Tulu is one of the Dravidian languages spoken mainly in the south coastal districts of Karnataka state and Kasaragod district of Kerala state. There are many Tulu speaking people who have migrated outside these geographical areas and settled in places like Mumbai, Gulf countries, Bengaluru. Total number of Tulu speaking people estimated to be around 3 million. Tulu language was a full-fledged language with its own rich glossary, culture, folk literature, tradition. Tulu had its own script which is even now used in Udupi Mathas. But the usage of Tulu script declined during last two centuries as more and more Tulu speakers migrated to Kannada script. Most of the rich heritage of Tulu is still now present in oral tradition. These have to be brought into digital domain and have to be preserved.

There are quite good numbers of printed material in Tulu language like novels, poems, dramas, magazines, but hardly any encyclopaedic books. Some encyclopaedic books about the rich heritage of Tulu land, language and culture exist in Kannada language and not in Tulu language. Govt of Karnataka has recently introduced Tulu as one of the optional languages of study from 5^th to 10^th grades for the schools in Mangaluru and Udupi districts. Students who take up Tulu as one of the languages of study have nothing much to read apart from the prescribed textbooks as there is no encyclopaedia in Tulu language. Tulu Wikipedia can fill this vacuum very well.

Tulu Wikipedia – the beginning

Tulu Wikipedia was in incubation since 2007. During 2007-08 periods, some enthusiasts requested for Tulu Wikipedia and got it initiated. As usual with all Wikipedia projects, it was in incubation. Volunteers added some article to Tulu Wikipedia which was in incubation during those days. But their interest reduced soon and activity on Tulu Wikipedia in incubation came to almost to a standstill. Till 2014 January, the number of articles in Tulu Wikipedia remained at around 135.

Injecting new life

During the Alvas Vishwa Nudisiri program at Moodabidire, its president, Dr. B.A. Viveka Rai mentioned about Tulu Wikipedia and the need to make it live. He initiated a meeting at Mangaluru in the month of January 2014 and invited many Tulu scholars to the meeting. But he himself could not participate in that meeting. It was decided in that meeting that efforts should be made to revive Tulu Wikipedia and bring it out of incubation. Many workshops were conducted after that at Mangaluru and Udupi where many enthusiastic people participated and added articles to Tulu Wikipedia. During the world Tulu conference at Mangaluru during Dec 2014, there were some Tulu Wikipedia volunteers who put up a stall demonstrating and explaining the need of making Tulu Wikipedia live. I did a presentation on Tulu Unicode and Tulu Wikipedia. Due to all these efforts many people became editors of Tulu Wikipedia and relentlessly added articles to  Tulu Wikipedia. Many meetings were also held at Mangaluru by Tulu Wikipedians to make some policy decisions, for ex., Kannada script to be used for Tulu Wikipedia.

Tulu Wikipedia becomes live

All these efforts culminated in making Tulu Wikipedia live. Tulu Wikipedia became live on Aug 6, 2016. At present Tulu Wikipedia has about 1100 articles. There are about 200 registered users (editors) for Tulu Wikipedia out of which about 100 are having more than 10 edits. On an average there are about 8-10 active editors. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu are the highest contributors.  Other prominent contributors are Lokesh Kunchadka, Dr Kishore Kumar Rai, Yashoda Kudla, Vasantha S N, Dr Benet G Amanna, etc. Tulu Sahitya Academy played a key role by supporting the workshops and editathons. Other institutes which helped by providing the labs for conducting the workshops and editathons are St Aloysius College Mangaluru, MGM College Udupi, Ramakrishna PU College Mangaluru and KTC Mangaluru.

During the Wikiconference India 2016 at Chandigarh (Aug 5-8, 2016), the keynote speaker Katherine Maher, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation, USA, announced about Tulu Wikipedia becoming live. She congratulated all the volunteers whose efforts made it possible. She specifically mentioned the names of  Dr Vishwanatha Badikana and Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, who were participating in the conference.

