Enable Tamil and Sinhala input methods

Here how I enabled Tamil (Renganathan IM) and Sinhala (Wijesekara) on Ubuntu 11.

Step 1 : As a root, do :

apt-get install ibus im-switch ibus-m17n m17n-db m17n-contrib ttf-tamil-fonts language-pack-ta-base ttf-sinhala-lklug language-pack-si-base


Step 2 : Just run from your user account (Not as root) :
rm -f ~/.xinput.d/* ; im-switch -z all_ALL -s ibus

Thereafter restart the session (Just logoff and login)

Thereafter do "ibus-setup" and configure your prefered input setup. In addition to that you can configure where it should appear in your screen.

Enjoy!

Reference : http://sinhala.sourceforge.net/

LAKapps

LAKapps is a project of localizing Open Source applications in Sri Lankan local languages viz Tamil and Sinhala. I am in the core team.
We are doing various projects and the project that we started are successfully done till now. Thats a great thing I suppose.

We have localized following FOSS into Tamil :
Joomla!
Moodle
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Squirrel Mail
Horde
GeoGebra

Also we localized following into Sinhala :
Mozilla Thunderbird
Horde
GeoGebra

We also prepared user manuals for all the software that we localized. And other than that we prepared Video training for Joomla! and Open Office.

Next 2nd september 2009 LAKapps is going to organize a Symposium on Local Language Application and Systems.

Wen site : www.lakapps.lk

Sarves

8th Tamil Internet Conference

INFITT has announced 8th Tamil Internet Conference and its going to be held in Kolen, Germany. I am planing to write a paper about Tamil localization, will see.
Hope you guys also can write something and can contribute to the Tamil-Computing.

For more info. :
http://www.infitt.org/ti2009/?page=eng/home

Tamil Forum in Joomla!

Now you can discuss about Joomla in Tamil on Joomla platform itself. We have created a forum there.
The link is : http://forum.joomla.org/viewforum.php?f=545

www.tamil-it.org

I am hoping to have an comprehensive site for IT related matters in Tamil. The site is www.tamil-it.org and now i am developing the site.
Planning to have separate areas for Joomla!, Mozilla, Moodle, Unicode... becuase these are the main areas that I am dealing in these days. But I will also have other IT related details in Tamil too.
Currently I am doing Joomla help site : joomla.tamil-it.org. Another good thing is, this is the Tamil Community site for Joomla and you can see this site in Joomla.org too.
I need ideas, what are the things I can add, how... But I am planning to maintain the simplicity... So dont expect me to put flashes on the sites ;-)
Please share your ideas...

IDNs in Firefox 3

Atlast found a solution for enabling Tamil IDN in Firefox 3. Got to know that by defalut the IDNs are disabled in Firefox 3 for the security purpose.

To enable IDNs in FF3,
- open a Firefox browser
- type 'about:config' on the address bar
- add a respective whitelist and set the boolean value to true.

Eg: if we want to see the www.சர்வேஸ்.blogspot.com, we need add following whitelist -  network.IDN.whitelist.com

Another doc that worth reading is : http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours- 8,002,530 downloads. I also pledge for this and downloaded the Firefox 3.0 on 17th June. For this pledging, Firefox people are issuing a certificate.
I also got a certificate for pledging :-)

Translation memory

We have been working on Localization for more than one year. As you all know there are many many step in localization process and there are tools too. But Till today we have done all these manually...
Very recently only I came a cross the translation memory concept :
Its like this : There are lot of words always repeat in many place and each time we also need to translate those words. But using this translation memory idea, we can save time by automatically (at least partially) translating all the similar words found in our localization resource file.
More than this, there are ideas like, fuzzy translation memory. What it does is, it suggest us some words with the % of appropriateness. The tools gathers this knowledge with the existing works that we have done.
So now we also planning to move on to tools :
Some tools that may help on this - All 3 are FOSS :

• OmegaT+ - http://omegatplus.sourceforge.net/
• Open Language Tools - https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
• Transolution - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132322