Weekly Notes 09 2023

Project Ideas:

My friend Balavignesh called from Scotland and spoke about the unavailability of Tamil books there. There seems no tamil book stores, to buy physical books. I think the same issue is there all around the global countries and for all languages.

We discussed about the need of a central organization. It should have connections with all languages. Any published book should be sent to it as PDF.

Any person from any country should contact them, order a POD, they should print and send to them. The profit of the books should be shared by that organization and the publishers or authors.

We both discussed about this. We dont know such system is there already. Please let me know if such efforts for easy POD of books on any country. If not, shall we build such organization? is there a real need for it? Share your thoughts.

What are the other best ways, for abroad people, to get printed books on native languages? Sending via parcel services are too costly. That cost will goto publishers or authors, if we have regional POD centers.

Will write detailed blog post on these idea soon.

I have another weird idea of storing all Tamil PDF books, magazines available in internet as Private Archive, for future usage.
Writing the idea, pros, cons as a detailed analysis. Will share the document in public soon.

FOSS Events :
At KanchiLUG, there are many regular online workshops happening.
Shellscripting workshop ended this week. Thanks to Mohan.
Data Structure & Algorithms workshop is going. Thanks to Syed.
Clojure Book reading club was started recently. Thanks to Thanga Ayanar.
Thanks to Parameswar and other KanchiLUG friends for building a great volunteer communities.

Wikimedia Technology Summit 2023 happened at IIIT hyderabad. Happy to see many Tamil wikipedians attended it.

At Saama Technologies, we conducted our monthly meet on Machine Learning. We need more such events from many organizations. It will be a great way, for organizations, to give back for the Open Source technologies.

At Villupuram GLUG, mini debian conference was completed as a grand FOSS celebration. Tons of thanks for all volunteers.
Here is a short video on this in Tamil –

They have announced a series of in person workshop on Machine Learning and cyber security.

https://vglug.org/2023/02/26/vglug-ai-ml-w-python-and-cyber-security-training-2023/

Debian Community got two new contributors from India. sahil, jru –

https://lists.debian.org/debian-dug-in/2023/02/msg00002.html

So happy to see more FOSS contributions from India. Thanks for all volunteers.

There are many FOSS communities around the globe. support them by participating the events and by using Free Software on your devices. If you dont see a FOSS community, start one. it will build a better future for the country and the globe.

Reading:

My friend Paavanan, started to write a good series on Vim in Tamil. Read at https://www.kaniyam.com/category/vim/
Good to see good tech articles on powers on vim editor. Though I am an emacs fan, I love the way he writes about vim.

Completed reading the book – எழுதுதல் பற்றிய குறிப்புகள்: (Art of Writing) by Pa Raghavan.

Few takeaways –

Write regularly. It is a long game
Read more.
The good writing will happen, if we keep on editing the content and remove the unwanted things
simple writing is the best thing
Neglect the good/bad feedback. The writing process itself is the good purpose of writing.
Plan for earning money, by doing commercial writing or doing some other works. Then only you can spend good time on writing what you like.

I strongly recommend this books for all bloggers, writers and readers.

Sad:

Sad to read a mail from Muthu Annamalai, on the end of Open-Tamil Python library development. Personally, I hope it will be a good relief for him. He is doing the heavy lifting for many decades. Hope we can focus more on AI systems for Tamil
than rule based systems. Hope we can collaborate on new AI based projects. What other games we know?
Tons of thanks for Muthu and other Open-Tamil contributors.