Chathans

A few months ago, one fine morning I logged into #smc-project IRC channel. An unusual number of members were present on that day, and we were completing the process of getting aspell-ml into Fedora. Meanwhile, Santhosh and Nishan were in the process of creating an ASCII-to-Unicode converter. The discussions and talks went light, and we went into a myriad of topics. Somehow, the discussion turned into Ani Peter’s “blog inauguration“, and then Santhosh pointed out at my Malayalam blog. That prompted him to ask if I am a fan of V.K.N. I said yes, and he replied the feeling is mutual. But a few guys in the list didn’t know who “Payyan” is, or “Chathans” is.

Payyans and Chathans are arguably the most famous characters by this exceptional genius V.K.N.

Few days later, Santhosh and Nishan released the ASCII-to-Unicode converter, and they named the software as “Payyans” !

Couple of weeks after, I was trying to learn GTK+ programming, and Glade. As an experiment, I wrote a small GUI for Payyans in GTK, which resulted in a patch to Payyans and a tiny GTK+ application, which I duly named as “Chathans”.

A few months withered away, I learned a little PyGTK programming, and I rewrote Chathans in PyGTK. Payyans was also improved in a substantial way, gaining internal APIs, so that services of Payyans can be used directly inside Python applications, feature for bidirectional conversion et al. I have added the ability for translation to Chathans later.

So, we have released Chathans, documented the steps to obtain, install and use in SMC wiki.

As always – comments, bug reports and patches are welcome.

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Thoughts on FAT64/exFAT

Yeah, yeah. M$ has released the next generation filesystem for large capacity flash media (iow, the portable USB sticks/external hard disks) and claims to offer “seamless interoperability”. Well, lets sit down and dissect.

It brings back the memories of struggling to mount a NTFS partition my friends had, and smiling a futile attempt to tell them that “Ugh, NTFS isn’t supported yet”. It was not long back. We got NTFS readonly support later, and I remember searching and installing the Kernel module to mount partitions of the dual-booting machines in our lab.

We got reliable NTFS write support with ntfs-3g much later, IIRC by 2006.

And the story repeats.

But no, there’s already an experimental driver for exFAT, thanks to OGAWA Hirofumi. It is reported to work well, but there are issues. Still, he had to hack the image created by Vista to create that driver.

Will there be a “non-sign-your-life-away spec” open to the developers, ye preachers of interoperability?

English-Malayalam Dictionary beta release

As mentioned earlier, we are ready with the beta release of English-Malayalam dictionary in DICT format. The RPM, DEB and source packages can be found here in Savannah repository. The steps for installing, configuring and using are documented in SMC Wiki.

The next step is Malayalam-English and English-Malayalam dictionaries, though their plausibility greatly depends on the favourability of CDAC’s reply who owns the required data. We are expecting and hoping that they will make the data available under a free software compatible license.