[4016] in linux-announce channel archive
Linux-Announce Digest #308
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Digestifier)
Mon Feb 3 13:13:10 2003
From: Digestifier <Linux-Announce-Request@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>
To: Linux-Announce@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu
Reply-To: Linux-Announce@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 13:13:04 EST
Linux-Announce Digest #308, Volume #4 Mon, 3 Feb 2003 13:13:04 EST
Contents:
[SLUG] Suncoast LUG Meetings ("Paul M. Foster")
[LOCAL] Linux Users Los Angeles-Tues, (LULA Announce)
LINK to IndicComputing... (FN)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Paul M. Foster" <paulf@quillandmouse.com>
Subject: [SLUG] Suncoast LUG Meetings
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 17:07:19 CST
*************************************
* Suncoast Linux Users Group (SLUG) *
* Meeting Schedule *
*************************************
BRANDON **************************************************
6 February 20:00-22:00 Brandon
(first Thursday of each month)
Brandon Barnes & Noble
Brandon Town Center
Brandon, FL
See http://www.suncoastlug.org/meetings.html#Brandon for directions.
TAMPA ****************************************************
12 February 19:00-21:00 Tampa
(second Wednesday of each month)
PricewaterhouseCoopers -- Room 684
3109 W. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Blvd
Lakepointe I Building
Tampa, FL 33607
* FEATURING: Ian Blenke of NKS, speaking on "User Mode Linux"
See http://www.suncoastlug.org/meetings.html#tampa for directions.
DUNEDIN **************************************************
15 February 10:00-12:00 Dunedin
(usually fourth Saturday of each month)
Dunedin Public Library,
223 Douglas Ave.,
Community Room A.
Dunedin, FL
See http://www.suncoastlug.org/meetings.html#dunedin for directions.
SARASOTA/BRADENTON ***************************************
19 February 18:00-21:00 Sarasota
(third Wednesday of each month)
Baker Electronics
8323 Lindbergh Court
Sarasota, FL
See http://www.bish.net/directions/
NEW PORT RICHEY ******************************************
1 March 13:00-15:00 New Port Richey
(first Saturday of each month)
New Port Richey Public Library
(second level meeting rooms)
5939 Main St.
New Port Richey, FL
See http://www.suncoastlug.org/meetings.html#npr for directions.
***********************************************************
ACTIVITIES:
Meetings include:
1) Presentation: As indicated.
2) Question & Answer Session.
3) Raffle and free stuff!
Bring your boxes, questions, problems, and plenty of good cheer!
(And don't forget to start your installs early!)
##########################################################################
# Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: cola@stump.algebra.com #
# PLEASE remember a short description of the software and the LOCATION. #
# This group is archived at http://stump.algebra.com/~cola/ #
##########################################################################
------------------------------
From: LULA Announce <somewhat@pacbell.net>
Subject: [LOCAL] Linux Users Los Angeles-Tues,
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 01:07:28 CST
[LULA Feb 2003 Meeting Announcement - Please repost]
LULA (Linux Users of Los Angeles) presents:
Low Latency Linux for Realtime Audio with TerminatorX
Speakers: Brian Redfern
When: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 7pm - 9pm
Where: Tom Bradley Center, 5213 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Cost: Free
LOCATION:
Tom Bradley Youth and Family Center
5213 West Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Telephone: (323) 692-0669
North side of West Pico Blvd.
between Cloverdale Avenue and Cochran Ave.
between major cross streets of Fairfax Avenue and La Brea Ave.
For a map, see
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?addr=5213+W.+Pico&csz=90019
DIRECTIONS:
>From 10 East or West - Exit north on La Brea, go one mile,
turn left onto Pico, go west about 1/2 mile and park.
>From 405 Freeway North or South, go 10 East - see above.
>From 5/101/170 Freeway North or South, go 10 West - see above.
North
Cochran Cloverdale
| |
| |
| |
| alley |
| +-----------| |
| lot | |
| Center | |
+---------------------+------------------+
| | Pico(1/2 mile) |
| | |
La Brea
South ^
|
(from 10 Freeway)
^
PARKING:
Metered parking on Pico, Cochran, and Cloverdale;
free after 6PM.
