KeyBoard Layout

MSKLC, MicroSoft Keyboard Layout Creator, as it's name makes it clear is a software that helps a person create ones own keyboard layout for inputing characters on Windows Operating Systems. The method of creating this layout is quite simple and hence will be put forward in 3 steps listed below:

1. Install the .NET Framework from Microsoft's website. The link is also given below :

   http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/c/aac39226-8825-44ce-90e3-bf8203e74006/dotnetfx.exe

2. Then download MSKLC and install it. It can be downloaded from the following link:
   http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx
   
   

3. After installing the MSKLC you are ready to make the keyboard layout driver. There are three different methods in doing so. To solve our problem we used the first method.
   Methods:

   1. Load Existing :
      If one already has a keyboard layout driver, it can be loaded into the MSKLC through the menu File>Load Existing. By this, the existing layout will be loaded and any changes that has to be made can be done by clicking on the virtual keyboard that appears on the screen and typing in the desired character that has to be the output. The attributes like the drivers name, description can be changed from the menu Project>Properties and then can be build from the menu Project>Build to produce the final product. This final product will consist of a project installer and a .dll file in a folder i386.
      
      

   2. Load Source File:

      From the File>Load Source File, a source file that has been made in MSKLC with the extension .klc can be loaded and can be modified. The steps of modifying different attributes of the file can be changed and the product can be built as mentioned in the previous method.

      
      
      

   3. New:
      A new keyboard layout driver can be made through the File>New menu. This will give you an empty virtual keyboard on the screen. By clicking on the different keys on the virtual keyboard you can get a dialog box onto which you can enter the desired key output. If one already has an keyboard layout driver, glyphs can be enter directly which will result into it's corresponding Unicode value or you could directly enter the Unicode value. The name and the description can be entered through the menu Project>Properties. The final step will be building it which can be done through the Project>Build menu as mentioned earlier.

FOSS

Being an open source programmer it is impossible to skip this part of writing about open source. Since the beginning of 1990's, when Linus Trovalt, developed the Linux kernel, GNU/Linux has been the fastest growing OS used ever. This OS is open source, which means that the operating system can be used , redistributed , studied and modified ,which gives the definition for free. Free here means in the term of "Free as in speech" and not "Free as in beer" . You must have noticed there has not been any thing suggesting about the cost of open source. That is because it really doesn't matter.
Open Source is not just the ability to get freedom of softwares but it is mainly a concept. A concept that will uplift the living standards of people. This concept was the vision of the GNU project creator, Richard Stallman. By giving the source code to people, they will be able to study it, and change it according to their needs. By this there will be a community with out boundaries that help in the development of that source code , making it better and more useful for a larger community.
Open Source has been the next big thing. Now even CNN, in it's programmes like 'code breaker' and 'Global Office' ,does topics on open source. This shows how important open source has become, and how helpful it could be to help society. Like in Africa where proprietary softwares like Microsoft windows would be meaningless, as they cost a lot, to start a project to educate the people.
Another great example that is worth looking into is the project FireFox. This as all of us might know is a web based browser. This is also an open source project. This browser was of the same company that has another proprietary web browser called netscape. After giving FireFox to the community, it has developed in such a speed that it has left it's proprietary counter part far behind. We should get in to the move too with the phrase :- Open Yourself To Open Source.

Hunspell

It's been almost a year working in MPP, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, as a software developer. The fact is that i do what ever job that i have been assigned. I have not only developed software but also made different contribution in the field of Nepali language computing, through the localization project PAN localization. MPP being mainly a pustakalaya, a library, is very much in front in the field of Nepali language computing.

At the start of my career in MPP i had been given a job to enable the spell checker in OOO, then OOO used Myspell. Myspell which could not support unicode, could not be helpful to our language. Then came Hunspell which was a Myspell based spell checker, for Hungarian langauge. It had many features in it that was suitable for nepali language, including having the support for detecting compound words, and two level morphology.

Hunspell basically works by combining the head word and the affixes as in usual grammar. There are two files present for it to achieve this the .dic file and the .aff file . The .dic file consists of head word and the .aff consists of the affix rules. Hunspell then combines the resources of these two files and forms a list of different words of the same head word, like happy, happiness, etc. This spell checker opened the door for nepali spell checking, by enabling spell checking in OOO, by educating us about the way of how Unicode could be enabled and how the spell checking works.