Some stats

Growth of Tulu Wikipedia in incubation

Top contributors during incubation period

Form left: Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, Katherine Meher – Executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, U.B. Pavanaja and Vishwanatha Badikana

Tulu Wikipedia URL – tcy.wikipedia.org

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Kannada and Culture Department of Govt of Karnataka have released Unicode complaint opentype fonts and Unicode based software for Kannada under GPL. These are available for free download at their website. Download and install “Ascii to Unicode Kannada Converter” from this page. This software works in Windows only.  Now you are ready to convert the text from PageMaker file into Unicode.

Open the PageMaker file. Select the Text tool depicted by a big “T” shaped icon.  Click anywhere in the text area. Select the entire text (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C). Now open Notepad and paste this text into that (press Ctrl-C). The text will appear gibberish in Notepad. Don’t worry about it. Save the file as plain text file (.TXT file). Remember where you have saved the file.

Now run the “Kannada ASCII Unicode Converter” software. In the first textbox enter the name of the ASCII file to be converted (the file you just saved from Notepad). In the bottom textbox enter a filename for the Unicode text file that will be created by the software. Select the default “GOK (Kuvempu Nudi Baraha)”, or other encoding as the case may be, as the encoding from which the text has to be converted. Click on the button written “ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ”. It will show the progress of conversion.

Once the conversion is complete, it will display appropriate message to indicate the completion of the conversion. If you open the text file created by the software, it will have the text converted into Unicode. This text can be used in Wikisource, Wikipedia, etc.

The post Converting from non Unicode (Nudi, Baraha, …) font encoding to Unicode Kannada first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

This brings us to the topic of querying Wikipedia data. Wikimedia Foundation Labs has put up a website wherein one can run SQL queries on Wikimedia data. The URL of the website is quarry.wmflabs.org. When we open the website, we get a textbox wherein one can type the SQL query which will run on Wikimedia data. In this example I will consider Wikipedia only. But the queries can be run on the data of other Wikimedia projects like Wikisource, Wikidata, Wiktionary, etc.

To begin one has to login with his/her Wikimedia login. After loging in, the SQL query can be typed in the textbox and the Submit Query button has to be clicked. The result of execution of the query on Wikimedia data will be displayed. In this blog I will be discussion Kannada Wikipedia. The database for Kannada Wikipedia is called knwiki_p. Complete list of databases can be obtained by running the SQL query “show databases;”.

To get the list of tables in Kannada Wikipedia, the following SQL queries have to be executed-

use knwiki_p;

show tables;

To know the schema of any table, run the query desc <tablename>;. For example to know the details of the table by name page, issue the query desc page;. The fields which are of importance in the current case is page_title and page_len. The following query will list of all articles in Kannada Wikipedia which are having less than 6144 bytes.

use knwiki_p;

select page_title, page_len

from page where page_len < ‘6144’ and page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect = 0 order by page_len ;

The resultant data can be downloaded as JSON or CSV file also.

Some other useful queries are listed below-

Useful links –

1. Details about Quarry
2. MySQL queries help

The post Querying Wikipedia data first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

I typed Kannada letter ಅ (a) in my Sandbox in Kannada Wikipedia and saved it. Then I checked the RecentChanges page in Kannada Wikipedia. That showed that I have added 3 bytes to my Sandbox page. But I had added just one Kannada character.  I did the same experiment in English Wikipedia. I just added one letter, the English letter “A” to my Sandbox in English Wikipedia and checked the number of bytes added. It showed just one byte.

What is going on? Here is the explanation.  There are different ways Unicode text can be stored. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are the prominent ways. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters. UTF-32 uses 4 bytes. UTF-8 is a special kind of encoding. It uses series of single bytes to represent Unicode data. The first character, called Byte Order Mark (BOM) indicates what encoding is being used. Unicode website has more details on these. UTF-8 was mainly used for web as the networking devices used on the initial days of Unicode could handle only 8 bits (1 byte) of data. In other words, UTF-8 was used for backward compatibility with ASCII, the original 8-bit encoding used prior to the advent of Unicode.  Even today the default encoding used by HTML is UTF-8.