Free parking also available in the rear lot; entered only from Cochran
via the alley, but it's a bit cramped.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
See http://www.lula.org
or http://www.lalugs.org
##########################################################################
# Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: cola@stump.algebra.com #
# PLEASE remember a short description of the software and the LOCATION. #
# This group is archived at http://stump.algebra.com/~cola/ #
##########################################################################
------------------------------
From: FN <fred@bytesforall.org>
Subject: LINK to IndicComputing...
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 01:18:43 CST
Indic-Computing Logo January 2002 -- December 2002 SourceForge Logo
Home About Status Projects Documentation Contributing Mailing Mirrors SF.Net Site
Lists Page Map
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Indic Computing Project > January 2002 -- December 2002
----------------------------------------------------------------------
January 2002 -- December 2002
Status of the Indic-Computing Project
31 December 2002
-- Joseph Koshy <jkoshy(@)users.sourceforge.net>
Executive Summary
The project's progress in the past year has been mixed. While most of our
software related projects are still in the planning and early execution
stages, the community response to the first Indic-Computing workshop has
been extremely heartening. We present the status of the Indic-Computing
project and present some of the next steps planned.
Retrospective
The lessons from the past year seem to be:
* There was a pent-up need for a cross-platform and cross-language forum
where issues related to indian language support could be discussed.
The community's enthusiastic response to the first Indic-Computing
workshop and its subsequent participation on our mailing lists showed
that a number of research groups, NGOs, open-source groups and
individual developers do not have adequate representation in the
``official'' fora in India today. Another point that emerged was that
there was no space earlier for people to discuss software development.
We are really pleased that we have been able to provide this
much-needed space to our community.
* Attracting quality, committed volunteers has been a challenge.
Finding good talent and winning people over to a cause is a challenge
for most volunteer efforts. However, open-source Indian language
projects seem to have the following additional characteristics
compared to projects being executed in the developed world:
* Most of the work is being done by fresh developers; working
groups with seasoned developers are few and far between. This
fits into India's contemporary software industry culture of
senior professionals almost exclusively concentrating on
management roles.
Perhaps as a consequence, the quality of software engineering
displayed by most of the existing groups is such that reuse of
the code by others is difficult. For example, most groups do not
have source control methodologies underpinning their work, and
their work is not generally open to peer-review while under
development.
* The vast majority of indian language open-source efforts seem
focussed on one Indian language. Efforts towards solving common
issues and developing a reuseable framework for indian language
computing are rare to find.
* The few companies that have some stake in the Indian language
market do not seem keen on contributing technology to the
open-source movement.
* Finding authentic linguistic information for the Handbook has
been a challenge.
We hope to address some of these concerns in the coming year by the
following means:
* The Handbook will have tutorial sections on the basics of technologies
relevant to indian language computing: character encodings, fonts,
locale programming, X Window System architecture and the like, in
addition to the originally planned linguistic information for
developers. We hope this will help our developers produce higher
quality, architecturally correct code.
* A Technology Map is being planned to serve as a guide to implementors
wanting to choose from the large number of open-source indian language
projects.
* We will seek out quality developer talent more aggressively, both by
attracting talent and by improving our persuasion skills and
convincing companies to donate quality developer time.
A frequently requested item has been a project roadmap and task list
chunked down to the level which matches the time available to
potential volunteers. This is being worked on.
* Whereever possible, we will focus our software development efforts
towards building infrastructure and infrastructure related tools.
Events
* The first Indic-Computing workshop was held at Bangalore during
the 15th and 16th of September, 2002. Forty two people participated
(we had to turn away a few because of space constraints) and the
response was overwhelmingly positive. The workshop proceedings are
available for public download via SourceForge's file distribution
service.
Kudos and a big thank you to our volunteers and organizers: Ashish
Kotamkar, Brij Sethi, Suzanne Adela Byford, Tapan Parikh, Venky
Hariharan, Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya (in alphabetical order by first
name).
