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smc-fonts (Meera) updated August 19, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux, malayalam.
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Meera is the default font for Malayalam in Fedora. Lately, a few bugs causing wrong rendering of some complex conjuncts were identified and reported – 1, 2.  There was another bug reported in RedHat bugzilla. As Unicode 5.1 is not supported by smc-fonts, glyph Ⓡ was being displayed for Atomic Chillu letters. To make the font Unicode complying, it was suggested to remove this.

Yesterday a new release of Meera fixing all these bugs was made available by Suresh, and I’ve uploaded a new upstream source file at Savannah repository. Then the RPMs were rebuilt for rawhide, which can be found here.

And the ChangeLog reads:

* The glyphs(an R inside a circle) at unallocated Unicode code points are removed.
* Wrong glyph for 'th1s1r3u1' (ത്സ്രു) fixed.
* Breaking up of conjunct 'l3k1k1' (ല്ക്ക) fixed.
* Shaping issues for 'r3cil'+'l3l3' (ര്‍ല്ല) context fixed.

Thanks to Suresh, Ani Peter, Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute !

Why doesn’t mget and mdelete play nice together? July 16, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux.
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One of my colleagues needed a shell script which should:

  1. connect to an external system via FTP
  2. change to a remote directory
  3. get all the files in the directory to local machine
  4. and delete all the files in the remote directory

The ftp commands mget and mdelete can be used to retrieve and delete multiple files respectively. And the code snippet would be:
do_ftp()
{
rm -f $FPTLOG
ftp -n -v <remote_host> <<FTP >$FTPLOG 2>&1
user <user> <password>
cd  $REMOTE_DIR
lcd $LOCAL_DIR
mget *.txt
mdelete *.txt
bye
FTP
}

This should do the job, right? Unfortunately it doesn’t. mget works, but the mdelete afterwards isn’t triggering at all when I checked vsftpd.log.

I managed to save the day by putting a harmless command in between (looks like they need a mediator!).

mget ZCNT_RECON_FBL1N_*.txt
ls         #Needed this for mdelete to work
mdelete ZCNT_RECON_FBL1N_*.txt

Geeks, any explanation on why this happens?

ExMan – the super simple personal expense manager July 5, 2009

Posted by Rajeesh in linux.
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Being a bachelor; I stay with my long term (college) friends. When my colleagues get to know we all guys happily live together, most of the time I hear a “wow”. And we have a cook who prepares delicious food [most of the time ;-) ], and we have a lot of common expense together, plus occasional/frequent personal expense things.

And yes, I dislike “Accounting”, and I hate keeping track of pennies spilt here and there. At the end of the month, I usually am at a loss, and I don’t care too much either. But I know I had to bookkeep something, but I detest that old fashioned “double entry bookkeeping”. I don’t want to care what are my assets, what are my liabilities, what is the liquid cash I have, and where to debit/credit, general ledger, blah, blah…

And I’ve been using GNote, the note taking application, for the purpose. But it needed manual calculation in the end anyway.

Few days back I realized that I need something better as I don’t want to sum all those items, meanwhile exclude some personal expenses or money lent to some guy. And I decided that it’s time to create a shiny new, uber-simple expense manager (which knows only how to add and/or exclude some entries).

The design concerns, in the order of importance, were:

  1. Should be lightweight, and should consume less resources
  2. Minimal external dependency
  3. Maintainable, clean design and clean code

Which resulted in some of the design choices:

  1. No database backend, instead a simple file backing store. The file structure is very simple, hence items can be easily added/removed/modified with a text editor as well.
  2. Qt4 framework for development, which makes ExMan a cross platform application
  3. (At least close to) Model-View-Controller architecture

It was exciting to develop on Qt4 platform, QtCreator and QtAssistant are awesome. Had fun with Signals/Slots, QTableWidget, QCalendarWidget, setCheckedState, SelectionModel,… learn by exploring.

And, without further ado, I present to thee, ExMan, the super simple personal expense/accounting manager:

ExMan

The Monthly Amount shows the total of all expenses, and the Excluded Amount shows the total of items excluded (personal items and other things).

ExMan source tar ball and RPM are available in Sourceforge.net project page.