One Year Old Bug Passed Away

A popular Malayalam rendering bug, known as the Karkkodakan bug, in GNOME which was active for 1 year, 2 months and 10 days was resolved last Wednesday(6th August 2008). This was the last known bug in GNOME Malayalam rendering. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) have come with a solution some months before, but the GNOME community didn't accepted the patch since the solution was not perfect. However, SMC was maintaining patched packages for all the popular distributions, which is no longer needed. Hopefully, the next major release of Fedora and Debian shall have 100% bug free Malayalam rendering in GNOME.

The bug was basically an issue with the Pango package which caused the incorrect rendering. The technical details and discussion can be found here. The bug was reported by Praveen A, and the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing team members actively participated in providing test cases and testing. It was one of the most complicated bugs in Malayalam rendering and several people including Sayamindu, Suresh and Baiju M contributed patches. The submitted patches have several rounds of review and finally the patch submitted by Rahul Bhalero got accepted.

A special thanks to all the people who commented, tested and helped to resolve the bug.

Praveen A
Hiran V
Sayamindu Dasgupta
Ani Peter
Santhosh Thottingal
Rahul Bhalero
Behdad Esfahbod
Baiju M
Suruma
Cibu C J
Mahesh T Pai

This was an achievement of SMC, after the KDE Malayalam Translation campaign.

Even though, the bugs in GNOME are completely solved, there are still bugs reported OpenOffice.org and Qt. The complete status of Malayalam rendering issues are available here

P.S : SMC is organizing a release party at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala on 9th and 10th August 2008 to celebrate the official inclusion of Malayalam in KDE-4.1. More details are here

Sychronize Gmail Contacts and Thunderbird Address Book

I was googling to find a solution to an issue with Thunderbird and Dovecot IMAP server and accidentally hit with an interesting Thunderbird extension viz Google Contacts. For a long time, I was searching for a solution to synchronize my Gmail address book and Thunderbird address book. Some of them have uni-directional syncing, while some other need weird configuration and just provided only auto-complete of email address. Eg. the Zindus extension has too much problems in syncing the contacts and Gcaldaemon, which requires Java, was very difficult to configure.

Google Contacts is a very simple add-on which can synchronize between the contacts on Gmail and Thunderbird. The add-on is very easy to install and configure. It's marked as experimental in the Thunderbird website and you may have to login to the website before downloading the extension. I tried this extension in Thunderbird-2.0.0.14 on a Fedora 7 box and so far there were no issues. It's being developed by H Ogi and he has maintained a good knowledge base in his blog. The only disadvantage is that it's not possible to sync the contacts created while Thunderbird is in off-line.

You can download the extension from here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/downloads/file/31555/google_contacts-0.2.60-tb.xpi
(Don't forget to login to the add-on website before downloading. If you don't have an account, create one, it takes less than 5 minutes ).
To install the add-on , open Tools --> Add-ons --> Install and then select the downloaded file. You may have to restart Thunderbird to enable the add-on.

I am sure that Google Contacts is a very useful extension for Gmail and Thunderbird users. Thanks to Google for releasing the Contacts Data API and also to H Ogi who developed this wonderful extension.

Tired of searching for Malayalam Unicode fonts

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) has come up with a list of beautiful Malayalam fonts licensed under GNU GPL (excluding AnjaliOldLipi which is in Public Domain). All the latest versions of Rachana, Meera, Dyuthi, RaghuMalayalam, Suruma and AnjaliOldLipi can be previewed and downloaded from this page.

http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Fonts

All the fonts except RaghuMalayalam are traditional fonts. RaghuMalayalam font was designed for the Typewriter script. Meera font is being used by two popular Malayalam dailies, viz Mathrubhumi and Mangalam. Rachana font released by Richard Stallman, is the default font in UbuntuLinux and Debian GNU/Linux. Currently these fonts are maintained and packaged by SMC and available for popular distributions such as Debian and Fedora. Thanks to Santhosh for setting up the page.

P.S: In addition to the fonts, you can also read the beautiful nostalgic poem by O N V Kurup.