This event was co-sponsored by Hewlett-Packard India Software
Operation, Dr. Patrick Hall of the SCALLA project, Microsoft India,
and Ekgaon Pvt. Ltd. A very big ``thank you'' to all of you!
Infrastructure
* A new mailing list, indic-computing-users(@)lists.sourceforge.net ,
for users of indian language software, has been added. We now have
five active mailing lists:
* indic-computing-announce for project announcements,
* indic-computing-cvs-logs for developers tracking changes to our
source tree,
* indic-computing-devel for software developers
* indic-computing-standards for discussing standards,
* indic-computing-users for users.
Of these, the -users list has seen the most traffic (374 messages)
this year, followed by the -devel list (332 messages) and the
-standards list (164 messages).
* Deeproot Linux Pvt. Ltd. has set up our first mirror in India. Thank
you, Deeproot Linux!
* The project website was reworked to integrate all of the project's
documentation. Our users should hopefully find the new look easier to
use. Our website build infrastructure has been documented and is
available for all to reuse.
* The following pieces of documentation were added to the project:
* A contributors list listing the people and organizations that
have contributed to the project.
* A document on the project's CVS infrastructure.
* A document on the project's SGML based documentation
infrastructure. This document also describes how the website is
composed from its constituent pieces.
* A guide for project volunteers.
* A FAQ.
Handbook
While we did manage to locate a number of resources on indian languages,
the task of incorporating the knowledge from these has not progressed very
far. The Handbook has however undergone some degree of expansion and
restructuring based on the feedback from its early reviewers.
* Scripts and Languages are now clearly separated.
* A number of tutorials on the basics of indian language computing are
in progress.
We hope that the coming year (2003) will be a more fruitful one for the
Handbook.
Software Projects
Most of the software development projects planned have remained in the
planning stage.
The current projects in-progress are:
Indic OS (a.k.a the Bootable CD)
Developing infrastructure to enable implementors to build custom
OS images that support indian language ``out of the box''.
Status: requirements specification is complete. Design is in
progress.
Translation Manager
A cross-platform tool to help documentation translators manage
translations to indian languages lacking character set standards
or having flawed character set definitions
Status: requirements specification complete. Design is in
progress. This project has graph-theoretical problems at its heart
so getting help from academic institutions would be easy (we
hope).
Technology Map
The design and implementation of a survey mechanism for indian
language computing technologies.
Status: requirements being specified. Prototypes in progress.
Documentation Toolchain
Design and implement a documentation processing toolchain capable
of handling indian scripts lacking the backing of character set
standards.
Status: partially implemented. This toolchain is in use today for
generating the Indic-Computing Handbook. Print side support (PDF
generation) needs to be strengthened.
The following projects were cancelled:
Portable Input Method Framework for Indian Languages
The volunteer who signed up for this work expressed his inability
to find time for the work.
People and Roles
Tapan S. Parikh <tap2k(@)yahoo.com> has graciously consented to be be a
co-administrator of the project on SourceForge.
About these project status reports
Our project status reports are sent out to the indic-computing-announce
list at periodic intervals. They are also archived under the project's
website, at URL: http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/status.html.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2001--2003 The Site ________________ Google
Built Indic-Computing Project. Search
With Last Modified: Wed Jan 8 12:42:08
WebMake 2003
Webmaster:
jkoshy(@)users.sourceforge.net
--
Frederick Noronha : http://www.bytesforall.org : When we speak of free
Freelance Journalist : Goa India 403511 : software we refer to
Ph 0091.832.409490 : Cell 0 9822 122436 : freedom, not price.
##########################################################################
# Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: cola@stump.algebra.com #
# PLEASE remember a short description of the software and the LOCATION. #
# This group is archived at http://stump.algebra.com/~cola/ #
##########################################################################
------------------------------
** FOR YOUR REFERENCE **
The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests
to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is:
Internet: Linux-Announce-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU
You can submit announcements to be moderated via:
Internet: linux-announce@NEWS.ORNL.GOV
Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites:
ftp.funet.fi pub/Linux
tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux
sunsite.unc.edu pub/Linux
End of Linux-Announce Digest
******************************
