Saturday, November 9, 2013

A New Chapter

Yesterday, my 20-month-long stint at Collabora ended. The company culture, work environment, and perks were brilliant, and working with friendly and extremely competent colleagues was a pleasure.

Starting today, and for the next couple of months, I'll be spending most of my time on the various projects that I've been working on, and on tackling the enormous backlog of itches to scratch that I have accumulated over the past two years. In addition, I'll be looking for (and am available for) part-time consultancy gigs to fill the gaps in-between.

I'm excited about the possibilities that have opened up for me due to this, and I'm really looking forward to spending more time on GNOME!

Friday, May 3, 2013

A FOSS Devanagari to Bharati Braille Converter

Almost a year ago, I worked with Pooja on transliterating a Hindi poem to Bharati Braille for a Type installation at Amar Jyoti School; an institute for the visually-impaired in Delhi. You can read more about that on her blog post about it. While working on that, we were surprised to discover that there were no free (or open source) tools to do the conversion! All we could find were expensive proprietary software, or horribly wrong websites. We had to sit down and manually transliterate each character while keeping in mind the idiosyncrasies of the conversion.

Now, like all programmers who love what they do, I have an urge to reduce the amount of drudgery and repetitive work in my life with automation ;). In addition, we both felt that a free tool to do such a transliteration would be useful for those who work in this field. And so, we decided to work on a website to convert from Devanagari (Hindi & Marathi) to Bharati Braille.

Now, after tons of research and design/coding work, we are proud to announce the first release of our Devanagari to Bharati Braille converter! You can read more about the converter here, and download the source code on Github.

If you know anyone who might find this useful, please tell them about it!