details of creating and maintaining their blogs in tamil language. Its well organized and there were lot of publicity done. Pondicherry Legislative Assembly speaker and Bharathidasan University vice chancellor are some of the noted figures who participated in this workshop.

I took a session on using ekalappai - tamil typing software for windows.

You can the pictures taken in the workshop:
http://tamilveli-news.blogspot.com/

This shows that tamil bloggers are growing in numbers and getting organized.
In this bloggers meet, some of us decided to take tamil computing workshops to next step. Thus "Project Tamil Ready" was born. More details about project tamil ready is in chella's blog.

My assumption is, there are roughly 3000 tamil blogs which is the highest in any Indian language. Even in hindi there are roughly only about 1000 blogs (if anybody else have a disputing figure please feel free to comment).

Tamils Protest in Malaysia

2007-11-25T22:58:00.000+05:30

I have lived in Malaysia for about 4 years and have known the problems faced by the tamil community.

I watched with heavy heart some of the videos in the net. The way the peaceful protest were handled by Malaysian authorities is very bad. The world leaders should condemn this.

Ethnic Indians protest in Malaysia

Sucking tear gas and laced-water

How to increase the VMWare (preallocated) disk space.

2007-09-03T15:05:00.000+05:30

I have started using ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) recently. But for some of our office work, I needed older version of ubuntu(6.06). And for that I used VMWare.

Initially I allocated 6GB space to ubuntu 6.06 virtual machine, which I found that is not sufficient for my work. So decided to increase it to 10GB. And after some search in google found a way to increase VMWare disks spaces. Following blog entry is to record the steps which I followed and it might be useful for others also.

I initially tried to increase ubuntu6.06 virtual machine disk size using the following commands:
$cd /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu6.04
$vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10Gb Ubuntu6.04.vmdk

It gave the following errors:
Using log file /tmp/vmware-msubramanian/vdiskmanager.log
This disk is part of a snapshot chain in '/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu6.04/Ubuntu6.04.vmx'.
The selected operation can only be executed on a disk with no snapshots.

I found I have snapshots of ubuntu6.06 vmware disk.

Used the following method to remove the snapshots:
In the VMWare menu, used the Remove Snapshot option,
VM --> Remove Snapshot .. ( This is done while the Virtual machine is switched off)

Again tried using vmware-vdiskmanager it worked.

$vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10Gb Ubuntu6.04.vmdk
Using log file /tmp/vmware-msubramanian/vdiskmanager.log
Grow: 100% done.
The old geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 783/255/63
The new geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 1305/255/63
Disk expansion completed successfully.

WARNING: If the virtual disk is partitioned, you must use a third-party
utility in the virtual machine to expand the size of the
partitions. For more information, see:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1647
$

Tamil blogging community gets media coverage.

2007-04-25T01:52:00.000+05:30

Oflate the number of bloggers who write in tamil language have grown considerably. I assume there could be more than 1000 active tamil blogs currently.
tamilblogs.com aggregator(which I maintain) aggregates content from about 650 tamilblogs.

Recently tamil bloggers held a get together in chennai. And it was covered by popular tamil TV channel Makkal TV. This TV show can be seen in YouTube here. This sort of media coverage for a bloggers get together is a good sign. This will help to get attention of the public towards blogging. And this will lead to increase in the number of tamil bloggers.

I would love to see a strong & responsible tamil blogging community which will act as an alternate media.

tamilblogs opensourced!

2007-04-01T00:35:00.000+05:30

I have been maintaining http://tamilblogs.com for sometime. This is a blogs aggregator which aggregates over 650 blogs written in my native language tamil . Initially I created tamilblogs.com using an opensource blogs aggregatory - gregarius . Later due to performance issues I switched to another opensource blogs aggregator called lilina.

Later I added mysql database support to tamilblogs using code from another similar opensource project lylina. Some of my tamil blogger friends have requested me for the complete sourcecode of the software used in tamilblogs. After few more such requests I thought opensourcing this tamilblogs software would be helpful to many.

Thus was born the new blogs aggregator by name tamilblogs here: http://code.google.com/p/tamilblogs/

Right now one of blogger masivakumar has joined me in this project. I hope many more will join and enhance this project.

Tamil Song Search

2007-02-27T11:38:00.000+05:30

Recently thro one of my friend I got to know about this website: http://www.s-anand.net/tamil
Its a wonderful service. Using this we can search for a particular song and start hearing it. The search can be made based on the song name or movie name.

For example, I am great fan of late MGR's songs. When I typed MGR in the search bar, it brought me some of the MGR's songs as below.

There are thousands of tamil songs around, its really very useful software.

I wonder why no tamil techie has thought about this earlier (including me :) ) !

Great work! Thanks a lot Anand for creating this.

TamilKey 0.3 (Thamizh Visai) released.

2006-12-14T13:48:00.000+05:30

TamilKey or ThamizhVisai(as its called in tamil) is an extension for typing tamil inside firefox,thunderbird & chatzilla. Its one of the projects initiated and being maintained by a group tamil freesoftware volunteers under thamizha.com.

Tamilkey version 0.3 was released on 12 Dec 2006 and release anouncement was made by our team member Gopi in freetamilcomputing list.

This release has following new features:
1. Support for Bamini and Typewriter keyboard layouts.
Bamini keyboard is popular among Srilankan Tamils and Typewriter keyboard is popular among the Tamil Nadu tamils.

2. User Shortcut option - Now users can set their own shortcuts for various keyboard settings and for switching from english to tamil typing.

3. And also many bugs were fixed in this release.

Almost all the development work related to this version 0.3 was done by Gopi. And also Freetamilcomputing list members Ravi, Thi.Va., Sethu contributed to this release greatly by testing this release and finding bugs.

This can be downloaded from the following locations:
http://tamilkey.mozdev.org/installation.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2994/

My home town in news!

2006-11-16T11:02:00.000+05:30

Recently my home town Namakkal - became first town in India to get ISO 14001 certification. I am really proud about this.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/04/09/stories/2006040900210400.htm

I hope other cities in India too follow Namakkal and become clean and efficiently managed cities.

'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin Killed

2006-09-04T11:19:00.000+05:30

Just saw this news in BBC site http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5311298.stm
I used to watch with awe Steve Irwin's wildlife programs in TV. I feel sad about his sudden death.

SumatraPDF viewer - A light weight PDF reader

2006-08-24T11:18:00.000+05:30

In my windows machine, I havent installed any PDF reader since I was not using windows system often. Yesterday I came across a light weight PDF viewer for windows by name Sumatra PDF viewer. http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

I liked it very much for the following reasons:
1. Its light weight compared to Adobe Acrobat reader.
2. It serves its purpose of showing the pdf files cleanly.
3. Its a freesoftware .

I have installed it and started using it as my primary and only PDF viewer.

Of cource it has few sortcomings too. Right now it doesnt have printing support. But I hope soon these features will be available since its a freesoftware. And by nature freesoftwares evolves thro community participation

Updated tamil firerfox extensions

2006-07-24T11:53:00.000+05:30

Last week I updated two of my firefox extensions.
1. Tamil language extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2989/ )
I had created a tamil language extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/512/) that works only on version 1.0.x . Even though I have updated this tamil extension to work in version 1.5 some time back, but could find time to updated the extension in addons.mozilla.org only last week.

2. Tamilkey extension:
Tamilkey is a utility to type tamil in firefox/thunderbird/chatzilla directly. Its now available at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2994/
It was created by myself and released on Pongal day (14-01-2006) .
Later voice of wings joined and enhanced the utility by completely rewriting the code.

Tamilkey project website URL: http://tamilkey.mozdev.org

Chennai in google earth

2006-06-13T21:43:00.000+05:30

Google has released a new version (release 4 beta) of their google earth yesterday. Details of this release is here: http://earth.google.com/earth4.html

I am happy about this release for two reasons:
1. Google earth is available for Linux machines. So now I am able to install google earth in my linux laptop.
2. Google earth features my favorite place chennai (its also my home state capital). Its now possible to see more details(street level details) of chennai. Previously google earth used to show in detail only Bangalore, New Delhi, Bombay & Hydrabad cities in India. For some unknown reason chennai was left out by google. I am happy that atleast now google earth shows chennai in detail.

Following screen shot shows chennai's famous Anna Flyover in google earth.

A tamil transliteration pluggin for Gaim

2006-01-30T21:41:00.000+05:30

Gaim is a popular opensource IM utility. I use Gaim to communicate with my friends using various protocols like Yahoo/MSN/IRC etc. It works both in Linux & Windows (also in BSD, MacOS X )
For typing tamil in any windows program, I use a keyboard driver software by name ekalappai (which is also created by me). But somehow ekalappai cannot be used with Gaim. It simply does not work. So far no time to debug this. So whenever I use Gaim in windows I type tamil text in notepad then copy & paste in Gaim and send it. Now there is a solution to this problem. Anna University student Varun has created a plugin for Gaim transliterate english text typed in gaim message window to tamil. You can read about this plugin in Varun's blog. Congrats Varun !

