I have been recently playing a bit with my camera these days.. And thanks to CHDK, I have been having great fun. Check out my flickr page http://flickr.com/photos/kamathln . And my videos page http://kamathln.homelinux.net/videos/ , available only if my laptop is online.

GNOME and Firefox in Kannada

Just installed kannada and got basic apps in kannada. Note: openoffice is something I use once in a bluemoon so did not bother about it at all.

I am running Debain lenny recently apt-get updated and installed. I got these quirks sorted out.

1) got Kannada Unicode to render properly on Firefox, after spoiling it badly.
2) got to type Kannada properly on all places
3) got Firefox translations for kannada
4) set kannada as preferred language in Firefox ( Firefox tells websites about this. The only website that honoured the setting was google, but i was pleased)
5) Get the whole gnome in Kannada

1) Kannada Unicode rendering on Firefox :
This really should not have been a problem at all. This was my own stupidity. Even before I started out to go to some Kannada website, I airily set a few fonts too Freesans. Then i saw that pages dont render properly, after I tried different stupidities franctically and vainly , I thought I will just reset all the configuration. To do this quick, I just entered about:config and researched for freesans, and "reset"' the values to defaults. This fixed the rendering and I was back in business.

As Sans-Serif is a magic font, it chooses the right kannada fonts magically.

And obviously, before starting off with anything ttf-indic-fonts were installed.

2) Kannada typing in all places.
This was simple. After a bit of googling (I wish I hadn't erased the history of Firefox) I found a page where a Japanese guy had solved the same problem like this :

GTK_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"

in /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim .

This worked like magic, I could use SCIM in all places, after I used im-switch to set scim as my default Input module.

For getting easy Kannada typing, I needed to install scim, scim-m17n and itrans packages and these also pulled some dependencies. After that, itt was smooth sailing with kn-itrans option available under Kannada.

To get the language list, just click the little keyboard icon in the system tray. ( After first installation, you need to re-login to get it). Note:you need to Left click on the system tray SCIM icon(little keyboard), not right click, which would give you setup options.

3) Firefox kannada translation
This one was easy

$ apt-get install iceweasel-l10n-kn
$ LANG=kn_IN iceweasel

The LANG=kn_IN iceweasel can be kept in a script and the panel launcher's properties could be set to launch the script. Anyways, Item (5) must obsolete it if it succeeds.

4) Preferred web content set to kannada in Firefox.

Again, pretty Simple:

Main Menu->Edit/Tools-> Preferences->Content->Languages

Or if you already followed item (3):

ಮುಖ್ಯ ಮೆನು->ಸಂಪಾದನೆ->ಆದ್ಯತೆಗಳು->ಒಳಅಂಶಗಳು->ಭಾಷೆಗಳು

Once you add Kannada in the list of languages, dont forget to move it to the top(order indicates the priority). Once this is done, you must find that google presents itself in Kannada.

5) GNOME in Kannada

I searched for kannada packages for GNOME for a long time. Then an angel from #kannada on irc.freenode.net made me realize that Kannada was installed with GNOME
all along! Stupid me. Just checked /usr/share/locale/kn/LC_MESSAGES/ and they were all there. But LANG=kn_IN gedit, LC_ALL=kn_IN gedit, all failed to present in Kannada.Then the same angel hinted me to run

dpkg-reconfigure locales

That reminded me that I was presented with the same UI during installation, and I had neglected it. Damn! Well, it re-generated and configured the languages I chose. after that LANG=kn_IN gedit just worked. So If I am not wrong, a re-login should add Kannada to the list of languages at the GDM login screen, and all the LANG=kn_IN should be unnecessary.

I will be writing to the GNOME's Debain package manager asking to include dpkg-reconfigure locales as a menu item in system->administration :-P.

Update:
I have rebooted and here is a screenshot :

Easy Management for Debian /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

Well, first things first, sorry for the misleading name for the script filenames.

The scripts can be found here.

What they do is, allow easy enabling and disabling of source definition files, just like Apache does. You put those files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d_available, which you would have otherwise put in /etc/apt/sources.list.d . then you use apt-src-enable and apt-src-disable that manages symlinks between /etc/apt/sources.list.d and /etc/apt/sources.list.d_available .

Big fat WARNING: The code is completely untested and is more meant to be read by humans than executed by code. Its more of an expression of an idea than code.

Telescopic display support for laptop

This is an illustration for an idea i submitted to halfbakery. You can view the idea here.

I am not a good artist or a technical drawing guy, so please only appreciate the main idea, and don't analyze it under a microscope :-) .

The base extension is actually thinner and can be fit into a groove on the sides so that even when it is extended, the laptop will maintain a flat level.

Tagz.in same or grown ?

For the uninitiated, tagz.in is a social bookmarking site by my friend Jeethu Rao. And If you already know about tagz, and visit tagz again you may find a little change visually. But don't be fooled. The engine under the hood has grown up and is a lot more mature.

For instance he just added recommendations, now that is something that I have been always wanting - it now recommends bookmarks from other people by learning your tastes once you have voted on at least 50 items. Of course .. it takes into account the tags you have saved under your bookmarks too, so dont forget to save your bookmarks.

And there are loads of tiny improvements here and there. A lot of caching etc..

Dont forget to keep a watch on the "whats new" entry. And yeah.. don't forget to register and check out the recommendation engine. It rocks!

My name is Laxminarayan Kamath

[Someone had asked me about the meaning of my name. I had this in my draft from more than 3 years. The "To:" field was blank. So I have completely forgotten whom it was for. So I thought it is better I leave it here, instead of being stagnant information in some corner of gmail's servers]

My first name is Laxminarayan. And last name is Kamath. Laxminarayan is actually a combination of the name Laxmi and the word Narayan. Where Laxmi is the Hindu Goddess of wealth and Narayan means owner or Lord. So as the Hindu perception of husband as the owner, Laxminarayan means, the husband of Goddess of wealth. According to the Hindu Religious beliefs, Laxminarayan is also a God. Laxminarayan is an all loving, all powerful God. He is considered the maintainer of the universe.

Kamath is my last name. Kamath is actually in a language called Konkani. Konkani is one of several languages of India, and is the primary language of the Goa state and also several people of the west coast of India. The word Kamath actually expands to Kama and Mathi. The word Kama in the language Konkani stands for material pleasure or material duty (as opposed to spiritual pleasure or spiritual duty). The word Mathi in the language Konkani, stands for soil. So in total, the word Kamath means occupied with the duty of soil.

Last names in recent years are only legendary, and inherited from the ancestors. There are few people who actually have the same occupation as their last name indicates.

Tagz.in - Yet another (?) social bookmarking site?

We got a huge number of social bookmarking sites. Is there a need for antoher one?
Well, this one is, by far one with a very clean, no-nonsense UI. It means business. Being developed by my friend Jeethu, it is mainly an experiment to see what happens when you mix social bookmarking like del.icio.us with social sites like reddit. Though it began with that in mind, Jeethu has not stopped adding usefull features http://tagz.in/help/ http://tagz.in/tagz/whatsnew/ . And knowing a bit of his plans, I can assure that several are on their way.
Oh! before I forget.. he also has a reddit page , uservoice page, and obviously a blog of his own. He likes coding in python, and as on the about page, uses django and other python stuff.
It is clearly evident from my monopolization of the website and the uservoice pages that I am really liking it. :-)