6 crore Taka versus the power of open source

I was reading Daily Bhorer Kagoj today, where I read some news about Banglapedia (how it is being pirated). Anyway, a portion of the news was the announcement about the 2nd version of Banglapedia, to be published by 2008. The Asiatic Society gave an estimate of 6 crore taka.

Link to the news item (Requires IE and some non-unicode fonts to view :( )

I'm quite astonished at the huge amount of money being spent in that way. True, a paper encyclopedia needs a lot of expenses. The writers are paid ... the office staff need to be paid and so on.

That's why the power of open source is so great ... in only 3 months, we were able to create 3000 entries in the Bangla Wikipedia, with only 10 people working in our spare time. True, many of these entries aren't complete yet, but I just gave the example to show how the open source collaborative effort can achieve better results than committees and paid writers.

So, in Bangla wikipedia, we can have a target now ... to build a great Bangla encyclopedia, which can definitely rival Banglapedia. Of course, Banglapedia only covers topics related to BD, whereas Bangla wikipedia is going to be a complete encyclopedia, covering all areas of knowledge.

Let's get up to 10,000 articles by next year, as I predicted last may in the BBC interview. And best of all, our knowledge in Bangla wiki is going to be given away free for all the Bengali speaking people of the world!

Banglapedia publishers -- our great intellectuals of the Asiatic Society of BD -- lamented that Banglapedia is being pirated in West Bengal. Well, we don't mind at all if anyone gives away Bangla wikipedia ... after all, "if you give away knowledge, it grows, unlike money". The very essence of Open source is to share ... share our knowledge and contributions with the rest of the world.


Let us make this dream come true.

50 years of Hard disks!

NewsWeek reports that, next September 13th would be the 50th anniversary of the first hard disk drive.

Steven Levy writes,

"On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first unit of the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) and set in motion a process that would change the way we live."

Change indeed! Today, we have 120 GB or more hard drives sitting on our desks, with some geeks sporting terabyte storage systems for storing their infinite collection of Star Trek trivia and Klingon love songs.

So, what was the spec for the first disk drive? Let's see what Steven Levy writes:

"The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes."

Don't laugh. Your own drive will become obsolete in your lifetime, and you'd be telling your kids that "in 2006, I had a 120GB hard disk drive". I can visualize the smirk on your grandchild's face :)

I think in future, everything will become static, flash based or some other kind of chip based memory. Hard disks are good, have a lot of capacity for a dime, but still, they consist of moving parts, and that's why they are so much prone to failure.

Anyway, I still have my first 2nd disk drive. Though it sort of sings a serenade when I try to read something off it. Perhaps it's almost time I buried it in a time capsule for an archaeologist to discover in the year 2525 ...

GrameenPhone Launches Online Marketplace

Reuters reports that ,

"DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh's top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone Ltd., majority-owned by Norway's Telenor, and USA-based CellBazaar have introduced a service connecting buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace over the mobile phone.

This is the first time such a service is being launched anywhere in the world, Kamal Quadir, CEO of CellBazaar told a news conference on Tuesday.

The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS.

The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Interesting indeed ... especially that MIT's media lab chose to implement its idea via GrameenPhone! Let's see how it turns out in the real world ...

New release of Shabdik

I am happy to announce new release of Shabdik Bangla software version 4.5. You can download it from here www.iecbd.net .

The new introductions are

** Revolutionary Single Layer Phonetic Keyboard without any Extra Joiner Key for Typing Conjuncts

** Mixed english typing without switching by pressing 0 at the end, very useful for messengers

** Easiest Ever Keyboard Switching Mechanism with Double Press of Shift

** Jump to the Desired Hint using a Single Entry Numeric Input

** Dynamic Configuration Change Options

** Most Sophisticated Legacy font to Unicode Auto Conversion tool

With the support of dictionary based hints, active speller and autocompletion features of shabdik, this relase brings the most convenient bangla interface.


I hope you would enjoy using it and send us any suggestions/ feature request to serve your need.


Here is a screenshot of the new version.

First Bangla Boot Camp

Yesterday,10th June, we had first ever bangla boot camp at IICT, BUET. There were 18 participants including the organizers. (The number was to be around 30 but some guys couldn't join us due to heavy rain). In the camp we worked on Open Office.org localization. The program


started at 9:00 am. First Jamil Ahmed and Mahay Alam Khan (both from Ankur) showed the participants how to use localization tool (we used pootle there). Then translation started. More that 2000 strings were transleted in Bangla. The camp ended at 5:00 pm with a discussion session. It was co-ordinated by Munir Hasan (from BdOSN). And...