In Hunspell and other general spell checker the problem that we come across, is that the way the affix rules are made and the disability of the spell checker to correct the words automatically. Generally, users won't be knowing the way the affixes are attached to the head word, they just want to know if the spell checkers work properly or not, and the other thing is that the automated spell corrector may not seem very vital at present but in due course when we advance into the computational linguistics and natural language processing, it will play a huge part in it. To make it clear let us take a system that can scan a book and convert that scanned picture into text by an OCR, and in turn a text to speech program that would read out for the user that converted text, so that people unable to read the book for what ever reasons would be able to hear it without even reading it. In such a senario when the OCR tries to figure out what the character scanned is, it might get confused with similar letters or digits like 5 with S and 8 with B etc. These type of errors would be corrected through the help of the automated spell corrector. Then human interaction between these process could be avoided, which would be a milestone in the field of computation.

Human Nature

Yesterday due to Monsoon rain the western part of Nepal has been flooded. A village of around 500 people has been washed away, by 300mm of rain. 22 people died. This is the type of disasters that occur frequently in Nepal. The media covers it pretty lightly, as if nothing big has happened. They have news from Iraq to put on their programs. As if the people that had been homeless by this natural disaster aren't people at all. It sounds as if a herd of goat fell off a cliff. I shouldn't call this type of incident a natural disaster but human created natural disaster.

I remember when an earthquake had taken thousands of lives in Pakistan last year. We citizens of Nepal collected funds and clothes to the people there. But now where is the same type of donations and help. Where are those helping hand that had spread before? The hand that had spread was certainly helping hands but who were they helping? People to be popular or to be known on the international stage has done so much to people abroad. The government has donated food to Bangladeshi flood victims. Where are those type of thing going on within the country. And it is strange that no one has ever noticed it.

Why, are we not humans? Don't we love our own people. We so much lack the nature within us. We have no feelings for our fellow people. We are not patriotic. This is the reason why we are still here in this position where humans life style has degraded so much that we feel ashamed in human nature. Human nature, i mean working for food for the day, the poor, the unhealthy. One must be Mother Teresa to love humans i guess. That is why people praise her, respect her like a god. May be because they know no human can do so. Why can't we all be like one! Let's start helping people. Let's start enjoying life. One shall die eventually, so why not make life beautiful.

Sadness, happiness, hardship are all part of life. Shall we not accept it? It really dose not matter. Time goes by. We then die and others will take our place. I guess it is human nature to act like this. Who am i to question human nature, so let it be!

lets use IPA

why did people develop different glyphs for the same sound. why didn't people use the same glyph, it could have been IPA. the sound wouldn't change. The only thing that would change is the way people wrote. Why can't we change every characters into IPA? Computation would have been extremly efficient then.

The French Disaster

It's 29^th may and still haven't reached Pakistan. Stuck in this oven like transit lounge . Our next flight to Lahore should be at 6:00 but now it's at 8:00. Dibyendra is laughing at the way i'm spending my time writing out what is happening. As i was saying it sucks. Traveling . If your an Asian no one will respect you. That is what i have learned about this trip till now, of course except for the air hostess.

Me and my friend went on JET airways to Delhi from Kathmandu. It took us an hour and a half to reach delhi. Just before the scheduled flight the aircraft had a technical problem in it's left wing, so we all had to stay in the plane without any AC it was damn hot. The heat was not the problem . The problem was that my friend was not with me. He had been seated four seats before mine. So the whole trip was lonely.

Now you may think where this French things come in. While during the flight their was this French who was sitting next to me in the next lane. He had an empty seat next to him so i kindly asked him whether he wouldn't mind my friend sitting next to him so that i could have his company throughout the flight. The French just urrrsssssh me .. with his lips. That bastard. So home is always sweet, Foreign is often sour.

This is what i get leaving my country and so my waiting begins..............

GNU/LINUX distro gets JAVA

After a long await, finally java can be redistributed with GNU/LINUX distros. Now Nepalinux might be releasing it's next version with java. Till date some of the functions in OpenOffice.org, open office suite, required downloading the jre to use them, which has been overcomed by the ok signal.

Sun's Chief Open Source Simon Phiipps says:
The nightmare that was installing the Java platform on GNU/Linux is over. As of right now, there is a Debian package Java on GNU/Linux. You can apt-get install sun-java-jdk and it actually works. Same on Ubuntu. Same on Gentoo Linux. I gather that Novell and Suse are endorsing this as well. Finally, the relicensing has happened so that Java is present on the Linux that is being used by most people in the two-thirds world….. [Red Hat] already have Java in their distribution up to a point. We did ask them if they wanted to be involved here and they decided that they would pass this opportunity. I think probably because they are busy tied-up committing themselves to Java anyway. They just bought this app server company apparently so there's really no question of Red Hat's commitment to Java because the profitability of JBoss depends on it.

Singularity

Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the "Singularity" by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds.—Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence