Dare to Dream?

Today, I finally finished all the formalities at Red Hat - deposited the laptop back with IS/IT, handed over the drawer keys to Murty ji, had a long discussion with Satish in the exit interview, burnt a copy of Fedora devel tree & finally bid goodbye to all the RedHatters

Leaving RH was a bit nostalgic - lots of good memories were associated with that office - our pune-trans team which was more of a family than a team, our no-mercy pool games, those TT matches, those awesome treks (I still remember how Bhalerao & Aalam had held me from falling down a steep slope!) & specially that night trek… I might miss that all!

I still plan to keep up with m17n-db & evolution projects - maybe when the core packages open up to general public with Fedora 7, I might apply for m17n-db’s ownership.

But till then, DBus’s on my mind - on all 360 degrees!

For those who never worked with Red Hat - an excellent company to work with, very laid back & relaxed environment, gives freedom to work on projects which you might like (ofcourse, official work needs to be finished first!)… & if you are a starter in the FLOSS arena, RH’s the best place to learn -  how to interact with the comunity.

It was… & will remain a dream company for me!

PS: (I’m going to install FC here on my machine when Celunite shifts to Kumar Cerebrum & when I’ll get my permanent box). I’ll set up atleast one FC repository here

Though Zoto’s logins are down for maintainance, I can still upload pictures through my ZoLoader …maybe I’ll polish it enough to be release to GPL - read as General PubLic (real GPL)

Here are some memories from Subu’s b’day!

Preparing for the event… as Ashok, Parag, Sachin & Ganesh anticipate the cake! lolz…

The b’day cards on display… as Shanky (one of our fastest bowler - in light blue T) looks on.

Rahul (offwhite shirt, our inhouse fonts expert), Ramky (Elvis dude!), Aman (our bug-master) & Satya (purple T)

The birthday boy - with his GF! lolz

The B’day cake - Since this time I (me, shanky, ankit) brought it, it was ought to be eggless - & tasted nice too

Sporting popzee’s fav kurta which I managed to get to Pune when last time I visited home - isnt it nice - klass apart! (lol, ‘k’lass apart - not to confuse the poor CPP compilers hehehe)

Fem Fatale - our Charlie’s Angels! - Sanjulee, Runa & Ani

The usual ceremony - without which a b’day seems incomplete

The dude - Ankit - without whose camera, this blog entry would have been lost with time! He had to travel those jammed roads of Viman Nagar to bring his camera from his home in 10 minutes flat! Thanks dude!

More pictures from the party are here

Everyone loves Mickey! Even Ramky

Dear Mayank Jain,
We are pleased to inform you that you are now part of the GNOME
Foundation Membership. You are now eligible to become a candidate
for election and to vote in the annual Board of Directors elections
held each November…

All the hard work - bugs, patches & keymaps I’ve been contributing to upstream (Gnome majorly) have not gone waste… & I was paid in gold this morning when I got an email from the GNOME Foundation Membership Committee confirming my membership.

Also, part of this credit goes to Red Hat - where everyday, my efforts get streamlined into measureable outputs.

Thanks everyone

One - Today, I completd one year at Red Hat, I landed in Red Hat on 7th Feb 2006 - & if we go by bugzilla statistics, I’ve fixed about 86 bugs for packages owened by me.

Two - We got some important visitors from our corporate HQ, Red Hat! It will be interesting meeting them

Okay… back to preparing my presentaion… I’ll be representing the i18n Engineering Team.

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Doh! I’m so sorry, I mistook 2.4.6 as 2.6 version. 2.4.x series had no support for Indic languages. I’ll update my testing again for version 2.5.1 (devel) and blog again about my findings. This post should aint be of any good use. Sorry again.

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Some days ago, I had responded on one of the Abiword blogs (msevior) that I was interetsed in testing the new Abiword release - 2.6.0 for Indic i18n. And today, after almost two weeks, I managed to get 2 free hours, after having a turbo charged “Exotica” pizza from Pizza Hut [Who says caffiene stimulates your nervous system! Pizza does it equally well - probably better!]

Abiword seems pretty nicely designed, but had some issues with rendering. I tested Abiword on following three aspects

• Rendering
• Inputting text
• Printing

Though printing & inputting Indic text worked as expected, rendering Indic text was my major concern. The first & most critical problem I found was that for indic text to be visible, the text had to be marked with the corresponding Indic font, otherwise the text would appear as circles! & the reverse was also equally frightening - if you type text with a hindi font (say Lohit Hindi) and SCIM is not activated, ie - the input is in plain english, the text is rendered as square boxes instead of plain english text. I think there’s some serious problem with the way Abiword uses fallback font or does font selection.

Other issues included ability to add more vovels to an existing vovel, giving something like this…

Another screenshot of interest - http://bugzilla.abisource.com/attachment.cgi?id=4113

Here is a complete bug list
10812 - Abiword does not selects font automatically according to …
10813 - Unable to render complex indic characters
10814 - Typing english text when indic font is selected, gives sq…
10815 - Unable to render ZWNJ properly
10816 - Vovels are not rendered properly for indic scripts.
10817 - Preedit window is randomply placed on the screen
10818 - Abiword cannot print when indic text is written, but corr…

Apart from this, I also found two very interesting things in Abiword.

1. The right click menu in text area gives an option to select the Input Method Engine (IME)- which is very very nice as compared to OO.writer - for which if the IME does not works, you cannot tell if it started or not or was there any other problem or that is GTK_IM_MODULE variable is set or not!
2. Abiword uses a preedit window to display the preedit text - as compared to the underlined text which is displayed by GTK+ apps.

With this, they have managed to escape preedit replication problems like Bug 166231 and Bug 199551, but got caught in a problem of preedit window placement - which currently seemed very random (unlike at the bottom of preedit string everytime in Gedit).

But all this being said, Abiword seems to be a very nice app, had very fast responses & has the ability to be ported to embedded devics like N800 maybe [wink]

…looking forward to use Abiword on my N800