Tamilkey - a firefox extension to type tamil.

2006-01-14T01:08:00.000+05:30

I am happy to announce the release of tamilkey firefox extension on this Pongal day.

Using tamilkey firefox extension firefox users will be able to type tamil without need for any external programs like ekalappai.
Currently tamilnet99 and Anjal keyboard layouts are supported by tamilkey. I am planning to add more keyboard layouts in future.
Tamilkey can be downloaded from http://tamilkey.mozdev.org

An Online Tamil Keyboard to type tamil from anywhere...

2006-01-10T13:45:00.000+05:30

I have often found myself unable to write tamil from cyber cafes. Many cybercafes dont have tamil input software installed in their computers. To address this problem i wrote a javascript utility for typping tamil and have hosted in my developer.thamizha.com site.

I have named it as Online Tamil Keyboard. URL for Online Tamil Keyboard : http://developer.thamizha.com/tamilkey.html

As of now I have given option for two keyboard layouts
1. Anjal layout - This is most popular keyboard among tamils who havent learned Tamil typewriter or Tamilnet99 keyboards.

2. Tamilnet99 keyboard layout - This is the keyboard recognised by Tamil Nadu Government. Using this keyboard we can type tamil very fast. I personally use this.

I plan to add Bamini keyboard (which is popular among Srilankan Tamils) and TamilTypewriter layout (which is popular among those who have learned Tamil Typewriter) in future.

And this only works in Firefox browser as of now. I am trying to figure out a way to make it work in Internet Explorer (I would greatly appreciate if any one helped me on this ).

I hope this Online Tamil Keyboard page would be helpful in some way to Tamil users :)

Connecting to IRC from Airtel's broadband connection

2005-12-11T22:35:00.000+05:30

I use Airtel broadband in my home. I noticed sometime back that I could not connect to any IRC channels from my home.

Then after googling about similar problem faced by others found a solution for that.

Airtel seems block port 6667 which is usually the default port used by IRC clients.

So to connect to IRC ports other than 6667 should be used if connecting using Airtel

I use port: 7000 for connecting to my favorite IRC channels.
For example to connect to my Tamil localization channel #thamizha in freenode, i use the following command in my firefox browser (with chatzilla Plugin) address box:
irc://irc.freenode.net:7000/thamizha

I hope this tip might be useful to some of you who use Airtel internet connection in India :)

New tamil unicode encoding proposal - My opinion

2005-12-07T00:55:00.000+05:30

Recently Tamil Nadu Government website has posted a proposal for new tamil unicode standard (named as TUNE ) and have asked for comments.

The details are in this URL: http://www.tunerfc.tn.gov.in/

Problem statement given by TUNE team is: "As a result, Tamil Language, the script of which is NOT a "Complex Script" unlike other Indian Languages had also been considered as a "Complex Script" and the Unicode encoding developed employing level-2 implementation (instead of level-1) resulting in an unwieldy coding scheme for Tamil. "

My understanding is that the above statement says the following two points:
1. Tamil unicode has been made into complex unnecessarily [ My opinion: so what ??? ]

2. The Unicode encoding developed employing level-2 implementation (instead of level-1) resulting in an unwieldy coding scheme for Tamil. [ My opinion: This sounds more to be an opinion of the TUNE creators. This statement dont have any factual backing. ]

Above problem statement itself appear very weak. I don't find a need for proposing a new Tamil Unicode standard.

And I find the paper gives the following incorrect information:

"Tamil Unicode support is yet to be available in other operating systems like MacOS, Linux , etc"

[4th sentence under the heading Other shortcomings in this URL: http://www.tunerfc.tn.gov.in/TUNE-an_introduction.htm ]

Tamil unicode is very well supported in Linux operating systems. Linux Distros like FC4 comes
with out of box tamil unicode support.

Also this paper says another problem with existing unicode standard is vendors like Adobe are yet to support tamil Unicode standard.

This is absurd, the authors of this new proposal should ask the vendors like Adobe to support for tamil unicode in their applications instead of trying to change tamil unicode standard for vendor not supporting.

Current status of tamil unicode standard is as follows:

1. Unicode tamil is supported very well in linux, Windows & Mac platforms.

2. Most Applications have now tamil unicode support (e.g. Tamil Mozilla & Tamil OpenOffice are already available)

3. Most of the tamil websites are now in Unicode

5. There are over 1000 Tamil bloggers writing in unicode tamil.

[ There are about 846 tamil bloggers listed in http://www.thamizmanam.com/tamilblogs/index.php alone , there are lot more listed in technograti and not in thamizmanam.com ]

Existing tamil unicode standard works fine in every aspect. And it is gaining acceptance among vendors and users very fast.

There is absolutely no need to change the existing tamil unicode. Efforts like TUNE should not be encouraged at all. I find such efforts are mere waste of time and energy.

At the same time I am not religious about supporting current tamil unicode support only.
If by chance, unicode consortium accepts the new tamil unicode proposal (which is a distant possibility) , then I too will start using/supporting new tamil unicode standard.

Until then I will continue to support and popularize the existing tamil unicode standard.

Built firefox (1.6a1) from my windows XP machine !

2005-11-19T21:51:00.000+05:30

Today I attempted & Succeeded to build the latest source of firefox in my Windows XP machine.
I followed the instructions from this page: http://gemal.dk/mozilla/build.html .

I have Airtel's 128Kbps (max) brandband connection at my home.
It took about 2 hours to download the source and another 2 hours to build the firefox.

Its was a wonderful experience to build our own copy of firefox and to use it.

I am writing this blog from my "homemade" browser :)

New job for me!

2005-10-10T20:48:00.000+05:30

I have joined spikesource in bangalore on 3rd of October.

Spikesource is a startup company started to facilitate the adoption of open source softwares in the enterprise.

I like free/opensource concepts. I like the freedom it gives to the users and programmers.
And free/opensource softwares gives an unlimmited oppurchunity for learning new technologies.

When I got this offer from spikesource, I just could not resist it :)

Spikesource India is looking for programmers who are passionate about free/Opensource softwares. Let me know if you are intrested.

Software freedom day 10 sep 2005 @ Chennai

2005-09-11T14:20:00.000+05:30

Yesterday Chennai Linux Users group and Tamil Nadu Science and Technology foundation jointly celebrated Software freedom day in chennai.

As part of it the following functions were organised at Birla Planatorium , kotturpuram, Chennai.
1. FOSS and Linux Demo Day
GNU/Linux and various Freesoftwares were shown to the public in about 10 PCs. This showed the power of Freesoftwares to the visited.
It should be noted that , for this program the Chennai Linux Users group volunteers have brought their own PCs for this event.

2. FOSS Training to 50 School Teachers
In this program school teachers were given briefing about GNU/Linux and other free softwares.
And the 11 std science sylabus about linux was also covered in this training.
I hope this program would have been very helpful to the teachers who attended.

Below are some of the pictures taken in that event...

Finding DNS errors in our website

2005-08-24T10:27:00.000+05:30

I came to know about an excellent online tool for finding DNS errors in our website yesterday.
I have been facing problem in acessing my thamizha.com & dnsreport.com from Navan's comment in my Tamil blog entry yesterday.
It seems to be a very usefull online tool for finding DNS errors in our websites. It had showed some errors in my tamilblogs.com DNS issue...

Similary another usefull website for finding much more online info is: http://dnsstuff.com/

SKIM installation issue in Xandros

2005-08-20T12:30:00.000+05:30

As I have mentioned in my earlier blog entry, I have started experimenting with Xandros. My main obstacle in using Xandros for my day to day browsing is typing tamil in it.
Many tools have been created by tamil community for this , but i am sorry to say, nothing is perfect and nothing is complete...

Recently I heard about SCIM and SKIM utilities which seems to be able to solve the tamil typing problem in Linux. SCIM stands for Smart common Input Method platform. You can find more details about this project in this URL: http://www.scim-im.org/

There is a discussion thread going on in tamilinux yahoogroup about this. You can see check at this URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/messages

I too tried my hand in installing SKIM in my Xandros linux box. But could not succeed. Here are the detailed steps I followed:

1. Downloaded skim-1.4.1 package downloaded from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scim/skim-1.4.1.tar.bz2
2. extracted the package using xandros update manager copied to my local folder (/home/mugunth )
3. Installed using ./configure command as mentioned in the install document. I received the following error messages:
mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1# ./configure
Checking for Python : /usr/bin/python
Checking for SCons : Use Bundled scons.
Checking for kde-config : kde-config was found
Checking for kde version : 3.3.0
Checking for the qt library : qt was not found
Please set QTDIR first (/usr/lib/qt3?) or try scons -h for more options
mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1#

4. I installed KDE development environment using Xandros networks

Xandros networks is excellent tool and using this its possible to download and install popular packages easily. see in the right the screenshot of how Xandros Networks window appears...

5. Again tried installaling skim by issuing ./configure command, this time the following error messages were got:

mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1# ./configure
Checking for Python : /usr/bin/python
Checking for SCons : Use Bundled scons.
Checking for kde-config : kde-config was found
Checking for kde version : 3.3.0
Checking for the qt library : qt was found as /usr
Checking for uic : uic was found as /usr/bin/uic
Checking for moc : moc was found as /usr/bin/moc
Checking for the qt includes : the qt headers were found in /usr/include/qt3/
Checking for the kde includes : the kde headers were found in /usr/include/kde/
Checking for pkg-config : Found
Checking for scim >= 1.3.3 ... Not Found
Checking for scim-x11utils ... Not Found
scim >= 1.3.3 was not found (mandatory).
Perhaps you should add the directory containing "scim.pc"
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1#

6. Now scim is found to be missing. So i downloaded scim 1.4.0 from the URL http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scim/scim-1.4.0.tar.gz?download

7. Compiled and installed scim 1.4.0 as per the instruction given in its INSTALL file.
8. Again tried configuring SKIM , this time it went thro succesfully.

mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1# ./configure
Checking for Python : /usr/bin/python
Checking for SCons : Use Bundled scons.
Checking for kde-config : kde-config was found
Checking for kde version : 3.3.0
Checking for the qt library : qt was found as /usr
Checking for uic : uic was found as /usr/bin/uic
Checking for moc : moc was found as /usr/bin/moc
Checking for the qt includes : the qt headers were found in /usr/include/qt3/
Checking for the kde includes : the kde headers were found in /usr/include/kde/
Checking for scim >= 1.3.3 ... Found
Checking for scim-x11utils ... Found
mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1#

9. Tried to compile SKIM using ./scons command (as mentioned in the readme file)
After compiling for a while compilation terminated with one error , the following error was received:

g++ -DNO_CONFIG_H -I/usr/include/kde -I/usr/include/qt3 -DENABLE_DEBUG=0 -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -D_REENTRANT -fPIC -O2 -DNDEBUG -DNO_DEBUG -DQT_NO_TRANSLATION -I. -Iplugins/mainwindow/applet -c -o plugins/mainwindow/applet/skimapplet.os plugins/mainwindow/applet/skimapplet.cpp
plugins/mainwindow/applet/skimapplet.cpp:35: error: visibility arg must be one
of "default", "hidden", "protected" or "internal"
scons: *** [plugins/mainwindow/applet/skimapplet.os] Error 1
scons: building terminated because of errors.
mugunthlin:/home/mugunth/skim-1.4.1#

10. Since SKIM 1.4.1 gave error, I decided to try older version 1.4.0 , downloaded skim 1.4.0 from the URL: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scim/skim-1.4.0.tar.bz2?download
SKIM 1.4.0 too gave the same error.

Searched the web for similar errors , could not find one... so logged a bug report in scim sourceforge page.

Nothing much I could do further , anyone have clue about the above compilation error.. please let me know...

XandrOS Linux - excellent choice for Newbies

2005-08-12T09:23:00.000+05:30

I Have recently formated my system and installed WindowsXP and Xandros Linux in dual boot mode. So far I am able to most of my work using Xandros instead of relying on Windows.

So far I am able to the following in Xandros:
1. Connect to BSNL Broadband internet.
2. Able to install ttf fonts.
3. View Tamil internet pages - Tamil rendering is very good.
4. Print Documents.
5. Access my windows partition files
6. Run windows applications like notepad, Internet Explorer in Xandros Linux using Crossover office setup.
7. Open/edit/create all the microsoft word/Excel/powerpoint files using Openoffice

My major irritant with Xandros as of now:
I am not able to type in Tamil. Tried all the available tamil IM utilities but so far not able to succeed..

Need to hack the Input methods to create a suitable typing utility...

Besides the above problem in typing tamil, for other English usage , Xandros linux seems to be an excellent choice for ordinary users.