Does these answer our original question? Not yet. I said UTF-8 uses series of single bytes. It uses 1 byte for English, 2 bytes for European languages and 3 bytes for Indian languages. That is the reason why we saw 3 bytes for one Kannada character.

This pops up another interesting question regarding the definition of a stub article in Wikipedia.  As per Wikipedia, an article which has less than 2048 bytes is considered as a stub article.  Go to any language Wikipedia’s search page and type Special:ShortPages to get the list of all articles which are having less than 2048 bytes. If we convert this into number of characters it turns out to be 2048 for English but about 682 for Indic. That means the length of a stub article will be different for English and Indian language Wikipedias. Should we have a different yardstick for the definition of a stub article for Indian language Wikipedias then? I think yes.

The post UTF-8, Indic and stub article length in Wikipedia first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

It has become a fashion to talk about the digital divide in India. These talks are going on for more than 2 decades now. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the need of taking the benefits of Information Communication Technology (ICT) for common man. The statement “ICT for common man has to be in his language” is always relevant. Many state governments and the central government of India are spending lot of money towards E-Governance. Of late many private vendors also have realised the importance of localising their applications into Indian languages. Be it a web based or mobile app based solution providing it in Indian language will increase the user-base by huge magnitudes.

This brings us to the issue of standardisation of terminologies used in localising the ICT applications into Indic. How does one write frequently used terms in Indic? Is there any standard? For example, how to write “Exit” in Kannada? Should I use “ನಿರ್ಗಮನ” or “ಹೊರಗೆ”? Enter FUEL Project. This project aims at standardising the Frequently Used Entries in Localisation. The project aims at having a consistency among the terms used across all applications, apps and websites. FUEL Project is run by volunteers. Corpus of translations of the terminologies is developed by contributions of enthusiastic people in true opensource spirit.

FUEL project has been organising annual conferences referred as Globalisation Internationalisation Localisation and Translation, in short GILT Conference. This year’s GILT Conference was held at New Delhi, India, during Sep 24 & 25, 2016. This year’s conference had general users, media persons and writers who are nothing but the normal consumers of the output of FUEL usage apart from the techies. There was a track exclusively dedicated for Mozilla localisation. The detailed agenda and speakers list is available here.

Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias

I have been a Wikipedian for more than a decade. I have contributed to Kannada Wikipedia ever since it was started way back in the year 2004. Tulu Wikipedia went live recently which was in incubation from 2008. I have been contributing to Tulu Wikipedia as well. I presented a paper at FUEL GILT Conference titled “Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias”.

Kannada and Tulu belong to Dravidian family of languages. Geographically and politically they both belong to Karnataka. Both languages share a lot of things and there are many common words used in both languages. At the same time Kannada and Tulu have their own distinct identities. One striking feature is that Tulu has less Sanskrit words compared to Kannada. Tulu had its own script and grammar but over the years the usage of Tulu script has been discontinued. Nowadays most Tulu people use Kannada script. This has led to the usage of many Kannada words in place of original Tulu words.

Kannada has an established history of science and technology writings as well as localised software applications. Naturally a well-developed glossary is available. It was somewhat easy to localise the strings used in Mediawiki, which is the platform used to host Wikipedias, into Kannada, which very fall under FUEL category. In Kannada, we have been using these formulas while creating technical glossary –
1. Create altogether new term
2. Translate the English term
3. Transliterate the English term, i.e., write the English term in Kannada script
Depending on the situation, one of the 3 paths is followed. The same philosophy is extended for localising the strings used in Mediawiki. In many situations, we have either a part translation available or a similar example available in Kannada which made the localisation of Mediawiki not so difficult.

Tulu Wikipedia was in incubation since 2008. It became live on Aug 05, 2016. One of the main requirement to make it live was to have major strings translated into Tulu. Most of the commonly used strings have been translated now. But the case of Tulu is not so simple which has no history of science and technology writing. It was quite difficult to localise most of the strings. At many places Kannada strings have been used. Many more strings are yet to be localised. In case of Tulu, we have been using these formulas for Mediwaiki translations –
1. Create altogether new term in Tulu
2. Use more of Kannada words in the localised string
3. Transliterate the English term, i.e., write the English term in Kannada script. Since Tulu is using Kannada script, the strings thus used will be the same for Kannada and Tulu

The questions and answers just after the presentation had some very interesting questions from other language Wikipedians as well as people from other walks of life who are into localisation. I could benefit by interacting with others and by gaining insights into some unexplored areas by me. Interactions with other participants which also included some Wikipedians continued after the presentation. Overall it was quite useful spending of two days. Looking forward for the next event like this.