Here is a summary of the discussion:

1. So far the output of the camp is satisfactory. The efficiency will be increased in future.

2. All participants will work for making at least one volunteer for the next camp.

3. We will try to get a real server online so that the localizers can work at their own time.

4. We need to do something to make Linux based CD available in the country. One probable.

5. The Glossary already prepared should be finalized and uploaded by next 2 weeks.

6. A office may be very helpful for this sort of activities.

7 students from SUST were present. (5 came from Sylhet!!)

And the last thing is we had great fun in the camp!


and all of you are invited in the next camp. The one thing that is needed is the capability of writting bangla in unicode . And that is very simple. U can even write bangla using english letters on phonetics by avro keyboard.

there is also an yahoo group for the camping ... and it is free to join now for limited time... it will be moderated soon.. through the group you will receive all the updated news on camping...

some related links....

Ankur

omicronlab

World Cup '06

FIFA World Cup '06 is approaching. I found an excellent excel sheet to keep track of game schedule and the results as well. Here is the schedule of FIFA World Cuop '06.

Internet Wars: Report Card

Recently, CNN published an article on measuring performance of search engines, in terms of financial activities. The article is quite an interesting read ... it analyzes the top search engines and measure / compare their actual economic performance. If you don't like to jump ahead to the article, here are the results:

• Google: A ("most likely to succeed, but needs to diversify")
• Yahoo: B+ ("well rounded but still not living up to the potential")
• MSN: C- ("Has to be more diligent to catch up to the competitors")
• AOL: C+ ("recognizes weaknesses, but is it too little too late?")
• Ask.com : B- ("an A for effort, but needs to keep working hard")

Cool!!

ACM ICPC World Finals

ACM ICPC World finals took place last week at San Antonio, Texas. As usual, the Russians and East Europeans dominated. The final standings go something like this:

2006 World Champions
Saratov State University

Rank	Name	Solved	Time
1	Saratov State University	6	917
2	Jagiellonian University - Krakow	6	1258
3	Altai State Technical University	5	681
4	University of Twente	5	744
5	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	5	766
6	St. Petersburg State University	5	815
7	Warsaw University	5	820
8	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	5	831
9	Moscow State University	5	870
10	Ufa State Technical University of Aviation	5	980
11	University of Alberta	4	479
12	University of Waterloo	4	636
13	Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica	4
13	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	4
13	Peking University	4
13	Sharif University of Technology	4

There are several interesting things to see here. As seen above, the Russians dominate the whole contest. The shift of programming skills from the West to the former Soviet or East European countries is clear. Also, the Chinese are in the 5th position. Notably absent from the list are Indians ... none of their IITs got a rank greater than 39 (and hence got only honorable mention).

Iran's Sharif University is at number 13, along with KAIST and Peking Univ. Good show for Asians!! The lone US school at top 10 is MIT, at number 8. I don't recognize another US school in the top 39, though there are some Canadian univs.

What did BUET do? BUET is at number 39. Not too much to brag about :( .

Old is Gold

The incident I am going to tell you took place two days ago on 21st March while we were implementing our interfacing project during the midterm vacation. On that day when we went out to take lunch we saw piles of old monitors, CPUs, printers and other instruments were stacked on the corridor in front of the networking lab. Our lab administrator of MCL lab was there so we asked him about what was going on. And then he told us that to clean up spaces these old pcs are sent to BUET stock room from where they will be sold out. He also showed us the very firsts of some of our lab's PCs, printers which includes First PC with keyboard and tape memory, first bubble jet and laser printer, scanner , projector, a keyboard prototype designed by one of former student and CPU of every generation . We then thought that these things should be saved and displaying them would encourage young students about how technologies are evolving. So we talked to Mostofa Ali Patowari sir, Tanvir parvez sir , Abu wasif sir and Masud Hasan sir and told them our plans. All of them agreed and talked with our head of department, Masroor Ali sir who happily agreed and allow us to select some of those so that we could implement our plans. Now what we thought is that we could place them in open spaces like in different corners of our lab or classrooms, or in a suitable position in the corridor with leminated descriptions of the device. I didn't have camera with me then but I took some pictures with my mobile. So I am attaching them at the end of this post. Sorry for the poor resolution.
Finally along this post by "We" I meant Atif, Ashish, Ovi, Shahan and Shafi.



Click the thumbnails to have bigger and better view.

Peeking into Google

Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering, offered a rare behind-the-scenes tour of Google's architecture on Wednesday. Read about how google works here.

Open Source Network

On 8th March, in the BUET DEL CAFE a meeting was held on open source network in Bangladesh, its usage and future. Munir Hasan (National Project Coordinator, Strengthening the ICT Capacity of the Prime Minister’s Office) lead the meeting And some officials of www.ankurbangla.org were present in that meeting. The main focus was on the bangla linux movements. The ankur officials told the story of their success and lack of supports, feedbacks and unwillingness of Bangladeshi people for using the open sourced operating system, linux. They also mentioned about latest goggle’s bangla version. Google just give us a translation but still it is not localized for Bengali people, as it does not focus Bengali culture. So, we have to make some moves to localize the open source network in Bengali. They also welcome us in the world of open source network by giving us some live cds and open offices of linux. Munir Hasan also told us about some target, s we can make the mozilla firefox in Bengali, and a total operating system in Bengali by 16th December of current year! But the main problem is short of participants, so, some of us will lively join the project.

A committee has formed from BUET students to operate the open source network activities in BUET. We will meet our present department of head, Dr. Muhammad Masroor Ali. We are going to approach for a complete linux based OS and network in BUET LABS. We also are going to arrange some weekly or periodically meetings or training for BUET students who are interested and if possible some more seminars on open source with the presence of leading personalities. A yahoogroup for the open source network in BUET has also formed BUET_OSN.

So, we are on move from BUET in the campaign of Open Source Network.

Return of the CS jobs

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that, five years after the dot-com bubble burst, high skill job market is increasing in Silicon Valley. I won't go into details, but here is an interesting paragraph from the article. Look where I bolded the numbers!!

"A study last month by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit group representing businesses and government agencies in the area, found the nation's tech capital had a net increase in jobs in 2005 for the first time in four years. Most of the growth came in the category of creative and innovation services, including firms in research and development, scientific and technical consulting and industrial design. In total, the number of Silicon Valley jobs in these areas grew 4% from 2002 to 2005, reaching 72,734. At the same time, the number of jobs in electronic-component manufacturing -- which tend to involve assembly and other repetitive tasks -- dropped 28% to 23,772, while jobs in semiconductor-equipment manufacturing fell 23% to 58,133."

Intersting indeed. So much for the "EEE is the best" myth perpetuating in Bangladesh. I told some of my colleagues and classmates here about that, and we had a hearty laugh. My office mate from India told me that in India, CS is the most coveted subject in the IITs.

Anyway, this should be a bright light of hope shining in the horizon for the current students.

Google Page Creator

Google has launched a new service called google page creator which enables it's users to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes and ofcourse for free. After MSN space and Yahoo 360 google joined the fight with google pages. I'vent experienced it yet. Because it's in Beta now and has limited users. Someone having a Gmail account can use this service. It's features are :

* No technical knowledge required. Because it uses WYSIWYG technology,

* What you see is what you'll get. Edit your pages right in your browser, seeing exactly how your finished product will look every step along the way.

* You don't need to worry about hosting. Because pages will live on their own site at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

Click here to know more about Google page creator.

Click here to use google page creator.

And here are some screen shots.

Gmail Skins

Gmail Skins is a Firefox extension that lets you change the look of your Gmail inbox

It adds the following features:

-Change the colour/skin of your inbox
-Insert smileys/emoticons and images in to your emails
-Make the navigation (Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, etc) horizontal
-Fix the navigation in place so that you don't have to scroll to the top of the page to see it
-Zebra stripes on mailbox - pretty!
-Change the attachment paperclip (on inbox) to an icon indicating the type of attachment
-Hide various page elements (invite panel, page footer, your email address from the top right of -inbox - may be useful for public computers)

Download here

Performancing Firefox

Another new advancement on Firefox for blogging..... the details are given below...:

Performancing for Firefox is a blog editor extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. Using this extension, anyone can post an entry easily to his/her Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type blog. Once it is installed the extension, by hitting F8 or click on the little pencil icon on the bottom right to open the WYSIWYG blog editor (see screenshot).
Before starting posting, you need to add your blog account information so the extension can “talk” to your blogging system. You can add your blog information into by using the Performancing Account Wizard (see screenshot).
Once the wizard is open, you can specify what kind of blog system you are using. Unless you are hosting Wordpress and Movable Type yourself, you will be asked to enter your account username and password. If you are hosting Movable Type or Wordpress yourself, you will need to enter the server API address. The file is named mt-xmlrpc.cgi for Movable Type and xmlrpc.php for Wordpress.
The blog editor include a formatting toolbar with commonly used buttons such as bold, italic, underline, quote, increase font size, decrease font size, insert link, insert image, color, ordered list, unordered list, justify left, justify right, and justify.
Just like most WYSIWYG editor, performancing for firefox allows you to preview both the source code and the final preview of the entry you are writing.
This is a very nice and easy to use extension for bloggers. If you are looking forward for the Flock web browser because of it’s built-in weblog editor, you might wanna give Performancing for Firefox a try.

Badh vangar Awaj

Here goes another effort of bangla blog writing....in badh vangar awaj ... Here you can write bangla blogs.. they support bijoy keyboard as well as phonetic key board... by clicking you can write bangla blogs. you can express your views, experiences ... write online diaries ..novels , etc. and all are in bangla...

Here goes their official blog site...

Mahathir says NO to Microsoft

Dr Mahathir Mohamad said Bangladesh should prefer Linux operating system to Microsoft in order to leapfrog in the ICT sector.Dr Mahathir Mohamad said Bangladesh should prefer Linux operating system to Microsoft in order to leapfrog in the ICT sector.While highlighting the key factor behind Malaysia's success in ICT sector, Mahathir said the Malaysian government did not adopt the "monopolistic and proprietary" computer operating system of Microsoft."We have standardized the use of Linux instead, which is based on open standards," said the former Malaysian premier while answering the audience after his remarkable keynote speech at the inaugural session of Bangladesh-Malaysia Business Forum .He gave credit to user-friendliness of Linux for Malaysia's tremendous success in e-governance, e-business and e learning. Mahathir said the Bangladesh government's ICT policy should also make Linux the national standard of computer operating system.

URL, http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/12/19/d41219050651.htm

Opera for mobile

Opera Releases 'Mini' Mobile Phone Browser, Opera Mini which supports virtually all Java-enabled cell phones and compresses Web pages by up to 80%, reformatting them for easy and fast browsing on mobile screens.

Opera said using the software will lead to significantly faster browsing and reduced phone bills for users who pay per kilobit of data traffic. Opera Mini's start page integrates a Google search box.

Opera will soon offer customized versions of Mini to mobile phone operators and handset manufacturers.

The browser is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish. More languages will be added in the coming months.


Source

Google in Bangla

Finally, Google opened a .bd domain ... So if you are in Bangladesh, most likely you'd be redirected to the new Google Bangladesh site : http://www.google.com.bd . The translations are somewhat strange sounding, but we'll get used to it. It was really great to see Google setting up their customized Bangla site.

Also, are you interested to write in Bangla in Firefox? Then here is a plugin you might find useful.

Let's promote the use of Bangla in computing. After all, it's our mother tongue!!

বাংলায় ব্লগিং

আমি সিএসই ব্লগ এ বাংলায় কণ্ট্রিবিউশন আশা করছি । ইংরেজি কিবোর্ড-এই বাংলা লেখার জন্যে আমাদের তৈরি সফটওয়্যারটি (শাব্দিক) হয়তো অনেকের কাজে আসবে । এতে ১.২৫ লক্ষ শব্দের ডিকশনারি আছে যা থেকে context sensitive শব্দের লিস্ট চলে আসে । এটা ডাউনলোড করে নিতে পারেন এখান থেকে www.iecbd.net । IECB সিএসই(বুয়েট) গ্র্যাডদের প্রতিষ্ঠিত কম্পানি । আমরা শুরু থেকেই বাংলাদেশে শুধুমাত্র সফটওয়্যার এর কাজই করছি এবং বিশ্বাস করি সিএসই (বুয়েট) গ্র্যাডরা বাংলাদেশের জন্য অনেক অবদান রাখবে ।

শুভেচছা সবাইকে ।