Acknowledgements

• Kannada and Tulu Wikipedians
• Dr Vishwnatha Badikana – Tulu translations
• Bharathesha Alasandemajalu -Tulu translations
• Wikimedia Foundation for sponsoring the travel

Links:

• My presentation
• Kannada Wikipedia
• Tulu Wikipedia
• FUEL Project
• TranslateWiki

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Windows Phone is the latest mobile phone operating system from Microsoft. It has caught the attention of developers. This is due to the fact that the learning curve to start Windows Phone developments is minimal for those who are already familiar with .NET developments. People who master the developments of applications for Windows Phone stand to gain a lot with demands for such developers picking up. A half-a-day event is planned at Mysore to give an introduction to the programming for Windows Phone. This event will highlight the Windows Phone developments using .NET. There are some ongoing competitions for developers and students. Developers have to develop, submit and get approved 3 applications on the Windows Phone market place. Similar scheme is available for students with the difference that they have to submit 4 apps. This will be a great opportunity for the developers and students to get an introduction to Windows Phone developments. Not only they can learn the Windows Phone developments, they can also get a brand new Windows Phone if they fulfill the conditions. The details will be announced during the event.

Agenda:
09:30 – 10:00 : Registration
10:00 – 10:45 : Introduction to Windows Phone by Dr U B Pavanaja, Vishva Kannada Softech, Bangalore
10:45 – 11:00 : Break
11:00 – 13:00 : Windows Phone Developments By Gautam Upadhyaya, Microsoft, Bangalore

Date : March 11, 2012
Venue : CS/IS Seminar Hall, SJCE, Next to Manasa Gangotri, Mysore

Speaker profiles:

Dr U B Pavanaja holds Master’s degree from Mysore University and PhD from Mumbai University. He was a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, for about 15 years. He has done advanced research at Taiwan. He resigned BARC in 1997 and dedicated himself fully for the cause of Computer and Indian languages. He has to his credit many firsts, viz., first Kannada web-site, first Kannada online magazine, first Indian language (Kannada) web-site to receive Golden Web Award, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for Palm OS, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for WinCE device (HP Jornado 720), first Indian language version (Kannada) of universally popular Logo (programming language for children) software, etc. his Kannada Logo has won the Manthan Award for the year 2006. He was a member of the Technical Advisory Committee setup by Govt of Karnataka on Standardization of Kannada on Computers (2000). He is also the member of Kannada Software Committee of Govt of Karnataka (2008-current). He started his career on computers from FORTRAN and then moved on to Pascal, C, BASIC, QuickBasic, Visual Basic, VB.Net, etc. He has attended and represented Indian languages in many Indian and International forums like Indic Font Workshop (Indic Computing Consortium, Bangalore, India), Unicode conference (Unicode Consortium, CA, USA), OpenType Font Seminar (Microsoft, Seattle, USA), etc. He is quite well known in Indic computing arena. He is also popular as a writer of articles in Kannada about IT. He has consulted to Microsoft India and Microsoft Research Labs India. His last job was at Excelsoft Technologies, Mysore as Evangelist & Mentor. Currently he is heading his own venture called Vishva Kannada Softech.

Goutham Upadhyaya works as a Partner Technical Consultant at Microsoft from two years. Having around 5+ years of IT experience and worked with Satyam and Wipro before joining Microsoft. His role involves guiding partners in adopting and implementing latest Microsoft technologies. He is passionate about Microsoft technologies and worked on NET 4.0, Silverlight, WPF,Windows Mobile/Phone7 and Asp.Net. Also, works on emerging technologies like Webmatrix ,RIA Services, Windows Azure, Visual Studio LightSwitch, Entity Framework and LINQ. On a personal front he likes traveling and spending time with friends and Family.

Registration (FREE) : http://wpdevday.eventbrite.com/

The post Windows Phone DevDay organised by Mysore Geeks, supported by CS & IS Depts, SJCE, Mysore first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

During this half day event you can connect with fellow Wikipedians, share your thoughts and views on this community project. There will also be sessions where you can interact with other contributors. Come leverage the power of the community!!

We have only 75 slots for the event so kindly contact Vikas Kothari at 9845129930 or vikas.kothari@gmail.com or at http://wiki10mysore.eventbrite.com/ for registration and confirm your slots.

For more info keep a watch on http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysore

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Since they were not seen, I started my keynote and went on and on till they came. I made the keynote session very lively by giving lot of anecdotes, the journey of Windows from version 1 to 7, giving lot of examples of all those software that we used in between. I made it very interactive, every time asking questions to the audience. Hey, I could have converted that session into a quiz session and given away all those goodies. But I did not do so.

Renukaprasad started with Sketchflow. After tea-break, he took the session on Silverlight. As usual, people appreciated all those examples and demos shown by him. Then the great SQL champ Vindo Kumar took over the stage. People were simply engrossed in his demo of tips and tricks with SQL Server. When it comes to SQL Server, there are very few speakers in India who can match Vinod Kumar. I heard people talking during lunch time that their colleagues who did not come for the event did really missed a very good session. They even called their colleagues to join the afternoon session and the audience number increased post-lunch.

First session after lunch is normally very difficult for the speaker. He has to make sure that no one sleeps.  That task was very weel handled by the Vic. He took a session on Expression Blend. No need to say anything about Vic. All those who are regular to Microsoft events know how good speaker is Vic.

Since Vinod wanted to go back to Bangalore, myself and he swapped our sessions. He did a good session on tips and tricks with Office. He also gave sneek previoew of Office 2010.

Then it was my turn to talk about Windows7. It was more like a dual speaker session with Vic adding many points missed out by me. Sometimes he was adding the points which were there in my agenda 2-3 slides down. I believe people enjoyed this session as well. That’s what they told me at the end.

Last session was again by Vic. he gave a demo of the new programmability features of Windows7. One can write programs in .NET making use of these features. He had brought some sensor board with him. he connected that to his laptop and showed how the sensor features work like sensing the direction, light, touch, etc.

At the end I picked up names from the box and gave away the goodies. They were licensed copies of Microsoft Flight simulator 2004 and some T-shirts.

Over all a very good program as per the feedback that I received. many people were expressing their interest to attend many more such events.

Thanks to all those who made it a memorable day by participating. I am extremely thankful to the speakers Renukaprasad, Vinod Kumar and Vic, who came all the way from Bangalore spending a whole day to share their expertise with the IT folks of Mysore. It will be my fault if i don’t mention and thank two persons who worked silently to make the event happen. They are Ravichandra and Suresh. They did travel to many IT companies in Mysore and distributed the posters and brochures. Most people who came to the programs are due to these brochures.

Photos at http://mysoregeeks.com/photo-gallery/?album=CommunityTechdayFeb202010

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When Microsoft acquired the company making Acryllic graphic suite, I was happy that at last Indic Unicode will be available in graphic and DTP packages. Microsoft renamed the Acryullic graphic suite and called them as Expression. But my happiness was short-lived. When I downloaded and installed Expression, I found that it still does not render Indic Unicode opentype fonts. I have attached the screenshot below-

Actually, intitially Expression was using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that comes with Dotnet Framework version 3.0 which was not rendering Indic opentype fonts. I was discussing the issue of non-rendering of Indic opentype fonts in Expression with Deepak Gulati. He mentioned to me that the Dotnet Framework version 3.5 is actually rendering Indic opentype fonts ande hence Expression which uses that also should be rendering Indic opentype fonts. He sent me the following screenshots from Visual Studio 2008.

Hence the conclusion is that as of now WPF that comes with Dotnet Framework 3.5 is actually

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